Dirk Harms-Merbitz wrote: I agree, there is a need for long-haul providers. But they also don't have to be that big. 20-30 people companies with an annual gross of, say 10 million, would probably do it. All they need is a T3/OC3/OC12 nation wide mesh which is expensive, but not that expensive. Plus peering arangements. Try selling a third T3 to a local ISP with 100 T1 clients and two T3s to larger networks. The local ISP will most likely talk about pricing plus how hop-counts can be reduced for his customers. Pricing being the more important factor at this point. Dirk Rest of thread deleted... Dirk, You are showing a lack of knowledge about the real costs of long haul networking. Economies of scale do not even begin to come into play until the revenue hits $50 million or so given the need for a network that is not sparsely connected or under provisoned in the backbone. This is the reality. There is a definitive place for the "big boys" as transit aggregators of bandwidth. Without them our collective costs would skyrocket. Mike Gaddis Savvis Communications