27 April 2005
I went along last night to the TUANZ After Fives presentation on Internet peering by CityLink's Carl Penwarden. It didn't turn into a revival meeting like the one in Wellington apparently did, but it was a nice demonstration of why the Internet should work like the Big Geeks say it should - and not the way that the ticket-clipping wholesale departments at TelstraClear and Telecom would like it to.
It's looking like some pressure is going to go on the two big telcos. Radio New Zealand will be placing audio content servers on the existing Internet exchanges in Wellington, Auckland, and Palmerston North, and the coming ones in Hamilton, Christchurch, Dunedin and Southland. TVNZ is apparently going to do something similar. So if your service provider also peers at the exchanges, it'll work really well. And if you're a customer of Xtra, Paradise or any ISP downstream from Telecom of TelstraClear, it won't be very good at all.
Furthermore, the e-government unit is becoming unhappy with one of the implications of de-peering - that sensitive government data is going out of the country and back in again because of the inefficient routing created by telco de-peering. It's quite possible that future RFPs for public agencies will actually mandate peering at the exchanges.