At 09:51 AM 14-05-97 +0930, you wrote:

If Europeans and Asians and Austrialians made strong efforts to keep the amount of traffic being sucked towards them from the U.S. with things like web caching hierarchies (haha, enjoy an international aspect to copyright legislation battles) and mirroring, particularly when this can be done without the total cooperation of end users, then they would be under less pressure to acquire more trans-Oceanic capacity from the U.S.

We do make large use of caching (including forcing our dialin users to use it) and while it helps a lot it doesn't stop us still sucking down a lot of traffic from the US (bear in mind that Europe is reachable only via the US anyway).

Mark.

Since we decided to put a router in Palo Alto (at the end of a leased line to London) we have had interest from Australian ISPs in getting transit to London. So although that is "via" the US it only involves one hop. Also Asian ISPs have been looking at connecting directly to Europe rather than having to transit the US backbones to get there. Bill U-NET Ltd "X2 AND K56Flex - soon" mailto:bill@u-net.net http://www.u-net.net/ Tel 01925 484444 Fax 01925 484466