New South Wales · network infrastructure

Sydney holds the state's capacity almost by itself. Equinix SY1/SY2 records 200 networks, SY3 records 174 and SY4 records 144, with NEXTDC S1 at 107 and DigiCo Sydney SYD1 at 103. Suburban buildings are much smaller: NEXTDC S2 in Macquarie Park has 24 networks and S3 in Artarmon has 18. Outside the metropolitan area the counts fall to single digits, at Newcastle and at Dubbo. Networks here do not have to leave the state to exchange traffic, because MegaIX Sydney counts 227 participants and Equinix Sydney 217, both in the same city.

An address block reads as New South Wales because the operator that holds it published a New South Wales address on its registry record, and geolocation databases copy that record. Mobile addresses work differently. Telstra announces its mobile subscribers from AS1221, Optus from AS4804 and Vodafone Australia from AS133612, and each carrier aggregates handsets behind a small number of regional gateways. A phone connected in Newcastle or Dubbo can present an address that databases place in Sydney, and a phone in a neighbouring state can present one that databases place here.

Reading the routing data tells you more than the label a lookup returns. The origin ASN on the prefix names the network that announces it, and the netname and registered address on the registry object name the party that holds it. Among 996 network presences in the state's facilities and 782 networks peering at its exchanges, two addresses that both report New South Wales can belong to a Sydney colocation customer and to a mobile gateway, which behave nothing alike.