Salesforce.com were talking about firing up a DC there in sydney, not sure if it happened.  Have been pushing for Microsoft to do the same, but no such luck.   Microsoft have at least (as you���re probably aware) gone down the path of putting a POP in AKL/WLG to at optimise their DC traffic out of NZ for ISPs that choose to peer.    With luck that will stop the asia-bound microsoft traffic routing via US/JPN or SYD/JPN.

From: nznog-bounces@list.waikato.ac.nz [mailto:nznog-bounces@list.waikato.ac.nz] On Behalf Of Bill Walker
Sent: Wednesday, 20 February 2013 3:47 a.m.
To: nznog@list.waikato.ac.nz
Subject: Re: [nznog] New Trans-Tasman submarine cable

And Rackspace have a presence in Sydney too (Since January)....

On Wed, 20 Feb 2013 12:45:28 +1300 (NZDT), Simon Lyall wrote:

On Wed, 20 Feb 2013, Ben Aitchison wrote:

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 09:56:19AM +1300, Tim Hoffman wrote:

These days you can pick up a surprisingly large amount of content / dump a fair amount of your international load into Sydney.

Mostly because a lot of the content is over there, and not here. Cachefly, Google, Yahoo, Akamai etc. The more we focus on improving Australia connectivity the less chances we have of getting CDN's to come here more directly. It's like how OS/2 provided Windows support, and lost out on native applications.

Amazon in Sydney is also a big game changer.
 
1. It is close enough to NZ that latency and bandwidth is pretty good
2. It has decent pricing ( even the list pricing beats most competitors for
    small to medium requirements )
3. It is fully featured enough for a large percentage of uses.
 
I was at an Amazon course in Auckland last week and there were people from 
2 of the top10 NZ websites (me and another) and one of the larger IT 
services companies. There is/was another course in Wellington this month 
too...
 
We discussed this here at length a few months ago. One advantage with the 
cables is that you can serve Australia from New Zealand but there are 
still significant bugs in NZ's national capacity and connectivity (mostly 
due to peering politics and the chicken and egg or low capacity since it 
is not needed).