 transmission network landscape with respect to bitrate and protocol is 10 Gbs, OC-192/ STM-64 SONET/SDH on a single lambda. A transmission of 40 Gbs OC-768/STM-256 is technically mature and ready for market demand. All that speed and bandwidth is enticing and interesting to contemplate, but carriers are like broadcasters and tend not to put all their eggs in one basket. In practice, ring architecture is preferred over point-to-point links. For a reasonable incremental cost, the rev- enue protection provided by ring architecture is well worth the investment. As traffic demand grows, the choice is to meet the demand with an incremental physical ring, or incremental circuit cards. OC-48/STM-16 (2.5Gbs) rings are the workhorses in the local ex- change and intra-LATA networks. Given the level of traffic and revenue at stake, it makes more sense to run two or four physical rings on diverse routes, each running at 2.5 Gbs, than it does to put all the eggs in an OC-192/STM-64, 10-Gbs basket. While it's always difficult to speculate, it seems logical to believe future growth in the transmission network will continue as it has in the past, incremental from lower to higher, favoring increments that best fit a trade-off between the actual amount of capacity needed and the risks associated with putting it all in one basket without some form of backup. If this view is valid, then it would make sense to see future use of 40 Gbs links and DWDM not as a single silver bullet PRACTICAL IP AND TELECOM FOR BROADCAST ENGINEERING AND OPERATIONS solution, but as flexible tools network planners and designers can leverage to address network growth and change in existing networks, as well as preparing alternative design approaches for new networks. Perhaps supporting testimony for this view is the work that has been done and continues in the ITU on Recommendation G.692. First approved in 1998, the second Corrigendum was released in June 2002. Achieving long-term stability in standardization is challenging when the technology is not stable