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Last year, we launched our IAASysters@AusNOG Program.  Based on the international systers.org and systers@IETF programs, this program helps to support and enable women to access the valuable technical content and business networking opportunities that come from the Australian Network Operators Group (AusNOG) conference.  

Sponsored attendees will receive: 

  • Economy airfares to Sydney and three nights accommodation for interstate participants 
  • Admission to the AusNOG conference (April 6 and 7) – sponsored by AusNOG 
  • Admission to the IAASysters@AusNOG workshop (April 5) 
  • A one-year complimentary Professional membership to IAA – subject to Board approval. 

An essential part of our program is the IAASysters@AusNOG workshop. This is a one-day event; offering targeted technical and presentation skills training in addition to a career planning session delivered by industry professionals, designed to help you advance your career. 

Whether you are at the beginning of your career, yet to begin or starting again, the IAASysters@AusNOG program offers a variety of opportunities designed to boost your knowledge, skills, and confidence. 

Details for the IAASysters@AusNOG workshop: 

Date: Tuesday, 5 April 2022
Time: 9:00am AEST – 5:00pm AEST
Location: The Fullerton Hotel, Sydney 

This program is proudly sponsored by AusNOG and Amazon Web Services, and we would like to express our appreciation of their support. 

For more information, please visit the IAASysters@AusNOG information page on our website. 

Program Sponsors

The IAASysters@AusNOG Program is proudly brought to you with the help of our sponsors.

The Australian Institute of Office Professionals (AIOP) is hosting a virtual webinar, and our wonderful Executive Officer and Company Secretary – Kitty Hibble – will be presenting! From Enthusiasts to Critical Infrastructure will take you through the journey of the growth of the Internet in Western Australia and a little known but crucial part of its infrastructure – Internet Exchange Points.  

Kitty Hibble will show how the association grew from a bunch of people with vision, to now being a fundamental – even critical – part of the Internet today and illustrate some of the organisational changes that had to occur to support this evolution. 

Event details:
Date: Tuesday 15th March 2022
Time: 10:00am AWST
Location: Online 

If you would like to attend, please email us at events@internet.asn.au to access your exclusive IAA member discount code! 

Dr Karen Lee, in the UTS Faculty of Law, is undertaking research into the ways service providers engage when codes of practice are drafted; and why industry participants choose to engage or disengage in code development.   

Using the development of the Telecommunications Consumer Protections Code (C628: 2019) as a case study, the research seeks to identify the consultation mechanisms used; the difficulties encountered; the barriers to participation that industry participants of all sizes and business types might experience; the effect these mechanisms and barriers have on the code development process, and measures that might be taken to improve industry rule-making activities.  

To schedule an interview with Dr Lee or for further information about the project (UTS ETH21-6356), please contact her at karen.lee@uts.edu.au.   

With Australia’s newest domain namespace launching next month – .au direct – auDA will be holding a webinar to update users on tools and resources to help get their .au. The webinar will set out how to apply for a .au direct domain name, demonstrate the new tools designed to support .au direct decision making, and how auDA has been working to drive awareness of the new namespace.  

Members may need to make some DNS changes or could get extra calls to the helpdesks if customers start seeing these strange new URLs on the interwebs. 

Date: Thursday 3rd March 2022
Time: 1:15pm – 2:00pm AEDT
Location: Virtual 

If you are interested in attending the auDA webinar, register here 

We are excited to share with members news of the safe arrival of Nick’s baby girl – Aria Pratley – on Wednesday 16th February. Both mum and baby are doing well, and we wish their family all the very best with this new chapter! 

Thank you to all Corporate and Affiliate members who have completed our member survey. As a member-run association, your input is vital to ensuring that we provide the network you want and need. As we have seen a good amount of growth across the exchanges, we are wanting to expand our network into Hobart, Darwin and other data centres. We’re also keen to get your input on the content you would like to see on the network, so if you haven’t completed the survey yet, please get to it! The survey closes on Friday 4th March 2022, 5:00pm AEDT.  

