Hi all,

Just wanted to express where VocusGroup NZ (AS9790/AS9503) sits on this matter. Spark is planning on decommissioning the Spark peering locations in April, and we are really concerned about what this move will mean for us. There is no replacement option to peer locally offered by Spark apart from being a customer of paid transit or paid peering. On the face of it, it looks like price gauging that will inject a great deal of cost into our business, for no gain. It��s quite staggering that Spark expect us to pay to send their customers traffic from our content, this is misguided, and just not how the Internet should be run in 2017.

Spark continue to carry on an anti-competitive behaviour of charging to access their customers which is putting NZ network operators, particularly local content service providers, at a disadvantage. We think that Spark needs to understand that they are no longer the centre of the Internet in NZ, not to mention that its considerably cheaper to send traffic to Sydney than it is to send traffic into Spark, albeit +24ms RTT from Auckland.

We have been trying to have an open discussion with Spark around peering for the past three months, but have been met with silence, which is, as you can imagine, frustrating.

We have always supported a free and open internet. Businesses who advocate Paid Peering and/or Censorship are trying to limit the internet for their own commercial gain, which in our view is something that the New Zealand Internet community needs to stand firmly against.

So what��s next?

VocusGroup has no intention of renewing any of our paid peering agreements with Spark unless they are willing to come to the party and peer in the way the Internet was designed.

On a cost-basis Spark are completely unjustified double-dipping and monetising access to their customers within NZ especially given today's environment where their own local scaling costs as a consumer ISP are driven by massive CDN growth with UFB. For Spark to peer with operators at common meeting points in NZ would be an insignificant cost to them, as they do so in Australia freely.

We��d like Spark representatives to have an open discussion about peering, and come to an agreement before April.

We have an open peering agreement and more than happy to peer at any of the locations we have a presence in, and we openly peer at AKL-IX, APE, Mega-IX (Auckland) and WIX.

We firmly believe that Spark should come to the peering party.

As an audience of network operators the benefits of settlement-free local peering, and the challenges dealing with networks that have a legacy "premium" mindset, are well documented in this thread and others.

Any questions please feel free email me.

Simon Allard

Development & Operations Manager

+64 9 550 2790

Simon.Allard@vocusgroup.co.nz

+64 20 1000 790

vocusgroup.co.nz

A:	Level 2, 1-7 The Strand, Takapuna 0622

From: nznog-bounces@list.waikato.ac.nz [mailto:nznog-bounces@list.waikato.ac.nz] On Behalf Of Dmitry Konchanin
Sent: Friday, 1 December 2017 7:32 p.m.
To: LRW Longhurst <walker.longhurst@gmail.com>
Cc: nznog@list.waikato.ac.nz
Subject: Re: [nznog] Spark/Vodafone peering

Hi Lesley,

Last use case I was dealing with was about Spark users access to customer's hosted servers. I haven't heard much about Spark offering datacentres and colo to a regular public, but they do and customers have to chose Spark vs rest of NZ, I would not be too sure about outcome.

As long as everybody (including me) know that it's not some kind of technical flaw but a business decision, I'm happy to pass it down to AMs.

Regards,
Dmitry

On 1/12/2017 7:15 p.m., LRW Longhurst wrote:

Hi Dmitry,

Actually, speaking as a customer, I don't think that would work in your favour. The customer's response would very likely be "Oh, you're too small, I'll switch over to <big provider>". Particularly if it's a medium or big customer.

Cheers,

Lesley L