Problem is the cost of comms

The main reason why people are centralising in co-lo's is the cost of comms.

I agree - if we could have a datacentre out in the sticks along the M4 or even up in rural locations like the Midlands or the North, near decent motorway infrastructure for access, it would be much more useful for Disaster Recovery purposes, and better for the national grid. But not having limitless pockets means we're a bit scuppered.

Having recently been through the exercise myself, we priced up a cost comparison of two London-based datacentres with multiple high bandwidth (Gigabit) links vs having them spread across the country.

The price of providing the comms links and the existing cheap architecture provided by companies such as Colt meant that we will have saved over a million pounds by having both sites in London vs having them spread across the country.

So it's a bit of a no-brainer for us financially.

So what do we do about it in the UK? How can we cure this problem?

If we can get the comms link pricing down by getting BT Openreach to lose it's stranglehold on the local loop and allowing more competition in the last mile (when I enquire about costs and lead times outside London, The BT leg is the single most costly part of any link), we may have a better chance of getting things away from being so London-centric. Problem is that Ofcom just seem to be making things much worse, and it's becoming so expensive to put in Fibre even the cable companies don't seem to be extending their reach and have no plans to expand. So it's a little bit of a stalemate.

Many of the providers now charge per kW pull instead of charging per rack, and they're even getting to the point of doing the 'sorry - you cannot put that in as we don't have enough capacity for power yet' so the hypothesis of the original story is coming true.

@AC Telecity - It's interesting to hear we're not the only ones who have had bad experiences of Telecity's building and it's greenhouse-like properties. We also were lucky enough to experience their capacitor explosion which managed to hose an entire data centre's UPS facility taking down power for a couple of hours not once, but twice in a year.