FYI, I thought this was interesting reading for the workaholics among us as we head into the holiday weekend in the United States. I'd also like to follow it with an (hopefully) interesting question. http://www.circleid.com/posts/20090520_bandwidth_buyers_price_differences_gl... The costs of wholesale bandwidth are significantly disparate by region, duh, but this article demonstrates how disparate. I was also recently discussing why some of these costs are disparate with a colleague in the African region and he had an interesting question that I thought would be operational enough to ask here. Are any African or Middle East costs being influenced by the Somali piracy problem? Is the deployment of Eassy being impacted by the piracy issue? The cable ships are sitting ducks for pirate attacks during lay and repair operations. There's one cable lay operation being guarded by the French Navy, likely an Alcatel operation. I'm interested to hear from anyone with direct knowledge (offline, I'll summarize back if it's worth it, maybe even a lightning talk for Philly?) on the impact. I suspect that it's possible that it could add cost to maintenance agreements with any security caveats, but since most cable operations taking place now were negotiated before the problem heightened, perhaps not. I'd like to know if you know. Best, Martin Hannigan -- Martin Hannigan martin@theicelandguy.com p: +16178216079 Power, Network, and Costs Consulting for Iceland Datacenters and Occupants