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Cisco ONS 15454 DWDM Installation and Operations Guide, R6.0
April 2006
Chapter 16      Card Reference
16.1.4 Transponder and Muxponder Cards
• Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (OADM) cards—These cards are mainly divided into two groups: 
band OADM and channel OADM cards. Band OADM cards add and drop one or four bands of 
adjacent channels; they include the 4-Band OADM (AD-4B-xx.x) and the 1-Band OADM 
(AD-1B-xx.x). Channel OADM cards add and drop one, two, or four adjacent channels; they include 
the 4-Channel OADM (AD-4C-xx.x), the 2-Channel OADM (AD-2C-xx.x), and the 1-Channel 
OADM (AD-1C-xx.x). This section also covers the 32-Channel Wavelength Selective Switch 
(32WSS) used to implement Reconfigurable OADM (ROADM) functionality.
16.1.4 Transponder and Muxponder Cards
The purpose of a transponder (TXP) or muxponder (MXP) card is to convert the “gray” optical client 
interface signals into trunk signals that operate in the “colored” DWDM wavelength range
1
. 
Transponding or muxponding is the process of converting the signals between the client and trunk 
wavelengths. 
A muxponder generally handles several client signals. It aggregates, or multiplexes, lower rate client 
signals together and sends them out over a higher rate trunk port. Likewise, it demultiplexes optical 
signals coming in on a trunk and sends them out to individual client ports. A transponder converts a 
single client signal to a single trunk signal and converts a single incoming trunk signal to a single client 
signal.
All of the TXP and MXP cards perform optical to electrical to optical (OEO) conversion. As a result, 
they are not optically transparent cards. The reason for this is that the cards must operate on the signals 
passing through them, so it is necessary to do an OEO conversion.
On the other hand, the termination mode for all of the TXPs and MXPs, which is done at the electrical 
level, can be configured to be transparent. In this case, neither the Line nor the Section overhead is 
terminated. The cards can also be configured so that either Line or Section overhead can be terminated, 
or both can be terminated.
Note The MXP_2.5G_10G card, by design, when configured in the transparent termination mode, actually 
does terminate some of the bytes. See Table 16-68 on page 16-117 for details.
16.1.5 Card Summary
Table 16-1 lists and summarizes the functions of each Cisco ONS 15454 DWDM and client card.
1. Client-facing gray optical signals generally operate at shorter wavelengths, whereas DWDM colored optical 
signals are in the longer wavelength range (for example, 1490 nm = violet; 1510 nm = blue; 1530 nm = green; 
1550 nm = yellow; 1570 nm = orange; 1590 nm = red; 1610 nm = brown). Some of the newer client-facing 
SFPs, however, operate in the colored region.
Table 16-1 DWDM and Client Cards for the ONS 15454
Card Port Description For Additional Information
Optical Service Channel Cards
OSCM
The OSCM has one set of optical ports and one 
Ethernet port located on the faceplate. It operates 
in Slots 8 and 10.
See the “16.4.1 OSCM Card” 
section on page 16-26.