HWB - You make some very important points through your frustration, the most key of which is this one: "...if someone points a finger at your competitor, don't be too happy about it. You may be next". Unfortunately with the available technology and labour pool, there is no entity which could provide a very clean global Internet, period. There is no organization you can pay more money to that will improve your general-case performance, unless your general-case utilization is really much more like a VPN than the Internet. That is to say, if what you're looking for is high performance to sites X, Y and Z, and OK current-Internet performance to everywhere else, there are several options open to you, one of which is putting X, Y, and Z on a VPN and hooking each of these sites individually to the Internet. This is something that Sprint Managed Router Networks does all the time and is very good at, and is essentially what (modulo policy) the vBNS is for. However, with respect to the Internet, anybody who tells you that they can provide a better quality of service, connectivity-wise, than their equivalent competitors is either lying or in for a really big shock. As to your other points, I'm not sure how to address them, but I think you probably have some ideas you'd be willing to share... :) Sean.