
Evolving MAN/WAN Technologies ◾ 363
allowing the in-building equipment cost to range from $5,000 to $10,000, it also has a number
of major technical limitations. ese limitations include no traffic management and virtually
nonexistent robustness to failure (the time needed to reconfigure around a failure is greater by a
factor of 1000 compared to time required with a SONET/WDM environment). Compared with
SONET and with the IEEE 802.17 Resilient Packet Ring, raw GbE backbones for metropolitan
applications leave a lot to be desired. Many dismiss a raw GbE-based metro backbone as inferior
technology. Ethernet-based systems must overcome at least ...