On Wed, 26 May 2004, Tikiri Wickramasingha wrote: *SNIP*
Most of NZ Internet subscribers that I know dont give two hoots about Telecom or Telstra. If indeed the combined customer base of Orcon + IHUG + Callplus + the rest is simillar to that of TCL or TCNZ then why not drop peering with TCL & TCNZ completely. Just do it together as a group and most importantly dont forget to make a big fuss in the media.
TCNZ most definitely has the largest base of dialup customers, and it would take a combination of all the others to equal it. However, the combination of the others excluding TCL is larger than TCL itself. So there is a balance. Where the combination of the other ISPs does come in is their commercial user base. TCL/TCNZ aren't monopoly commercial providers, and the loss the services hanging off all the other ISPs would hurt deeply. Xtra's customer base suddenly being unable to access TradeMe and NZDating would kill their helldesk. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth. They cannot just peer with each other and pretend that all is well. Another result might be to get some of the larger content players to indulge in some direct peering - Throw U-AKL, Stuff, TVNZ et al onto APE and/or WIX, and suddenly the problem goes away again. The customers of the other ISPs would be able to reach that content, and as a side benefit the traffic costs incurred by the providers would decrease since they've now shifted a lot of domestic traffic onto a flat-rate link.