The operative concept in this paper is 'telephone networks'.

"Architectural Solutions to Internet Congestion Based On SS7 and Intelligent Network Capabilities"

I particularly liked the myopic use of the term "Internet Congestion". And here I thought that they had a solution for MAE-East.... ;-) I think the paper would have been more accurately titled: "Kludges to get around modems that don't say goodbye." or "We never should have introduced flat rate local dialing. What now?" ;-) ;-) tony -- i almost went catatonic when i tried to read that paper -- check out sentence number One: The explosive growth of the internet has created problems for the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), which for the forseeable future will provide the majority of users with internet access via dialup modems. i love how their phrasing it like they have this acute perception about the market demands. as though we're all still using modems by choice. as though THEY aren't the ones limiting us to this silly analog crap, despite that they already have perfectly high quality dedicated copper pairs into customer premises. the only reason Anyone is still using a modem is cause the PSTN can't seem to Get With The Program and learn how to speak Internet (speak it, hell, they can't even Spell it with a capital I in this paper. i think we should all lowercase pstn from now on.) (ok so that made less sense coming from me. whatever.) if it weren't so depressing it would be amusing, the attitude throughout this paper: that the PSTN views Internet traffic as something to quarantine off to its own network (keep it away from the precious lucrative pstn) this paper provides no architectural solution to, nor even insight into, Internet congestion. not even solutions that could clearly increase RBOC revenues (what morons) instead it draws Magic Sphere around the telephony network, shielding it from the Horrible Intimidating Internet, without any consideration of how they might be able to participate in evolving the Internet efficaciously. ok so maybe we weren't expecting some huge breakthrough from them, but did they have to so *Vividly* confirm my worst fears about the prevailing archaic pstn mindset. my favorite part was one of their possible solutions for how to divert circuit calls to ISPs based on some numbering scheme: to obtain all ISP and on-line service provider (OSP) telephone numbers, and configure office-based 'triggers' for these numbers. oh yeah. that'll work. all the phone numbers of all the ISPs. yum. the boggling part is that they're *already* openly assuming the need for an additional packet switched network No Matter What. and the pstn has already dedicated Always-On copper lines from customers to COs -- so their plan is to do some heuristics on the signals coming in from the copper pair, and turn it into a transient fixed bandwidth circuit. brilliant leap of logic right into the abyss, how did they manage that. can't they come up with a more broken model? (no, i don't want to know) i just don't see what's so repulsive to them about just building a PSI(nternet)N, colocating routers, then using the already dedicated circuits to customer premises to access it. (i guess that's what @home thought too; they seem to have at least gotten that part right) they're adding so much Kruft to their system just to avoid moving to a more capable one there is something so Deeply Wrong with this picture where's Kuhn when you need him maybe we should get michael moore to do a movie about it (i know, you all were planning to wait for the movie rather than read that article anyway. wise souls.) k