l (BGP) are now commonplace tech- nologies for a networking professional, but less than a few years ago, they were truly breakthrough concepts. 10,11,12 A giant web of routers deployed on a worldwide scale and armed with the appropriate routing protocols and interface adapters could handle the ever-increasing massive traffic of the Internet around the clock. If a certain link was inaccessible, the routers would reroute a link around other less congested areas. The whole world would end up being a connected place. This new connectivity fabric would enable the realization of the original dream: From a circuit-switched world, which used old telephony network relay switches, traffic could now be completely packet switched. Even more striking is the observation that everything is digital in this transmission realm; therefore, the nature of the informa- tion semantics is irrelevant. All digital bits following the modulation stage of the transmission process are transformed into electromagnetic energy pulses. Regardless of whether the pulses are traveling down a fiber-optic cable as a bunch of light photons or down a coax cable as a collection of electrons, or whether they are transmitted over the airwaves as microwave photons, they will always be repre- senting digitized and compressed voice, streaming audio/video, or alphanumeric data with the same likelihood. Voice and data were no longer distinguished from one another as they were in the past. It would not take a rocket scientist to realize that the Internet or IP telephony was now the logical out- come of such enabling technologies. Competition would be severe for the traditional voice commu- nications providers. Packetized transmissions would be generated by breaking up the information that was going to be sent into packets. The network would route these packets automatically and in an unsupervised man- ner through the optimal route that it calculated. Such an approach brought forth a new generation of problems. For example, some packets might arrive at their dest