How big is too big? Trading off the economies of scale of larger telecommunications network elements against the risk of larger outages

摘要

"How big is too big?" here means "At what size do the risks of bigger network elements overtake the cost savings that bigger devices offer?" This paper builds a mathematical cost model to answer the question. The model analyzes network elements of a single type. The paper first discusses deployment costs and then the probabilistic model of outage costs. In the final section, the two costs are combined into a total cost and its distribution, stochastic dominance, and utility are discussed.