Punchline - a 10Gb/s connection from NLR/CENIC to Amazon Web Services data center(s) is probably going to happen in the summer timeframe. I was in a meeting yesterday organized by Amazon Web Services folks, Ed Lazowska and Ron Johnson at UWash, and Larry Smarr at UCSD. Tom West from NLR was also on the line. It looks like Amazon is going to move forward in connecting their web services data center in Washington (and probably Virginia as well) in the next few months. Primarily this is to get 10 Gb/s access for R&D but also it is likely to drop the I/O pricing (not to zero, but some) for AWS (EC2, S3, etc.) I'm working with Ron and Steve Cotter (director of ESnet) to figure out whether an ESnet direct connect makes sense or a peering with NLR. In the end we want 10 Gb/s access, so I'm expecting we will want ESnet to connect direct to avoid too much sharing. CeC