(SONET) A broadband networking standard based on point-to-point fibre optic networks. SONET will provide a high-bandwidth "pipe" to support ATM-based services.
The SONET standard will establish a digital hierarchical network with a consistent worldwide transport scheme. SONET has been designed to take advantage of fibre, in contrast to the plain old telephone system which was designed for copper wires.
SONET carries circuit-switched data in frames at speeds in multiples of 51.84 megabits per second (Mbps) up to 48 Gigabits per second. Since SONET uses multiple channels to transmit data, each SONET frame can be considered to be a two-dimensional table of bytes that is 9 rows high and 90 columns deep. For every OC-n level, SONET can transmit n number of frames at a given time. Groups of frames are called superframes.
SONET is the American version of SDH.
[Wulf Losee; Corporate Computing 8.92; STACKS; LAN Magazine 10.93].
(30 Nov 1994)