Since 1984, a trend developed throughout the world to encourage competition in the telecommunications sector through government deregulation and market-driven economic stimulation. Since competition was introduced, revenues and access lines have grown 40 percent. However, investment in outside plant has increased 60 percent. The 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act gave way to myriad new operators in the long-distance and local exchange markets. These new providers offered the promise of driving down costs. They also offered to create demand for additional services and capacity. Moreover, early competition among long-distance carriers was based mainly on price reduction. Today s competitive advantage is built on maximizing the capacity of the network and enhancing reliability through aggressive service-level agreements (SLAs).

Bandwidth demand increased as the carriers guaranteed fail-safe networks. Telecommunications is critical to businesses and individuals today. Carriers agreed to guarantee fault tolerance and immunity from outages. In many cases, telephone companies include service-level guarantees in their contracts, with severe financial penalties should outages occur.

To meet these requirements, carriers have broadened route diversity through either redundant rings or 1:1 point-to-point networks. Backup capacity is provided on alternate fibers. Achieving 100 percent reliability requires that spare capacity be set aside and dedicated only to a backup function. This can effectively double the bandwidth needed for an already strained and overloaded system because the protective path must equal the capacity of the working path.