Substantial growth in areas such as IPTV, consumer voice and consumer and business broadband have required flexible, scaleable and cost-effective provisioning of services.

DWDM has evolved beyond serving as a long-haul application to become a key enabler in WAN, large enterprise, and campus LAN applications. Today, a new wavelength circuit can be remotely provisioned across the furthest points in a Carrier Class network, only requiring manual intervention at ingress and egress locations. Cisco's leadership has been influential in enabling the use of Ethernet over DWDM, as carriers look to put Ethernet throughout their networks, even over optical transports.