The Cisco ONS 15540 Extended Services Platform (ESP) is a highly modular and scalable next-generation dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) platform that integrates data networking, storage, and information streaming over an ultra-high bandwidth-intelligent optical infrastructure that can support any packet, over any wavelength, on any platform.The Cisco ONS 15540 offers a transparent transponder line card that supports line rate connectivity of different protocols at speeds ranging from 16 Mbps to 2.5 Gbps. Each line card consists of a motherboard that can be equipped with up to four transponder modules. Each transparent transponder module supports one TX, RX pair SC connectors for interconnecting the customer premise equipment (CPE). The Cisco ONS 15540 provides 99.999% availability for demanding carrier and enterprise environments, with hardware redundancy and automatic protection switching to protect against fiber cuts and equipment failures. The Cisco ONS 15540 transports Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) and ATM traffic at OC-3/STM1, OC-12/STM4, OC-48/STM16, and OC 192c/ STM-64 (future) speeds; supports Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet for data networking, and ESCON, FICON, and Fiber Channel for storage networking.