Telecom Move Welcomed By ISPANZ

July 20 2007

The Internet Service Provider Association of New Zealand (ISPANZ) today welcomed the move by Telecom towards re-joining the New Zealand internet peering community.

However, whilst the proposal covers many areas, ISPANZ believes that there are further details to complete Telecom's proposal which hold the key to the success.

"Telecom's proposal looks promising, but if New Zealanders are going to reap the full benefits of Telecom peering, then we need to get the detail right to ensure an optimal and efficient peering system for New Zealand" says ISPANZ spokesperson Jamie Baddeley.

The goal behind peering is to optimise the topology of the New Zealand internet so that the shortest possible path is taken between internet services and the end customer. This is essential for interactive and real-time internet services such as Internet calling, IPTV and video conferencing. Of course, the fine tuning of this peering topology cannot be done in an economic vacuum and the costs of getting to the additional peering points needs to be weighed off against the benefits that they will bring.

ISPANZ has been asking Telecom to reduce the number of peering points from 29 points to 12 peering points based on regional coverage areas with regional internet traffic exchanged on a 'bill & keep' basis.

"The feedback that we are hearing from our members is that with 29 peering points, the coverage areas are so fragmented that the costs involved in setting up peering points for such small fragments of the market is uneconomical", says Baddeley.

Telecom has indicated to ISPANZ that it would initially only be providing peering connections with Xtra DSL customers, with access to the telecom hosted websites and business customers on CID coming at a later date. As such, Telecom's peering proposal would only allow Xtra customer's to get better access to content on it's competitors networks and would offer little benefit to customers of other ISP's.

"I can't see Telecom's proposal being truly useful until they offer reciprocal access to the content and medium/large business customers on their network", says Baddeley. "Telecom gave us a commitment to look at that - we think it's very important for any peering arrangement to have a good amount of reciprocity".

"We'd also like to see Telecom come to the neutral internet peering exchange locations around New Zealand, such as APE or WIX. There's several locations around NZ which are natural "meet-me" points, and if Telecom say 'come to our place' for all 29 proposed points, we don't think that's truly reciprocal" adds Baddeley.

ISPANZ believes that peering has an important part to play in providing a higher performance internet platform in New Zealand on which to build innovative services. "As bandwidth becomes increasingly well interconnected, services that were deemed too slow or too expensive or too unreliable yesterday, will tomorrow flourish." says Baddeley.

ENDS

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