e new infrastructure investments stall. Of course there are other markets than the wholesale carrier and Internet ISP markets. Private leased lines in international and transatlantic markets have been another profitable source of revenues. Large profits were being made on international leased circuits before the dotcom crash in 2000/01. To give one example, 58 a 2 Mbps circuit from Switzerland to the United States was retailing to end-users at about USD 500 000 per year in 1997, while the operating consortium's purchase price, discounted over five years and including annual maintenance and operation, represented only some USD 60 000 per year. Even allowing for the terrestrial circuits and for operations, overheads and profits, this was a high margin. Another example, for 2 Mbps circuits on the US-Australia route indicated typical end-user charges were USD 98 000 per month, while the INFRASTRUCTURE TO 2030: TELECOM, LAND TRANSPORT, WATER AND ELECTRICITY - ISBN 92-64-02398-4 © OECD 2006 2. TELECOMS INFRASTRUCTURE TO 2030 costs incurred by consortium members to provide such circuits were estimated to amount to less than USD 13 000 per month. 59 However by using the new security and traffic discrimination resources in IPv6 for the Internet, corporate VPNs can be hosted on the expanding Internet infrastructure, which still has spare capacity, SO that the attractiveness of literal control of physical resources - leased lines - is reducing in favour of hosted shared services, in which the major ISPs can use their peering agreements to extend their geographic reach. In summary what we see is expanding demand but faster expansion in capacity, using replacement technology, not new construction, and the current real capacity is unknown due to over-investment in some areas of the United States and possibly Europe. Installed fibre can be quickly and comparatively cheaply upgraded by perhaps ten times (or more) in capacity with each new generation of WDM. In consequence, while overall bandwidth demand soars with broadband serv