ABSTRACT
Over the past few years, the field of computer and telecommunications networking has experienced tremendous growth. Traffic demand has increased substantially, somewhat unexpectedly, prompting carriers to add capacity quickly and in the most cost-effective way possible. There is no sign that this increase is an anomaly, and both traffic and backbone capacity are likely to continue a rapid increase into the foreseeable future. The leaders of the data communications industry are not the same companies that lead the marketplace today in sales of telecommunications equipment, so one cannot extrapolate to the future by simply assuming the network element types deployed today will increase in speed and number to meet the capacity growth required in the future.
