OT: converting 100MB to OC-3 POS

Tue Sep 9 11:45:39 UTC 2003

On Tuesday, Sep 9, 2003, at 08:26 Canada/Eastern, Andy Walden wrote:

> On Tue, 9 Sep 2003, Gil Levi wrote:
>
>> Can anyone help me convert a 100MB Ethernet interface to an OC-3 POS
>> interface in a small cheap box ?
>
> Depends on what you mean by cheap? Ethernet<->POS isn't a conversion 
> per
> say, but it could be switched or routed. The more expensive part will
> probably be the POS interface. An RS 1000 would work. Maybe a 7300 
> also,
> but it would cost twice as much I think.
>
> http://www.riverstonenet.com/products/router_rs1000.shtml

If it's an interior application, and you are open to alternatives to 
POS, you could use a cheap enterprise switch with an ATM uplink and do 
RFC1483 bridging. It used to be the case that a cisco 2900XL with a 
single OC3 ATM card was way cheaper than the cheapest cisco router that 
could do OC3/POS. The 2900XL supported either SDH or SONET framing, if 
your application involves a synchronous optical network and not just 
dark fibre. You don't need an ATM switch (you can back-to-back the UNI 
speakers across the SONET/SDH network).

Note also that "cheap" in "cheap enterprise switch" is relative and, 
for the record, ATM is evil.

Joe