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Packetized voice has also spawned rapid growth in another area--start-ups. In the recent past, the number of new companies offering packetized voice solutions has grown at a tremendous rate. VocalData and other small companies are introducing products and growing quickly as carriers sign on and begin offering VoIP (voice over IP) to their customers.

Yet despite the availability of VoIP products, businesses have been slow to adopt VoIP. The H.323 standard is too broken to be fixed. Call conferencing and other services cannot be done without huge iron, and the only easy solution in sight is to extend the protocol--again, with added baggage.

Packetized voice needs a new back to ride on--namely, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). Komodo and other companies are providing gear that speaks both SIP and H.323, to help smooth customer changeovers, while 3Com Corp. is working on true SIP gear with Level 3 Communications.

Customers already have started bringing their networks together on these larger bandwidth pipes as can be seen by the number of concentrators that have hit the market. Vendors are creating more possibilities for customers by adding features to their FRADs and ATM concentrators. Mariposa Technology earned our choice of ATM access concentrator this year because it added more features to its already feature-rich product line.

Carriers and vendors will continue to be the driving force behind packetized voice. Voice is a big business, and the need to carry it will never diminish. Packetized solutions will help reduce the amount of bandwidth used by the ever-increasing number of voice calls. OC-48 will no longer be the big dog of the backbone world; carriers will install even more OC-192 equipment in the next year. Switch manufacturers are increasing port density and back-plane capacity to match. Not only will the carrier-class equipment grow, but enterprise equipment that used to top out at OC-3 will now see OC-12 and OC-48 interfaces as commonplace.

As data networks grow and voice networks are integrated, management products will become even more of a necessity. Paradyne Networks' Paradyne OpenLane Service Level Management Solution package was our choice this year for best WAN management tool, and shows that affordable, scalable and useful products can be brought to the market.

Last year, a plethora of WAN technologies rolled into homes and businesses, extending the reach toward affordable WAN services. For something that was used primarily to connect security systems to central offices, DSL (digital subscriber line) took off like gangbusters. If only ISDN had been so widely accepted when it was introduced. DSL was the talk of the town, from little Joey connecting to the Internet from his home computer to interconnecting offices with voice and data services, with the help of TollBridge Technologies and other companies. Service providers began creating VPN (virtual private network) and WAN last-mile connections with DSL. If the Web popularized the Internet, then DSL let even the smallest companies have high-speed access and place their own servers on the Internet for worldwide access to their services or products.

But let's not forget the thick black cable that comes into most every home these days. Not to be left off the information superhighway, cable TV companies merged with carriers and increased the number of cable modems on the network. But with cable's newfound popularity came bottlenecks. A year ago, a savvy person might be the only one using a given segment, but now he or she is battling neighbors for the same bandwidth.

WAN services are now reaching out to the SOHO market. Vendors like MCK are delivering products that extend the corporate data network and PBX services right to the home over ISDN or DSL services. All the PBX features that office workers have come to enjoy, like call waiting, call transfer and four-digit dialing, are now extended to the fuzzy-bunny-slipper brigade. This market will continue in the next year as more workers find ways to avoid traffic and work from home, while office managers better integrate services to their off-site personnel.

Who needs ESP?

Forget copper, forget fiber. According to the hype, the big arena is wireless. Wireless phones and pagers are just the beginning. Lucent Technologies is the driving force behind the 802.11 specification, and even Apple Computer is jumping on the bandwagon to throw the wires away. Products are being created not just for the office, but for the home as well. If this trend continues, the only wires left will be those providing power to the wireless equipment.

Ubiquitous wireless Internet access is closer but still limited by standards confusion and minimal infrastructure. Metricom's Ricochet comes closer than anything else to providing the ideal mix of speed, convenience and price. Ricochet's only major flaw has been limited service area compared with slower, more costly, but more widespread alternatives--namely Mobitex and CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data). In the past year, Ricochet increased coverage somewhat, but the more significant developments won't be seen until later this year, as 128-Kbps service is rolled out. Right now, Ricochet service is still the best general-purpose wireless data service you can get...if you can get it. Soon, not only will you be better able to find it in your area, it'll be four times as fast.

So who will be carrying all that data in the new millennium? The way things are going, it will be MCIWorldComSprintUunet. There used to be a name for companies like this: Ma Bell. Like a mercuric monster, what was taken apart so many years ago seems to be recombining in a similar form today--and it's ready to take over the world again. With so many mergers happening, the question has to be asked: "What network is my information actually running on?" WorldCom has yet to migrate customers off smaller networks it purchased years ago, not to mention the customers of the larger MCI. The gluttony continues as WorldCom, while still trying to chew MCI, has a forkful of Sprint pressed to its lips.

Every evolving industry needs a fresh start at some point in its life. Leaving the last century, we continually mumbled "convergence." But it is not enough to converge technologies by melding them together. Networks must be redesigned and rebuilt from the ground up. With inexpensive, high-bandwidth technologies such as DSL proving their flexibility, this year will be the year we take the first steps toward one network that can handle voice, video and data anywhere, anytime.