Dead of the Net predicted GIF, at 11. If you believe Business Week, August 26, "Above all finacial incentives for investment must ome into line. Right now, customers who pay a mere $20 a month, can blast the net with untold megabytes of data, voice and video. Without usaged-based charges service providers are called on to upgrade their infrastructure with no clear promise of a return on investment." Under the section "Dirty Secret" "One dirty little secret is that most phone calls and videoconferences ram their way past data transmissions by using a bully of a communications method called UDP. Unlike the more polite Transmission Control Protocol, TCP, which drops back when it detects congestion, UDP continues at full speed, elbowing ahead of TCP traffic. Yet UDP customers aren't paying anything extra for their fast lane". Sigh, you should see the section on peering. Its worse. Its a good thing none of these journalist used the train, telegraph, or telephone systems when they were growing at these extact same rates, or we wouldn't have trains or telephones today. A little research into the growth of the telephone network reveals very similar patterns. Clue seems to be a conserved quanitity in the universe, such that as the net gets lager the clue-denisty gets lower, thus causing most of the problems we see today. If only we had been able to get the Network Clue Transport Protocol going in time. -- Jeremy Porter, Freeside Communications, Inc. jerry@fc.net PO BOX 80315 Austin, Tx 78708 | 1-800-968-8750 | 512-459-9816 http://www.fc.net