OC3 to Gig-E conversion

Fri Apr 29 23:05:04 UTC 2005

On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 05:20:21PM -0400, Peering wrote:
> All,
> 
> > Is there something out there (other than a router) that will convert
> > from OC3c to Gig-E?  Feel free to answer offline, don't want to fill
> > everyone's inbox at once :)

If you are looking for transport, there are many boxes out there that will 
carry ethernet frames over sonet (for example the Cisco 15454). However, 
this only works when the other end is of similar configuration, as it is 
just an extra layer of encapsulation, not a conversion. This is how the 
10GE WAN interfaces work also, encapsulating ethernet frames into sonet 
so you can use existing OC192 infrastructure.

If you are looking for something that will actually convert native 
ethernet frames to native sonet frames, you are pretty much SOL. There is 
no straight forward way to "convert" between the two frames (sonet has 
nothing approximating the concept of arp), except of course to have a 
router put the IP packet in the right kind of framing. The closest thing I 
know of is a Juniper feature called "tcc", which does layer 2 bridging 
between incompatible interfaces like sonet and ethernet. This requires a 
manual mapping though, for example you have to tell it the mac address 
that you want packets to come out using when you configure the ethernet 
side.

Personally I'd love to a cheap magic box which can actually convert 
between OC192 and 10GE, even if it requires static mac address mapping. I 
wouldn't hold out any hope for seeing this any time soon though.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)