Re: [nznog] Pacific Fibre to Cease Operations - cites not enough investment.

On 01/08/2012, at 4:21 PM, Nathan Ward wrote:

On 1/08/2012, at 4:22 PM, Matthew Moyle-Croft wrote:

...

Main issue is protection. If you buy AKL->SYD->Rest of World then you still have to buy matching SCCN in order to protect that capacity. So, SCCN won't get cheaper as they know you have to buy them anyway. PacFibre by building both ways allowed you to protect either leg using other non-SCCN capacity.

One could potentially build Auckland->Sydney and Invercargill->Melbourne, in order to get better access to Aus content. It's about 50-100km difference in distance as the crow flies. I imagine protected capacity over that (with on-land transport over existing networks) would be much cheaper than protected capacity over SCCN.

Melbourne is not on the coast facing NZ, so you'd spend a lot of money getting from the coast to one of the North-South cables and hauling it back to Sydney where the content is anyway. One question though: Is the issue actually submarine cables? Although there isn't a lot of competition for submarine capacity to/from NZ the price one pays on SCCN in Auckland isn't actually different from what you pay in Sydney really. 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? MMC