That's a protocol, not a hardware thing so no waste in the physical realm. Also, backbones are nowhere close to exhausting their capacity. One could even argue

That's a protocol, not a hardware thing so no waste in the physical realm. Also, backbones are nowhere close to exhausting their capacity. One could even argue that the change in topology to a more distributed network could actually reduce deployment/maintenance costs. Source: Worked at an ISP for 2 years.