What I should have said, I guess, is, " be glad you're not the one who has to fight that fight."

If you don't get the whole 47Gbps, or whatever, for yourself, it's only because the overhead associated with sharing it with others consumes a big part of the bandwidth. The routers may have a top end, and the switches, and the ethernet has its limits too.

Since I got broadband at home, and, certainly, when I got DS3 in the office, I began to notice that the speed of our link didn't have much effect on performance. The remote sites' weaknesses simply become more apparent when your own link speed is increased. Most backbone is still DS3-limited, though it may, in places, be much faster, albeit in bursts.

In general, I find that a full DS1 (T1) is perfectly adequate, and comfortably supported by most equipment. Further, I've found that, generally speaking, an increase of an order of magnitude in the ethernet maximum results in an increase of about 2x in the actual throughput. I suspect it's not much different on the telecom infrastructure.

RE