I put those service areas on some lists before the time of distribute or even any ideas of a backbone. AILIST would anyhow benefit from a U.S. peer because I think it's quite high volume digest and has a large audience. Also I remember that someone in Israel and in U.S. wanted it and maybe NL-KR? TEXHAX seems to be a bit odd situation because there hasn't been going anything for few months and I've understood that the already well peered TEX-L should also carry TEXHAX in addition to the bitnet only discussion, am I right? Maybe I should fade away the TEXHAX already. I've even sent an early warning of the change to TEXHAX. In general I'm going to set up mail-via=distribute as soon as the new backbone is running to ensure minimal problems with it. Hopefully it wont hog too much CPU-time of this poor old 4341-12. But you have to have load on the machine to show the need for a faster one, don't you? Maybe next year or... Harri Ps. at night there's still plenty of time.