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> Australia needs more global connectivity. IIRC, data transiting outside of AU is relatively expensive. > China needs more connectivity, especially with the U
by vitus 5y ago
> Australia needs more global connectivity. IIRC, data transiting outside of AU is relatively expensive.
> China needs more connectivity, especially with the US for e-commerce (AliExpress is very slow).
To both of these points, yes and no.
- Population of Australia + NZ is about 30M people. While that's not nothing, 30M people don't require the same scale of deployment as serving India, or the US / Canada / Mexico.
- How much traffic to/from China is there in practice (given the Great Firewall, so it's largely unidirectional)?
Pinging aliexpress.com, I get ~100ms latency from US East Coast. From mtr, it turns out that I'm being served out of Germany ("alicloud-ic338528-ffm-b1.ip.twelve99-cust.net"; Telia uses ffm to denote Frankfurt). So latency to/from China is actually irrelevant here.
If you want to serve users faster, you need to invest in content delivery (whether that's buying from Akamai or other players in the space, or building out your own, as AliExpress has done -- I have a much lower ping to img.alicdn.com, which serves me out of New York).
CDN usage also lowers egress bandwidth costs, since you use transit links less (cachefill is expensive but infrequent compared to fetches from cache).
Either way -- higher latency dictates lower steady-state throughput; that said, most requests are short and dominated by start-up costs from e.g. TCP handshaking (especially in the world of larger initial congestion windows), so if you have +100ms latency, that's very visible in terms of flow completion time.
To some of your other points -- SE Asia has a lot of connectivity because it's one of two ways into India (the other way around the world goes through the Middle East, which is fraught with geopolitical tensions). Iceland is a convenient landing point en route to northern Europe. The other way to get from south-central US to South America is through LAX->SCL (Los Angeles -> Santiago, Chile).