On: UBB overturned - Canada no longer biggest internet...

[iwwr]

New Zealand is rather isolated geographically, it's expensive to build infrastructure on the periphery of the network. This is true for the South Pacific islands in general.

This is a snapshot of the current undersea infrastructure in the Australia-New Zealand area: http://i.imgur.com/K1t4y.png

[goatforce5 → iwwr]

Right. And the expense is(/was?) typically picked up by the isolated edge node rather than shared between the two end points.

ie: There's a lot more value to New Zealand in connecting to the rest of the internet, than for the internet to connect to New Zealand.