[OT-ish] How big is the UK 'net?

[Peter Fairbrother]

As some of you know, I've been working on computational anonymity for email
for a while. I am wondering what a practical limit for per-user bandwidth
would be, and if anyone could advise, off-list if appropriate.

I have now (in theory) got the traffic down to a few 100MB per customer per
day, that's for 1 million customers sending up to 40 emails per day each. :=
)

While that's not a lot for the individual user with broadband, and is just
about manageable even with dialup although it would hog nearly all the
dialup bandwidth, it comes to a few 100 TB/day in total. How would the net
stand up to that increase overall? Contention issues? I'd envisage most of
the traffic being in the UK only.

How much would it cost the single central server for the connectivity? The
server itself would cost around =A310 million, how much do you think people
would pay for truly anonymous email? How many people have broadband?

If 100-500 MB/day is too much, can anyone come up with an acceptable traffi=
c
figure, per person, for 1 million users, that would not disrupt the 'net? I
can perhaps squeeze it down further, but at the expense of some of the
anonymity (partial).

Thanks,

-- Peter Fairbrother