lable Inefficient bandwidth usage Many hard-to-manage point-to-point connec- tions required Fiber-Optic Interrepeater Limited bandwidth Link (FOIRL) Primarily short-haul solution Inefficient use of fiber resources No built-in redundancy No end-to-end management Router-based packet transport rings Limited support for mixed services Limited support for long-haul, high-capacity applications Not based on carrier-grade network elements Proprietary technology Next-generation SONET Scalable Cost-effective, bandwidth-efficient Connectionless Full support for mixed packet data and TSM services Short-haul or long-haul, high capacity up to 1.6 Tbps Survivable with inherent resilience Easily manageable Carrier-grade equipment Open industry standards Chapter 4 traditional solutions.9 Multiservice next-generation SONET platforms enable the end-to-end delivery of multiple high-speed services, including 10 GbE, PoS, Fibre Channel, ESCON, FICON, and GbE. These platforms enable the delivery of traditional and new service offerings such as data cen- ter interconnections, storage area networking (SAN), VLANs, and virtual private networks (VPNs). The new platforms provide low-cost native LAN interfaces, eliminating the need for more expensive TDM transport inter- faces in customer equipment and/or additional customer premises systems (such as T1/T3 multiplexers) in order to access the backbone. Typical equip- ment available at the time of this writing possesses the following features: Carrier-grade reliability Protocol and bit-rate independence Ethernet switching integrated directly into the optical layer Up to 32 protected wavelengths and 64 unprotected wavelengths Per-wavelength protection switching Dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) bandwidth scalable to 2.5 Gbps per wavelength (10 Gbps in the future) The ELECs startup providers typically aggregate Ethernet traffic from customers with IP routers and Layer 3 switches, and then direct the traffic to a core router in the packet-based long-haul carrier's point of presence (POP). 