Patent ID: 8532137

Claim:
A transport network comprising: a gateway-multi-service switch for supporting packet and time division multiplexing services; a gateway-multi-service switch interface for providing time division multiplexing traffic and data packets to the gateway-multi-service switch, wherein the gateway-multi-service switch performs a deep channelization to suppress idle packets embedded in the data packets, wherein the deep channelization to suppress the idle packets comprises discarding the idle packets; a second interface between the gateway-multi-service switch and a multi-service edge for handing off the data packets without the idle packets, wherein the second interface provides the functions of: receiving a pseudo-wire encapsulation encapsulated packet with a customer identification information payload; encapsulating the pseudo-wire encapsulation encapsulated packet with a customer identification information payload into a multi-protocol label switching/label switched path encapsulated packet; encapsulating the multi-protocol label switching/label switched path encapsulated packet into a generalized framing protocol based frame; and encapsulating the generalized framing protocol based frame into a synchronous optical network physical layer; and a third interface between the gateway-multi-service switch and a broadband-digital crossconnect system for handing off the time division multiplexing traffic.