It's actually an chip level engineering decision. The current trend is to build custom chipsets for this type of applicaton. The idea is to pack as many features in as few chips as possible. This increases manufacturing yields (fewer components == fewer places for something to go wrong) and product lifetimes (less power == less heat dissipation == longer lasting electronics). Current cable modem and DSL router chipsets have the ethernet port integrated into the same chip as the cable/DSL tranceiver. Since the troughput will never even come close to 10Mbps, they can't justify the extra chip realestate it would take to implement a 100Mbps interface, not to mention the extra buffering needed to convert from 100Mbps to 128Kbps (OK some have higher rates, but I haven't seen any DSL go higher than 7Mbps) on the upstream side. Eric Diamond eDiamond Networking & Security 303-246-9555 eric@xxxxxxxxxxxx
