VDict mobile



networking (SONET) A broadband networking standard based
on point-to-point optical fibre networks. SONET will
provide a high-bandwidth "pipe" to support ATM-based
services.
The SONET standard will establish a digital hierarchicalnetwork with a consistent worldwide transport scheme. SONET
has been designed to take advantage of fibre, in contrast to
the plain old telephone system which was designed for copper
wires.
SONET carries circuit-switched data in frames at speeds in
multiples of 51.84 megabits per second (Mbps) up to 48 * 51.84
Mbps = 2.488 gigabits per second. Since SONET uses multiple
channels to transmit data, each SONET frame can be
considered to be a two-dimensional table of bytes that is 9
rows high and 90 columns deep. For every OC-n level, SONET
can transmit n number of frames at a given time. Groups of
frames are called superframes.
SONET is the American version of SDH.
[Wulf Losee; Corporate Computing 8.92; STACKS; LAN Magazine
10.93].
(1994-11-30)