 when the per-building nodal cost is low (for example, in the case of mid-range, next-generation SONET rather than more expensive DWDM). These results, grounded in a level of pragmatism, should prove to be instructive. Even a successful carrier will only have a handful of broadband customers in a building.17 Hence, the deployment of high-channel-capacity WDM systems in the metro access is highly ineffective from a financial standpoint and an overkill. Even if you assume that there are eight build- ings on a ring and each building has three broadband customers that a car- rier is able to bring online, it needs to be noted that the typical wide area network (WAN) speed today is 10 to 100 Mbps. This equates to a maximum Chapter 5 Table 5-4 Broadband Customers per Fibered buildings (CIR et al. stats) Building in the per city (top 30 U.S. cities) (*) United States Broadband customer/building 15(#) 20(#) Broadband customer/building, 10(#) first mover (50%) Broadband customer/building, second mover (25%) Broadband customer/building, all other (25%) (*) The remaining 60 cities have the other 50 percent balance, as modeled in Chapter (#) This number may in fact turn out to be high, but we follow the model's formulation. of 2.4-Gbps per ring, which fits the profile of a next-generation SONET solution very well. If by 2006 the bandwidth need grows fourfold, OC-192 next-generation SONET solutions will still be adequate. However, again, it is important to understand that the issue is less technical and more finan- cial. If a DWDM solution were to enjoy cost parity with a next-generation SONET solution, the planner would have no problem selecting the former over the latter. In summary, the issues in metro optical networks are significantly dif- ferent than in the long haul. Whereas long-haul networks are focused on lowering the cost per bit for point-to-point transport, metro networks are more concerned with cost-effective connectivity to a multitude of endpoints (that is, connectivity to a large set of buildings), service tra