[plug] peered or unpeered: that is the question

[Gavin Chester]

Regular readers of this list with elephantine memories may recall my
previous missives wherein I wrote of finally convincing telstra that
yes, my rural line _is_ good enough so they should supply me with
adsl :-/ So, I'm fairly new to broadband this late in the game.

With the novelty of it all, I have been on a download-fest and have come
up against the problem of: when is peered traffic NOT peered trafic? My
provider is amnet and I used a mirror at pacific.net.au, who are members
of waix. I even googled to check that other users found them to be a
peered source of traffic. I even did a traceroute and packets came
through peered hosts. Speed was blinding-fast, too. All good you might
think :-/

Well, in two days I've downloaded 8.5gb, it seems. Quota is 10gb,
unpeered. Trouble is, ALL is showing in unpeered allocation. Long call
to amnet follows. "Sorry, we can't guarantee traffic sources, even if
they are peered mirrors". WTF? All my quota nearly gone with balance of
month remaining and I did everything possible to avoid just this
situation. Sympathetic mid-level tech only said I just have to take pot
luck on peering (do small sample download first :-/) and/or only use uwa
or iinet mirrors in Perth to guarantee peered waix traffic. 

Is this really the bottom line? grrr.

Gavin