Sydney ranks eighth among world's most connected co-location regions

Sydney has ranked eighth among the world's most connected co-location regions, according to a report from Cloudscene.

Cloudscene is a directory of co-location data centres, cloud services providers and network fabrics throughout the world founded by serial tech entrepreneur Bevan Slattery, who founded NextDC and Megaport.

The ranking is based on combined data centre density and connectivity rating, specifically the number of co-location facilities and points of presence (PoPs).

Sydney has a total of 723 PoPs and 56 data centres as of 31 January 2017, according to Cloudscene, putting it just behind Los Angeles. By comparison, Melbourne has 42 data centres, and Brisbane and Perth both have 31 each.

The most connected city Is London with 1649 PoPs and 152 data centres, followed by Amsterdam and Frankfurt. The US was by far the largest market for data centres however, with five cities included in the top 10.

Slattery noted considerable growth in co-location facilities in Sydney over the past three years.

"We expect there will be some movement in next year’s ecosystem rankings as the Asia Pacific market continues to be the fastest-growing region for the data centre industry," he said. "So it’s likely that we’ll see more APAC cities make their way to a top ten spot."

Cloudscene said the market's most dominant players were arguably Equinix, Digital Realty, Global Switch, CenturyLink, NTT, AT&T and Verizon. However, the only companies to appear in all of the top 10 cities were Equinix, Digital Realty and Verizon.