Sydney is not the center of the Internet

Definitely not in Australia, and even more so anywhere else.

Here is a list of ISPs and carriers that have a problem that I shall verbalise on:

• Three*
• Vodafone*
• TPG
• SuperNerd*
• iiNet
• Virgin*
• Nextgen Networks*
• Digital River*

The list could go on, but there is no need.

All of these providers have the following problem - all of their transit is in Sydney. Not their international transit, all of it. The starred entries fail additionally, as they peer poorly, if at all.

Traffic from any of these providers for a Melbourne-terminated connection will be tromboned to Sydney, out to the internet and then back again. In the case of the unstarred entries, they do much better in that they peer at Pipe's Melbourne IX and announce at least part of their network there. This alleviates the problem in many cases, but not all. 

For example, my home ADSL2+ connection is provided by Mr Teoh's elves from TPG. Connecting to gear that uses connectivity from those miserable proles in the Group of Four results in this delightful tromboning I mentioned above. The same is true of iiNet, and iiNet only have a single PoP in Melbourne so they're ironically spending less on their core infrastructure than TPG is.

The point is that the captive nature of the Australian transit market results in such patterns emerging for savvy businesses such as TPG and iiNet - peer everywhere and use transit where needed. As for the other entries, there is another explanation.

They're inept, each and every one of them. Failing to peer in Melbourne, Brisbane or Perth when you have a local Point of Presence AND relying on intercaptial backhaul for all connectivity is just braindead. SuperNerd are extremely guilty of this, as are Nextgen and Virgin. There is no excuse whatsoever to not pay Pipe the comparatively tiny sum of $1000/month for 100Mb/s peering in Melbourne and Brisbane and even less excuse to not connect to WAIX in Perth.

TPG's stance is almost understandable, given their pricing and their incredibly lazy approach to their usage of their SX/PPC-1 bandwidth, but iiNet's stance is a bit more puzzling. They have a large number of customers on-net, they're the 3rd largest ISP by customers in Australia, have managed to get a price on Telstra+Reach transit that makes sense commercially yet still refuse to terminate domestic transit anywhere other than Sydney. Fail!