Central offices are everywhere, too. You've driven or walked by any number of them, and the most you noticed was a Bell System logo. The downtown COs in big cities are on expensive real estate.
I want to know so badly what the telcos are still doing with all that space. Some, like mentioned above, are probably edge data centers. I imagine there's a lot of Internet infrastructure in them as well.
But even the biggest IXP is surely tiny compared to the space required for an electromechanical exchange (that would host human operators as well). Are there just floors and floors of empty space? Like you said, on very expensive downtown real estate?
