Dear friend!
This is a key measure of the cross-connect capability of the two levels of equipment.
The cross-connect board of the equipment has two types of cross-connect chips: higher-order cross-connect chip and lower-order cross-connect chip.
The higher order cross-connect chip processes services at the VC-4 level (155 Mbit/s or higher).
The lower order cross-connect chip processes the service granularity of VC-4 or less, for example, VC-12 (2 Mbit/s) and VC-3 (34 Mbit/s). Different cross-connect boards of the same type have different cross-connect capabilities.
Such as the TDM Cross-Connect Capacity of OSN 7500:

The position of the device on the network determines the minimum switching granularity and switching capacity of the cross-connect chip. For example, the core backbone node does not need to add or drop small-granularity tasks. The core requirement is large-capacity and large-granularity cross-connect grooming. The edge node serves as the service termination point for small-capacity users. A large number of lower order cross-connections are required to directly add and drop services.

As shown in the preceding figure, a large number of lower order cross-connections are required at the access layer and a large number of higher order cross-connections are required at the backbone layer.
Thank you!