People are starting to tell me that the way out of smashing into the brick wall at 60 miles and hour that the Links on the Blink discussion was worrying about a week ago, is to take cascade or other frame relay switches for the national service providers backbone topology and push routers out to spoke and wheel hubs at the perimiters of the back bone where traffic sent on the backbone at the data link layer (2) can pop out and into the appropriate router for layer 3 routing to the final destination. PSI and UUNET have apparently been following this strategy with their backbones for some time. Netcom has also come on board. Its advocates say that this combination can scale and avoid the 60 mile per hour brick wall crash. Are they right? And if so why aren't sprint and MCI running in this direction and away from purely router based networks as fast as they can? If they are why are they wrong? Where does this architecture fail? If it fails. ******************************************************************** Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher Subscript.: Individ-ascii $85 The COOK Report on Internet Non Profit. $150 431 Greenway Ave, Ewing, NJ 08618 Small Corp & Gov't $200 (609) 882-2572 Corporate $350 Internet: cook@cookreport.com Corporate. Site Lic $650 Newly expanded COOK Report Web Pages http://pobox.com/cook/ ********************************************************************