Broadband slow and expensive? Blame Telstra says CloudFlare

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 Europe as we do to for Australia. That’s in spite of the fact that approximately 33x the number of people live in Europe (750 million) versus Australia (22 million),” the post states.

The US$200 per megabit per second CloudFlare has to pay Telstra for transit, the company says, is 20 times its international benchmark rate, and since the carrier controls half of the market for the kind of services CloudFlare uses, traffic in Australia averages out to US$100 per megabit per second.

Other ISPs allow CloudFlare to peer with them.

“What's interesting is that Telstra maintains their high pricing even if only delivering traffic inside the country,” the post continues.

With peering taken into account, the company says, its North American cost is US$8 per Mbps; Europe is $US5 per Mbps; and Asia and Latin America are $US32 per Mbps. ®

Bootnote: Telstra has said that its charges are not as high as outlined by CloudFlare, and on a re-read of the post, The Register agrees - up to a point.

CloudFlare notes that it is not revealing exact numbers for any of the benchmarks. However, its central claim, that Australia's transit costs are 20 times the international benchmark, still stands. ®