In article <103014.212147.2001@avi.netaxs.com> Mr. Maddaus wrote: : This may be true on the services side of the business but the hw/sw : manufacturing side that provisions the service side has seen fit in years : past to ignore small issues. It is just too costly to develop and support : with limited R&D resources in financially sparse times. For example, the : major telecom manufacturers (i.e. Lucent,Nortel...) do customize code and : equipment for the major telcos, but only when the proverbial "mega-deal" is : signed and booked. : regards Avi, : Maddaus Agreed on the hardware side, certainly... But network providers are only very recently getting good at prioritizing "it must work and pass packets without crashing" vs. "it needs the features to let me network scale, provide multi-application support, etc etc etc ". It sounds like AOL is voting with their $ there, so at least that's a good sign. Regards, John... Avi