U.S. Carriers To Share Connection Fees To Oz

T J Quoll pointed us to this story from Australia's The Age announcing an agreement reached this weekend among telecommunications officials from Australia, the U.S. and other members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group. The officials, says the article, "agreed to scrap arrangements under which non-U.S. Internet carriers had to pay for the cost of links to and from the U.S., while U.S. carriers paid nothing." Sounds only fair to me. The article concentrates on Australia; can anyone enlighten us on how it will affect connections to other countries?

Comments

Re:USA gets screwed on telephone calls

[Raindeer]

This has resulted in the USA subsidizing the telephone systems of many countries, the outflow was $5.4 billion in 1996. I wonder what the actual telecommunications balance of trade is between Australia and the USA is when both voice and IP are considered.

What you do forget is that the United States Telcos are actually getting the better deals. Because of their power and size they get the best deals (though alot of countries still rip them off) If you don't live in the United States, you really are screwed. Because your telco isn't as important as the US telcos, they have to pay even more for the connection to other (espescially third world) countries. This has had as a result that it was often cheaper to first call to the US and then to the country you really wanted to talk to. That is why companies like Callback have been growing so much.

I would figure that your question would have to be answered with the statement that the United States on balance is probably doing better then the rest of the world. Or to put it in your words: Other countries are more screwed then the US.

Great news!

[Matts]

I seriously hope this is a trend that will spread. The cost of internet connections in non-American countries is insane because of this factor (that most US citizens don't/didn't even know about). Of course it's not the only factor, take for example the crazy profits of our own British Telecom - their profiteering and monopolising makes sure that my internet costs remain at over £360 a month for a 64k link.

Re:Great news!

[thogard]

Is this good news or not?

Personaly it sounds like blamestorming where the US compaines are being blamed for the high price of the trans-pacific link costs.

The real reason access to the internet cost so much in Austrlia a simply Telstra is makeing way too much profit (to the tune of about $1000 profit per person in the county per year). Right now Telstra is 1/2 owned by the goverment and 1/4 owned by Aussies and 1/4 owend by large institutions. It can't compete in the real world because the goverment won't let it and they use all these lame excuses about service to the remote parts of the country and thats way stuff is expensive blah, blah. The areas where there is phone service in Oz is more dense than where there is phone service in the US plus it much cheaper to run cables (no ice--ever).

My company pays about $1000/mo for 128K isdn access from Telstra. We pay $.19/megabyte for
incomming traffic even though most of it comes from other sites on Telstras joke of a backbone.

We just got a E1 for a digial modem. The set up fee was $1600 for the first 10 phone lines. Extra sets of 10 are an additional $800 each. The installed a 6 foot rack full of equipment to provide the E1. It was not a low cost solution.

Telstra -- the cheapest phone company on earth unless you want to use the phone

this trends long term to more content in oz

[jason andrade]

one the the problems with the lack of settlement in the past has been virtually no incentive to host any content in australia - not only does it end up on the deep end of the internet gravity well but you actually have to pay a component of this *back* to american telcos when you ship bytes in that direction in "backchannel" costs. this starts to be significant when you're shipping terabytes of traffic a month and as your outbound is growing quickly, so is the bill.

with some settlement now available perhaps the long term trend will be that it simply makes more business sense now to leave content within australia instead of hosting it offshore.

as a maintainer of a large public archive i can state that we had to shut down international access to it because _more_ people in the US were accessing us than locally in australia, which was incurring horrendous network charges for to keep letting them do this!

-jason

Good news, but will it effect us?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply, what it means is that right now, 30% of IP traffic between us and the USA comes from us to the USA, so the USA should have to pay for that traffic, just like we have to pay for the 70% that we get from the USA, it's just like paying for what you download. Currently, the fastest connection one can afford here in Australia is a 56K modem, that in most places the fastest it will connect at is about 36K. Telstra (Tel$cum) won't pass on this saving because just like banks, they are greedy and only answer to their shareholders now they have been privatised, but at least we're seeing prices for calls finally come down in price! (Even if a local call costs 22c as opposed to 25c) Until the day arrives that Tel$cum make xDSL affordable to the average bloke who doesn't have glorious co-ax running past his castle (thanks to the freak'n greenies - 'no more overhead cables!') I'm not going to be a happy chappy. Perhaps we need to organise a 'walk for cheaper bandwidth' over the Sydney Harbour Bridge to show just what we think of the outrageous telecom prices we've been paying for so long.