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| 2R/3R - Reshaping and regeneration constitute the 2Rs, with
retiming making up the third R. The terms refer to the process
of ensuring that the process of converting digital information
from the optical domain to electrical form is as robust as
possible, compensating for the natural degradation that
occurs when a signal is transmitted over a distance via
optical fiber. Reshaping and regeneration restore the integrity
of the signal, while retiming ensures that the potential impact
of jitter is minimized. |
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| A |
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| ADM - Add/Drop Mux - A device used to connect peripheral
network links to a SONET or SDH ring, wherein traffic is
dropped from the ring to the peripheral link, or added to the
ring. |
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| ASP - Application Service Provider - A service provider, which
offers enterprise level software applications such as, SAP,
ERP, from a centralized server site to the end-users. |
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| ATM - Asynchronous Transfer Mode - A method of breaking
up data into 53-byte cells, or packets, and transmitting them
from place to place on a network over a series of switches.
ATM is a universal standard that was created to transport
multiple services including voice, data, and video. |
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| Access Network - That portion of a public switched network
that connects access nodes to individual subscribers. The
Access Network today is predominantly passive twisted pair
copper wiring. |
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| B |
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| B-POP - Building Point-of-Presence - A building location on a
service provider's network from which services are offered.
This is different from a central office. The B-POP may be
installed in a commercial building facility. |
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| BER - Bit Error Rate - Measure of transmission quality
indicating the number of bits incorrectly transmitted in a given
bit stream compared to the total number of bits transmitted in
a given duration of time. |
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| C |
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| CLEC - Competitive Local Exchange Carrier - a general term
for a local service provider (formerly telephone company)
which competes against incumbent local exchange carriers. |
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| CPE - Customer Premises Equipment - Communication
equipment residing on the service user's side of the network
interface boundary. |
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| CSU - Channel Service Unit - A digital interface unit that
connects service user equipment to the local digital telephone
loop. |
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| Carrier Grade - Equipment that meets the stringent
requirements for installation and operation within service
providers' or carriers' locations, such as central offices. The
NEBS set of standards is often used as a measure of carrier
grade requirements. |
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| D |
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| Dark Fiber - Installed fiber not yet connected to transmission
equipment. For more information see: "It's getting dark," an
InFocus Story June 12, 2000. |
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| Data CLEC - A CLEC that is focused on providing data
services rather than voice. DSL providers currently fall
primarily into this category. |
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| Data Warehousing - An application in which data
information is stored at a remote location away from the
enterprise end-user site. |
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| Disaster Recovery - The ability to re-establish networking
and data information in a timely manner after a disaster such
as an earthquake. The re-establishment may occur at a
secondary site. |
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| DSL - Digital Subscriber Lines - Digital Subscriber Lines
carry data at high speeds over standard copper telephone
wires. With DSL, data can be delivered at a rate of 1.5 Mbps
(around 30 times faster than through a 56-kbps modem). |
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| DSU - Digital Service Unit - User terminal equipment is
tasked to convert terminal interface connections into
sophisticated remote access devices located at the central
site. |
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| DWDM - Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplexing - a more
specific form of WDM in which wavelength channels are
densely spaced to provide a maximal number of channels
within mainly the erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) window
of operation. |
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| Dark Fiber - Optical fiber that has been buried or deployed in
which no traffic is being transported. The fiber is considered
"dark" or "unlit". |
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| Demarc or Demarcation - The point regarded as the
boundary between the equipment that is the responsibility of
the end user and equipment that is under the jurisdiction of
the service provider. |
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| F |
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| FE - Fast Ethernet - An upgraded standard for connecting
computers into a local area network (LAN). FE operates very
similarly to Ethernet except that it can transfer data at a peak
rate of 100 Mbps rather than 10 Mbps. |
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| Fiber CLEC - A CLEC which has a fiber-optic infrastructure
