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On Tue, 19 Mar 1996, Arun Welch wrote:

Yup. There's work in progress to put IP directly on SONET, which should save people with OC-3c backbones from paying the ATM penalty.

Last year, I was involved with some vendor work that was being done to optimize the SONET payload for various protocols. In particular, the 'growth' bytes Z3, Z4, and/or Z5 in the SONET Path overhead would be used to optimize the payload size based on the protocol being used. The thought was that such an optimization would take place at the "edge" of the network, where local traffic is passed to a WAN, via SONET. ATM was being focused on in particular, especially with the concatenated (OC-Nc) payload. I was told that IP has now been added to the list of protocols that SONET would optimize/support. If this work comes out as a SONET standard, it would be a great plus when using OC-3c interfaces on routers.

mm mm sssss nnnnnn * Bharat Ranjan * m m m s nnnnnnn * Network Engineer * m m m sssss nn nn * Microsoft On-Line Services * m m s nn nn * (206)-936-0471 * m m sssss nn nn * bharatr@microsoft.com * ******************************************************* * The opinions/ideas in this memo are not necessarily * * those of Microsoft Corp. * *******************************************************