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Wednesday, June 13, 2012

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

This is a very brief post, motivated by a consulting engagement that consultants keep coming accross. The requirement is a 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.

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