"take the contracts away from MFS...." uh, the last I knew there was no "contract" that MFS has from anyone (the gubmint types??) that can be taken away. I haven't taken the time to sort out who pays for what at the other NAPs. The Gigaswitch at MAE-EAST is smoking along just fine. There *are* ports onto MAE-EAST with lower-performance than dedicated Gigaswitch ports, but that is a function of what some clients want to buy. To a good first approximation, MFS sells what the clients want. Same with MAE-WEST as well. That is why some attachees have a port on a shared Ethernet off the FDDI and others have (possibly multiple) dediated FDDI ports on the Gigaswitch. Remember that MAE-EAST existed over a year before NAPs were created. As for additional exchange points, this is trivially obvious and will almost certainly come to pass in some time frame, I hope sooner rather than later. What is less obvious is who runs them, especially if one has second thoughts about the majority of the exchanges not be run by one company, as well as insist they be implemented with non-experimental technology and operated by people with clues about telco-grade service quality. It would also be nice if the exchange operator were not a competitor of the subscribers, but all of these desires may over-constrain the problem. One would think there is a nice little business in running exchange points around the country. Get co-lo space on a contract that will let you sub-let, put in a nice FDDI Gigaswitch, heavy-duty power with generator backup, good remote hands, plenty of DS3 entrance facilities (ideally on OC12 or faster sonet for growth!), monitoring and statistics gathering facilities, out-of-band management network, and a nice NOC somewhere to coordinate with all your customers. Put locations in major metro areas and go to town. You may need some up-front cash, but hey, this Internet thing is hot, so you can probably find investors (big grin). So how much do you have to charge subscribers to make this work? -mo