Pardon my ignorance here, but isn't this more of a case of traffic
growing outside of the USA which means that traffic within the USA
represents a smaller share of the total internet traffic ?
I suspect so - especially with CDN/Content providers pushing traffic out
to the edge it means that we (the rest of the world) don't pay so much
to haul it back from Northern America! (Thanks to those who are doing
it - you know who you are and we love you for it!).
Japan has 80% of it's internet traffic as domestic, as do a lot of Asian
countries. As China, Korea and others grow their domestic volumes the
%age coming from the USA is a lot less.
Did western europe ever really have a primary route via the USA to reach
asia ? (I realise that during the cable cuts in middle east last year,
traffic might have been rerouted via USA but this would be a temporary
situation).
Most Asian providers (at least Northern Asia) use USA, Atlantic path to
get to Europe. The capacity going Westt isn't that high in comparision,
so the extra latency hit is well offset by the much reduced cost. My
point in my first post is that this is changing rapidly as people (eg
Reliance/Flag) are building more capacity West to Europe plus the
Trans-Russian terrestrial (eg. TEA) are going for fast (and expensive
from my understanding).
For instance, out of Australia we have a single, old cable going West
out of Perth to Singapore (SEA-ME-WE3) which allows only low speed
circuits, but we've got almost 4 (as of next year) cables going North
and East out of Sydney. So most Europe traffic to/from Australia is
via the USA.
MMC
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Matthew Moyle-Croft - Internode/Agile - Networks
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