At 05:06 PM 7/23/96 -0500, Tim Salo wrote:

The desire for a full mesh of VCs between routers becomes more compelling if you have more than three routers. The diagram is left as an exercise to the reader; I rather dislike having to draw in ASCII.

Note that the two paths between A and C, (directly versus via B), seem to take distinctly different paths. (Perhaps, I missed your point).

Perhaps I missed your point. Tim, I could've sworn that you had been following the IETF ION WG mailing list, where this has been discussed on hundreds of occasions. I hesitate to even mention this on NANOG (I really don't want to re-hash this on this list), but I can't hold my tongue. The scalability of an ATM network where each end-point is fully meshed to all other end-points decreases in direct proportion to the number of end-points. This is not so much a layer 2 problem, per se, but rather the ability to maintain functional routing (convergence, et al.) in a fully meshed network topology. This does not scale. - paul