 rate Net present value (NPV) $116,800,000 87.6% Advances and Opportunities in Next-Generation SONET 80 percent. A highly skilled telecom team might achieve a 40 percent gross margin. A net telecom income of 20 percent, accumulated over a five-year startup horizon, is a major accomplishment. At the end of 2001, the leading ELEC had received over $300 million in funding and had achieved, after approximately three years of existence, an annualized income of $25 mil- lion, or less than $0.10 for every dollar invested. Telecommunications carriers are utilities, and net incomes in the 20 per- cent range are major accomplishments. A number of carriers resorted to questionable bandwidth swaps and/or wholesale business to show any revenue numbers. Although Table 1-4 reflects Ethernet-based technology and not SONET or WDM technology, there is no silver bullet on the horizon. As we discussed in our companion book (from which the rest of this section is based), the major cost components are in the building fiber access spur, the operations cost, and the SGA, not the network element in the network, much less the protocol engine. For protocols, architectures, or Request for Comments (RFCs) to see deployment, they must address and solve the real underlying problem at hand. Perhaps what the industry needs to do is not just build some new architecture, but also tackle the issue related to the financial viability of delivering tangible services to users within an acceptable provisioning interval. Real-life analysis demonstrates that the most expensive element of delivering said broadband service (unblocked/unoversubscribed 10-, 100-, 1,000- 10,000-Mbps throughput) is not in the equipment itself when it is selected appropriately or the backbone ring when it is designed correctly (except for the very high-end Gbps/10-Gbps cases), but in the fiber access to the building from the backbone itself running perhaps just in the street below or maybe a block or two away. This portion of the network is called a spur. The building's riser(s)