["Long time listener, first time calling..."]

It really helped me listen to this one as everyone's audio was of high quality, tried a few other times but with varying success.

Connecting two dots on the conversation, what if populating the mirrors for a release used bittorrent (a private tracker, obviously)? Would it help mirrors spread it more quickly? A handful of the more powerful seeders then let the other nodes catch up?

I forgot who said but, I agree that if the client is smarter then we wouldn't rely so much on SRV records or GeoDNS. There was a talk by the Facebook folks on Fosdem I think 2016 about it and how they were moving away from GeoDNS to something that made a bunch of requests to a set of servers to measure speed before picking the datacentre to connect to. Think apt-fastest-mirror but for pkg.

GeoDNS to determine which mirror to go to is very limiting, there was a long conversation saying traffic between African countries but ignoring that connectivity in-continent is poor (or used to be) as most telcos prefer to buy the connectivity back to Europe and US rather than to their neighbours, as that's where the content their customers want is.

Sorry about the long message and thank you if you read this far!