On 01/02/2012, at 8:19 AM, Alastair Johnson wrote:
On 1/31/2012 1:04 PM, Joel Wiramu Pauling wrote:
The general attitude towards peering is that:
Peering is an issue for RSPs to deal with in the context of UFB so "is up to the market" to decide.
This makes sense. As underwhelmed by the ComCom report as I was, I'm not totally convinced there is a significant peering issue.
I'm thinking some kind of statement around market power abuse with regards to peering, but ultimately it is a commercial/market issue and for the most part it seems entirely manageable in New Zealand at this time (and in the immediate-ish future).
The market though isn't just the inward looking market (ie. within telcos in NZ). The actual market is much broader and important. NZ is a small market. For an entrant to come into the market from outside they need to be able to access a very high percentage of your broadband services *at a reasonable cost in country* to be able to make the numbers work. If there's a significant barrier to in-country peering then they will stay out of the country. It's like protectionism. It raises the cost of connectivity for everyone across the board. So, this means people like Amazon, Google, Limelight, Microsoft etc (ie. the big content players) won't ever setup inside you country. (Think how important they are these days in terms of bandwidth). This means that the benefit of a project like UFB is reduced as the latency (very important to get high bandwidths) is kept high. ie. the market is broader than between domestic ISPs. I'd argue therefore the report has gotten it wrong as it's not understood what the market is nor why that's important. (For NZ you could replace this with almost ANY APAC country other than just a few). MMC