Networking's future appears to stay focused on achieving higher speeds, even though our data rates already do everything we want. The real goal is to get that speed to everyone, and do it in a secure environment.

WANs: After years of build-out in the long-haul telephone and Internet backbone networks, there's more than enough capacity to accommodate needs for the immediate future. The economic downturn has slowed the provisioning of all this capacity. Lots of dark fiber is available to light the future when necessary.

MANs: This is the hot spot in the market today. Metro networks either fail to meet the current speed and capacity needs or don't exist at all, so there are plenty of growth opportunities (see "Optical: Undisputed King Of High-Speed Data Transmission," p. 57).

LANs: Virtually all medium and large enterprises have been fully networked for years. However, there will be an ongoing need for upgrades in service to higher speeds and gradual replacement of older sys

Ethernet Everywhere: Clearly, Ethernet is the networking technology making the most impact. Even though it's been around for decades, it has considerable life left (Fig. 1). The original 10-Mbit/s coax systems have mostly been replaced by 100Mbit/s twisted-pair Fast Ethernet. A newer version handles 1 Gbit/s on CAT5 (Category 5) wiring as an LAN backbone or to the desktop.

Finally, and maybe of greater importance, is the resolution of security issues in Internet and wireless applications. While there are some software and hardware solutions in the form of firewalls, encryption, and more recently biotechnology, we're still waiting for "the" elusive product that will make this happen. The deployment of some applications will continue to be slowed by the technical complexities of the problem, the lackadaisical attitude about security in industry despite terrorist and hacker threats, and the widespread disagreement over which approaches to take. Indeed, security is one of the better opportunities in networking today.

What's next for Ethernet, 100 Gbits/s? Not right away, as the technology isn't there yet. Most likely, a 40-Gbit/s version will take advantage of available Sonet OC-768 semiconductor technology and provide some compatibility with Sonet in the metro and long-haul networks.

The classical network topology is the mesh, where all nodes are connected to each other. Even though they're very expensive to implement, there's a growing interest in mesh networks because they provide network redundancy and thus QoS (quality of service). Further, mesh networks scale more easily than other topologies, so many local carriers and metro network vendors are seriously considering them.

Additionally, Ethernet has come to dominate wireless networking. Wireless is increasingly

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