All nodes were purchased and shipped. The onboarding on the nodes was supported by our platform ops team. The was no need to for 1300 nodes from launch on. We have nodes that are contributing, nodes that are ready to be onboarded and datacenters were nodes were racked but not deployed yet. The nodes are moving from one state to the next depending on the needs of the network.
It perhaps sounds like a lot payed but unused nodes were avoidable but reality is a bit more complex. If you already tried to roll out 1300 nodes in 70 datacenters within a year including contracting and purchasing, and that in a decentralized way, you know that this already very ambitious. On the end it took almost 18 months. Including everything that is needed to grow from there.
Correct.
Seeing the rising costs for new HW the new nodes could get more expensive than the previous models. There are no plans to replace old nodes. For sustainability reasons we would like to run them as long as possible. I think that the node rewards should allow the node providers to decide about the replacement. Rewards need to adapt to the performance of a node. Getting less rewards compared to new node types that perform better would allow node providers to decide about their break even depending on their amortisation and running costs.