ues of Ethernet seem compelling, the issue is how QoS and SLAs can be enforced by the carrier. This has been one of the key propositions behind ATM versus Ethernet. The need to enforce QoS within SLAs was based on an assumption of a scarcity of bandwidth. While this assumption has been true in the past, today's bandwidth has been doubling every nine months, twice the rate of Moore's law for chip capacity. With prices of 2.5G and 10G products dropping rapidly coupled with metro DWDM products, the cost per megabit is dropping rapidly for metro optical services. Hence, the significant operational costs and complexity of enforcing QoS to customers can be resolved simply by recognizing that bandwidth is no longer a scarce resource. Rather than expending significant resources to micro-manage bandwidth, it is suggested to Chapter 4 advocate throwing bandwidth at the problem. Rather than QoS, it is recommended to enforce Class of Service (CoS) for most applications. The engineering of the network with significant bandwidth capacity will reduce the complexity of enforcing stringent QoS guidelines. Furthermore, any cost of provisioning additional bandwidth will be more than offset by a savings in operational costs. In today's tight market for network management resources, the savings in operational costs become the overriding critical path item versus incremental capital spending for bandwidth." 11. Although according to The ATM & IP Report (July/August 2001), the worldwide ATM switch market was $4.7 billion in 2001, this is but a mere drop compared with the estimated $150 billion spent annually on telecommunications equipment worldwide (just considering the sales numbers for Cisco, Lucent, Nortel, Alcatel, Tellabs, Marconi, Siemens, and SO on). 12. Nortel White Paper, "Product/Service Information on OPTera Packet Edge System for Native Ethernet and IP Services over SONET Networks" Issue 1, 56132.16, March 2001. 13. D. Minoli, P. Johnson, and E. Minoli, Ethernet-Based Metro Area Networks (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002). 14. 