Fred, FB> You know, I'd like to see a little more respect for people, and for the FB> reports they make. Yes, it would be much better if operational staff from FB> each of the Fortune 500 companies and larger tertiary operators came to the FB> IETF and spoke for themselves. They don't, and that doesn't make their FB> opinions or requirements irrelevant. You are right. The problem is with taking input that purports to represent others, when we have no way to validate that input. Personally, my technical comments are really on behalf of God, and it is rather irritating that so many folks keep rejecting His input (that I offer), but the IETF way of doing things is to take first-person input. I've learned to live with it, no matter how misguided are all the folks who do not see the correctness of my comments. The problem with trying to deal with the problem you present is that it leads to the one that I've just demonstrated. What I do not understand is why it is not enough to have some folks say "I want this thing and I will build it" and to have others say "I want this thing and I will operate it" and to consider both sufficient? Unless and until we have a way of simply, reliably, and validly calculating the "fan out" a particular bit of input represents, we simply cannot add more fuzziness to our work by taking some claimed representative input but not others. A different problem, of course, is having one group claim that another doesn't know what it is talking about. For example, the idea that an operator could claim that a vendor to operators has no understanding of operations, is a bit strange. To the extent that the operators are correct, there is a gaping market opportunity waiting to be filled. d/ -- Dave Crocker <dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com> Brandenburg InternetWorking <www.brandenburg.com> Sunnyvale, CA USA <tel:+1.408.246.8253>