From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com> Why not just start calling it the Internet "core". The core of the US Internet no longer follows a backbone topology. The core is composed of the major NSP's who operate national backbones providing national transit and who interconnect at all or most of the public exchange points.

Make sense?

Core makes sense to me, as a description of the entirety! Actually, the old "backbone" was a mesh, with redundancy. Some NSPs claiming "backbone" (such as PSI) have so little redundancy that they fall over regularly. And the connectivity beteen many NSPs is excrable, as well documented in this forum. My point was there are few (if any) backbones. If your own back didn't connect to all your limbs, you would have a bit of trouble standing. WSimpson@UMich.edu Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32