OC3 to Gig-E conversion

Richard A Steenbergen ras at e-gerbil.net
Sat Apr 30 02:03:50 UTC 2005


On Sat, Apr 30, 2005 at 01:45:24AM +0000, Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote:
> 
> In article <cistron.20050429230504.GH696 at overlord.e-gerbil.net>,
> Richard A Steenbergen  <ras at e-gerbil.net> wrote:
> >
> >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 something that will actually convert native 
> >ethernet frames to native sonet frames, you are pretty much SOL.
> 
> If you have an OC3 circuit and just want to see GigE on both
> sides, use two RIC-155GE boxes - one on each side.
> 
> http://www.rad.com/Article/0,6583,21840-GbE_over_STM-1_OC-3_Intelligent_Converter,00.html
> 
> "The RIC-155GE is an intelligent converter enabling simple, efficient and
> cost-effective bridging of Gigabit Ethernet over STM-1/OC-3 lines."
> 
> I have no idea how well this works or what the costs are ..

Well, except that it actually does nothing of the sort. This is just 
another ethernet over sonet box, it takes the whole ethernet frame and 
slaps it inside a sonet frame for transport over a sonet network.

If you want to transport ethernet services over sonet, for example to 
bridge two network networks via a traditional telco circuit, this is a 
reasonable way to do it. However, this is in no way a "converter", since 
it requires a matching box (or something with similar functionality) on 
the other end to pop off the sonet frame and hand off the original 
ethernet frame to the client side interface.

-- 
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)



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