Paul - Thank you for your kind words. Sprint's filtering policies have led directly to a more survivable SprintLink and ICM, which is to the benefit of Sprint's Internet customers. The trade-off is the inability to reach people who have just hooked up to other parts of the Internet for the first time and who are using addresses that are in conflict with what we feel our routers can support. So far the two (yes, two) customer-originated complaints involving reachability affected by our filtering have been resolved by straightforward renumbering of the non-SprintLink entity. There have, by comparison, been several hundred rather angry messages from non-customers who hook up and find that they can't use their freshly-acquired addresses to talk to SprintLink/ICM, and who claim never to have been warned that this was a virtual certainty. Two troubles in several months are rather obviously dwarfed by the thousands of customer-originated complaints about routing problems after major exchange points or other major routing transitions happen (we have observed major peers having serious difficulties with their routing system scaling recently), not to mention the most recent serious connectivity problem which involved working very closely with our vendor on getting new technology out the door that will let us scale with increasing traffic and hopefully better deal with the scaling of the increase of globally-announced routing informaiton. Customer feedback I have gotten about our CIDR and other routing policies tends to be very positive. Indeed, a number of our customers are active participants in CIDRD, NANOG, EOF and other forums where these policies sometimes are discussed at length, and none of them seem very shy about putting forward their own points-of-view, all of which is remembered and thought about frequently. We are, after all, very keen as a corporation to develop and maintain long-lasting relationships with our customers. It is possible that a number of unhappy customers have not made themselves heard, or that a number have simply voted with their feet on this precise issue, however there certainly has not been enough of the latter to justify any sort of re-think on this particular policy. Whenever I see "Sprint sucks" in newsgroups and mailing-lists, it's almost always because of reliability problems. One of our most serious backbone reliability problems involves routing convergence times and long-term stability, and this particular routing policy in combination with BGP dampening and other tools and techniques we've developed here, goes directly to the heart of those problems. I am always interested in proposals that will help provide a more robust and stable level of connectivity and performance to our entire customer base, and if you have any ideas that would make it reasonable to withdraw our prefix-length filters and _improve_ our routing stability, I would be very glad if you could detail them. Sean.