Cisco Interface Cards

There are several cards for use with the cisco 4000, 7000, 7200, and 7500 series routers. The 2500 series are fixed configurations. This section only describes the cards used with 7000 and 7500 series routers. The first is the Fast Serial Interface Processor (FSIP) card. The FSIP is available with 4 or 8 serial ports. These are used for synchronous data connections such as T1s which are used in Wide Area Networks (WANs). Ethernet Interface Processor (EIP) cards contain 2, 4 or 6 AUI type connectors for 10 megabit ethernet and are used for connecting the router to the low speed Local Area Network (LAN). Fast Ethernet Interface processor (FEIP) cards contain two rj45 type modular connectors used for 100baseT connections. ATM Interface Processor (AIP) cards are used for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) connections. There are a couple of varieties of ATM cards. Most commonly used is a DS3 interface which has two BNC type coaxial connectors (one for transmit and one for receive). This interface operates at 45 Mbps. In our Phoenix POP, we have installed a SONET interface card which makes use of a fiber optic connection to a lightstream 100 (which is an ATM switch essentially). This connection operates at OC3c speeds (155 Mbps). Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) Processors (FIP) are used in These cards have two fiber optic connectors and may be connected by one or the other, or both connectors may be utilized to create a fiber ring for redundancy. This interface operates at 90 Mbps. High Speed Serial Interface (HSSI) Processors (HIP) are used for DS3 level connections. These cards have a single connector for one T3. Channelized T3 Interface Processors (CIP) are used to connect a muxed T3 into a router. This card has two BNC connectors for the transmit and receive of the T3. It also has 3 db9 connectors for T1 output and one db9 for output to a test set. Using this card, it is possible to configure 28 full or fractional T1 circuits in one slot within the router. This is a significant advantage over the use of external CSUs and multiple FSIP cards which occupy valuable rack and bus space, respectively. Built using the second generation Versatile Interface Processor design (VIP2), this card also supports distributed switching and can actually handle the same conventional load while using less of the router's primary processor. The outputs can be used to feed T1s to external devices of for connecting to a MIP card for channelized T1 processing. Pack Over SONET Interface Processors (POSIP) are used to provide Point-To-Point connectivity between locations at the OC3 level. This interface operates at 155 Mbps, full duplex. It has one optical connection to receive an OC3 circuit.