Agreed. Although my preference is (as you stated earlier) 'graceful degradation' in the face of congestion, not intentional degradation of traffic based on some arbitrary monetray boundary. Again, there should never be a case for _intentional_ "less- than-best-effort", in the traditional sense. Of course, these arguments assume that the service provider does the Right Thing (tm) w.r.t. capacity planning & engineering. ;-) - ferg -- Lamar Owen <lowen@pari.edu> wrote: On Friday 16 December 2005 09:21, Fergie wrote:

Doesn't anyone really remember the whole smart-v.-stupid network analogy? Not meaning to start a flame war here, but trying to stick all of the intelligence back into the network is not exactly a win-win proposal.

A stupid network is easier for malicious applications to exploit. Need a balance point, not either extreme. -- "Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson Engineering Architecture for the Internet fergdawg@netzero.net or fergdawg@sbcglobal.net ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/