The Cisco 2-Port Channelized T3/E3 circuit emulation over packet and ATM SPA is available on high-end Cisco routing platforms, offering the benefits of network scalability with lower initial costs and easy upgrades. The Cisco SPA/SIP portfolio continues Cisco's focus on investment protection along with consistent feature support, broad interface availability, and the latest technology. The Cisco SPA/SIP portfolio allows different interfaces (Packet over SONET/SDH [POS], ATM, Ethernet, etc.) to be deployed on the same interface processor.

The SPA can be deployed for ATM service that delivers high-performance interconnectivity, metro, and intra-POP applications between service provider points of presence (POPs) for IP/Multiprotocol Label Switching (IP/MPLS) transport. It can also be deployed as customer premises equipment (CPE) to provide the data component to the service provider networks.

The ATM service allows service providers to effectively manage the bandwidth at the edges of the network while implementing value-added Layer 3 services. Advanced traffic management features (such as per-VC and per-VP traffic shaping) can also be leveraged to ensure that traffic from one customer does not impact traffic from another.

With advanced traffic shaping features and support for many ATM service classes, the SPA can be widely deployed in many parts of the service provider network. Figure 2 shows a sample scenario where the SPA is used to transport ATM traffic over IP/MPLS network using pseudowires.

Features at a Glance
- 2 T3 ATM ports per SPA
- Support for ATM traffic classes: UBR, UBR+, VBR-nrt, VBR-rt, CBR
- Support for ATM QoS: VC & VP shaping
- Support for Inverse Multiplexing over ATM (IMA)
- Support for ATM PWE ( VC and VP mode cell-relay)
- Support for ATM UNI (3.0, 3.1)
- Online insertion and removal (OIR)
- Overall SPA status LEDs
- Per-port status LEDs