Sonet to Ethernet

[jobarty]

I work at a hosting facility for the DoD, and we are having an OC-12 installed. The base engineers have the OC-12 coming into our facility and branching out to our three separate organizations as OC-3's. My question is why I cannot use Ethernet instead of an OC-3. The egress routers for my three autonomous systems are ten feet away from the switch with the OC-12. With Ethernet I don't have to upgrade my 7140 routers with very expensive Sonet adapters. Are there any benefits to continuing to run Sonet to the egress point?

[m.prouty]

The possibility exists to take 10/100 Ethernet into a SONET/SDH system and multiplex it up onto a OC-12 or OC3 or any SDH/SONET rate it will fit into. The issue is this: Does the provider have a system that will accept an Ethernet interface card? I have seen very few that do, and the ones that do offer this I have never seen in the field. It is common for the customer to conform to the carrier's standard. What would be optimal would be if the carrier had a switched passive optical network and split three lambdas at your demarc and sent them to your Gigabit ethernet interface, but that is maybe a couple of years off yet. So to sum it up, don't expect the carrier to go out and buy Ethernet cards for his system for two reasons, 1. They take up a whole slot in the system and the bandwidth to slot ratio is low. 2. They already have the OC-3s.

[jobarty]

The tentative equipment will be a Nortel 3500, I'm pushing for a Cisco 6500. We own the equipment, and will have a unit at each side of the fiber trunk. The core facility will have a DWDM ring running at 80 Gig. Since the 3500 or 6500 will be CPE, I would like to run eithernet rather than Sonet in my computer room. I don't see why I can't pair VPI/VCI to a VLAN and let it go. My question is can I do it and do I still retain the QoS and MPLS benefits.