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A. You can see their lips move.

Okay, it's an old joke and usually applied to politicians - but I'm sick of politics right now and it seems that at least one ISP and its customers are none too happy with a local telco so I thought I'd change it a little.

Back in July, it was rumoured that TelstraClear was about to start charging ISPs that wished to peer with it. For those who aren't familiar with exactly what peering is -- it's an agreement and technical arrangement that allows traffic to take a more direct route between the two peers rather than a somewhat more torturous route. In effect, they get to use each other's networks for exchanging traffic.

Anyway, some time ago, TelstraClear decided that (according to this IDG story) it would redefine the definition of peering so as to only include other parties who also had "national networks".

Naturally this would put small ISPs at a disadvantage and they'd have to either route their traffic through international circuits, or buy connectivity from TelstraClear.

Well now TelstraClear have gone and turned off a peering arrangement that has been in place between themselves and ICONZ for quite some time.

And ICONZ are not best pleased!

Apparently, the first sign of this was that some websites appeared to disappear off the face of the earth. Exactly which sites depended on what side of the peering arrangement you were situated on but IDG and KiwiBank were a couple mentioned by Aardvark readers who emailed me about the problem.

It now appears that all traffic between TelstraClear and ICONZ will have to travel all the way to Australia and back -- so if you're over-cap on your DSL connection then think: "kerching! kerching! $$".

Now I'm sure that TelstraClear has its own very good reasons for dropping the peering arrangement with ICONZ but what could that be -- and why wasn't there advance notice given so that things could be re-routed ahead of time?

Hmmm... let's see.... maybe they're now able to charge customers who pay by the megabyte for international traffic even more for their websurfing?

Maybe they're just miffed that ICONZ dropped them as a bandwidth provider and switched to someone else?

Or maybe it's just a fair and reasonable business decision -- after all, peering arrangements rely on both parties getting fair and roughly equal value out of such a deal -- and perhaps ICONZ customers were using much more of TC's bandwidth than TC's customers were using of ICONZ.

Whatever the reason and whoever is in the wrong/right, it's now absolutely absurd that some Net users will be paying international traffic charges to access a website that may be located on servers that are just a few Kms away.

Of course if we didn't have this ridiculous over-cap data-charge on our DSL circuits it wouldn't be such an issue would it?

Aardvark readers can rest assured however, that this change will not affect them. Aardvark's website is located in the USA so if you're over-cap then it already costs you a cent a day to read it if you're over-cap.

If any Aardvark readers want to share an opinion on today's column or add something, you're invited to chip in and have your say in The Aardvark Forums or, if you prefer, you can contact me directly.

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