As has been observed many times on NANOG, one of the advantages that a circuit-switched network like the PSTN has over a packet-switched network like the Internet is that the PSTN has leisurely call setup times and relatively infrequent routing table lookups. No long-distance carrier processes even 100 million phone calls in a day networkwide; yet there are many routers which process billions of packets daily *per interface*.

I suppose for one this depends on your definition of leisurely, though I certainly agree with your point. I believe the lack of pre-populated "forwarding tables" in the PSTN is also a major difference, and a major factor in circuit setup time... The comments regarding number allocation and portability were more so related to the attributes of PSTN datatbase (E800, LIDB, PVN, etc..) versus forwarding capabilities. -danny