A communications system that facilitates the provision of differentiated quality of service is disclosed, including a marker for receiving a packet of data from an application (110), for examining the packet for predefined criteria, for setting the value of QoS bits in the packet based on the predefined criteria, and for forwarding the packet to a multiple Virtual Circuit (multi-VC) bridge (300). The multi-VC bridge (300) is connected to the marker and selects an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) Permanent Virtual Circuit (PVC) (120, 122, 124) over which to transmit the packet by mapping the value of the QoS bits to a PVC in a mapping table and forwards the packet over the selected PVC to a destination address.