All,
Is there something out there (other than a router) that will convert from OC3c to Gig-E? Feel free to answer offline, don’t want to fill everyone’s inbox at once 
Thanks,
Diane Turley
Sr. Network Engineer
Xspedius Communications Co.
636-625-7178
If you are looking for transport, there are many boxes out there that will
carry ethernet frames over sonet (for example the Cisco 15454). However,
this only works when the other end is of similar configuration, as it is
just an extra layer of encapsulation, not a conversion. This is how the
10GE WAN interfaces work also, encapsulating ethernet frames into sonet
so you can use existing OC192 infrastructure.
If you are looking for something that will actually convert native
ethernet frames to native sonet frames, you are pretty much SOL. There is
no straight forward way to "convert" between the two frames (sonet has
nothing approximating the concept of arp), except of course to have a
router put the IP packet in the right kind of framing. The closest thing I
know of is a Juniper feature called "tcc", which does layer 2 bridging
between incompatible interfaces like sonet and ethernet. This requires a
manual mapping though, for example you have to tell it the mac address
that you want packets to come out using when you configure the ethernet
side.
Personally I'd love to a cheap magic box which can actually convert
between OC192 and 10GE, even if it requires static mac address mapping. I
wouldn't hold out any hope for seeing this any time soon though.