Frontiers doubles up OC-48 capacity

The hybrids are coming, and Frontier Communications is beefing up some of its existing Internet protocol backbone. Frontier will double up to two OC-48 circuits on its link between Los Angeles and New York by the end of the second quarter.

What makes this network different is the combination of varying capacities. While some of Frontier's 20,000-mile backbone is already passing commercial traffic at OC-48 (2.4 Gb/s), much of it is still at OC-3 (155.5 Mb/s). The company also plans to deploy OC-192 (9.6 Gb/s) coast-to-coast by the first quarter of 2000.

"We will be adding a West Coast express ring and ones on the East Coast," said Johnathon Plonka, vice president of IP architecture and engineering for Frontier.

"The move that they have made is from OC-48 to 10 Gb/s and that in itself gives them a lot of bandwidth capability," said Mathew Steinberg, director of optical networks for RHK.

On the IP backbone, the company uses Cisco Systems' 12000 Gigabit Switch Router to run IP directly over the optical layer, skipping typical Sonet or asynchronous transfer mode layers. However, Steinberg said the company still uses Sonet, mixing different vendor equipment together, like Hitachi Sonet and Pirelli WDM.

"The other thing they were looking for was to be able to mix and match OC-48 and OC-192, because they have a very large Web hosting service and they need to transport the bits somehow," Steinberg said.

The trend of mixing will continue this year as Williams and Sprint both plan to deploy OC-48 and OC-192 on the same system.