Elastic buffering takes place within a head end terminal (200). An elastic buffer (206) has the effect of shifting time at its output frame-of-reference backward by a fixed amount to compensate for unknown time differences between time at its input frame-of-reference and time at the frame-of-reference of a remote node (150). The amount of time that the elastic buffer (206) shifts data is determined by a time-stamping technique, where data packets are time stamped at the remote node (150) and the time stamp is analyzed at the head end terminal (200) to determine the time shift.