Summary: Omen and iiNet are both at the peering point at 2M+
For those that don't already know, the Western Australian
Internet Association has sponsored a local peering point
in Perth, referred to, originally, as the "WA Internet
eXchange" (WAIX). At the moment, if you send email to
Wantree, we get charged exactly the same as if you sent
email to Sweden. This is particularly a problem for heavy
duty bandwidth chewers, such as Quake. It's quite
ridiculous to be paying a significant amount of money
to have your data carried down the street.

If two organisations "peer", then traffic between these
two networks is effectively free, or very low cost. Basically,
they put a link in between each other, using whatever technology
they want. The idea of the peering point is to have a centralised
location, to which all the larger networks and IAPs can connect,
and exchange traffic for "free".

For the end user, this means very fast access to local
networks connected to the peering point. It also means
that (ultimately) peering bodies will actively encourage
traffic between themselves, since it is very low cost.
This should see a number of local services, such as
a common Quake server, news and DNS servers, and perhaps
more.

As of about half an hour ago, iiNet and Omen are the
first two networks peering at the WA Internet Exchange.
A traceroute from opera shows:

traceroute to omen.com.au (203.8.107.33), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 qv1.west.net.au (203.59.24.253) 21.591 ms 3.361 ms 3.288 ms
2 omen.ix.waia.asn.au (198.32.212.3) 3.833 ms 8.598 ms 13.548 ms
3 fastway.omen.com.au (203.8.107.179) 10.568 ms 15.122 ms 14.184 ms
4 backbone.omen.com.au (203.8.107.177) 7.97 ms 7.541 ms 7.357 ms
5 platypus.omen.com.au (203.8.107.33) 20.774 ms 24.014 ms 30.114 ms

which isn't too shabby really :-)

Wantree and Paradox digital expect to be connected to the
peering point within a week, and PARNet (the four public
Universities and CSIRO) should be on by mid July.

While some of you may not understand why, we're all pretty
excited about this. For the IAPs involved, its a laudable
display of cooperation between competitors. PARNet agreeing
to connect takes WAIX beyond commercial concerns and confirms
it as a significant contribution to the Internet in Western
Australia.

MM