http://www.scienceblog.com/community/article1018.html
--- "The Internet is 'fault-tolerant,' so there are always many routes a message can take. A packet of data traveling from New York to San Francisco might go by way of Chicago or Dallas, or might even hop from New York to Columbus to Miami to Omaha to Denver to San Francisco. "Routers have many ways to decide. Sometimes they send out test packets and time them. Sometimes routers exchange information about the condition of the network in their vicinities. But if routers choose the route that looks the least congested, they are doing selfish routing. As soon as that route clogs up, the routers change their strategies and choose other, previously neglected routes. "Roughgarden has a suggestion that wouldn't be expensive to implement. Before deciding which way to send information, he says, routers should consider not only which route seems the least congested, but also should take into account the effect that adding its own new messages will have on the route it has chosen. That would be, he says, 'just a bit altruistic' in that some routers would end up choosing routes that were not necessarily the fastest, but the average time for all users would decrease." --- This might be easier to understand if it was more technical, but I'm only aware of a lot of disabled features on my routers that are supposed to in theory do some of these things. Abstractions and analogies aside, is this really a problem, and is it really worth solving? Sounds like a lot of additional complexity for the supposed benefits. Pete.