Sean writes: Thirdly, there are some very cunning ideas being proposed by various hardware people for making the 7500 do interesting things on the switching front that very probably will get the router to deal with the kinds of loads you're asking about. COOK: does this mean that there is some way to get the cisco to behave like the cascade switch I asked about?? If not what in general does it mean? Finally you said if the 7500 doesn't perform well then you might have to do the redesign I asked about.... meaning going to an atm switched backbone with routers at the periphery of the backbone?? ******************************************************************** 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/ ********************************************************************