Jew World Order

Pacnet CEO Bill Barney announced today that the company is expanding its Sydney datacentre due to demand, but pointed out that Australia wouldn’t meet its full potential as a datacentre host, unless the country does something about its international transit costs.

Bill Barney in his datacentre.
(Credit: Josh Taylor/ZDNet)

Pacnet will be adding another two floors to its Tier III CloudSpace datacentre in Liverpool Street, Sydney, out of which it provides managed services, such as infrastructure as a service, or space for bandwidth-hungry datacentre tenants. The additional space will add up to 700 racks and 3MW of power to the facility, when it will be completed towards the end of this year.

The datacentre already has 29 tenants and is close to capacity, according to the company, with space likely to run out before the completion of its upgrade.

The company is also looking at expanding into various Asian locations. It launched its Hong Kong CloudSpace datacentre earlier this year; the second in Hong Kong. There’s also one in Singapore. There are no plans to build a second Australian datacentre at this time, but, if the company does, then Melbourne will be the destination, as 40 per cent of the company’s Australian customers are based there.

Barney said that the demand for datacentre space has grown beyond anyone’s expectations over the last 36 months, due to a combination of businesses and consumers moving into the cloud.

Yet, even though the IT industry is in a period of “rejuvenation”, which drives unprecedented growth in datacentres, Australia is getting less of that growth than it should, according to Barney. He believes that even though Australia has relatively cheap power, it costs datacentre providers too much in network costs to service the US, Asia and Europe.

“It’s an enormous island with, essentially, a monopoly of cables,” he said.

The National Broadband Network (NBN) would fix the last mile, but the connectivity with the rest of the world needs to be repaired more, in Barney’s opinion.

There has been movement in the cable industry, with Pipe Networks laying a cable in 2009 to Guam, challenging main provider Southern Cross. Huawei, a Leighton Contractors subsidiary, and a New Zealand conglomerate — which Pacnet pulled out of — all have cable plans. Barney, however, believes that the government should get on-board.

“They should do exactly what they’re doing with the NBN,” he said, suggesting that the government spend $500 million on two cables: one to Asia and one to the US, and then wholesale access to the capacity. That would lead to almost unlimited demand for datacentres, in his belief.

When asked why Pacnet didn’t lay a cable, Barney said that the company had always looked at it, but hadn’t been able to make the maths work; adding that Asia is more attractive as a cable destination, as the returns are almost immediate.

Also, the connectivity issue doesn’t just affect datacentres, but also other investments, he said, which results in less Australian jobs.

“We had a call centre serving in Australia, but we moved it out. The network cost is prohibitive to run it out of Australia. We were paying more for the network than we were for the people,” he said, adding that the government should really be moving on this now, before Australia misses out on more investments.