Telstra charges lots of money for lesser service than others.
News at eleven.
CloudFlare has carried the fail-bucket to Australia and dumped it on incumbent Telstra's doorstep. The cloud provider has published benchmark peering price comparisons which it says show that Telstra is staggeringly expensive as an Internet transit provider: “we pay about as much every month for bandwidth to serve all of …
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In the old days, you would ask Telecom Australia to install a phone in your house. There was already cable into the house. All the technician had to do was put a phone in there. The fee was gigantic. Worse, you had to wait 2 weeks and they wouldn't even give you an appointment, you had to wait at home the whole time.
They later changed their name to Telstra. And this is the mob the KRudd government gave the NBN monopoly to.
Wut? KRudd and friends were building the NBN as a completely separate infrastructure to Telstra as you well know. It's Turnbull who is gifting it to Telstra, along with hiring all the ex-Telstra execs to manage it. (Upvote for line connection rort, downvote for KRudd/Telstra/NBN delusion)
KRudd and friends were building the NBN as a completely separate infrastructure ONLY after Telstra told them they couldn't do it for the price asked... Turned out they were correct. Went massively over budget and behind schedule, because it couldn't be done at the price.
"All the technician had to do was put a phone in there. "
I'm making no attempt to defend Telecom Australia - but you do realise that provision of telephone service, anywhere in the world, is a little more complicated and involves a few more people than how you've described it?
From my days in telephony provision back in the *cough* 1980's - you'd need exchange equipment to be provided, you'd need a route from the exchange to customer planned, you'd need someone to connect up that route inside and outside, you'd need capacity planning in the exchange, directory entries, paper records updated, meter readings taken, phone number allocation - I could go on. Phone lines were expensive because a whole host of people were involved, all operating largely manual processes.
It's not clear to me that they've used the term 'transit' in a clear sense. If, as the linked article claims, they peer to all the other ISPs in Aus, then they aren't 'transiting' Telstra in the sense that they use the same word when talking about the USA.
It could be that in this one case, they mean that 'peering' to Telstra is charged, like the deal Netflix just did in the USA.
Or it could mean that they transit Telstra to get access to small ISPs that they don't peer with, that they didn't include in the group 'all other ISPs'
Or something.
"It could be that in this one case, they mean that 'peering' to Telstra is charged, like the deal Netflix just did in the USA."
I read it as meaning backbone - both national and international. The fees mentioned for Europe match what I'd expect for Ethernet private lines between data centres.