Technological and Economic Drivers and Constraints in the Internet's "Last Mile"

Abstract

This paper investigates the physical topology of the Internet at the edge of the network, known as the "last mile", and considers the technological and economic features that drive and constrain its ongoing deployment and operation. In particular, by considering in detail the various technologies used in the delivery of network bandwidth to end-users, it is shown how the need to aggregate traffic is a dominant design objective in the construction of edge networks and furthermore that the large-scale statistics of network topologies as a whole, including features such as overall node degree distribution, are dominated by the structural features at the network edge.