What does OC mean? You know…OC-3, OC-12, etc.

April 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment

This is a very brief post, motivated by a consulting engagement that MPLS-Experts is working on right now. This client is building a global private network to service its offices, using eight or ten collocation facilities as the Points-of-Presence. Each collo will be connected with two diverse 1Gbps Layer-1 point-to-point circuits.

So the question came up, what optical circuit do you need for 1 Gig? Not something your average client uses.

OC is short for Optical Carrier, used to specify the speed of fiber optic networks conforming to the SONET standard.

This list shows the speeds for common OC levels.
OC = Speed
OC-1 = 51.85 Mbps
OC-3 = 155.52 Mbps
OC-12 = 622.08 Mbps
OC-24 = 1.244 Gbps
OC-48 = 2.488 Gbps
OC-192 = 9.952 Gbps
OC-255 = 13.21 Gbps

We’ll need a partial OC-24 to provide 1 Gbps on each circuit.

Filed Under: Get MPLS Price Quote, International Networks, International Private Leased Circuit - IPLC, Network FAQs, Private Lines, Quotation Thoughts Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

What are your high bandwidth loop options?

August 28, 2008 by Leave a Comment

A new client called this morning.  They were a smaller sized business and  were looking for a 45Mbps MPLS network.  When I asked what they needed that bandwidth for, they explained that they were in the online printing business. “Now I understand!”  They needed to be able to grow to over 100Mbps in the future.  So this is what motivated this simple block entry.

To start, you can get as much bandwidth as you are willing to pay for.  For local loops, this is what the options are:

DSL loop: 1.5M download and 384K upload

T1: 1.54Mbps

E1: 2Mbps (not in USA)

DS-3: 44.736Mbps

OC-3: 155.52Mbps

OC-12: 622Mbps

OC-48: 2.88Gbps

OC-192: 9.953Gbps

Ethernet: Depending on availability: up to 100Mbps of 10Gbps

Filed Under: Carriers Offering MPLS, Industry Surveys, Notes About Implementations Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,