I was involved in building a datacenter around year 2000 which was connected to a district heating/cooling loop. This was in Stockholm, Sweden.

It's very beneficial to do this in places where heating is needed, as excess heat from datacenters can be re-used for instance for residential applications.

Can't believe nobody complained about the mixup between GB/s and Gbps (gigabit/s). It's 96 gigabit/s, not 96gigabytes/s.

Another point to make is that at 8 megabit/s (not that uncommon speed for HSPA), spending those UKP240,000 takes ~11 hours. 40GB of data is approximately what you can fit on a standard Bluray disk.

That is what encryption is for. Get truecrypt or other similar application and then the data won't be extractable by anyone without the password.

The problem with ECN is that no major core router platforms support it, neither does the smaller routers. The only "core" networking device I know of that supports ECN is the CPU type routers (7200 et al) that Cisco makes. Their 12000 and CRS-1 do not.

There is little reason to have ECN turned on at end systems, if the intermediate devices that move/buffer packets doesn't set/use the ECN flag.

I agree. Flow routing with 4M flows didn't work in devices engineered in the late 1990ies, and they won't work now. Any script kiddie can create new "flows" by sending random port/dst IP packets thru the device, and it'll fall over and die just like the devices 10 years back did.

We stopped doing flow routing for a reason, it didn't work. Routers need to care about IP addresses and perhaps take into account port numbers to do load sharing between equal cost links, but nothing else. Looking into flows does NOT scale.

In Sweden, typical monthly peak average is between 20 and 400 kilobit/s depending on type of access and type of users.

This is equivalent to around a few GB per month (remember, it was peak bw usage during the day in 5 minute interval) to 40-60 GB per month.

This means that in most markets, 250GB is hit by a few percent of the users, but on the other hand 250GB per month is 0.7 megabit/s average usage, and with 10/10 megabit connections, a user can theoretically hit 10 times that cap, thus I understand why Comcast wants to do this.