> 	In MCI's defense I think it's the crossover points, NAPS, that
> 	are the real problem.
> 	
> 	When I stay within MCI I get pretty close to full bore performance.
> 	It's only when I have to cross over to another provider that things
> 	turn to "slugs fornicating"...
> 
> 	It seems popular to blame MCI these days for the NAP situation but
> 	it isn't their fault per say. A good chunk of their internal
> 	network is now OC3, 155Mbit ATM, and you can tell from the
> 	traceroutes.

Actually, if your packets regularly cross MCI backbone circuits in the vicinity
of the Bay area or New Jersey, you will indeed find that MCI's backbone gets
pretty funky during the middle of the day.  In MCI Internet Engineering's
defense, well before I left MCI in October we had figured out that to avoid
running out of backbone we'd have to start upgrading the bandwidth on the long
distance circuits by about January, so the fact that they're just starting this
in April makes the fact that they ran out of backbone in February or so not a
big surprise.

Dennis Ferguson