The Internet has a profound
impact on the competitive landscape, since it is affecting the way that firms??™ activities are
coordinated, how commerce is conducted, how business communities are created, and how
communications are defined and performed.
As we are moving towards the Web-dependent era, the 99 percent or even the 99.99 percent
network reliability would be inadequate for the mission-critical applications that have
genuine requirements that exceed the typical application needs.
The e-service applications are typically reliant on IP data networks that construct the Internet,
which has become a ubiquitous success. Furthermore, the capacity of optical fibers
is doubling annually toward a terabit per second per fiber, providing strong incentives to
exploit the huge bandwidth of fiber-optic networks, which has increased considerably with
the introduction of Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (WDM) technology.
The rapid advancement of optical technologies and the growing effort to enhance the Internet
Protocol (IP) makes it possible to move from the current network architecture to an
all-optical Internet, where the network traffic is optically transmitted, buffered, amplified,
and switched through high performance Internet switches and routers directly connected
using WDM optical links.
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