Fly on WallStreet

There is an old saying in the telecommunications industry, "Internet access is great, but dial-tone is a god given right." That statement has been true for the last 15-20 years, but the sentiment is changing. Organizations increasingly rely on their Wide Area Network (WAN) to support their day-to-day business. Network outages, while prevalent in the past, are no longer tolerated. Businesses these days need to run at the speed of light, and they need to do it efficiently. More and more companies are integrating content-rich applicaitons into their business plans, and their hunger for bandwidth is growing exponentially. Couple this with the fact that companies are adopting enterprise-wide Voice over IP telephone systems at a record pace. When your organization's telephone system is built upon its data network infrastructure, you better be sure as shit that your network isn't going to crap the bed. Remember, "Don't fuck with dial-tone." The acceptance of VoIP technology and the adoption of content-rich business applications are forcing companies to make large scale upgrades to their WAN, and it is about to make some well positioned telco's a lot of money.