Telstra blamed for Australia's high bandwidth cost

Content delivery network provider CloudFlare has attacked Australia's largest telco Telstra for imposing a high bandwidth cost for both international and national data transit.

CloudFlare founder Matthew Prince in a blog post said Telstra charges some of the highest transit pricing in the world.

Prince said Telstra's fees were 20 times the relative benchmark cost of transit pricing, at US$200 per megabit per second and month.

"To give you some sense of how out of whack Australia is, at CloudFlare we pay about as much every month for bandwidth to serve all of Europe as we do to for Australia," Prince wrote.

"That’s in spite of the fact that approximately 33 times the number of people live in Europe (750 million) versus Australia (22 million)." 

In comparison, CloudFlare pays US$5 per Mbps/month in Europe, and US$8 in North America.

Even the traditionally expensive regions of Asia and Latin America have lower transit pricing than Australia, at US$32 per Mbps/month, Prince said.

As CloudFlare is able to peer with half of Australia's internet providers bar Telstra, its effective cost of local bandwidth is US$100 per Mbps/month, Prince said.

Telstra also charges very high pricing for delivering traffic inside Australia, something Prince said can only be justified by the telco's market power.

Telstra said in a statement the figures stated by CloudFlare were incorrect and "far in excess of Telstra's actual charges".

"For a customer in Australia wanting gigabyte bandwidths around the benchmark CloudFlare are using, they are overstating our charges by a factor of ten," a spokesperson told iTnews.