Anyone thought about eliminating large physical exchange points and replacing them with a more distributed architecture?
Yes, lots of folks have given it lots of thought.
Multiple data centers interconnected over ATM in a single metro area run by indepdenant entities who are free to provide any level of service or value add they wish.
The fundamental problem is there are no magic pixie dust in this business. Sure, some people like to put out press releases saying how they've solved all the worlds problems using the Magic Frambulator. But what they've usually done is ignored half the problem. The Sanfrancisco NAP is actually a distributed architecture of several ATM switches around the bay area. And although the SF-NAP is handling far less traffic than MAE-East on a daily basis, it too has suffered from the problems of congested trunk lines between the switches. There have been other proposals too. Most of the 'solutions' I've seen have had either far fewer number of interconnects, or far less total cross-connect bandwidth. It seems to be very difficult to get both. When they get close to either the number of connections, or the amount of traffic, they seem to run into the same walls. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation