It may suck to Australia but Australia is a tiny market in the grand scale of things which is why I don't see a full ec2 data centre going in. CDN node sure but I don't see anyone launching EC2 instances in Sydney anytime soon.
Australia is a tiny market in the grand scale of things
No we aren't! We are one of the few rich countries where the economy is growing, and our currency is very strong. At the moment we are very attractive to offshore companies because we offer revenue growth.
Amazon executives are in discussions with several large independent data centre providers in Australia to house another availability zone for its global cloud computing service.
The only people that would benefit from an EC2 cluster in Australia are Australians. For everyone else its just more latency. It's not a huge market, I worked in Sydney for the past 3 years and I'm very much familiar with it and its recent growth but its still tiny. I just don't see the demand being high enough to warrant anything more than something like CloudFront.