Lessons from the AU model

Mon Jan 21 00:16:58 UTC 2008

>  - What's my traffic to south Asia and the other apnic regions ?  Can 
> I save some money buying *partial* routes from a large player in this 
> region.  Or is the problem that actually it's the transport to 
> *anywhere* out of Australia ?
The cost is getting out of Oz.   Once you get to Japan (Australia Japan 
Cable) then it's not that expensive (heck cable station to Tokyo is more 
than cable station to USA).  

Currently there are 3 cable systems out of Australia:

Southern Cross Cable (SXC) - 2 legs to the US, one via Fiji, one via NZ.
Australia Japan Cable (AJC) - one leg from Sydney to Guam and onto Tokyo.
SEAMEWE3 (SMW3) - Perth to Singapore (old, and expensive).
PIPE Network is building Sydney to Guam (PPC-1) which will link up with 
a VSNL Cable to Japan and onto the USA.

There's rumour another cable will be build Perth to Singapore, but it's 
been that way for years so let's see.

All of these cable systems are charging high rates compared to what you 
guys are used to across the Atlantic for instance (order of magnitude or 
more).

>  - Am I peering widely enough ?  Should I actually be stuffing a 
> switch under the floor in my employer's suite and letting my buddies 
> plug in ?  Peeringdb knows about eight exchanges in a developed 
> economy of 20 million people.  We have more than eight in single 
> cities of Europe.
Peering in Oz is MPLA.   This leads to no one worrying about having to 
be found to form peering relationships, so peeringdb is incomplete at 
best.  I've tried to encourage people to add their data in.

However, domestic peering here is alive and well.  We get 2/3 of our 
domestic capacity from peering.  1/3 from (expensive) transit to the 
"Gang of Four) who won't peer (Telstra/Optus Singtel/AAPT Telecom NZ/MCI 
703).  (AS703 will peer sometimes).

Unfortunately the 1/3 transit for domestic is outrageously expensive 
too.   (Well over US$120/mbps in large quantity).

--
Matthew Moyle-Croft - Internode/Agile - Networks
Level 5, 150 Grenfell Street, Adelaide, SA 5000 Australia
Email: mmc at internode.com.au  Web: http://www.on.net
Direct: +61-8-8228-2909		    Mobile: +61-419-900-366
Reception: +61-8-8228-2999          Fax: +61-8-8235-6909

       "The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, 
 but in escaping from the old ones" - John Maynard Keynes