Cloudflare live in Wellington

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OmniouS

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#324340 30-Mar-2026 13:41

I was pleasantly surprised to read about the Cloudflare Wellington POP in the Quic/Vetta thread.

My Voyager connection is also reaching Cloudflare via local peering.

A quick check of the local RIPE Atlas probes (below) shows that traffic from Mercury users in Wellington is also reaching Cloudflare locally.

There were a couple of 2degrees and One NZ probes that weren't peering, but that should change at some point.

Other ISPs may also peer but there were no probes on their networks in the area to confirm.

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taneb1

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Mercury

#3475540 30-Mar-2026 13:48

Yes, can confirm the team stood things up on our side on Saturday morning! Great to see other ISP's get things stood up so quickly as well.

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boosacnoodle

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#3475710 30-Mar-2026 18:23

How do you use that website? I can't find the map you posted or work out how it shows that those providers are now peered with Cloudflare locally.

saf

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#3475716 30-Mar-2026 18:50

boosacnoodle:

How do you use that website? I can't find the map you posted or work out how it shows that those providers are now peered with Cloudflare locally.

Sign up to RIPE Atlas and you can use credits (you get 100k to start) to perform measurements from probes around the globe. 😁

If you can, also spin up a VM with a probe and you’ll have more credits than you know what to do with!

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MaxineN

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#3475745 30-Mar-2026 20:36

I really need to get around to doing that.

Thank you Shaun for the reminder...

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backfiah

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#3475748 30-Mar-2026 20:46

Any chance that Spark will peer with Cloudflare in Wellington? If I remember correctly, they don't peer at WLG-IX --- has that changed?

My traffic on Skinny is going via AKL. How will I cope with the extra 12ms on DNS resolution ;)

yitz

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#3475750 30-Mar-2026 21:00

backfiah:

Any chance that Spark will peer with Cloudflare in Wellington? If I remember correctly, they don't peer at WLG-IX --- has that changed?

I think Cloudflare requires bilateral peering session... so would really depend on what datacenter Cloudflare are in rather than any particular multilateral peering exchange.

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#3475751 30-Mar-2026 21:04

I noticed something had changed when I pinged 1.1.1.1 and got a 1ms return time!

michaelmurfy

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#3475783 31-Mar-2026 01:44

backfiah: Any chance that Spark will peer with Cloudflare in Wellington? If I remember correctly, they don't peer at WLG-IX --- has that changed?

Spark still don't openly peer in New Zealand and while they're "peering" over AKL-IX (See Grafana here) they're not peering with their route servers (See NZIX's LG here) which in my opinion goes against what a peering exchange is. My guess is they're consuming a single peer available on AKL-IX that that do not make themselves available in any other way in New Zealand.

In my opinion it is frankly ridiculous in today's day and age how Spark still acts this way because it just affects their customers. I would be incredibly surprised if Spark peer with Cloudflare outside of Auckland or even start openly peering in NZ like every other provider in NZ instead of what it is right now - where other providers pay Spark to peer with them.

You can see how ISP's stack up with peering: https://bgp.he.net/country/NZ - Global-Gateway (Spark) as you can see there do actually peer but not in New Zealand. Quite a few ISP's, like Vetta for example https://www.peeringdb.com/net/6836 do keep PeeringDB records showing information into their network.

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hio77

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#3475859 31-Mar-2026 09:24

michaelmurfy:

Spark still don't openly peer in New Zealand and while they're "peering" over AKL-IX (See Grafana here) they're not peering with their route servers (See NZIX's LG here) which in my opinion goes against what a peering exchange is. My guess is they're consuming a single peer available on AKL-IX that that do not make themselves available in any other way in New Zealand.

In my opinion it is frankly ridiculous in today's day and age how Spark still acts this way because it just affects their customers. I would be incredibly surprised if Spark peer with Cloudflare outside of Auckland or even start openly peering in NZ like every other provider in NZ instead of what it is right now - where other providers pay Spark to peer with them.

In many cases you will find Spark are peering primarily for specific large enterprise customer prefixes.

I do find Sparks peering policies to be rather backwards for such a well-connected country, while it makes sense due to their GGI relationship to have all the peering done there on paper. When you consider the end result being practically not peering locally aside from costly bilateral agreements is where the whole concept goes upsidedown.

even One NZ changed their strategy to peering, maybe spark will catch on one day..

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boosacnoodle

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#3475879 31-Mar-2026 09:55

What's the net effect of not peering domestically? Somewhat increased latency for the end user?

Presumably there is also an increased cost to the ISP of sending that traffic overseas then back again - but I guess that doesn't really matter if you have a dominant market position.

Jiriteach

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#3475883 31-Mar-2026 10:00

boosacnoodle:

What's the net effect of not peering domestically? Somewhat increased latency for the end user?

Presumably there is also an increased cost to the ISP of sending that traffic overseas then back again - but I guess that doesn't really matter if you have a dominant market position.

For an end user? In the case of Cloudflare from Wellington - means traffic goes to Auckland for handover ~ 10msec on Spark as opposed to handover in Wellington which would be ~ 2 msec.

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Talkiet

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#3475922 31-Mar-2026 11:10

backfiah:

Any chance that Spark will peer with Cloudflare in Wellington? If I remember correctly, they don't peer at WLG-IX --- has that changed?

My traffic on Skinny is going via AKL. How will I cope with the extra 12ms on DNS resolution ;)

patience :-)

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OmniouS

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#3475939 31-Mar-2026 12:17

backfiah:

My traffic on Skinny is going via AKL. How will I cope with the extra 12ms on DNS resolution ;)

Hah, the real benefits here will be the compounded total effect, especially if you use websites that proxy content via Cloudflare and/or use CF services yourself.

With CDN content and other services served across town (vs a potential return trip to AKL/SYD), benefits include consistently lower latency, faster speeds - especially for real time / chatty content with fewer potential hops/handovers etc along the way. Better resiliency is another plus.

Depending on the levels of traffic, peering can also help to reduce costs for ISPs.

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