A few years ago it was expected that wide area technologies such as ATM would be the unifying protocol to integrate LAN and WAN networks. However ATM largely failed to penetrate the LAN market. But now the tide may be turning. LAN based technologies, particularly high speed variations of Ethernet are poised to invade the WAN. Ethernet based networks may end up as the all encompassing unifying protocol from the LAN to the WAN. All optical DWDM networks in combination with condominium or municipal dark fiber networks, 10Gigabit Ethernet and CWDM will allow LAN architectures, concepts and most importantly LAN economics to invade the WAN. Control and management of the optics and wavelengths will increasingly be under the domain of the LAN enterprise customer at the edge, as opposed to the traditional carrier in the center. Over time the current hierarchical "connection oriented" WAN environment will become more like the Internet which is made up of autonomous peering networks. These new concepts in optical networking are starting in the same place as the Internet started – the university and research community. For these reasons it is believed that most forecasts for the expected take up of Gigabit Ethernet and 10Gigabit Ethernet in the long haul are considered to be far too low.
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