just under 38.5 Gbit/s. Where fiber exhaustion is a concern, multiple SONET signals can be transported over multiple wavelengths on a single fiber pair by means of wavelength-division multiplexing, including dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) and coarse wavelength-division multiplexing (CWDM). DWDM circuits are the basis for all modern submarine communications cable systems and other long-haul circuits. SONET/SDH and relationship to 10 Gigabit Ethernet Another type of high-speed data networking circuit is 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE). The Gigabit Ethernet Alliance created two 10 Gigabit Ethernet variants: a local area variant (LAN PHY) with a line rate of 10.3125 Gbit/s, and a wide area variant (WAN PHY) with the same line rate as OC-192/STM-64 (9,953,280 kbit/s). The WAN PHY variant encapsulates Ethernet data using a lightweight SDH/SONET frame, so as to be compatible at a low level with equipment designed to carry SDH/SONET signals, whereas the LAN PHY variant encapsulates Ethernet data using 64B/66B line coding. However, 10 Gigabit Ethernet does not explicitly provide any interoperability at the bitstream level with other SDH/SONET systems. This differs from WDM system transponders, including both coarse and dense wavelength-division multiplexing systems (CWDM and DWDM) that currently support OC-192 SONET signals, which can normally support thin-SONET–framed 10 Gigabit Ethernet. SONET/SDH data rates User throughput must not deduct path overhead from the payload bandwidth, but path-overhead bandwidth is variable based on the types of cross-connects built across the optical system. Note that the data-rate progression starts at 155 Mbit/s and increases by multiples of four. The only exception is OC-24, which is standardized in ANSI T1.105, but not a SDH standard rate in ITU-T G.707. Other rates, such as OC-9, OC-18, OC-36, OC-96, and OC-1536, are defined but not commonly deployed; most are considered orphaned rates. Physical layer The physical layer refers to the first layer in the OSI networking model. The ATM and SDH layers are the regenerator section level, digital line level, transmission path level, virtual path level, and virtual channel level. The physical layer is modeled on three major entities: transmission path, digital line and the regenerator section. The regenerator section refers to the section and photonic layers. The photonic layer is the lowest SONET layer and it is responsible for transmitting the bits to the physical medium. The section layer is responsible for generating the proper STS-N frames which are to be transmitted across the physical medium. It deals with issues such as proper