[c-nsp] DS3 over STM1

[Ian Henderson]

Hi all,

I'm in the process of moving one of our remote offices from one carrier to 
another. At the moment we have an L3VPN terminating GigE at the remote 
end on a 7301 and DS3 on a G1 with PA-2T3 at the head office. Link does 
10Mbit about half split between voice and data.

The new carrier has provisioned a 45Mbit clear channel service with a DS3 
at the remote site, and a channelised STM1 at the head office. I can't 
seem to find a combination of router/card/mux to make this work.

- Cisco 7200 with PA-MC-STM1 can't channelise larger than E1.

- Cisco 7600 with SPA-1XCHSTM1/OC3 can do it according to the spec sheet 
for the SPA, but is incredibly over-speced and pricey.

- Adtran Opti-3 is SONET/OC3 only (but I can't find confirmation of this).

- Juniper M7i with STM1 IQ PIC can't channelise larger than E1.

- Juniper M7i with OC3 IQ PIC can channelise DS3, but doesn't do SDH 
framing for STM1.

- The carrier suggested re-engineering the service to deliver 21 E1s and 
run MLPPP over them. The data sheet for the PA-MC-T3-EC indicates MLPPP is 
only possible in hardware up to 12 T1s. I doubt MLPPP in software would 
perform at all, let alone perform well.

I've never worked with channelised services more complicated than DS0s in 
an E1, so I've got a few questions:

- Has anyone ever done this? What config/hardware did you use?

- Are there any muxes/converters/router interfaces that can do this at the 
~20Mbit end of the market?

- Does the Adtran support intermixing of SONET and SDH (DS3 over STM1)?

Many thanks,




- I.