A Connect spokesperson told ZDNet Australia work to double the capacity of its current 100 Mbps peering link with the Telstra' BigPond network was expected to receive a green light later this week.
Connect spokesperson Camilla Fiorini said the tier-one service provider had recently acquired a number of large, new customers requiring higher than anticipated volumes of traffic to run across the link to Telstra.
"The upgrades to the links have been in train for quite some time," said Fiorini. "We monitor [the links] constantly and once we got to a point where we could see that congestion was the next step it was just a matter of upgrading".
However Connect has also lent some official support to claims from sources within the company's technical ranks that the link has been in need of capacity upgrade for months.
According to those sources the link has been a daily source of annoyance for Connect customers trying to reach Web sites hosted by Telstra such as online directories White Pages and Yellow Pages. They also alleged that Telstra had been dragging its feet to carry out the upgrade due to a dispute between Connect and Telstra over billing of traffic crossing over each provider's network.
Fiorini concedes that there may have been some congestion on the network over the past months but Connect director of networks, John Greenhough, has denied speculation that a billing dispute between the company and Telstra existed.
Greenhough said that Connect's relationship with Telstra remained good and that the company didn't consider Telstra's terms for the upgrade unreasonable. He added that Telstra's response to the upgrade request was not unusually slow.
Telstra's relationship with ISPs over peering links has been frostier in the past. In 1997 Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) reported allegations that Telstra was using its extensive backbone network to undermine competing ISPs beginning a lengthy enquiry into competition and peering arrangements in Australia.
In 1998 the ACCC issued an Internet competition notice -- a power newly given to the regulator by telecommunications provisions in the Trade Practices Act granted to it the previous July -- against Telstra for entering a peering agreement in which it would credit OzEmail for carriage of its Internet traffic.
"Telstra's arrangement with OzEmail last week is late recognition by Telstra that it has been acting anti-competitively in this market," said commissioner Rod Shogren at the time as it had not entered into similar agreements with Connect or Optus.
Since then the ACCC has mandated the establishment reciprocal peering arrangements for the carriage of traffic across ISPs' networks.
