Key technologies
Ethernet
The de facto standard for wired networking. Well established in 10Mbps and 100Mbps over copper varieties for LANs, also used in 1Gpbs over fibre or copper to interconnect servers. 10Gbps over fibre products expected in 2002, telcos expected to offer 10Gbps over fibre connections by 2003.
DWDM
Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, a technology allowing large numbers of data streams to be carried over a single optical fibre, considerably increasing the capacity of optical fibre thus vastly improving the capacity of optical networks. The use of DWDM in city-wide optical networks paves the way for Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) offerings from telcos.
iSCSI and FC/IP
Internet SCSI and Fibre Channel over IP are two new technologies expected to be ratified by the end of 2001, which allow storage hardware to transmit data over the IP protocol, allowing it to be sent over much longer distances for communication between SAN devices over LAN or WAN links. While FC/IP still requires a dedicated FC connection, iSCSI can operate over standard Ethernet networks.
TCP/IP offload engines
If processing TCP/IP takes 1 processor cycle for every bps, then a 1GHz processor would be completely swamped processing a 1Gbps connection. In order to meet the performance requirements of IP-based SANs using technologies such as iSCSI and FC/IP, hardware vendors are now starting to offload this processing task onto the network interface cards, which include a TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE), or basically an IP stack on a chip
ATM
Asynchronous Transfer Mode, once thought of as a competitor to Ethernet, is now increasingly marginalised into niche applications. The most common of these is as a transport mechanism for IP over carrier backbones.
MANs
Taking advantage of telcos' extensive intra-city optical fibre networks, and the extra bandwidth provided by DWDM, Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) allow businesses to connect geographically disparate locations within the same city together at bandwidths approaching those of LANs.
VoIP
Using IP networks to carry voice as well as data, applying compression techniques, can reduce costs by reducing or eliminating the reliance on expensive long-distance calls. However, a greater saving may be found in the long term by creating unified voice and data environments, eliminating the need for a separate telephone network entirely.
Wi-fi (802.11b)
This standard for interoperable wireless networking has been accepted by almost all the major manufacturers, and is now a viable option for many office environments. The 802.11a standard expected next year would boost wireless speeds from 11Mbps to 54Mbps, making it a serious competitor to 100Mbps wired Ethernet.
Your story gets a bit repetitive around paragraph nine in the MAN chapter...