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

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