Hopefully that means they'll be opening a data center in Australia before too long.
EDIT: To expand on where I'm coming from, I'm the technical lead at a web agency in Melbourne so I make recommendations on what hosting providers we use, both for our staging servers and live servers for our customers' sites.
We already have a few staging and live servers with AWS in California, but for most live servers we have to use Australian hosting providers for lower latency and (sometimes) for legal reasons regarding storage of customer data. I guarantee that if AWS were to open a facility in Australia, all of our hosting would move to that facility ASAP.
I've been hearing stronger and stronger rumours about them opening in Sydney sometime soon, most often linked to a partnership with Equinix's big new datacenter in Alexandria...
I'm not sure how that follows. There are more than 5 times as many internet users in Brazil than Australia, and about 13 times as many in the whole of South America.
A lot of my customers find the latency from Australia to southern Asia, EMEA, or North America far higher than what' typical with South America to North America. Might be a user experience play more than anything else.
Have you considered OrionVM? The guys running that are amongst the smartest, keenest people I've ever met, and their setup seems second-to-none. Well worth checking out if you need Australian-based cloud hosting.
I second that, as do many others on AWS forums (https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=271852). Other comment in this discussion is that this new Sao Paulo region is more expensive than the rest of them - I guess it would be the same (probably even more expensive) for Australia. However I'm sure that many AWS customers would be more than happy to pay for it. Without it, CloudFront is not truly global.
It's pretty likely that AU will have more expensive pricing than most places. Amazon doesn't enter a market and ignore the cost base that applies to everyone in the market place.
What about Asia-Pacific? We have a service in AU which currently we're serving from our US-East servers, and I just assumed we would want to move to AP when we could, but is it not better than US-West?
That's what I assumed myself initially, so I spun up an AWS micro instance in their Singapore data center. But then I found that the ping times were almost twice that for instances in the US west coast, because some Australia ISPs (including mine which is Optus) route traffic to Singapore or Japan via the US west coast since it's cheaper than going through Perth. So although Singapore is closer to Australia than the US as the crow flies, it's not necessarily closer on the internet.
If you're lucky enough to have customers on specific ISPs, Singapore can be great. We have users who are predominantly on AARNet, Internode and other ISPs with decent transit (e.g. SEA-ME-WE 3) and the latency between AU and SG via Perth is wonderful.
Anything to shake up the Australian hosting market would be welcome! We just ditched our AU CDN because it wasn't nearly as reliable as it should be, and very expensive to boot!
I hope so too. Bandwidth and hosting prices are outrageous. VPS rates are terrible too, though some vendors seem to have gotten the message in the last year or so.
They will only light it up as it's purchased, which leads to supply / demand / pricing. The cost of lighting it up front is prohibitive and pointless to some degree as it depends on what the cables customers will need.
That being said, another cable system may help the cost of connectivity into AU. It's been on the downward spiral for many years.
It's a 2 pair system with DWDM. Their cost is actually basically the fiber and the DWDM gear. They won't launch unless they have enough committed revenue to cover opex, I'm sure, and to project to earn a good return on the cable as laid. The incremental costs to light additional 10GE or 40Gbps waves isn't that high (usually people start out with CWDM on a system, then upgrade the WDM gear once they need to do so).
I'm a little surprised that it's a 2 pair system -- I'd be a bit more comfortable with something bigger, but for a long repeatered fiber, your repeaters get more expensive per-fiber. I'm not sure what the costs would be for 2 pair vs. 8 pair -- I'm a lot more familiar with ~300km repeaterless fiber.
The main innovation here is being a corporate owned vs. consortium cable. I can see corporates, web hosts. etc. directly taking 1-10G capacity on LA-NZ-AU, as well as mobile carriers. Southern Cross, etc. are usually unwilling to sell capacity directly in the form of IRUs to non-members, and members are licensed telcos.
If this happens, I'd be really tempted to set up a business in NZ.
EDIT: To expand on where I'm coming from, I'm the technical lead at a web agency in Melbourne so I make recommendations on what hosting providers we use, both for our staging servers and live servers for our customers' sites.
We already have a few staging and live servers with AWS in California, but for most live servers we have to use Australian hosting providers for lower latency and (sometimes) for legal reasons regarding storage of customer data. I guarantee that if AWS were to open a facility in Australia, all of our hosting would move to that facility ASAP.