1. SONET Mariano Goluboff

2. What is SONET? SONET provides a digital multiplex format for the wide bandwidth of optical fiber cable. What this means is that one can take different inputs, multiplex them together, and send them on a line with wide bandwidth, therefore having faster transmissions.

3. Why SONET? Before SONET, the capacities of multiplex formats was in the range of 100-500 Mbps. Although the base SONET format (STS-1) can handle 51.840 Mbps, it is easily multiplexed itself to render higher data rates. This combination is called STS-N where N is an integer. STS-9 has a data rate of 466.56 Mbps. It is expected that N will reach 255 soon.

4. What is SONET used for? There are many uses to SONET. It can be used to transmit any type of data over a wide bandwidth line. So SONET can be used for high-capacity telephone lines, data transmission, etc

5. Cool Stuff The 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta used fiber optics for all of their transmissions and they used SONET to work it all out! Check out http://www.lucent.com/olympic/tech.html for more info on that