ffices or points of presence. This "last mile" of the network is also the most expensive investment a carrier must make since it provides connectivity across the geography of the service area involving the installation of media and equipment termed "outside plant." Historically, most access was based on copper twisted-pair cabling that followed the roadways outwards. Modern networks use fiber as the preferred media for "fixed" or "wired" access with the latest approach called Gigabit Passive Optical Networking (or GPON). (The older metallic copper or for cable networks, coax, is still used into the home or business except where a rebuild has happened that delivers fiber all of the way as a "fiber to the home" or FTTH). With the emergence of mobile (cellular) communications as a method for virtually anywhere communications, many have decided to forgo traditional wired service and go completely wireless. Like fixed networks, these networks have also undergone major changes, the most recent being the LTE or 4G (for fourth generation), which is based on an all-IP structure. The goal of the access network is to provide each customer with reliable and high-performing connectivity to the network in as economical a manner as possible. This is done by maximizing the amount of the infrastructure that can be shared. For GPON, sharing is done by combining up to 64 service connections onto the same single strand of fiber. For LTE, it is done by sophisticated radio control protocols that shares radio spectrum as efficiently as possible. With the Network Cloud, access technology is being fundamentally transformed by leveraging the distributed network fabric, compute and storage capabilities to host access-related network con- trol and management functions. The data plane of access, due to its unique aspects, will continue to the use of specialized hardware that needs to be very close to the access media, but even here it is envisioned that programmability within that hardware can be brought to bear to provide for flexible evolu