Or maybe to put it another way, Telstra, Optus and AAPT suck?
As I'm working from home full-time I've been listening to loads of internet radio. Had a look at my traffic statistics today and listening to a 128kbps stream for most of today has sucked down over 500MB. The beauty of being on iiNet is that this traffic does not count towards my download quota.
Sure, Bigpond has unmetered music @ Bigpond Music but its just a lame excuse to make you buy tunes. Optus, well I don't know what they hell they're doing anymore.
On Optus, Stephen pointed out that recently when accessing various Akamai hosted content he's been sent off to US Akamai clusters despite Optus hosting their own. This got us onto a discussion about CDNs in general, and how the Gang of Four's non-peering attitude may well bite them as more CDNs become sizable and host down under.
Back in August(?) Limelight established their presence in Sydney. It appears that they're peering @ PIPE now (according to my own experience as an iiNet customer) so most of the Tier 2 ISPs should pick that up for "free". What do the Gang of Four get? They get a scenic route to Singapore and the US. I wonder if this may actually result in a noticeable difference in web browsing speed of GoF customers vs the rest? It would be amusing if the largest networks in the country also become known for being the slowest.
Back to my original point - if you are shopping around for an ISP, also consider the fine folks over at Internode who also provide unmetered access to radio streams, games, and other tidbits.
