The question, in my mind, is whether it's reasonable to ask that regional providers reach the same bar as privately owned campus networks.
you are comparing LAN to WAN, never a bright idea
Today's residential internet speeds ("WAN") are greater than the LAN speeds of 20 years ago. Users generally don't care about "LAN" vs "WAN", and just want their stuff to work fast and well. I would counter your statement with a warning that it's never a bright idea to simply discount what people want to be able to do just because it would involve what us techies call a "WAN." It's too easy to forget what users want to be able to do; for example, maybe at&t didn't really properly predict that users would be downloading huge amounts of YouTube, pictures, app-driven data, and movies over their "3G" network, which is kind of the ultimate example of the general point I'm making. It's likely correct that WAN speeds will never match LAN speeds, so from that point of view, you're correct, but that doesn't mean that it might not be nice to be able to backup someone's PC over a SOHO cablemodem to a corporate backup server, and in fact some people try to do that, since the alternatives are not good. Bleh :-) ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.