This scenario has one problem: the providers have determined that large public peering points like the CIX, NAPs, MAEs, and FIXs do not scale well, and that for the continued health and growth of the Internet, there are going to have to be more small, private interconnects between providers. Put another way: if the equipment you're working with has certain limits (let's say 100Mb/s FDDI or 45Mb/s T3/DS3 interfaces), it's better to have more interconnects with fewer peers at each interconnect point when your traffic potentially or actually will exceed those interface limits in aggregate. This is being driven by the incredible growth of the Internet, and by the fact that the customers can (and do) buy the same size pipes into the providers that the providers themselves use for their backbones - i.e. any such customer can potentially fill your backbone around the section of your backbone where he connects to you. Ooops. If you want to have fewer, large interconnects, which, incidentally, you can monitor all the traffic passing through, you've gotta have monstrous point-to-point bit pipes and/or LANs, and the Router/Switch From Hell to make the traffic move. There are people trying to build such things - it's called Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), but it doesn't really work in practice yet at high enough speeds - best you can get at the moment is OC3 (155Mb/s), which is only a trifle faster than FDDI, and the stuff is more expensive than conventional LAN/WAN technology, so it's only being used in small areas to prove the technology (with the hope that it really does scale as promised, and gets cheaper). There are working examples of a fast LAN switch in use at the public peering points: the DEC GIGAswitch (3.2Gb/s aggregate - 16 100Mb/s FDDI ports). Of course, you also have to build a pretty fast computer to suck down all this traffic and analyze it, too. And we all have the ultimate laugh on would-be eavesdroppers: IP security (read: end-to-end encryption of the data payload of IP packets on a per peer basis), drafts for which are in implementation phase as of the Stockholm IETF meeting (July 1995). This leaves 'em with just traffic analysis to use on us. Erik Fair