Neatly wrapped packets

Interactive Week has an item on "an enhancement to the basic language of the Internet" called Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)> Essentially, ECN adds a tiny bit of information to a packet header for e-mail and Web requests to reduce the number of packets lost during transmission. The Internet Engineering Task Force is close to making ECN a proposed official standard, and Cisco expects to make the new technology available in its routers by early 2002.