Hi friend.
Generally speaking, 6800 and 6800A share most parts in hardware and software; however, they have some different features and structure (include software and hardware).
The differences are the following:
1. 6800A supports the State Model (like IS,OOS, AINS, UAS) and the State Model is used to indicate the board's state, board's attribute and protection state, etc; however, 6800 has no such Model. We can say that the Model is the most notable difference between them.
2. the communication between NMS and equipment - 6800A adopts TL1 (Transaction Language 1) and 6800 employs the Qx interface; 6800A supports the 'Sub-rack ID Auto-Negotiation' function; the subrack ID is decided by the network cable connections between the subracks of NE and the subrack ID starts at 1(Master subrack), then 2 for the slave subrack, then 3 and so on. The relationship is shown in Fig 1. 6800 doesn’t support this feature and the subrack ID starts at 0 (Master subrack); the subrack ID is set by the jumper inside of the AUX;
3. The alarm name of 6800A adopts '-' and the name doesn’t include the alarms level; for example, ODU-LCK, ODU-LOFLOM; however, the name of the alarms of 6800 adopts '_' (underscore) and the name includes the alarm level; for example: ODUk-PM-LCK( k can be 0,1,2,3);
4. 6800A adopts the IP over DCC as DCN protocol; 6800 first chooses the HWECC protocol as the DCN protocol.
5. the 6800A subrack supports 1+1 protection; however, 6800 has no AUX protection.