Caches are a big win too. If more clickers pointed HTTP proxy
somewhere we'd be a lot better off. Persistent connections between
cahces is the only thing that makes any sense at all.
And we're about to see just how far proxy/caches will scale. On Sept 15, everyone in Singapore will be routed through proxy/caches. That's about 60K customers though SingNet/STIX caches (see http://www.singnet.com.sg/cache).
Barry