Re. Carl's suggestion to "lay our own wires/fibers..." That's exactly what I'm up to with the Community Dialtone project. Basically it comes down to having a neighborhood switch. We may be doing our first installation in the Winter, about 800 lines if all goes well. Seems to me that owning the switching & transmission infrastructure has a lot of possibilities. Anyway, more news to come on this in a few weeks... The thing is, I've looked into things like having infrared laser networks and various non-switched message relay systems... these just don't have the overall reliability of a decent switched system, for a large number of reasons which essentially boil down to the fact that each individual link is weak enough that even a redundant system can break down badly at points where the link density is relatively thin. Then also there's the question of economic feasilbility; to make a decentralised/non-switched system work, you need an application that is *so* popular that everyone in an area will want to be in. This comes down to subscriber density, and the issue is basically the same with telephone lines, but everyone needs a phone line... cable TV has high market penetration but satellite TV doesn't... how can we expect a lot of average folks to set up an infrared relay, eh...? Seems to me the best thing is to have the IR relays located where they can connect among the switching systems serving the various blocks and neighborhoods. (and if anyone's figured out how to do that at 2.048 Mb, i.e. approx double T1, please email me ASAP). -gg