Pacific Internet's director of technology and strategy, Iain McKimm, told ZDNet Australia that current arrangements favour Telstra, Ozemail, Connect and Optus.
"We believe that there should be a commercial arrangement that's fair to all parties and is not anti-competitive," he said.
According to McKimm it's consumers that will benefit most from "equitable" peering relationships.
"If I can get an equitable peering relationship I'll be able to deliver a home broadband product for under AU$40," he said. "I'm paying for this data... I've got to pass that on to my customers. There's a competitive edge for those four".
McKimm, who submitted to the ACCC along with Stuart Marburg, managing director of ADSL provider Netspace Online Systems, says that pricing on Australian data from the big four, and the lack of peering between them and the smaller players, is anti-competitive.
"We're obtaining Australian data at about three times the rate at which we're bringing it in from the US," McKimm said. "That's the case for pretty much every ISP in Australia except for the big four".
In the past, he said, there wasn't a great need for peering--most data came from overseas. All of that has now changed.
"Because there wasn't a lot of domestic data it wasn't a big cost... We now see that around 50 percent of all content coming in to each user is from Australia," he said.
This isn't the first time there's been some pressure applied to the bigger carriers over this issue. In 1998 ISPs banded together to force Telstra into a peering arrangement after the other companies started routing all data to Telstra through the U.S., forcing it to pay for every byte.
"We almost had two Internets," McKimm, who was involved with Access One at the time, said. "We'd take the data directly from BigPond but we'd send the data back via the US just to make a point... Eventually Telstra gained its sense".
Some ISP's still route some non-time critical data to the big four through the U.S. in protest.
"For e-mail and non time-critical applications they'll route as much of it through the U.S. as they can... even some Web [content]," McKimm said.
Aside from the high data charges, McKimm says that the big four won't give the smaller ISPs credit for data that it sends upstream to the bigger companies, and that's just not fair.
"We should be getting credited for the data we send out," he said.
McKimm has welcomed the call for submissions by the ACCC. He says the last time they conducted a call for papers it was a low key exercise--he doesn't believe the ACCC actually wanted a big response.
"They did this back in 2000...[the call for comment] was hidden in a disused lavatory in the basement with a sign on it that said 'beware of the leopard'," he laughed.
"They had about eight or nine submissions that they posted on the web site and that was the end of it... I would actually like to see some action taken by the ACCC this time," he added.
