A switch may be configured to support a point-to-multi-point PVC which can be used to support a point to multi-point application. The signaling overhead is reduced due to the use of PVC, and the available bandwidth is used efficiently due to the use of the point-to-multi-point connection. Another aspect of the present invention minimizes the resources required while providing such point-to-multi-point virtual connections. A switch may minimize allocation of resources to branches that are not active. For example, a switch may determine that a branch is inactive based on the absence of reception of OAM cells in a specified duration and delete the forwarding information for the inactive branch. The switch may thus scale to support many point-to-multi-point virtual circuits having many branches.