main point is to remember that before you proceed to make decisions based on technology platforms and promises, you need to make sure you also consider what your regulatory agency is thinking and doing. Converging Public Infrastructures Today we have converging public infrastructures. The PSTN and the Internet are well on the path to convergence. There has been a steady, albeit slow, migration to packet-based networks. Today there are many networks running converged voice, data, and video over a common WAN infrastructure. Meanwhile, new develop- ments, especially in the optical era, stand to alter the path of migration for all concerned. Truly magnificent new network designs are facilitated through the introduction of optical elements end to end. As a result, a new generation of net- works is emerging. If we look at where the PSTN and the Internet stand, side by side, we see that they both have the same goal (see Figure 10.1). Where originally the PSTN was a voice solution and the Internet was a data solution, they have now converged their objectives-that is, both are striving to become high-speed networks capable of PSTN (Voice) Internet (Data) High-Speed Multimedia Communications Quality of Service ATM/MPLS IntServ/DiffServ/MPLS IP + Optical GMPLS Figure 10.1 Converging public infrastructures Chapter 10 Next-Generation Networks accommodating interactive multimedia applications. Both are also striving to apply QoS guarantees, for two reasons. First, the performance of applications is critical to customers, and without QoS guarantees, we are not able to guarantee the perfor- mance of interactive rich-media applications. Second, and perhaps more impor- tantly in the mind of the service provider, having differentiated levels of service allows differentiated levels of pricing, and in an era where the cost of transporting a bit continues to drop dramatically, revenues have to be gained from new sources. One of those sources is potentially to offer customers a wide range of service levels and prices, from best-effort/