From: Johnathan Corgan <jcorgan@aeinet.com> One of the lessons learned in the years-long debate between the telco folks pushing synchronous time-division multiplexing point to point circuit switches and the data folks pushing variable length packet-switched broadcast medium networks is that fixed length packets can give you both TDM and statistical multiplexing. There's an important difference here. Namely, the telco/ATM folks were building hardware from scratch and we're not. We're layering on top of an existing Internet routing environment. This doesn't mean that your point is wrong, but that it may no longer be true when the base layer is IP. I'm not familiar enough with the ATM arguments to know whether they're still valid in this other domain. Eric