nd higher than they are in their retail Ethernet businesses. And, while both Yipes and Cogent like to promote themselves as retailers, major portions of their revenue is wholesale business." This observation points out that tra- ditional SONET-based handoffs may be more prevalent in the near future than Ethernet handoffs. The fate of some of the ELECs may in fact reinforce this hypothesis. Many of the current traditionally built networks deliver a data service known as private line. Private-line services are billable, physically (TDM) separated point-to-point circuits that are directly provisioned into segre- Advances and Opportunities in Next-Generation SONET gated bandwidths in the intermachine trunks on the transmission infra- structure: DS1/DS3. Virtual private-line services are billable, virtually sep- arated point-to-point circuits that are carried over (encapsulated or tunneled) common shared bandwidths provisioned in the intermachine trunks on the transmission infrastructure; examples include Frame Relay, ATM, and VLAN GbE. Despite the weak telecommunications market and the slow economy of the early 2000s, the new metro access market relatively remained a hot spot at this writing for incumbent carriers, startup providers, and equip- ment manufacturers looking to create value for their customers. There is reportedly a large market potential for broadband services. Fiber to the Home (FTTH) systems are expected to grow at a decent pace during the decade. The number of MAN/WAN broadband (greater than 10 Mbps) ter- minations is expected to exceed 2 million by 2005. 18 Some people forecast 5 million FTTH subscribers in 2005 and 22 million in 2009. 19 Others quote 2.6 million FTTH subscribers with an additional 1.9 million subscribers with Fiber to the Curb (FTTC). ²0 The average data rate per building is expected to grow from 10 Mbps (2001) to greater than 250 Mbps (2005) according to some, and from 10 Mbps to 73 Mbps per average customer according to the authors of this book (see Figure 1-5); others forecast e