I'm having a discussion with a work colleague. I'm saying that a network with 100 elements will have pretty much 10 times as many failures as a network with 10 elements, ie a tech will need to replace faulty hardware 10 times more often. He suggests that the failure rate doesn't go up in a linear fashion and the failure rate will be significantly less than 10x, in fact only slightly more failures. This is not the probability of an outage etc, we are just talking in relation to the amount of parts that a tech would need to swap out in a given time frame.