Australian Bandwidth Pricing

I recently switched hosting of large files (12Mb or so PDFs) on my employer's website from the existing Australian host to one in the USA. Why? Because it's cheaper to send data from the USA to Australian users than it is to send it from within Australia..

About 100x cheaper, in this case, when comparing Anchor Networks per-Gb pricing to SimpleCDN's.

SimpleCDN doesn't have any Australian node(s). Data gets requested by their US nodes on first request, cached, and sent back to Australia. Yet they're incredibly, vastly cheaper than anything local I can find.

The root of the problem appears to be that Australian hosting providers charge all IP traffic as if it were to go via an international link. There's no provision made for peering or intra-national traffic at the majority of hosts. This may be an issue with the hosting provider its self, or it may be with their upstream bandwidth suppliers, but I don't care. Internet routing is designed to solve this sort of problem - thankyou BGP - and peering points exist for a reason.

It's actually way cheaper to store your data in the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, or pretty much anywhere except Australia even if your users are 100% Australian. Isn't that kind of sad?