Pardon my ignorance, but aren't the pipes that actually go to Australia relatively small? So, wouldn't this just increase burden on those interconnects and maybe not help unless connecting to somebody else in Australia?
I don't know much about the pipes actually, but I do believe a new one is being constructed. That said, I am curious to know the answer to this question too.
I guess torrenting within the borders will be a speedy affair however.
Allow me some time to find the statistics again on this, but from what I've gathered following the NBN debate for a few years now: No. The pipes are more than double our current requirements and growing faster than requirements do due to some funny incentive scheme.
Total capacity: ~2TB/s [1], but the PPC-1 line has potential to add another 2.5TB/s. The others are being upgraded too [2]. "Currently, Australia has a theoretical 5637734.4Mbit/s of transpacific bandwidth, however lit capacity is much less."[3]
"The total international capacity in use for the Australian market in 2009 is estimated to be around 300 gigabits per second."[4]
The days of this being an issue are long gone, especially since there is now good competition in the submarine cable space. Last mile is starting to be the bottleneck.
