The insatiable desire for increased bandwidth led to the development and deployment of optical technology. However the potential of this technology has not been fully exploited. Currently, SONET sets the standard for optical communications with bit rates of up to 9.8 Gbps per wavelength channel. Although wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) has been deployed, the number of wavelength channels per fiber is relatively small at the current time. Dense WDM that better utilizes the fiber capability further boosts the SONET capacity, along with the next generation bit rate of 40 Gbps. Current research and development in this area is utilizing this high bandwidth availability for future integrated data transmissions, such as packets over SONET, broadcast TV, video on demand, and video conferencing. These applications in turn induces fundamental impact on SONET itself, which leads to a new generation of technologies evolving from SONET, such as MPLS
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