An incomplete PQ answer

[James Firth]

Ian Batten wrote:
> So each grant is of the order of 700 grand.   It depends on if the
> grants are capex one-off, capex on a depreciation basis or capex+opex,
> but for half a million quid a year over three years you could buy and
> operate a substantial fraction of a petabyte of disk in a MAID arrays,
> and a few hundred terabytes of conventional RAID (the power would get
> you).

I think it's fairly safe to assume the grants are not just for storage.
This leaked BT network diagram on The Register (re: Phorm) shows Passive Tap
devices, which I assume would be used for legal wiretap of an IP steam and I
can't see the ISPs stumping up for the cost of this architecture themselves.
http://regmedia.co.uk/2008/02/29/architecture.jpg