This chapter examines
the building blocks for constructing broadband networks. It looks at high-speed
connectivity from a hierarchical perspective, moving from international, to national,
to metropolitan, and finally to local access deployment solutions. The chapter describes
the various wireline and wireless technologies for deploying broadband infrastructure,
including examples of various deployments throughout the world, and discusses some
of the issues associated with implementing these technologies. The focus is on the
physical networks and associated protocols for routing traffic rather than the end
user services and applications that are accessed over the networks, which are discussed
in chapter 6.