for inter-POP as well as for end-user access. This type of
Fiber CLEC is expected to provide the highest bandwidth
possible to end-users. |
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| Fibre Channel - Fibre Channel is an industry standard
technology for transmitting data between computer devices at
up to 1.0625 Gbps and over 10 km in distance. Fibre Channel
is optimized for connecting servers to shared storage devices
and for interconnecting storage controllers and drives. Fibre
Channel utilizes either an optical fiber or copper connection. |
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| G |
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| GbE - Gigabit Ethernet - An industry standard based on
Ethernet and Fast Ethernet used to transmit data at a data
transfer rate of 1 Gbps up to 10 km. (Distances beyond 10
km have been demonstrated for transporting GbE over a
MAN.) GbE utilizes either an optical (typically) or copper
connection, and is typically used in connecting multiple
local-area networks. |
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| GbE Backbone - A backbone network operating at Gigabit
Ethernet speed. |
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| GUI - Graphical User Interface - A user-friendly interactive
graphical display represented on a computer screen as a
window. Equipment and its functions are visible as graphical
icons through which information concerning the operation of
network elements can be monitored. |
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| I |
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| ILEC - Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier - a relatively new
term used to describe the primary existing carriers, formerly
known as RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies), as
distinguished from new competitive carriers with the advent of
telecom deregulation. The term recognizes the loose and
dwindling nature of the ties with the former Bell system. |
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| IP - Internet Protocol - A standard describing software the
keeps track of the Internetwork addresses for different nodes,
routes outgoing messages, and recognizes incoming
messages. |
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| ISX - Internet Service Exchange - An entity which provides an
exchange point for ISP-to-ISP connections, ISP-to-Carrier
connections, ISP-to-content provider connections. The ISX is
essentially a co-location facility. |
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| IWM - In-Wavelength Management - J&B technology that
non-intrusively integrates management and data transmission
on the same wavelength link. It enables remote management
over fiber link and eliminates management overlay network. |
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| IXC - InterExchange Carrier - All long distance carriers; also
known as Other Common Carriers. |
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| L |
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| LEC
- Local Exchange Carrier - a local service provider that
provides primarily voice services to business and/or
residential customers. A LEC provides intra-LATA (local
access transport area) telecommunications services. RBOCs
are considered a subset of LECs (LECs provide local transmission
services). |
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| Layer
1 - The OSI reference model has 7 layers. Layer 1,
the physical layer, defines the electrical, mechanical,
procedural, and functional specifications for activating,
maintaining, and deactivating the physical link between
end systems. |
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| Layer
2/3 - The OSI reference model has 7 layers. Layer
2, the data link layer, provides reliable transit of data
across a physical link, and is concerned with physical
addressing, network topology, line discipline, error notification,
ordered delivery of frames, and flow control. Layer 3,
the network layer, provides connectivity and path selection
between two end systems, and is the layer at which routing
occurs. |
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| M |
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| MAN - Metropolitan Area Network - A network spanning
geographical area greater than a LAN but less than a WAN
(Wide Area Network). |
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| MTP - Multi-Tenant Provider - A new type of service provider
that leverages building cabling within a multi-tenant building. |
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| Managed Networks - These are networks in which end to
end installation, operation and management of all IT and
telecommunications needs are managed for an enterprise by
a service provider. |
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| O |
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| OADM - Optical Add/Drop Mux - An ADM used specifically to
insert and remove optical wavelength channels from a linear
or ring network. OC-n - Optical Carrier level n - SONET
channel rate nomenclature. OC-3 is 155.52 Mbps; OC-12 is
622.08 Mbps, OC-48 is about 2.488 Gbps; and OC-192 is
about 9.95 Gbps. The "n" indicates the number of basic
optical channels (51.84 Mbps) as defined in the original
SONET standards. |
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| OSI - Open System Interconnection - It is a logical structure
developed by the International Standards Organization to
enable devices from multiple vendors to communicate with
any other OSI - compliant system. |
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| OSS - Operation Support Systems - The term used to
describe systems used to operate and maintain service
provider networks. |
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| Optical Access - Optical access offers the promise of greatly
