We have competitors that are claiming that their network is superior to ours (salesdroids to customers) because they have fewer L3 hops in their network. I see this "fact" pop up in customer questions all the time. I can see that L3 hops adds latency if a network is built on slow (2meg for instance) links, but at gigabit speeds, L3 hops adds microseconds in latency (if you use equipment that forward using hardware-assisted forwarding, but as far as I know there are no routers out there nowadays that doesnt). Does anyone have a nice reference I can point to to once and for all state that just because a customer has 6-8 L3 hops within our network (all at gigabit speeds or higher) that doesnt automatically mean they are getting bad performance or higher latency. Hiding the L3 hops in a MPLS core (or other L2 switching) doesnt mean customers are getting better performance since equipment today forwards just as quickly on L3 as on L2. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se