network-processing technology (component or system) who were hoping to launch new platforms. On the other hand, it has been positive for others who needed some more breathing space to conclude their race against the clock designing sophisticated chips and putting the final touches on their devel- opment work. The vendors hoped that by doing their work more thoroughly, they would be able to weather the financial storm and be ready with real and stable products when the market would finally be ready to talk to them. The same context seen from the market's viewpoint has also had a double effect. Carriers realized that they were not under the gun to deploy products such as VoIP in lieu of traditional legacy voice technologies. The pressure therefore was sent back to the network equipment manufacturers to accom- modate TDM traffic along with their more targeted packetized future network. The purported demise TABLE 3.1 Bandwidth of Typical WAN Links Physical Layer Bandwidth 1.5 Mbps 2.0 bps 45.0 Mbps 34.0 Mbps 155.0 Mbps OC-12 622.0 Mbps OC-48 2.5 Gbps OC-192 10.0 Gbps OC-768 40.0 Gbps Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. PACKET PROCESSING PACKET PROCESSING 49 of ATM was also delayed. Interesting new concepts appeared to take advantage of this window of opportunity, such as technology from Litchfield Communications, whose chips packetize TDM traf- fic and feed it into network-processing systems and switch fabrics that have been designed to handle packetized flows. Of course, the decelerating economy of 2001 and 2002, the corresponding market repercussions, and the ensuing delay that affected the deployment of faster technologies had adverse effects on the financing and development pace of startups. This created a domino effect that few companies could avoid. We will discuss these issues in later chapters when we identify the trends of a