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Managed Wide Area Networks WANs, At the most basic level, a wide area network exists to interconnect individuals or communities in a useful and cost-effective manner. Service providers deploy hardware, software, and people to maximize the utility of their network while minimizing its capital and operational cost. The utility of the network comes from the services it enables: how well each service solves a customer problem, how quickly a service can be deployed to a customer, and how reliably the service performs. Of course, the utility of the deployed services determines the revenue realized by the WAN. The cost of a network comes from the infrastructure deployed to support it: the capital cost of required equipment, the cost of supporting information systems, the cost of support personnel, the network bandwidth consumed by the services, and so on. Obviously, the most profitable WAN service providers are those who are best able to deploy their revenue generating services at the lowest costs.