increased access-network bandwidth by up to several
gigabits per second (Gbps)-and most likely more, as
technology advances. View the J&B™ Web ProForum
Tutorial for additional information on Optical Access. |
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| Optical Access Network - The part of the Access Network
that is implemented using optical fiber. |
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| Optical Renaissance - The rebirth of optical
communications. The first widespread use of fiber-optic was
for long-distance, coast-to-coast communications within a
carrier's internal network. The next wave, or re-birth, of
wide-spread fiber-optic communications will be locally
between business locations, between businesses and service
providers, and eventually between service providers and
residential customers. |
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| P |
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| PON - Passive Optical Network - the usual acronym for an
optical fiber based transmission network containing no active
electronics. |
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| POS - Packet-Over-SONET - A technology in which IP
(Internet protocol) information is mapped into SONET frames
which allows LAN-type "end-user friendly" traffic to be
translated to SONET TDM-type "telco friendly" traffic. |
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| PBX - Private Branch Exchange (also PABX - Private
Automatic Branch Exchange) - Switching equipment
dedicated to an enterprise (private) network for voice/data
traffic usually owned by the enterprise. |
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| PSTN - Public Switched Telephone Network - The generic
term for the collection of networks which provide public
telephone switching service. |
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| Physical Layer - First layer of the OSI Reference Model. It
governs hardware connections and byte-stream encoding for
transmission. It is the only layer that involves a physical
transfer of information between network nodes. |
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| Protocol Transparency - Systems that do not need to be
aware of higher level protocols to transmit information are said
to be protocol transparent or protocol agnostic. |
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| R |
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| RBOC - Regional Bell Operating Company - A local exchange
carrier that was specifically formerly part of the Bell System,
also known as a "Baby Bell", resulting from the break-up of
AT&T in the early 1980s. The original RBOCs were: Bell
Atlantic, NYNEX, Bell South, Ameritech, Southwestern Bell,
Pacific Telesis and US West. The following RBOCs have
recently merged: Pacific Telesis and Southwestern Bell (now
SBC); Bell Atlantic and NYNEX. |
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| S |
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| SAN - Storage Area Networks - A managed server-storage
infrastructure that offers gigabit speed data connectivity. |
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| SDH - Synchronous Digital Hierarchy - the ITU's standard
equivalent of SONET, beginning with SDH-3 (there is no
SDH-1 level). (An international standard for transmission in
SONET) |
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| SNMP - Simple Network Management Protocol - The network
management protocol of choice for TCP/IP-based Internets. |
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| SONET - Synchronous Optical Network - a specification for
high-bandwidth data channel multiplexing and deployment.
SONET was designed by the telephone companies to support
the growing telecommunications network. |
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| STS-1 - Synchronous Transport Signal 1 - A SONET
standard for transmission over OC-1 optical fiber. SONET
signals are labeled STS-n (synchronous transport signal level
n) beginning with STS-1 at 51.84 Mbps. The STS-n are on the
electrical side of the interface and correspond with the OC-n
(optical carrier level n) optical signals. |
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| T |
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| T-1/T-3 - Leased lines come in different grades of which T-1
and T-3 are examples. A T-1 link, which is most common,
provides a communication link at up to 2.048Mbps. For
extremely high performance communications needs, T-3 can
support communications links to 45Mbps. |
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| TDM - Time-Division Multiplexing - techniques of sharing a
transmission medium among several channels by assigning
each channel with a recurring time interval. |
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| V |
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| T-1/T-3 - Leased lines come in different grades of which T-1
and T-3 are examples. A T-1 link, which is most common,
provides a communication link at up to 2.048Mbps. For
extremely high performance communications needs, T-3 can
support communications links to 45Mbps. |
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| TDM - Time-Division Multiplexing - techniques of sharing a
transmission medium among several channels by assigning
each channel with a recurring time interval. |
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| W |
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| WDM
- Wavelength-Division Multiplexing - a technique of combining
multiple signals onto a single optical fiber by assigning
each signal a unique wavelength. Using WDM, combining
over a hundred individual wavelengths have been demonstrated.
The appeal of this technology is that it saves the cost
of deploying additional optical fiber cabling between
two sites, which is labor intensive and expensive. |
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