The exponential growth in IP data traffic is forcing service providers to upgrade their Point-of-Presence (POP) with higher performance and scalable Layer 3 backbone switches and routers. In order to keep costs down for their network expansions, Internet service providers (ISPs) are looking for intra-POP connectivity between the multigigabit backbone routers and edge routers using high-port density OC3/Packet-over-SONET/SDH (PoS) interfaces.