Singapore sucks for Australian connectivity. Best case is ~50ms round trip to Sydney (which is half to West Coast US), but some ISPs route to Singapore via the US because the bandwidth is cheaper[1][2] (yes, this is insane).
Yep. Best path through is via SeMeWe3 to singapore which is fairly fast. Most people end up with bw through PPC1 or SX which both end up in the US. People mostly do this because SeMeWe3 is stupidly congested and expencive compared to say PPC1, and most traffic goes through to the us rather then europe/asia.
Also remember that PPC1 when it stops over in Guam can end up coming back into asia via Asia-America gateway/etc. I'm not sure if any of the major providers actually backhaul through there.
It may suck to Australia but Australia is a tiny market in the grand scale of things which is why I don't see a full ec2 data centre going in. CDN node sure but I don't see anyone launching EC2 instances in Sydney anytime soon.
Australia is a tiny market in the grand scale of things
No we aren't! We are one of the few rich countries where the economy is growing, and our currency is very strong. At the moment we are very attractive to offshore companies because we offer revenue growth.
Amazon executives are in discussions with several large independent data centre providers in Australia to house another availability zone for its global cloud computing service.
The only people that would benefit from an EC2 cluster in Australia are Australians. For everyone else its just more latency. It's not a huge market, I worked in Sydney for the past 3 years and I'm very much familiar with it and its recent growth but its still tiny. I just don't see the demand being high enough to warrant anything more than something like CloudFront.
Also remember that PPC1 when it stops over in Guam can end up coming back into asia via Asia-America gateway/etc. I'm not sure if any of the major providers actually backhaul through there.