About The Edge

For years, industry leaders and corporate net professionals have complained that one area has lagged behind the amazing advances in enterprise communications.

The problem? The bottleneck at the edge of the public carrier network. Applications that fly across LANs and cruise across national broadband carrier backbones congeal and even seize up where enterprises meet shared public networks.

Now all that is threatening to change. Welcome to The Edge - a resource devoted to the advances in service-provider networks that are shaking up the old telecom order.

In classic Network World fashion, we're going to focus on the hardware, software and services coming to market - but this time from the vendors targeting legacy carriers, new alternative local carriers, ISPs and application service providers.

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In The Edge, we'll continue our coverage of new classes of high-speed switches and routers that carriers and ISPs are buying. We'll expand coverage of the new "softswitches" that big-name network vendors and start-ups are offering carriers for IP data and voice architectures. We'll delve deeper into optical network equipment, which could dramatically reduce the cost of metropolitan- and wide-area networking.

We'll also examine terminal equipment for the broadband local-loop trifecta of digital subscriber line, cable modems and fixed-wireless services.

We'll bring you news flashes, research topics and an online community for service providers.

Once a month, we'll examine new carrier products from the standpoint of what they mean to you. For example, can new gear really enable service providers to make native high-speed Ethernet an alternative to ATM carrier backbones?

Several of our senior editors who write about carrier-class products will contribute to The Edge.

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