I'm not sure about USF for universal broadband. However, if we are going to give carte blanche duopoly to the bells and the cablecos, I think they should be required to build out to serve ALL of their near monopoly areas. I don't think any legislation aimed at the TCP/IP stack is appropriate. I was not for any of the recently proposed "net neutrality" legislation because I think no one in Congress has any idea what they're talking about. I appreciate the pointer to Dave Siegel's blog. He makes many good points. The key one is this: "Global Crossing continues to have one of the highest quality Internet backbone in spite of it being in the lowest priority class, because we continue to design the network to perform at a high level of quality." While I can believe this is true for Global Crossing - however I don't have any direct experience with your employer - I wholly believe this statement is not true of any of the bells. The at&t backbone network, from a customer perspective, is most emphatically not designed for high performance. I do not believe that they are capable of doing QoS to the level that you describe at Global Crossing. I believe this is true of Verizon and BellSouth as well. Qwest may have somewhat better handle on network optimization. The cablecos may have QoS capabilites up the sleeve with DOCSIS 3.0 - from their customers to their network centers - but I don't believe their backbones are optimzied for QoS either. Both of these groups of companies make lots of posturing about "not limiting any traffic" but I believe with their current network topologies they are not prepared to implement the level of QoS they want to, and it will directly impact their consumer and business customers negatively. I believe that there are opportunities here both for companies like Global Crossing and smaller ISPs who can buy bandwidth from high-quality network providers, to sell to discriminating customers who do not want the limited broadband service that the bells currently offer.