A friend at work in the computer science dept. at work said that if I wanted the ultimate in fast Internet connections (and price were no issue) that I would get something called a OC-255 or better. He said that it is over three hundred times as fast as the best T-3 connection (I think he said it was something like 13,200 million bits per second download). Where can one buy such a connection? If The Donald or Bill Gates said get me an OC-255 installed in my home office by tommorow or your fired (to his VP or something) who would they call to save their jobs?
Okay, maybe I answered my question in part. I found a website called dslreports.com that had the following post:
Nice card, looks to be an older OC HP card. I own a computer company that installs very large scalable networks. About 2 years ago we installed multiple OC-192 Fiber Optic Lines for a very large networking company. They service one of the main backbones of the internet. We used a few Cisco ONS 15900 series Wavelength Router for that high of data rate they needed, but unfortunately OC-192 is as high as a line can go so we had to use multiple lines. We had to use a bunch of Cisco’s One-port OC-192c/STM-64c POS Line Cards (if you want to see a picture of it Cisco has a link here), »Cisco - Networking, Cloud, and Cybersecurity Solutions… OC-192 can deliver 320 Gigabits per second, that is roughly 9.6 GB per second fiber connection. The cost is around $100,000 to $150,000 per month, WOW! Plus we had to run very expensive fiber cabling, cost around $300 per foot. Trust me we didn’t waste an inch of it! When we were done they had a ultra-super fast connection…the one I wish I had 
They had 12 OC-192 lines coming in roughly 115 GB per second or 1.2 TB Per second.
So it appears that my scenario is not pure fantasy and that some people/companies actually need the ability to transmit terabytes of information per second. So what kind of computer would you want to service that sort of information? I’m thinking my Pentium IV would come up a bit short.
A single computer could not possibly saturate such a network. These kind of lines are for linking together giant networks of thousands of machines. (In other words, The Internet.)
I believe that for the most part, the companies that use that level of bandwidth are ISPs who are chopping the bandwidth up and selling it to smaller ISPs and, maybe, individual consumers. Just like a company might buy a T-1 or T-3 to service an office full of desktops, a backbone provider needs an OC-192 or whatever to service a group of smaller ISPs that it has sold slower connections to. There are probably very few instances where that that level of bandwidth is actually being generated rather than just passed through.
Come up short is quite an understatement. The typical 7200 RPM drives in most computers can usually sustain around 50 MB/s or so. Even 10k or 15K RPM drives like the WD Raptor or various SCSI drives top out at 75 MB/s. It would take over two hundred computers, using high-end consumer grade equipment, to max out a single OC-192 line.
I fear the numbers got a little mixed up. 320 Gigabits/s is roughly about 32 Gigabytes/s as usual encoding algorithms on carriers use about 10 transmitted bits to transport a single data byte.
A single OC-192 line has a bandwith of 10 Gigabits/s, see here
That is far from the mentiond 320 Gbps. It may become that fast with Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM), but AFAIK, DWDM has yet to come out of the labs. Another approach using singleton waves (i.e. ultra short pulsed laser light whose waves behave different from “normal” light waves) is also still in the labs. I did not lookup Cisco specs, but I think the 320 Gigabits/s are the overall bandwith, that Cisco box can manage in a single housing.
The 12 OC-192 delivering 115 GBps (Gigabytes/s) is too much, though 115 Gbps (Gigabits/s) sound fairly OK. 1.2 TBps is even ten times more and again must be a mistake.
Your question actually was “What is an Optical Carrier Internet connection and how can it be so fast?” You have answered the “What” part, so I would like to answer the “how” part, and I tried, but it seems I cannot do so in English, which is only a foreign language to me. Sorry, it get’s too complicated.
BTW. I work with high end computers, fiber optic connections are well known to me. Even the fastest computers will not fill up the bandwith of a single OC-192, so the only people that need such connections are indeed Internet companies (either networking providers (so called ISPs) or large content providers)
cu
So is the part about an OC-255 connection being over three hundred times as fast as a high end T-3 connection accurate?
I searched a more complete list of bandwidths for you: http://host-tribune.com/host_start/bandwidth.htm
Well OC255 / T3 = 13.271 Gb/sec / 44.736 Mb/sec = about 303 times.
Yes, it is accurate speaking of bandwidth. It actually is not correct to say, that you could surf 303 times faster with an OC255 than with a T3. It is only correct to say, that 303 times more users can surf with an OC255 as fast as the single amount of users can with a T3.
cu
OC is Optical Carrier and is a standard measure of optical bandwidth within the SONET standard for telecommunications within North America. SDH (of which SONET is a subset) is used elsewhere.
Basically the older digital hierarchy was DS0 (64 kbps) DS1 DS3 (~45Mbps). OC-1 is 51.84 Mbps and encapsulates a DS3. Now from here on up an OC-N is N*51.84 Mbps. Current longhaul networks and metro systems use OC-192 (~10Gbps) as a default rate with lots of OC-48 (~2.5Gbps) links being used as well. Basically you have large routers plugged into each other by fibre.
DWDM (the multiplexing of differing wavelengths) is extensively used around the world to minimize the laying of optical fiber. The current standard has 36 to 72 wavelengths as a possibility but current demands are lower that that.