American domain name service provider CloudFlare has taken a stab at Telstra for what its chief executive describes as some of the world’s most expensive internet prices.
CloudFlare co-founder Matthew Prince attacked Telstra operations via the company’s online blog, describing the service as “some of the highest transit pricing in the world.”
According to Prince, Telstra’s dominance over the Australian market enables it to charges as much as 20 times the standard service fee ($200/Mbps), forcing CloudFlare to pay as much in Australia every month as it costs the company across all of Europe.
“Telstra, which controls approximately 50 per cent of the market … charges some of the highest transit pricing in the world — 20x the benchmark ($200/Mbps).”
“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 33x the number of people live in Europe (750 million) versus Australia (22 million).
“If Australians wonder why internet and many other services are more expensive in their country than anywhere else in the world they need only look to Telstra.”
Telstra hit back at the blog post, telling ZDNet that CloudFlare’s claims “are overstating our charges by a factor of ten”.
Thankfully, Telstra will eventually lose its stranglehold grip on the Aussie market when the national broadband network eventually succeeds telco competitors as the foundation provider of Australian internet services.
“The chart below shows the relative cost of bandwidth assuming a benchmark transit cost of $10/Megabits per second (Mbps) per month (which we know is higher than actual pricing, it’s just a benchmark) in North America and Europe.” (via CloudFlare)
Photo: James Alcock/Getty Images
