Transparent flexible concatenation

A framer, comprising:

• a transmit framer circuit including
• a plurality of buffers at least some of which store a corresponding payload of a concatenated frame, the concatenated frame including a parent timeslot having a pointer and at least one child timeslot having a concatenation identifier, and
• a pointer generation circuit operatively connected to said buffers, said pointer generation circuit adapted to replace the concatenation identifier for each of the child timeslots with the pointer from the parent timeslot;
• and
• a receive framer circuit receiving a plurality of transparently concatenated frames including N frames each having a pointer,
• said receive framer circuit including:
• a receive pointer interpreter circuit for parsing each of the transparently concatenated frames according to the pointers, and
• a receive concatenation table operatively connected to said receive pointer interpreter circuit, said receive concatenation table storing concatenation information for the plurality of transparently concatenated frames,
• said receive framer circuit re-concatenating the transparently concatenated frames according to the concatenation information stored by said receive concatenation table.

A method for performing transparent flexible concatenation, comprising:

• converting STS-Nc signals in a SONET/SDH frame into N STS-1s;
• transmitting the converted STS-Nc signal as the N STS-1s;
• and
• reconstructing the STS-Nc from the N STS-1s.