ary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Telecom Market Segments Chapter 8 more than 60 percent of all metro spending; this is a significant percent- age of the overall market and deserves the attention it attracts. Furthermore, the fundamental local-loop technology for the metro is Gigabit Ethernet, and to be even more granular, switched Gigabit Eth- ernet. Service providers can simply drop a fiber connection in the base- ment of a metro office building, terminate it on a high-volume Ethernet switch, and deliver a broad range of high-bandwidth services to multiple customers in the building. Network Revamp Today the typical ILEC operates a wide array of disparate and function- ally unrelated networks: the PSTN, the IP network, the ATM network, the frame-relay network, the ISDN overlay, the DSL overlay, the wireless network, the high-speed Ethernet access and transport network, and so on. Recent technological advances such as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) allow for many of these net- work infrastructures to be converged onto a reduced set of protocols and physical networks, a move that dramatically simplifies the complex man- agement task that ILECs face. This complexity translates into revenue barriers because of service delays, QoS issues, and billing discrepancies. Anything that can be done to simplify "the cloud" is a step in the proper direction because it reduces overall operating cost and stands a good chance of increasing customer service levels because of reduced network complexity. The move to an IP infrastructure is clearly underway, but in many cases the telcos are reluctant to make big moves in that direction because of uncertainty over the business reasons for such a radical migration. In fact, there are relatively few valid business reasons for the migration to IP. The first is obsolescence: If a telco is facing a situation in which a switch in a central office is n