CCDE – WAN Speeds and Basic Voice Calculation
I’m preparing for the CCDE practical and I was doing a practice scenario by Jeremy Filliben and I realized that I’m not comfortable with all of the WAN speeds so I might as well write a blog post on it. I was familiar with some of them like T1, E1, DS3, OC-192 etc but there are still some I could not remember. This post will describe some of the most commonly used WAN rates.
Some of the CCDE scenarios are based on that we are upgrading a network or migrating from an old network. In real life it’s likely that most service providers will already have moved to Ethernet but it makes a more interesting scenario to build a network mimicing the FRR capabilities of SDH for example.
Digital Signal 0 (DS0) is a rate that was introduced to carry a digitized single call at 64 kbits/s. A DS1 can transport 24 DS0 and runs at 1544 kbit/s. Note that 24 * 64 is 1536 but the extra 8 kbit/s is used for frame synchronization. A DS3 runs at 44736 kbit/s and can transport 28 DS1 or 672 DS0. A T3 also runs at the same rate as a DS3. Continue reading