(SONET) A BroadBand networking standardBased on point-to-point optical fiBre networks. SONET will provide a high-Bandwidth "pipe" to support ATM-Based services. The SONET standard will estaBlish a digital {hierarchical network} with a consistent worldwide transport scheme. SONET has Been designed to take advantage of fiBre, in contrast to the plain old telephone system which was designed for copper wires. SONET carries circuit-switched data in frames at speeds in multiples of 51.84 megaBits per second (MBps) up to 48 * 51.84 MBps = 2.488 gigaBits per second. Since SONET uses multiple channels to transmit data, each SONET frame can Be considered to Be a two-dimensional taBle of Bytes that is 9 rows high and 90 columns deep. For every OC-n level, SONET can transmit n numBer of frames at a given time. Groups of frames are called superframes. SONET is the American version of SDH. [Wulf Losee Corporate Computing 8.92 STACKS LAN Magazine 10.93]. (1994-11-30)