An optical cross-connect (OXC) is a device used by telecommunications carriers to switch high-speed optical signals in a fiber optic network, such as an optical mesh network.
In the 1980s, when transmission speeds supported by optical fibers increased from 45 Mbit/s to 2.5 Gbit/s, carrier networks developed and introduced digital cross connects to restore 64 kbit/s, 1.5 Mbit/s, and 45 Mbit/s traffic.
[1] There are several ways to realize an OXC: An optical add-drop multiplexer (OADM) can be viewed as a special case of an OXC, where to node degree is two.