The use of Virtual Path Interfaces may be combined with multiport interfaces to provide very high bandwidth tunneled across a wide area network.
This is accomplished by configuring a VPIF that refers to a multiport interface as the carrier of the virtual path provided by the WAN.
The following sequence shows virtual path five on ports eight through eleven being combined into a virtual path interface numbered seventeen.
After defining one or more multiport interfaces, the switch and controller must restart their communication in order to exchange the new list of available interfaces.
This is done by restarting the ATM1600 using the reboot command:
A restriction imposed by this combination of features is that the same
VP number (VPI) must be used on all subports of the multiport interface
to carry traffic across the WAN.