Patent ID: 7065037

Claim:
An apparatus providing equipment and facility redundancy, comprising: working circuitry configured to receive and process a first stream of communication data; protection circuitry configured to receive and process a second stream of communication data, the second stream being identical to the first stream, the protection circuitry and the working circuitry being functionally identical and synchronized to each other; an N×N switch fabric having N input ports and N output ports, wherein each of the N input ports may be connected to any one of the N output ports; and a first cross point switch having N input ports and N output ports capable of receiving the processed first stream and the processed second stream, wherein the first cross point switch couples the processed first stream to a first input port of the N×N switch fabric in a first configuration and couples the processed second stream to the first input port in place of the processed first stream in a second configuration upon detection of an error condition in at least one of the working circuitry and the first stream of communication data; wherein the working circuitry includes a plurality of first ATM channels performing ATM functions on the first stream; wherein the protection circuitry includes a plurality of second ATM channels performing the ATM functions on the second stream; and wherein one of the first ATM channels and one of the second ATM channels includes the multiplexing, SONET framing, routing, and user parameter control.