eration card in the router, the router only supported the lowest com- mon denominator set of features. Managing many generations of hardware necessitated costly and time-consuming truck rolls over a large footprint to evolve the packet edge infrastructure. Failure to evolve had, at times, catastrophic headline events when the Internet route table exceeded the hardware limits of one popular early router (Lemos 2014). For a period of time, there was an industry push to develop a single common packet edge plat- form for all services. However, this generally did not succeed in practice at scale because it led to service feature compromises and complex and difficult to predict interactions between how multiple services consumed logical resources. As the speed of innovation increased, the flaws of blackbox edge platforms became acute and necessitated a fundamental rethinking of packet edge platforms, which we address in the next section. The next section gives examples of edge platform applications in typical service provider networks. Provider Ethernet Multiplexing P-Core Aggregator Ethernet Provider MPLS & Optical Multiplexing Core Network P-Core Ethernet Provider Aggregator Multiplexing FIGURE 12.2 Overcoming constraints with Ethernet multiplexing and core aggregation routers. Building the Network of the Future 12.3.2 EDGE APPLICATION As the Internet grew in the late 1990s, large IP router backbone networks were built. Independently enterprise private data services were implemented on frame relay and ATM networks. These sepa- rate networks provided virtual circuit services as private line replacements and offered Ethernet transparent LAN bridging services. About 1998, a new service-prover-based IP VPN service was introduced, implemented with the new Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology. MPLS also soon became an infrastructure technology for implementing Ethernet virtual private LAN and point-to-point psuedowire services. At the same time, the Internet backbones of most large ISPs were moved to MPLS imple