This is a very brief post, motivated by a consulting engagement that SD-WAN-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.
