Benefits & Applications for SONET

Benefits of SONET
SONET provides the fastest, most flexible voice and data transmission options available. There are many benefits as follows:

• Savings: SONET OC-3, OC-12 and OC-48 Dedicated Ring services provide you with leading-edge technology while requiring no major capital investment -- most service providers do all the work and installation for you! And you can further hold costs down by consolidating traffic and controlling network usage.
• Efficiency: By enabling you to aggregate DS1/DS3 service onto SONET services, and consolidate voice, data and video traffic over a single transmission pipe, SONET increases bandwidth capacity while reducing overall networking costs.
• Expandability: SONET protects against obsolescence by giving your business the options of scalable bandwidth to expand, as your business needs change.
• Flexibility: SONET offers simplified multiplexing to meet changing communications needs. It's also fully upgradeable, so you can purchase the service in increments and upgrade as your needs change or your business expands.
• High-speed transmission: SONET is capable of transporting up to 48 DS3s. That is 48 times T-3 - that's 1,384 times T-1 lines. SONET allows for high-speed digital transmission of bulk data transfers, so you can transfer huge volumes of data to alternate sites quickly and efficiently.
• Reliability: SONET provides reliability because of fiber optics, end-to-end network monitoring, and built-in network survivability. These features enable easy and efficient network maintenance, faster service provisioning, and early detection of potential system problems.
• Network survivability: SONET offers features that make it highly dependable. SONET Dedicated Ring Service with its redundancy is provisioned to survive cable cuts without any interruption in service. Using "path protection" switching, a separate route is available to bypass problems and prevent outages. SONET Point-to-Point Service can also be provisioned with a number of disaster avoidance options.
• It has survivability, interoperability and manageability: It's just so easy to protect your service from equipment failure and optical fiber cable cuts! So, productivity increases and your large-scale business runs smoothly at all times, anyplace, anywhere throughout the United States where fiber is installed. Note: In some areas, fiber optic cable may not yet be installed. Check with your Service Provider for availability in your area.
• It can handle just about any data type over one link, e.g., calls from a corporate Private Branch Exchange (PBX) can travel without difficulty on the same fiber as data network traffic.
• Because SONET is versatile in what types of transmissions it can carry, your core network can be IP, ATM, frame relay or another Layer 2/Layer 3 protocol.
• SONET is considered the king of bandwidth with current specifications running to almost 10 Gbps at OC-192 -- and even higher rates currently being designed up to 40 Gbps.
• Quality of Service (QoS) is excellent because data and voice traffic is checked before hitting the SONET switch -- so the arrival of quality high-bandwidth voice and data is consistent and constant.
• SONET is a logical ring topology that uses redundancy in the event of any equipment failure or fiber optic disruption.

Applications
SONET is an excellent solution for the following:

• Networks in large metropolitan areas with many users and very high bandwidth high-volume voice needs.
• Networks needing the fastest, most flexible transport options available.
• LANs or WANs requiring the highest bandwidth available.
• Multiple large business sites that are inter-connected.
• Networks that are data-intensive and also use a high volume of voice calls.
• Networks that are growing and finding that they are having increasingly dense data traffic over the Internet.
• Virtual private networks (VPNs).
• ISPs that require the highest bandwidth Internet infrastructure and smaller links within the Internet infrastructure.
• Can be used as a large national backbone for RBOCs. A backbone is a high-traffic -density connection portion of a communication network. A backbone can be thought of as like a highway.
• Can be used as the foundation for the physical layer of a broadband ISDN Network (BISDN)
  BISDN is a new set of services and developing standards for integrating digital transmission services in a broadband network of fiber optic and radio media. BISDN will encompass Frame Relay service for high-speed data that can be sent in large bursts, the Fiber Distributed-Data Interface, and the Synchronous Optical Network. BISDN can support transmission from 2 Mbps up to much higher, but as yet unspecified, rates.
  
  BISDN is the broadband counterpart to Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) that provides digital transmission over ordinary telephone company (POTS) copper wires on the narrowband Local Loop.