1080p: Southern Cross needed to be looped like it is because at the time of construction there was no other alternative. If it failed all communications (other than satellite and those able to be routed across Australia) would be lost.
Pacific Fibre will not require that kind of backup because they will likely have a capacity agreement with SxC enabling them to offload traffic in the event of disaster. SxC will likely have a similar agreement with Pacific Fibre eventually.
Beccara: Maybe, Pacfici Fibre will need and agreement like that or will just sell transit at costs to reflect the lack of failover but I seriously doubt SxC will buy transit, they already have a loop thats been effective in stopping outages
While it's not impossible that those will happen, it's not typically the way cable systems operate or sell capacity. Typically it will be up to the IRU purchaser to determine what their redundancy requirements are, and purchase capacity on enough systems to meet their needs (although one cable system may be able to broker deals with another).
Transit typically refers to L3 Internet services and has nothing to do with L1.5 or L2 transport sales on a cable system. PacFiber would not typically sell transit-esque services, although they have said they're open to exploring all business models where they may move higher up the stack -- although I think this would damage their business opportunities with many potential customers that they would end up competing with.
Regs: and i'm finding pacnet particularly challenging in ANZ. They route all the traffic for asia via Japan and the routing and speed to datacentres based in Hong Kong and Singapore is, basically, crap. Ironically it got better *after* the Japan quake cause they switched the route via Aus instead of LAX. Why datacentres in HK/SG? Global vendors seem to think that HK and SG are great places to house datacentres for ANZ customers - with pacnet we would be better off with a US datacentre.
Well the best (highest capacity) way out of Australia to Asia at the moment is basically via AJC, so you will typically end up going through Japan, even if you don't see it as a L3 hop. I do agree that content operators should stop assuming the best path to ANZ is via Hong Kong or Singapore, especially since a lot of connectivity in and out of Singapore will go through the US first. In almost all cases it would be better to serve from the US -- there was a small discussion on NANOG-l recently about this.
Regs: Go pacific fibre! Maybe with their new service, all the non-telecom ISPs will buy service/routes to asia that are somewhat shorter!
Via what?
I hope they succeed but I've reverted to full cynicism due to the Pacnet MOU ending.
Yes, which is interesting on many levels. One wonders whether Pacnet had concerns about the long term viability of IP transit in ANZ.
I understand Pacnet are keeping options open to buy bandwidth on the remaining pair of fibres. Bit of a shame.
I suspect Kordia would be joining up with Pacific Fibre if a previous government hadn't left them with so much debt overhead, but would be good if their international plans got revived somehow. I also think the industry should push the government to buy some international fibres with Pacific Fibre, to be used when NZ has its next bandwidth shortage.
Just curious, any ideas what would be the cost for building just a NZ-AUS part of the system?
I know that NZ-US with it's low(er) latency etc. is better but as there are multiple options from AUS to the world already and their market is at the doorstep for uncapped data, NZ-AUS link alone would shake the current monopoly.
Back in 2008 Kordia/Orcon were planning to participate in PIPE and fund an extension NZ to AU link but they weren't able to raise funding for it. They needed about $USD 100million at the time... should be cheaper now.
One problem is most ISP's in NZ are too small scale to buy direct, SXC only sells STM-16 minimum (iirc).
Kordia/Orcon have gone direct recently and spun off a new division/company called Odyssey networks. You can say Telecom go direct via their own company/division Global gateway international. Telstraclear through their parent Telstra's divsion/company Reach. All these divisions also resell to smaller ISP's.
Basically all the other ISP's buy from resellers.
The main resellers are Pacnet, Verizon, Telecom GGI, Telstra Reach, Vocus and Kordia/Orcon Odyssey Networks.
I think the lack of scale harms purchasing power for a lot of these ISP's.
Ragnor: about $USD 100million at the time... should be cheaper now.
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I think the lack of scale harms purchasing power for a lot of these ISP's.
Ok, so doing just NZ-AUS would be relatively expensive as well. There's a new Venezuela - Cuba fiber, slightly shorter than AUS-NZ, and the project is valued at 70m USD.
Lack of scale -type of problems are also something that are frequently created by the bigger players, like not selling anything less than STM-16 directly or demanding terms that are impossible to meet. It's been the case since the very early days, we did it here in the 90's with domain registrations and IX, being a middle player the incumbent telco's did tricks to us, etc. Luckily the regulator actually did their job fairly well and worked for a fair game.
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