Cloudflare has singled out Australian telcos Optus and Telstra as among the most expensive ISPs in the world.

The assessment comes as a result of the telcos avoidance of peering relationships with competitors, a practice that sees ISPs allow data to flow between each other at no cost.

Their report found that, as a result, “prices in Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) are lower than they used to be, but continue to be extremely high in relative terms, costing 17 times the benchmark from Europe”

They note that this number drops 90% once Telstra and Optus are removed from the equation. 

They assert that “today, however, there are six expensive networks (HiNet, Korea Telecom, Optus, Telecom Argentina, Telefonica, Telstra) that are more than an order of magnitude more expensive than other bandwidth providers around the globe and refuse to discuss local peering relationships.”

“To give you a sense, these six networks represent less than 6% of the traffic but nearly 50% of our bandwidth costs.”