Would you rather deploy a $3000 cisco edge box which is a unexpandable, 100 mbit piece of crap, or throw two $2000 Dell boxes and have a 1 GigE platform?
You don't need two $2000 Dell boxes to get a 1G platform, but this isn't the list for that. You also don't need a ton of money to do open source development (we do one major project here in-house, one that's responsible for generating a noticeable amount of traffic on most networks). But this also isn't the list for that discussion. I suspect software routing is going to continue to be a growing factor in the packet herding world, as more people want to do more interesting things, and the CPU's are able to deal with more, more, more. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.