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Such a thing is (or at least was) commonly done in Australia. Many ISPs hold membership to their regional internet association, which provides low cost traffic for local transit (through exchanges such as WAIX, PIPE and the academic AARNET). Traditionally ISPs have passed on unmetered access to these networks (not contributing to the established quotas) however this has become uncommon with many ISPs pocketing the savings and counting all the traffic.

Indeed many local pirates were using the networks for file trading under an assumption of protection from prosecution (saving the ISPs from the usual traffic bills) until crack downs shut down the more popular sites.

It's a pity that the price of this move is the just about definite sell-off of that remaining government stake in Telstra. The sale is going through because the Gov got a majority in the senate at the last election (first time sice the late 70s) so they can push it through now. But this in turn means they have to placate their coalition partners, the Nationals, who only care about Telstra services to the bush being at parity with the city - i.e. heavily subsidised. So we finally get the Telstra split to allay fears of Telstra pricing getting out of control without the Gov holding them back. I would have like the split+maintaining Gov control. Actually there was a plan floated I believe which would sell off some parts - such as the ISP side of things, but keep infrastructure and wholesale under Gov control - the best of both worlds I think.

Of course it's all going now in the final stage of Uncle Howard's Great Fire Sale where all the nation's assets get sold off for short term gain.

Telstra ding you for traffic both ways. Some ISPs ding you for the max of either way. Most only charge you for traffic sent your way (ie, downloads).

Many are connected to state-wide peering arrangements like WAIX, and most of those offer free traffic across the peering point (so, forex, ArachNet don't account me anything for an ISO image I pick up from a WestNet server). EfTel don't do the free traffic. Highway1 only recently started doing so. iPrimus, the Scrooges, even account you for traffic from other iPrimus customers and their own servers!

Expensive?

In Australia, sending traffic to the U.S is cheaper than sending traffic accross the road to Telstra, Optus, MCI or AAPT where you get billed per the MB since they refuse to peer with anyone else.

Practically every leecher in Australia has an ISP who doesn't charge traffic to ISPs who peer in IX'es in the same state. (i.e PIPE Networks IX and WAIX)

Just ask SprintLink.

Of course the US and Australia both share the same primary language which results in far more US traffic than South Korea. Add in the people per capita, Telstra and South Korea's pro broadband government and that explains bandwidth costs in Australia.

Of course the price of bandwidth has resulted in a lot of peering exchanges meaning that while I can only download 8 gig of "premium" data a month on my 512 account, my ISP lets me download from itself and other peered ISP's in my state for free.

I won't pay to download the ISOs of Mandrake 9.2 either, when it arrives. I will send money to Mandrake (and some of the FOSS projects that they wrap) because I think they deserve it, not because they threw me over a barrel and demanded it. Yes, even if some of their advertising references someone other than MandrakeSoft now.

Be kind to it, only fetch if you're going to do something useful with the code. Some of the real mirror sites are still up (wayback is your friend) and may be faster if you're in the USA or Europe. Of course, if you're hitting my ISP from WAIX then ArachNet won't care about bytes, so go for it.

Your quota is measured as the maximum of traffic in and out, which is fairly common. Some ISPs ignore traffic from you and only charge for traffic to you.

For comparison, Telstra charge you up to 19c/megabyte (here 12-16c) for the combined sum of all traffic both directions, and iiNet (biggest ISP in West Aus, second would be WestNet) soft-limit all home accounts (limits are 6GB for AUD$79.95 512kb a/c or 0.5GB for AUD$49.95 128kb a/c) and charge 12c/MB on business excess.

ALL DSL goes through Telstra DSLAMs except on a very few busy exchanges Optus and/or Request have their own DSLAMs. This causes no end of problems for competing ISPs because they have to phone up and ask Telstra to do a "tunnel reset" when someone's DSL screws up, which often takes a day or two to execute.

Note in the Telstra DSL plans avobe that their entry level plan is AUD$10/mo more expensive, and a 512kb plan with only 3GB limit (sum of both directions, remember?) and a max of two users - the cheek! - is $18/month more than I pay ArachNet.

