Alex said it better than me, but this week he has a 1 time zone advantage. :-) Sean Donelan writes: | What annoyed me isn't the technical decision, but the marketing | blitz used to justify it as "saving the Internet." Marketing blitz? There was me. And me. And me. And more me. Find another Sprint person who blitzed. I had alot of vocal supporters, many of whom were at vendors and customers. If it was shrill at times, it was because there were real problems that went beyond Sprint, and which were contained only by virtue of Sprint's relative size and inertia. The one-direction-only filter was an attempt to goad Tony Bates in particular into putting in place a "revenge filter" because it was causing him headaches in dealing with his new customers who were cut off from Sprintlink, and it was causing his sales staff headaches in terms of lost upgrade/2nd-circuit orders to us. The arrival of money to connect directly to Sprintlink and thus avoid the filter (and there was some) was what kept other people at Sprint from putting in the energy to overcome the inertia, otherwise the filter would have been gone gone gone a long time ago. Sales guys weren't saying "because our routers can't handle the full routing table" or anything of the sort. Weren't you trying to buy from Sprint sales people then? You *know* what they were like. Indeed, some of the cleverer ones were thrilled that their jobs got easier. The grillings of sales people over the filter and the bad PR surrounding it in the first year of the filter could be counted on one hand, and in base ten. Likewise, so could the number of "revenge filters" that would have encouraged our customers to clean up their own long prefixes so that our sales people wouldn't have to say: | say "because our routers can't handle the full routing table." instead of "MCI are filtering you, those bastards. We're sorry. There's nothing we can do. You'll just have to renumber." (or connect to them... and the next big network that filters you, and the one after that...) So I'm far from perfect, but I think I had good reasons for making the filter one-way-only, and it mostly worked. Or perhaps you could now argue in hindsight that the filters did NOT affect the global growth of the routing system at all or in any positive way, and that the people who believed otherwise at the time were badly misguided? Sean. ps - for the other networks, large and small, that filtered, i would be interested in your experiences with sales/marketing/pr/etc.