Q: What is AFC carrier and how does it work?
Darrin Sand
NTC
Wadena, MN
A: First there was digital loop carrier (dlc) and then next-generation digital loop carrier (ngdlc) and now there is afc carrier, or so says Advanced Fibre Communications (afc).
AFC, a manufacturer of telecommunications systems for the "local loop" between telephone service users and public telephone networks, has developed a third-generation dlc (3gdlc) with 6.2 gigabits per second of bandwidth that provides services from "plain old telephone service" to xdsl (digital subscriber line) over copper, fiber, coaxial-cable, and radio transport media. 3gdlc has a three-bus architecture that includes a 100-megabit-per-second time-division multiplexed (tdm) bus, an 800-Mbit/sec cell bus and a 5.3-Gbit/sec high-speed serial bus. 3gdlc supports narrowband, wideband, and broadband services and can transport data between tdm, frame relay, and Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks; copper and fiber (up to OC-48, or 2.5-Gbit/sec) networks; and coaxial-cable and radio transport networks.
For more information see www.fibre.com/ on the Internet.
Donna Ballast is a communications analyst at the University of Texas at Austin and a bicsi registered communications distribution designer (rcdd). Questions can be sent to her at Cabling Installation & Maintenance or at PO Drawer 7580, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78713; tel: (512) 471-0112, fax: (512) 471-8883, e-mail: ballast@utexas.edu.