One of our staff members caught up with founding member, James Bromberger, to learn more about the history of WA-IX. Here’s what James had to say: 

What was the fundamental reason for building WA-IX?
WAIA, the former name for IAA, was founded in 1995 principally to represent the civil liberties of Internet users and organisations that wished to have private communications. With network engineers and stakeholders from the fledgling ISP and Telco sector involved, it became clear there was a need for a non-profit, carrier-neutral peering exchange. Up until this point, the incumbent telco in Australia had been charging volume based carriage fees for inbound and outbound traffic; this was making connectivity expensive for those who received traffic – which possibly was not solicited or requested by them. For example, if someone sent you a large email, you’d be paying to receive it, and the sender may not have optimised the email down to cost less (think of attached images not being scaled to a smaller resolution/file size). 

Did you think that WA-IX would be as large as it is today? Why did you think that?
I recall the first organisations being the ISPs, as they were shouldering much of the comms bills from the growing ISP subscriber base, but it was when some of the commercial organisations, particularly in the mining sector, started to connect to the exchange we saw there was a real solid future for wider customer use. CoLo providers extended the peering fabric to multiple facilities, and then more and more end organisations started to swell the throughput. Given a fixed, predictable monthly cost, the service expanded rapidly. 

What was the uptake of the exchange like in the first ten years?
Within a few years, nearly all of the smaller ISPs had connected locally in Perth. It seemed to be a right of passage to connect in and then subsequently be consumed by iiNet! 

What would you say was WA-IX’s most significant contribution to the Internet in Australia today?
Ensuring that B-party charging was not extended to the Internet bill of consumers was a key element of opening up the Internet to consumers; in a country of the size of Australia, making communications more affordable with less personal cost risk to consumers meant the adoption surged in the community. This drove scale, and further reduced cost, to the point where consumers were being offered unlimited volume download (and upload) plans. Prior to this, traffic quotas were commonplace, and consumers would make decisions if it was worth sending or downloading content. With large content providers and CDNs putting cache nodes within the peering network meant that consumers would start to use large amounts of local traffic without making a conscious decision to do so, further driving the ISP-incurred bandwidth costs down. 

With the expansion to multiple peering fabrics across Australia, we saw the fundamental economics of the digital online ecosystem become more commodity, accessible, and thus spurring the digital skills; most people now have email, browse websites, do online banking, and order groceries. If the adoption of online services had continued to be throttled by a single organisation, then society would still be using fax machines, and the ability to comfortably isolate during the pandemic would have been much harder. 

There’s still progress to be done in the telecommunications space in Western Australia. For customers in the north of Western Australia, there is very little (i.e. no) peering locally between telcos; that traffic often comes down to Perth, jumps across providers, and then transits back to the North of Western Australia, a round trip time that is at times a performance impact on applications. Having a small community peering in Port Hedland, Carnarvon, Geraldton, Broome and asking the ISPs servicing these areas (typically via NBN these days) to exchange traffic locally could have a cost-saving and performance improvement, but thus far, we don’t see this happening. 

[CEO comment – if you agree with James’ view on the utility of regional peering, don’t forget to complete our survey!] 

On Wednesday 9th February, Google (AS15169) went live on VIC-IX with a 10G port! Now, you and your customers can access a wider range of Google content via our network.  

We’re keen to add more content providers as it is an important part of building a more efficient, open and reliable Internet. If you have any content providers that you would like to see on our network, let us know at peering@ix.asn.au 

On Friday 11th February, a bug that had been affecting a number of peers across NSW-IX was identified. To resolve this issue, our engineers initiated an emergency outage across the entire IX to resolve the issue permanently, and prior to the outage, conducted an emergency reboot and firmware upgrade on the affected switch.  

The firmware upgrade, in addition to resolving this bug (outlined on our status page), will be progressively rolled out to all exchanges to bring them in sync in preparation for our new portal’s automation platform.  

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