associating a virtual circuit to a layer 3 next hop, the virtual circuit being associated with a layer 2 protocol specific logical circuit, wherein said associating includes defining the virtual circuit within a VC table, the virtual circuit having a logical circuit ID field, a virtual circuit ID field, and a next hop pointer field;

receiving a packet on the logical circuit;

processing the packet with configuration information indicated by the virtual circuit;

forwarding the packet to the layer 3 next hop associated with the virtual circuit without processing the packet's layer 3 header of the packet; and

processing a second packet according to the second packet's layer 3 header if a second virtual circuit is not defined within the VC table that associates a second layer 2 protocol specific logical circuit with the second packet and a second layer 3 next hop, wherein the processing includes the following:

selecting a prefix in a forwarding information base (FIB) that corresponds to the destination of the second packet,

selecting the second layer 3 next hop by the selected prefix, and

forwarding the second packet according to the selected second layer 3 next hop.