Use of COTS products is often highly desirable as a means of reducing the cost of infrastructure, yet such products bring concerns as well (see the discussion below in the section “Leadership for National Defense and Homeland Security”). For example, military requirements can exceed what COTS products alone can deliver, perhaps because the demands (e.g., the need for multilevel security) are higher or the application environment is different, because of the presence of an adversary, for instance.
Telecommunications continues to be a dynamic sector in which significant innovation is possible provided proper research investments are made. Some examples of potential payoffs from telecommunications research include the following:

A significantly enhanced Internet architecture that goes beyond incremental improvements to the existing network architecture to provide enhancements such as greater trustworthiness in the network core and customer networks, improved addressing and routing, and end-to-end quality of service provisioning;3

New network architectures that take advantage of ever-greater storage densities, processing speeds, and communications bandwidths;

More trustworthy telecommunications networks better able to address such challenges as maintaining the security of the voice network even in the face of a rising frequency, sophistication, and severity of attacks and the complexities and interdependencies that come with the convergence of voice and data networks;
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