Has anyone seen this? http://www.real-internet.org/whatisric.txt "It is widely recognized that, because of the speed limitation of electric circuit, Tbps or Pbps routers can be constructed only with massively parallel architecture with a lot of elementary routers combined by a high speed interconnection backbone. On the other hand, it is widely misunderstood that fine grain QoS assurance of individual flows is impossible, because, at the high speed backbone of the Internet, there are so many flows that signaling of the flows and routing (including policing and fair queuing) of packets of the flows do not scale. It is not widely understood that the backbone scalability problems of QoS assurance is solved by massively parallel nature of high speed routers. As a result, people in conventional standardization forum such as ISO, ITU and IETF are, in vain, trying to produce complex protocols to aggregate flows to reduce the complexity. However, it is easy to prove that such aggregation is impossible at least with multicast or QoS routed flows. Thus, in some IETF WG, QoS assurance is finally given up and CoS assurance, which is not useful for most applications, which is often obfuscated by the fallacy of calling CoS QoS, is pursued."