eriphery LANs started to show very serious problems of congestion. This is because fast LANs serving the desktop produced SO much traffic that the campus backbone linking these LANs would choke. It was only a matter of time before some serious help was needed. The effort to control this problem led to the introduction and wide-scale acceptance of the Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) and the Gigabit Ethernet technologies along with the advent of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). FDDI was based on a logical and physical ring structure that offered speed (like the original IBM token ring principle), high reliability (because the ring would logically fold back on itself in case of rupture or accident), and the avoidance of traffic congestion. 17 Due to their significance torical overview, we will discuss ATM and Gigabit Ethernet later in this chapter in separate sections. IP NETWORKS: INTRANETS AND EXTRANETS The arrival of the Internet signaled the beginning of the era of web technologies. Client-server mod- els were being applied on a grand scale beyond campus- or site-wide deployed systems. Companies forced by deregulation better manage their resources started restructuring (a term that came in vogue during the late 1980s and early 1990s). This involved looking among other things at better stream- lining their operations while cutting costs. In many cases, they radically changed the way they did business (processes) and ran their internal operations. All of a sudden new words entered into everyday vocabulary, such as e-business, e-commerce, and SO on. Companies started realizing that the use of these technologies could be applied toward improving their day-to-day operations. For example, corporate users could now dial into specific web sites and access their daily resources from anywhere on the planet. They could check with divisional associates and databases, and carry out their work efficiently from anywhere and at any time. These special internal networks that were deployed on top of the same physical Int