In the late 1990s, many metro service providers based their business plans on the assumption that bandwidth limitations on metropolitan-area networks (MANs) were the major bottleneck to higher-capacity long-haul networks. The construction spree that followed replaced the metro bottleneck with a considerable metro fiber surplus that, despite many consolidations, persisted through 2006. The hope today is that with the right product portfolios, local access and metro service providers can capitalize on burgeoning demand for enterprise services to put this surplus to use. With growing capacity requirements, strong demand for traffic differentiation and prioritization, and a movement toward the converged WAN, delivering these more complex services will result in less customer churn and growing bandwidth requirements.
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