Mo McRoberts wrote: >> Or is the major slowdown in uk infrastructure happening at the edge >> with the core running underutilised? > > AIUI (and if anyone's got information to the contrary, I'd be glad to > hear it — this is a fishing expedition…), more-or-less… the edge is > harder/more expensive to beef up.
I'm not sure it is so simple on this latter point. At present, there are no trunk link technologies that scale cost-effectively above 10Gb/s - last I looked 40Gb/s gear costs 4x as much as 10Gb/s, and 100Gb/s is only just becoming available. This leads to major scaling headaches at the core - the extensive use of inter-switch trunking of multiple 10Gb/s links at major IXPs to handle traffic volumes of many 100s of Gb/s is just one painful consequence of this. Keith
