> Australia is the most expensive region in which we operate, but for an interesting reason. We peer with virtually every ISP in the region except one: Telstra. Telstra, which controls approximately 50% of the market, and was traditionally the monopoly telecom provider, charges some of the highest transit pricing in the world — 20x the benchmark ($200/Mbps). Given that we are able to peer approximately half of our traffic, the effective bandwidth benchmark price is $100/Mbps.
Cloudflare supposedly buys transit from transit providers. However, since it's serving cached data locally from each POP, presumably that means that connections from a site visitor to Cloudflare are served locally, for cached assets, rather than being passed on across transit to Hetzner.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/net-neutrality/
Their article about the relative cost of bandwidth around the world made the rounds on Hacker News when it came out:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...
> Australia is the most expensive region in which we operate, but for an interesting reason. We peer with virtually every ISP in the region except one: Telstra. Telstra, which controls approximately 50% of the market, and was traditionally the monopoly telecom provider, charges some of the highest transit pricing in the world — 20x the benchmark ($200/Mbps). Given that we are able to peer approximately half of our traffic, the effective bandwidth benchmark price is $100/Mbps.
Cloudflare supposedly buys transit from transit providers. However, since it's serving cached data locally from each POP, presumably that means that connections from a site visitor to Cloudflare are served locally, for cached assets, rather than being passed on across transit to Hetzner.