The specification is positioned towards the $200 billion and growing telco carrier grade market. Particularly in telecom central offices, the industry currently tends to use large, heavy layer-count, and powerful custom telecom backplanes (see a few Bustronic examples). The overall system is geared to be NEBS (Network Equipment Building Systems) compliant. A NEBS compliant product generally implies that it has been tested to GR-63 for environmental and GR-1089 for the EMI/EMC and safety.

Utilizing a "mesh" switched fabric topology (with point-to-point fabric links), the spec will be able to handle the massive bandwidth requirements, High Availability (99.999% uptime), and Quality of Service issues demanded by the industry. The form factor will go to an 8U x 280mm card size plugging into a 6U backplane with slots spaced at 1.2". The larger cards allow more space for more components, while the wider spacing between slots allows for taller components. This is important as many of today's cards or "blades" are packing more storage, processing, and memory onto a single card. With the backplane "shorter" than the cards, there is 2U of space for increased airflow in the system. This is particularly important for rackmount applications where cooling intake comes from the front of the chassis, and has room to flow up the cards and out the rear of the chassis. In addition, the backplane allows for 48VDC input from an external source to be distributed to the individual slot cards.

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