Like IP over raw fiber. Our friendly WDM vendors would love to get rid of SONET. SS7? What's that? ;)
Sorry, gotta weigh in here... As great as POS is, and as exciting as running IP on optical OC-48 onto WDM gear sounds (no piece of cake, believe me...), there is STILL room for ATM. More than just the much-touted network traffic engineering value, too. Simply put, because of the B-ISDN heritage of ATM, I can actually run synchronous circuits over it (using circuit emulation) and have it work right. Can't get there from here with any IP-over-glass solutions, alas. And as much as an "IP over everything" bigot as I've been for the last 17 years or so, I still run into situations where what I *HAVE* to have is some kind of synchronous circuit. Wish it weren't so, but I can't just tell people "oh, you can't do that"... Stan -- Stanley P. Hanks Vice President, Engineering / FirstPoint Communications (an Enron company) 210 SW Morrison St., Suite 400 / Portland OR 97204 vox (503) 464-8480 / fax (503) 464-2042 / email stan_hanks@firstpoint.net