New Zealand service providers and content providers are entitied to peer with Telecom and exchange local traffic at one or more of Telecom's 29 points of interconnect across the country. 

Local peering reduces the requirement for end-user traffic to needlessly travel to a remote city for handover between the networks before it can be routed to its destination.  This results in:

• A better service for end-users on both networks; and
• An incentive for local content to be hosted locally.

We are commencing trials of these arrangements with service providers with a view to launching the service in August 2008.