Patent ID: 6928056

Claim:
A system for detection of error conditions when passing a cell stream at a particular transmission rate from a first location to a second location over multiple links, the system comprising: a first unit at the first location coupled to one end of each of a plurality of low capacity data links for receiving the cell stream and inverse multiplexing the cell stream into frames that are transmitted over at least two data links trained to operate at optimal rates and selected from the plurality of low capacity data links that are set to active status; and a second unit at the second location coupled to the other end of each of the plurality of low capacity data links for receiving the frames from each of the active trained data links and multiplexing the frame to produce the cell stream, wherein the first unit inserts at least one detection cell containing a predetermined pattern that is known by both the first unit and the second unit into each frame prior to transmission and the second unit analyzes the received detection cell to determine if an error condition exits wherein the trained data links operate at an optimal rate, and the optimal rate is selected based on at least one of a data rate selected, physical characteristics of the low capacity data links, and a number of available links.