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September 14, 2009

SONETS: Lord of the rings

Newton’s Telecom Dictionary defines a SONET, Synchronous Optical Network, as a family of fiber optic transmission rates from 51.84 million bits per second to 13.27 gigabits per second, created to provide the flexibility needed to transport many digital signals with different capacities, and to provide a design standard for manufacturers. The benefits of SONET include a reduction in equipment requirements, increased network reliability and generic standards which enables transmission products from multiple vendors to be connected. Capacity ranges from 28 DS1s or 1 DS3 on an OC-1 all the way up to 21,504 DS1s or 768 DS3s on an OC-768.

There are a variety of configurations available including rings. Rings provide connectivity to multiple customer designated locations or nodes. The segments of a ring can be identified by the SCID/SNID. A couple of things to keep in mind when auditing a SONET ring are ports and mileage. There are two types of nodes, Central Office and Customer Premise. A minimum of two nodes must be billed and at least one node on a ring must be a Central Office node. The number of ports allowed on a node is determined by its size. An indicator to determine the number and type of ports allowed to bill is the provisioned NCI code. The 7th, 8th and 9th characters indicate the type and quantity of lower level circuits being ported. The NCI Dictionary offers a matrix of the quantity and speed of drops. When looking at the mileage, it is billed between nodes. Mapping out the ring helps determine the points to use to calculate the mileage to validate that it is being correctly billed.

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