Your paper will highlight a telecommunications technology, an industry segment or an organization with critical interests in telecommunications. The topics may include Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSAT), Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), frame and/or cell relay, Synchronous Optical Network (SONET), local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) interconnection, Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), video conferencing, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) or one of many other possible topics you may have in mind, subject to my approval. At this point, you may not know what some of these terms mean - which means you have a wonderful learning opportunity ahead for you. A little research never hurt anybody. What makes the exercise especially painless, however, is the fact that you can probably find all the information you need on the Internet - and I have no objection to your depending entirely on Internet resources to fill the requirements of this assignment. You are not likely to find the kind of up-to-date information that you need in other formats, much less in more easily accessible formats. With that said, make sure that the sites you reference are 100% credible and reliable, within the normal boundaries of the salesmanship you find in commercial websites.

Your assignment is to provide a coherent description of the topic at hand and to the best of your ability evaluate its potential and relative importance to corporate America and/or the networking industry, whichever is more appropriate. You should address technological innovation, the relevant regulatory environment, industry acceptance, and possible competitors for widespread adoption and market share. Within those general guidelines, you have wide latitude to address your chosen topic. In conjunction with your paper, you will be giving an interesting and, hopefully, discussion-provoking presentation. Perhaps you may inspire discussion by raising questions of your own, or by relating your own personal knowledge and/or experiences. The presentations will necessarily be of short duration, since there are a number of potentially long-winded students in the class. Therefore, you must be concise and to the point. Keeping all this in mind, here are the specific requirements of the assignment:

• 15 to 20 minute presentation (20 points) - use your imagination and your best presentational skills. Your performance (and you may consider it as such) will be judged on the dynamics of the presentation, encompassing clarity, methods of presentation, speaking voice, eye contact, "interestedness," and "interestingness."

• Brief (no more than one page) outline of your presentation (10 points) - to be distributed to the members of the class and to me. It will be judged on the quality of the handout, based on its completeness, its consistency with the oral presentation, its "user-friendliness," and its future value to the class members.

• A six to eight page paper (70 points) - written in excellent and engaging prose, and conforming to my usual stringent requirements for style, organization, spelling, and grammar. It will be evaluated on the appropriateness of the content and organization of the paper, based on the subject matter of the selected topic and the general guidelines of the assignment.