The concept of clustering traffic is a noble idea from a number of perspectives. In digital communication channels, signals from different sources are multiplexed at the source and carried on a single communication channel. At the receiver side, a demultiplexer is employed to split the multiplexed signal into its various constituents. In this way, the available channel bandwidth is utilized efficiently, as compared to circuit switched channels. At the packet level, data segments can also be combined and transmitted as a block. This is the basis for asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), integrated service digital network (ISDN), plesiochronous digital hierarchy (PDH), frame relay and synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH). This goal of this paper was to provide an empirical analysis of these clustered techniques in terms of their architecture, carried traffic, data transfer rates, operational strengths and challenges. The objectives were to understand how the architecture of these clustering techniques utilize the available network bandwidth and establish how their structure affects their data communication efficiency. This is significant as it provides a basis upon which new novel clustering mechanism can be developed to address the challenges inherent in one or more of these current clustering techniques. The results indicated that owing to their inflexibility, they cannot adjust to the changing network bandwidth. Moreover, it was noted that some of them contained huge signaling overheads that could effectively lead to wastage of channel resources.