Simon Lockhart <simonl@rd.bbc.co.uk> | In Europe [bandwith is] becoming cheaper too - especially to major cities. You're welcome. Sean. - -- aka Sean Doran <smd@ebone.net> PS - The "gigantic plunge" in pricing was triggered by Dave Morton, who, acting with what was then Ebone, negotiated a city-to-city PDH E3 for approximately 10% of the prices on offer from the PTTs. This particular circuit set a benchmark that terrorized the industry in advance of further trans-border deregulation (wisely) promoted by the Commission of the European Union. Previous efforts led by Peter Lothberg, Dave, Stefan Westman and many other former Ebone board and consortium members led to dramatic discounts against PTT 1/2-circuit pricing, and of course, companies like Hermes Europe Railtel (now part of Ebone) also stepped into the market with deep discounts against the traditional telco models of international/intercity pricing. This does not exactly help the North Americans, but to make it NANOG-relevant, there are certainly some things that the NA regulators and consumers of bandwidth can learn from Europe, just as Europeans have learned from successes and failures in earlier large-IP-backbone construction in NA. First and foremost is that "creative destruction" works very well at reducing prices in practise, and incrementalism does not. Service performance itself remains essentially unchanged either way. QoS therefore is a solution to a non-problem (maintaining service levels), and is moreover a contributor to incrementalist thinking.