BitTorrent really allows clients to pump the maximum from their upstream and downstream - however I've seen my ISP be as responsive as a ./'ed site when something popular comes out on P2P clients... What do you think of trackers providing clients with seed/peer's located closed by network geography?

I personally think of BitTorrent as P2P's Akamai, except open-source. However one thing I have always seen Akamai excel at is using IX peering to reduce load on the ISPs own down/upstream link. I would love to be able to prefer the WAIX, for example, over a possibly equally fast source that is outside of peering and more local resources.

And there are many regional IXes, besides things like the AUSBONE. WAIX, the Western Australian IX, is a good example of this done fairly well. Almost every ISP with a presence in the state has a presence, as well as several other big transport providers (Singtel, Comindico, etc).

There are a few main problems with Australian peering. First, certain big, nasty corporations profit too much from providing rip-off transit services by refusing to peer with IXs. Secondly, said companies have really stupidly designed broadband solutions involving tunneling most traffic interstate -before- providing endpoint connectivity. Thus local peering is impossible thanks to stupid design. Minus one for incentive.

The second issue is one that this will hopefully help address - BGP size. Unfortunatly, Australian BGP feeds are notoriously poluted thanks to various hacks and tricks in our national transit networks. This causes everyone a headache, as keeping a full BGP feed on a router (for both routing -and- accounting puposes) is expensive. Route tables are pretty memory hungry, and most backbone infrastructure is still driven by Cisco routers. Extra ram is not cheap, assuming you have the grunt to hold the table anyway.

The third problem is consumer oriented. Australian ISPs -have- to make money currently because Transit is expensive here. Even with this change, transit will still be far more expensive than in most other places in the world. While solutions to this are being worked on (new links and companies trying to bypass the traditional monopolies), this means Australian consumers are almost always traffic capped and either shaped or billed after a 3-6gb allowance.

It's not 1gb, but it's still a pain. Now, the problem is that in Western Australia we are lucky. Most ISPs give free access to the WAIX for their customers. This is fast and a major cost cutter for everybody. The IX has a lot of excellent resources - mirrors abound for everything.

However this does not happen in most other states. Or to a limited extent. Part of this is the age-old ingress/egress problem (just because a traceroute going OUT, eg a http -request- goes via a IX, the charged incoming data usually won't) presenting both confusion and billing problems. This leads to the second part, where most IXs, eg AusBone, do -not have a well maintained list of freely peered resources available-.

Billing is a pain for ISPs in other states as it's very hard to tell if something is freely available, and providing this as a marketing ploy (technically IXes are good... netadmins will be happy, finance may be happy - but given the outlay for ram for BGP, etc, -somebody- has to convince marketing it's a good idea :) is difficult at best. The WAIX has several fairly well maintained lists of resources, many which local ISPs list on their websites. This provides user incentive.

AND A MAJOR GROWTH POINT. Users, if provided with a list of resources available at a freely exchanging peering point, are more likely to try and convince their providers to participate. It's simply.

... and that is pretty much Australian Internet Exchanges 101... from my uneducated point of view of course :)

So large file sharing is very much alive and well in Australia. (The iiNet plan also allows unlimited P2P traffic within your own state, I believe)

Yes that dedends on the State, here is WA we have the WAIX peering network. The thing is tho all traffic in that network is free "billing wise" and local "there is no way a US comapny can look at it unless they connect to WAIX"

You're right this will be the downfall of P2P, but only international P2P - bandwidth caps will encourage localised P2P. International data costs, as the price of data reaches a more sustainable point, are the problem.

Almost all West Australian ISPs are connected to a peering point known as WAIX, and allow free unmetered traffic to it. The P2P hubs (DC and Edonkey) on WAIX are supposedly huge, and those in the eastern states on the iiNet are not insignificant in size. Queensland just got an IX called PIPE with free traffic for data passed through it. Really, it isn't as severe as the end of P2P, as long as you can find an ISP who are cool about local traffic. If bandwidth caps become predominant in other countries as they have here, expect it to happen.

Here's some info on it: here

Other searches of mine haven't turned up anything, so it may still be fictional.. anyone else got anything?