The technology and the economics behind some next-generation commercial IP networks are examined and an implementation of a backbone built on those principles is presented.

About the Presenters
Positions held by Vijay Gill include systems development and analysis at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Senior Network Architect/Senior Member of the Technical Staff at UUNET. He is currently Senior Architect at Metromedia Fiber Networks.

Jim Boyle works for Level3 Communications, where he has worked on the teams that developed its ATM, and then MPLS, multiservice backbone networks. He is currently seeing if he can load IP software onto DACs and ADMs.