The G-Series Gigabit Ethernet card for the ONS 15454 platform enables the delivery of carrier-class, private line Ethernet services. The G-Series card is a four-port, 1000Mbps Ethernet card. It utilizes pluggable GBIC optical modules for the client interfaces, enabling greater user flexibility when terminating multiple equipment types on to the same G-Series card. The card has four "virtual" SONET/SDH interfaces. The virtual ports are scalable in size from STS-1 (,50Mbps) to STS-24c/VC-4-8c (,1.25 Gbps), or an aggregate of 2.5Gbps total virtual port bandwidth per card. The payload from a client interface gets mapped directly to a virtual port. The virtual ports are then cross-connected to the system's optical interfaces (from 155Mbps to 10Gbps) for transport, along with other services, to other network elements. The G-Series payloads can be transported over protected circuits (UPSR, path protected mesh network (PPMN), BLSR, and 1+1) or unprotected circuits, providing the level of resiliency specified by the network administrator or available bandwidth. The scalability of the virtual port size enables the system administrator to match the client ingress bandwidth requirements to the transport bandwidth consumed.