In the long-haul market, the goal of the network is to move massive amounts of data and voice between cities.
Metropolitan networks are much more complex.
Traffic flows between COs and PoPs within a city, from carriers' networks to customers, and within the buildings themselves. Dozens of new startup companies are targeting the metro market, each defining the issues in their own language, which adds to the confusion. Given the variety of service providers and network architectures, this is not often a useful way of looking at the network. Consolidating and distributing traffic to and from the access network. Equipment at the customer location is determined by the services offered, the number of users at the particular location and the type of access network.