| Native IP over fiber is not a religion; it's a solid engineering. I'm not totally convinced of this yet, because of the useful O&M and restoration facilities SDH/SONET buys you now. You need something underneath IP to do the sort of Lothberg restorations I think you saw explained at the last NANOG meeting. SDH/SONET is also a really keen way of sharing a network among IP and other things on the wide-area side, and an even keener way of having access to relatively low-speed customer data on the more local side. I agree with you that there is alot of unnecessary overhead in SDH/SONET, but there is also alot of what seems now to be necessary overhead, too. I do, however, expect heavy experimentation involving radical simplification of on-fibre framing for point-to-point paths dedicated exclusively to IP. Sean.