From: Johnathan Corgan <jcorgan@aeinet.com> There are many, many analogies you can draw about a network of this type to an ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) network. Thank you for the analogy. It's always good not to reinvent the wheel when you don't need to. The switched path could be set up and torn down dynamically by the user by interacting with the "switch" at each point to select the next hop the encrypted byte stream will follow. When you set up a mapping on a packet forwarder, this is exactly the kind of initialization that would be required. It is also at this point that keying would be negotiated, etc. Fixed length data packets (at the encrypted telnet level) also make it very easy to aggregate individual circuits into higher bandwidth pipes that connect server to server. Now here's an important detail that needs to get done right. Is the forwarding for fixed length packets, variable length packets, or streams? Is this decision global or local? What are the latency and aggregatation effects? How important are these for different classes of data? (telnet v. voice, e.g.) I'd suggest just getting something running first, to get some prototyping experience. Eric