each optimized to carry unique types of traffic: voice, data, and video. This may not be efficient but, until recently, may have been functional because the characteristics of each traffic type made it incompatible with the others. This is quickly changing. Whereas in the past, applications contained only one type of traffic, today they combine voice, video, and data. Streaming media on already- congested LANs, or worse, WANs can make a network unusable. Internet Protocol (IP) is not only the clear winner in packet-switched networking, it is the clear winner for networks, period. It is not just the winner in the Local Area Network (LAN), it is also the winner in Wide Area Networks (WAN). Carriers are purging legacy protocols such as frame relay and Asynchronous Transfer Protocol (ATM) as quickly as they can, and moving to pure-IP networks. The reason for this is that organizations are seeking economies and utility by consolidating voice (which, historically, has included video) networks into data networks. The characteristics of video and voice communication strain such networks. Bandwidth allotted for voice or video streams should exceed the video stream itself by about 20%, and the total bandwidth used for those streams should never comprise more than 33% of total network bandwidth. Reliance upon networks is driving organizations to get serious about infrastructure design and management. What they have is already straining under the weight introduced by changes in the network usage model. Traditional LANs and WANs began bog down when organizations moved from character-oriented host/terminal computing models to more interactive client/server architectures. Client/server computing, which splits a user level program into client processes and server processes, requires significant interaction between the two. Powerful CPUs on both Video Communications: The Whole Picture sides of the exchange pump out data in a fashion that peppers a conventional LAN with bursts in the hundreds of Mbps. Along with the shift to clien