int-of-presence (POP-to-POP) segment without bringing the fiber connectivity to major commercial neighborhoods, office buildings, hospitals, industrial campuses, or college buildings is not achieving the intended goal. 2. The equipment cost is typically 15 percent of the total cost to deliver a service. Hence, a 20 percent decrease in equipment cost only results in a 3 percent decrease in total service cost. A new technology and/or a new piece of equipment needs to show deeper savings to really impact the bottom line. For example, it should reduce equipment costs by, say, 100 percent and/or reduce operations cost by 100 percent (which is typically 20 percent of the cost to deliver service). In this case, the bottom-line savings would be 17.5 percent, which might be enough for a customer to consider a switch in service/service provider.8 Advances and Opportunities in Next-Generation SONET 3. Reliability, security, and carrier-class-grade features are a must. Campus-derived service offerings by ELECs are arguably not sufficiently robust or secure. As users pack larger portions of their corporate traffic onto fewer broadband facilities, high levels of reliability and security become imperative. 4. Metro broadband communication is neither free nor cheap. End users requiring broadband at the local level need to comprehend the cost issues. With the lavish9 long-haul investments that have appeared in the recent past, the price of long-haul services has gone down "as much as 92 percent with fire-sale price offerings by less solvent competitors."10 Unfortunately, these reductions in prices in long-haul services coupled with free-reign hype on the part of startup carriers seeking venture capitalist funds foster an unattainable expectation in end users for very low prices in metro access/metro core. Low prices have not been achieved yet in the metro access/metro core space partially for intellectual reasons. The focus of architects, designers, technologists, and venture capitalists has not been where it needs to be. The foc