A few time already I've wished for a fully standardized and vendor interoperable way of doing a true point to point ethernet link. It would work just like an old leased line or synchronous serial interface and completely do away with ARP, MAC addresses and all that stuff. Obviously no switches in between would be allowed. Each side would run in "promiscuous mode" where every ethernet frame is received and passed up to the network stack (just like on a serial link). Since MAC addresses are useless they can be scrapped and only the ethertype field remains. This increases the effective MTU by 12 bytes. The framing overhead goes away and the packet can directly be directly placed on the wire without taking a detour through L3->L2 lookup and encapsulation step. More importantly one can specify the just the outgoing interface again instead of the next hop: ip route 10.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 g0/1 Do you think this is useful? Maybe vendors will hear me/us. -- Andre