Sorry, Leo is correct. Technologies he outlined are only the tip of the ice-berg of what *isn't* being exploited by the router vendors.
Your average PC doesn't have to be NEBS-compliant, doesn't have to work more than 24 hours w/o crashing, and doesn't have quite strict constraints on power & heat dissipation. It doesn't have to have redundant power, and its components are readily available and cheap (those are produced in _large_ batches).
i think mo said something like "can we not discuss building global infrastructure using home appliances?"
"Technology" is neither NEBS-compliant or not. I don't think the suggestion is that the toaster-oven or the PC become an integral part of the infrastucture, but that the vendors are lagging in taking advantage of technologies that have been widely, and successfully, deployed elsewhere. I don't want my router on the absolute bleeding edge of processors and supporting chipsets and what-not because I want the vendor to have seen the lessons learned by others in many orders of magnitude greater numbers of deployments in other devices. Neither do I want my vendor to lag so far behind that while other kinds of devices have a cheetah in their case, my router vendor is still shovelling in hamsters. Stephen (Maybe this one will trigger some filters for insensitivity to hamsters. "crap" and "crud" failed completely.)