| Today, the three most competitive and realistic network technologies to deliver broadband services are hybrid-fiber coax, broadband fixed wireless and xDSL. Other network transport technologies may arise in the future but, for the present, these are the strongest market segments. Deployment of all of these broadband delivery platforms is being accelerated by IP and Internet based services. The communications services carried over these networks can be roughly broken into three categories: voice, video and data. Each category will have unique quality of service (QoS) and service level agreement (SLA) requirements depending on the underlying content: constant bit rate (CBR) for traditional voice and video, variable bit rate (VBR) for IP and Internet services and session initiated protocol (SIP) for on-demand QoS by content type. All of these technologies are available today and are the key drivers to broadband communications. Service convergence has arrived.
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