nt infrastructure that offers minimum latencies to ensure the responsiveness that customers need. Traffic is growing at an alarming rate. More human users, more machine users, and more broadband access are all contributing to the additional traffic. Established carriers and new startups are deploying huge amounts of fiber-optic cable and wireless broadband, introducing new possibilities, and optical technol- ogy is revolutionizing the network overall. This new era of abundant capacity stimulates development and growth of bandwidth-hungry applications and demands service qualities that can allow control of parameters such as delay, jitter, loss ratio, and throughput. Bandwidth-intensive applications are much more cost- effective when the network provides just-in-time bandwidth management options. Next-generation networks will provide competitive rates due to lower construc- tion outlays and operating costs. Chapter 10 Next-Generation Networks Converging Public Infrastructures Public infrastructures are converging on a single set of objectives. The PSTN looks to support high-speed multimedia applications, and therefore it also looks to pro- vide high levels of QoS and the ability to guarantee a granular diversification of QoS. The PSTN has traditionally relied on a connection-oriented networking mode as a means of guaranteeing QoS, initially via circuit switching and now incorporat- ing ATM as well. The public Internet is also intended to support high-speed multimedia applica- tions, and it must deal with providing QoS guarantees. But we are investigating slightly different options for how to implement this in the Internet than in the PSTN (see Chapter 8, "The Internet and IP Infrastructures"). Included in the IETF stan- dards are Integrated Services (IntServ), Differentiated Services (DiffServ), and the new panacea, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), all of which are described later in this chapter. Broadband Service Requirements For next-generation networks to succeed, they must offer a unique set of features,