Cheaper broadband may be a-peering - News - Communications

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Cheaper broadband may be a-peering

By James Pearce, ZDNet Australia
July 29, 2003
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Cheaper-broadband-may-be-a-peering/0,130061791,120276641,00.htm

A strong demand for peering services between ISPs has seen Internet peering facilitator PIPE Networks expand its Brisbane operations into four additional Australian cities.

PIPE Networks was founded in Brisbane last year to provide a connection between the infrastructure of local ISPs, which reduces the cost of network traffic. The Brisbane node is currently handling an average monthly traffic of 90TB, and PIPE has recenly begun operations in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Hobart. Sydney is currently handling 25TB per month in data, and Adelaide around 22-23TB per month.

Stephen Baxter, director of PIPE Networks, told ZDNet Australia it took around six to 10 months to get a critical mass at an exchange point.

PIPE Networks operates by providing a central point for ISPs to connect their networks, allowing a more efficient sharing of data. Smaller ISPs have criticised the 'big four' -- Telstra, Optus, Connect and OzEmail -- for maintaining unfair peering arrangements, and Pacific Internet claims it could offer broadband for AU$40 per month if the larger ISPs agreed to fair peering arrangements, or were forced into it by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

PIPE Networks is expecting the east-coast peering points will each be doing over 200Mbps by the end of this year, and PIPE nationally will be exchanging data at over 1Gbps for its customers. For this reason it has decided to connect different peering points within a city by a dark fibre network, and is currently in talks with hardware vendors to increase the capacity to 10Gbps.

"A gigabit might sound like a lot, and it is, but if just five percent of Australia's broadband users logged onto a video streaming event there would be an instant demand for up to 5Gbps of capacity," said Baxter. "Until now there hasn't been a common scalable and fixed cost infrastructure, capable of delivering these services to Australian ISP's and ultimately end users."

Cheap peering arrangements are also important for service providers to offer features such as online gaming and video on demand. "Who wants to pay $5 for a video on demand service and pay $50 to download it, or $10 per month to join an online gaming service and use 3GB of your monthly quota?" asked Baxter.

PIPE charges a flat rate of AU$1,100 per month to connect to its peering centres irrespective of the speed of connection, a tactic which encourages the use of high speed Internet. "The DSL craze is going through the roof," said Baxter. "You need fast access to resources, you don't need to be slowed down."

PIPE currently provides peering services to Primus, Powertel, UeComm, TPGi, iiNet, Netspace, Internode, Pacific Internet and content providers including Webcentral and Hostworks.