You were saying that Cisco's "state of the art" equipment was inadequate to handle the load you were presenting to it, in that the slightest abnormality in the external world made it essentially useless for a period of time.

Yes. But not because of CPU switching packets.

My argument is that one of three things must then be true:

1) You are incorrectly using the equipment you purchased.

Please teach us on how to use it correctly. Ypu have the full information on the toplogy of SprintLink and the Internet at large.

2) The equipment is not meeting its specifications which you relied on when you purchased it.

That is certainly not the case, for we are beta-testers for cisco. We do not rely on the marketing literature; and cisco is being very cooperative in providing large ISPs with the access to the people in company who actually know how the thing works.

3) The equipment is incapable of handling the load presented by a "modern" Internet.

It is barely capable. The fact is it is the only equipment today which is capable of handling the load and has appropriate functionality (i.e. actually works). Which explains why *all* large service providers use ciscos as backbone routers. We're investigating the alternative vendors' products, too. The only interesting thing available now on the market is highly specialized, unfortunately. --vadim