Re:

It is merely that an l3 exchange point over an l2 shared medium is a bad idea.

agreed. the problem is that it's the best idea we've come up with so far for folk who are willing to have a lot of small peers. one of the problems folk like we have is not wanting to manage (i.e. monitor, tune, ...) the bandwidth to 75 small peers at a meeting place. we just want to plug one wire in (well, two for redundancy) and let the packets fly. of course, for the 10+ big-bandwidth peers, multiple point-to-point interfaces is the current practice. and it is here that we have hope that aggregated layer one may pay off. yet to be seen, of course. randy