we would soon reach the point where the individual 100Mb/s ports were just too full.
Some of the larger providers (like MCI, Sprint, & AlterNet) are there (or nearly there) already. My understanding is that the providers that are pushing lots & lots of bits between them are going off & implementing a number of point-to-point links to offload traffic from the interconnects. I've heard that MCI & Sprint are putting up something like 6 T3s between themselves; that MCI & AlterNet are doing 4 T3s; and that Sprint & AlterNet are doing 2 T3s. There may be other folks doing similar things. [AlterNet has had a number of private peering in place for years - to folks like NEARnet, BARRNet, Sesquinet, & THEnet.] Once these are in place, a fair amount of traffic should be removed from the major interconnects. --asp@partan.com (Andrew Partan)