Let's back up. You've got an OC-48 or OC-192 fiber and you want to grab ALL of the data in this fiber. Now I'll grant that in real life there's
A. You don't want all data. A nice illustration on ether speeds is obtained by using simple tools like putting the NIC in promiscuous mode, using simple reassembler and filter that discards everything but smtp/pop text parts. This can be trivially done with tcpdump+awk. The percentage of mail texts is usually less than 2-3% of all traffic. And it's not even because of porn - it's stupidity of html generators (humans & software). B. Even 'All data' is far less than line speed. Average fiber utilisation is under 4% in US. Buffers! ===== end (of original message) Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail