A carrier can overcome the challenges to capturing the managed multiservice solutions opportunity. The following capabilities are required.

Traffic Management

• support for the unique service requirements of diverse applications, beyond the conventional four ATM

QoS categories

• the ability to map different applications to the network with a high degree of granularity
• the ability to engineer networks for 100-percent utilization, while maintaining QoS
• traffic shaping, to contain congestion at the ingress to the network
• ATM–switch architecture optimized for transport of IP traffic

Network Management

• comanagement, which offers customers a view of their network and lets them monitor the progress of SLAs
• integrated, end-to-end fault detection on a global basis
• global, multicarrier management
• the ability to monitor SLAs and report the performance not only to the carrier but also to the customer

Applications Availability

• multiple layers of redundancy
• equipment that is easily configured for redundancy
• ATM switches designed for six nines (99.9999 percent) availability
• a self-healing network
• fast rerouting

Voice Capabilities

• aggressive voice-compression ratios with toll quality
• voice capabilities that reduce the bandwidth required by voiceband and fax traffic

Applications Focus

• a transport infrastructure that is extremely flexible, scalable, and cost-effective, providing the ability to focus on development of higher-layer applications