Vocus really, really need to offer do-not-advertise on their combined product.
I think this needs to be reiterated yet again. That and people shouldn't use local preference to decide on peering exchange within the same region. If both sides work together, then things are less likely to break. I want to go off on a slight tangent though. If APE goes down, and a provider has APE and Vocus, should traffic travel via Sydney, or is it preferable for it to go via AKL-IX? If a provider is on APE, WIX, and Vocus is it better for it to go via WIX, or via AKL-IX over Vocus transit? Valve/Steam network has some odd routing as they have peering via Equinix and transit via Highlands CDN's network. And Highlands CDN's network is advertised at Megaport. So they're in a slightly similar situation, as some people definitely are preferring Megaport over Equinix in Sydney. The carryover effect is that if local preferencing traffic to go over Megaport/Highlands rather than Equninix, the return path will still be via Equninix so an outage on either of the networks will create issues. They've had quite a lot of stability issues, and some complications like that aren't obvious at a first glance. And would be helped if more people had looking glasses. And preference wise, who's to say which is better? Cheaper or less congested or closer network wise. But as soon as both parties don't choose the same thing you increase your chances of issues - and so in a way it would be nice if more of these exchanges would fail completely rather than partially. Given that people in New Zealand really want to keep traffic domestic when possible it makes sense to make it obvious when domestic peering fails, and route via Australia or such. But to remote locations like Australia, it makes more sense to go over peering links when possible falling back on transit, before going via another country. If a provider is on Equinix Sydney, paid transit in Sydney and ANY2IX/Coresite peering in California it's better go via paid transit than California if Equinix fails. On a pure performance basis, if a provider has combined international/national from Vocus with APE and WIX peering if APE goes down latency should be reduced going via international on Vocus at AKL-IX rather than WIX. And cost wise it's cheaper than transitting to WIX. So it's actually quite a good thing for NZ domestic stability that there are becoming more peering exchanges. Ben.