On 01/08/2012, at 8:32 PM, Bill Walker <bill@wjw.co.nz> wrote:

On Wed, 1 Aug 2012 19:29:24 +1200, Dean Pemberton wrote:

Sydney has Equinix and Global Switch which are both completely carrier neutral and very good/high quality sites. But NZ, aside from Skytower, which isn't ideal for content (ie. lots of servers), doesn't have a clear central location in Auckland to build capacity and caching servers etc into and easily connect to enough people to make it viable. Is this lack of focal point more of an issue?
Nope - I think lack of population and what I'm calling CDN Gravity is
more of the issue.
I don't think that NZ has the population or demand to pull the content here.

 
This is the main problem, some of the CDN's I spoke to in my time at Snap needed 1Gbit of aggregate throughput transiting your AS to even consider talking to you. And most of those already had a presence in AU.
The problem is that if you're a CDN/content player then there currently is no answer to:

Where do I go in Auckland to connect to most of the NZ internet?

To butcher what Dean has said - You need to all not be a suburb of Sydney, you need to be all a suburb of Auckland.  If there's a nice and easy meeting place for content in Auckland then you'll all get to benefit, but at the moment, from the outside the NZ internet is very splintered.

NZ has a small population, so you need to focus on having as much of it available (IP wise) in one place as possible otherwise the small parts won't be enough.  

If you all focus on Sydney, then that's what you'll end up with, nothing in country.  

MMC