28 February 2005
TelstraClear has finally "de-peered" from the communal Wellington Internet Exchange (WIX) yesterday after first saying it would do so by last November.
Spokesperson Mathew Bolland says the firm has spent the last six months or more in discussions with major ISPs around how it would be introducing its alternative, which it calls the Domestic Internet Service. "They have either signed with us or signed with others and we've provided the notification that we would be removing that connection and this morning we went through the final process," he said yesterday.
At the Auckland Peering Exchange TelstraClear will stop connecting with ISPs but will remain connected to APE because of the international route server.
Sam Morgan, general manager of the country's largest internet content provider TradeMe, says he can't understand why TelstraClear has de-peered. "It means their ISP customers will have a worse internet experience in getting to major content such as TradeMe. It also means the TelstraClear network, from a consumer's perspective, is more fragile because it's less route rich. I don't understand the politics of it but it makes no common sense to those who understand the Internet at a technical level."
Morgan says traffic from TelstraClear ISP customers would have previously been connected straight across the WIX to major content providers such as TradeMe. "That will now almost definitely go through Auckland and often through other countries."
Morgan re-iterated an earlier reported comment that de-peering such as this creates "quite an incentive" to put TradeMe servers on the West Coast of the US. "Those links are in many cases faster than domestic links."
Article reproduced with the permission of Richard Wood of www.theline.co.nz