right to say its not relevant. Barry Nice one Barry, it's good when a network Geek lets rip and give's us the inside info. The ispreview family needs clued up on UK bandwidth availability, one of the largest UK networks JANET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET has a shit load of users and has upgraded their core network to 100Gbps not much at all when you think about it. So -- if you had any doubt about the capability of this project this interview should clear up the real understanding these folks have. I honestly don't think I've seen such a scary dismissal about the true costs and economics of operating a network as I have in this interview and the follow up. Of course there are contention ratios in local area networks! If I have 5 machines on a LAN with 5 1G ports and 4 machines all try to talk to one machine at the same time -- whats my contention ratio?! The same absolutely applies in any network, there is _always_ a contention ratio. In fact with switched LANs is the biggest danger! On the one hand, one talks as if bandwidth is magically added for nothing, on the other more clues are given but then the cost of adding 10G links, peering ports and transit are dismissed as if its not relevant then later "oh actually it is relevant". Caching server and cloud storage? Hmm let me see, what are you caching? is it Yahoo? or Google? Hmm -- how