Welcome to the Last Mile Technologies

Networking technologies have brought increasingly more abundant and, therefore, cheaper bandwidth to the Local Area Networking environment (LAN). Likewise, Metropolitan Area Networking (MAN) bandwidth has become more plentiful and affordable. Wide-area Networking (WAN) bandwidth remains tight and expensive, though even here, progress has been made.

As more and more individuals, as well as small to medium businesses, start to get "connected", the WAN bandwidth known as the "last mile" becomes even more important. The last mile refers to the wires that go from the telephone company's central office (CO) to a point at the subscriber's location known as the demarcation point or the "demarc". This tutorial looks at many of the newer technologies that are being used to address the demand for a faster last mile. Select a topic of interest from the list on the left.