In accordance with at least one embodiment, fixed TDM slot/frame structure and statistical multiplexing are combined. A TDM slot, which is fixed (in size and position) is reserved for a variable bit rate service such that the bit rate of the TDM slot/channel is below the average rate of the service. Such a reserved TDM slot may be referred to as a service specific slot. Since the service specific slot is reserved with a bit rate below the average rate of the service, additional capacity is reserved from a rate matching slot, which may be common for multiple services. In this rate matching slot, the capacity may be shared between services according to any suitable strategy for allotting services to portions of the rate matching slot, including, but not limited to, a statistical multiplexing algorithm.