Hi, #There are certainly applications and users out there that would #like to use all of the bandwidth possible, but do not need #to step on other, more bit sensitive, services. They might want to, but unfortunately we (the Internet2 community as a whole) have had limited success in helping them routinely achieve higher throughput for bulk transfers. Again refering to http://netflow.internet2.edu/weekly/20041108/ see Table 1: -- The median throughput for bulk TCP flows is still less than 3Mbps. -- The 95th percentile for bulk TCP flows is still less than 15Mbps. There is an I2 end-to-end performance initiative designed to improve those numbers, but at root, because most of the PCs that scientists and students work from are not shipped from the vendor pre-tuned for high throughput, average throughput numbers remain low. When PC vendors begin to read http://www.psc.edu/networking/perf_tune.html or http://www.web100.org and offer higher education special SKU's preloaded with OS's tweaked per those approaches, then, maybe, we'll see average performance routinely increase and congestion become a pragmatic issue. Until then, it will be routine to see most Abilene connectors run at only a fraction of their potential capacity, e.g., see: http://stryper.uits.iu.edu/abilene/aggregate/html/report-2004-11-20.html Shrug. Regards, Joe