OC192 - The Ideal Transmission For Core Networks

SONET networks have been the work horses for transport of traffic in the core or the backbone networks for quite some time. While the technology has remained constant, it has been continually changing the link transmission speeds to cope with growing bandwidth demands. One of the most common core network transport links today are the OC192 links.

There are many benefits of using SONET as the transport network. The two most important ones being reliability and scalability. The SONET infrastructure has the concept of rings which allow redundancy. These rings ensure a very high percentage of uptime. The scalability ensures that the existing network can be expanded to adapt to growing demands from the customers.

While there are many implementations of SONET like the OC3 and OC12 which are used to connect remote locations and customer centers to the service provider core, the pure core infrastructure is always built using the OC192 links. These links can support a bandwidth of nearly 10 Gbps. These links are built to carry the major traffic between all the major centers regionally, nationally and internationally for the service providers.

The Optical Carrier level 192 has also extended itself well to the other parallel stream of network connectivity called the Gigabit Ethernet. With the GigE, there is a new stream of network connection which uses the most popular LAN solution, the Ethernet. With Optical Carrier level 192 coming close to the 10 GigE links, there are variants called WAN-PHY which interface the two.

There is another variant of Ethernet based WAN technology called LAN-PHY. In its native form this is not compatible with the Optical Carrier level 192 links and hence the two cannot be used without proper signal conditioning. Regardless of the compatibility, with various Ethernet variants, OC192 remains the preferred choice of backbone networks for the service providers.

An important part of the SONET core networks is the ring topology. Every SONET link at the core is protected by a redundant link of equal capacity. This is done to maintain high level of reliability in the service delivered. Given the high capacity, taking down an OC192 link could affect several thousands of customers simultaneously. Hence, at this level having some level of protection becomes mandatory.

In conclusion, the OC192 is an ideal core based transport technology. It has the high transmission rates to support the current and even the future needs for bandwidth from the customers. It also extends itself well to SONET concepts of redundancy which makes it highly reliable.