In an I/O subsystem comprising device drivers for controlling connection-oriented hardware adapters, connection-oriented data transports, and an integrating component allowing data transport drivers and hardware device drivers to be "bound" together to form data communication channels. The integrating component exposes a connection interface for creating and maintaining connections. Furthermore, a proxy client component is disclosed that interacts with a known application-level interface, such as TAPI, and converts such known application-level interface commands into appropriate commands for the connection interface of the integrating component. Additionally, the proxy client component will interact with the integrating component in order to represent the underlying connection-oriented devices and attendant device characteristics to the known application-level interface. All this allows the application programmer to take advantage of a connection-oriented I/O subsystem and underlying connection-oriented devices without requiring the programmer to learn yet another interface. Added benefits include the ability to dynamically redirect a data stream received over a created connection from one data transport to another under application control. This is useful in multimedia applications where different types of data may come over the same connection.