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Updating Our Governance

IAA is currently an association incorporated under Western Australian law – the Associations Incorporation Act 2015 (WA) – reflecting our origin as the Western Australia Internet Association, and this was a suitable way to become a legal entity. When the association changed its name to the Internet Association of Australia we remained incorporated under the WA Act.

As IAA has grown substantially and now represents the interests of corporate, professional and affiliate members across Australia, the IAA Board believes it is appropriate to consider transferring our incorporation to Commonwealth law (Corporations Act 2001 (Cth)) and become a company limited by guarantee. Should we do this we would remain a not-for-profit entity, with our main office in Perth, and ensure we retain all the important aspects of our current rules.

It is often argued that state-based laws are effective but that they best suit local associations who are of limited scale. Once an organisation grows it may be better regulated by federal law which has stricter, Australia-wide rules and systems with greater resources. For example, there is one Commissioner and a small team in the WA government, whereas federally a whole department (ASIC) exists, there are many sources of independent expertise, and a wide range of training available on corporations’ law.

We are therefore commencing a process of member consultation with a view to briefing our members on current issues we have encountered and canvas member perspectives on any transition. An FAQ and briefing paper are being prepared which will be presented at the upcoming consultation to be held:

Date: Wednesday 7th April, 2021
Time: 3pm AWST/5pm AEST
Location: Zoom (online)

Members can register via Zoom

From the CEO’s Desk

Well, that was quite a month, wasn’t it? The floods certainly had us worried about our east coast connectivity, and luckily we lost only one of the fibre runs. That run was successfully restored once the fibre crews could reach it safely and we experienced no related down time though I admit my knuckles were a little white for a time! I’m glad too that our Australia-wide intercapital project is over, so we now have redundant paths between all the IXes. We’ve not been slacking, though as the tech team also recently upgraded Adelaide to increase the 10G ports, activated even more capacity into Amazon and set up a nice new L-root presence in the east.

What has put me into a state of complete despair, however, are the recent disclosures from the Federal political scene. Over my years of interactions with politicians and Canberra lobbyists of all varieties, I have always jokingly said that it wasn’t safe to party on drinking with them, but my fears were based purely on the risks from extreme alcohol consumption! Members should be assured, however, that once some form of dignity is reinstated in Canberra we will champion your views again. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait too long – we deserve so much better from our representatives and system of government.

Our own industry has had its own criticism, however, with the Human Rights Commission’s 2018 finding that “four out of five people working in information, media and telecommunications reported being sexually harassed”, so we certainly have our own path to travel. On that basis, the IAA board adopted a Code of Conduct for Events, one for the Board itself, and I have made a personal commitment to all IAA staff to ensure a healthy, safe and harassment free workplace with mechanisms to back that up, and we did all of this before the recent disclosures from Canberra. If members would like to further discuss this topic, or look to strategies for industry-wide improvement, please feel free to be in touch. One specific industry initiative we are newly supporting is that of a Women in Tech WA (WiTWA) sponsorship, and we are actively working with other potential partners, too.

Speaking of governance, the IAA board recently met to review the organisation’s strategic directions, including architectural standards, and we are close to finalising a new strategic plan. One topic that came up is that of updating our corporate structure from the current West Australian Association’s law to federal corporation’s law. If we were to do this, then a process of member consultation will be followed, so your views on our corporate governance are sought. Rest assured, the board is fully committed to remaining a not-for-profit, member driven association and our roots firmly remain in Western Australia.

Best wishes

Narelle

Peering for Nerds

So, you own this shiny new “peering” thing. It’s all the rage and you are awesome, but your cat videos are still being routed over those expensive transit links?! What gives!

Quite simply, IAA operates Australia’s largest multilateral peering exchanges. However, due to routing policies of some larger network operators further setup may be required on your part to ensure optimal routing and hence make full use of the exchanges. Everyone likes to manage their traffic balance to suit their own capacity and network topology: think of all those congested cats!

There are two types of IX Peering

Multilateral Peering: Each peer connects with every other peer using the route servers. With just four BGP sessions (2x IPv4 and 2x IPv6) you get full access to every other peer connected to the exchange fabric! It’s a free-for-all that works wonderfully and a simple, many-to-many arrangement to interconnect.

Bilateral Peering: This is a one-to-one peering relationship between two IX participants that allows for finer policy control, established over the IX address ranges for simplicity. In this case, each peering relationship is set up independently by the peers themselves.

As bilateral peering allows for greater traffic control, some larger members do not present themselves on the IX route servers. This means that even though you are both “connected” to the IX you will never use the IX for these connections, unless you set them up separately. Essentially, they don’t tell us about their routes so we cannot tell you. To make things even more granular, some peers only advertise a sub-set of their address space to the route servers, but they will send you a larger table if you set up bilateral peering.

“Ok, so how do we FIX it?”

The first step is to ensure you have a valid PeeringDB entry, as these larger networks use PeeringDB to build their router configuration. Updating your entry may even shave a few days off the provisioning time and some back and forth to verify details. As a side note, every request you make for bilateral sessions should include a link to your PeeringDB profile.

You will then need to locate a list of peers who are connected – but do not present on the route servers – that serve the content and networks you want! Again, a good place for this is PeeringDB for each IX (NSW-IX example: https://www.peeringdb.com/ix/716).  Compare this information with the respective Looking Glass (NSW-IX example: https://lg.ix.asn.au/routeservers/rs1-nsw-v4) to verify whether a peer is sending the routes you want, or not.

A simple email to each network peering contact is generally all it takes from here. If you are feeling lucky you could deploy your router configuration whilst waiting for the other network to respond!

Some interesting networks to look for on the IX Australia exchanges:

  • AS16509 – Amazon: Amazon don’t peer with the route servers and require bilateral sessions
  • AS6939 – Hurricane Electric: HE will send you almost double the routes with a bilateral BGP session
  • AS63293 – Facebook Caches: Facebook caches do not peer with the route servers, and won’t serve any traffic to your network without a bilateral session.

IAA News – February 2021

This month we announced member eligibility for the ACCC broadband monitoring program, said goodbye to a piece of IAA history and showed off our new lab.

Read the full newsletter here.

ACCC gives IAA members an MBA

Are you interested in finding out how your network’s broadband performance stacks up against others in the industry? Our Internet Service Provider (ISP) members are now eligible to join the ACCC’s broadband monitoring program. Some members had complained to IAA that only larger ISPs (and we know who they are) were able to participate in the program and were then using it for marketing. We’ve all seen those ‘Best ISP as Measured by the ACCC’ claims on the backs of buses and online advertising, but members complained that smaller ISPs aren’t even on the list to compare. Meaning that consumers hunting new services would only see the same old big players, and no-one else. We raised this with the ACCC and now our members are eligible to join.

The Measuring Broadband Australia (MBA) program provides information on the real-world performance of Internet plans. Its aim is to provide Australian consumers with accurate and independent information to assist their purchasing decisions. The ACCC will assist you in getting on board, and provide the measurement equipment, they just need you to assist in recruiting the measuring customers. If you can’t get enough customers to join, then you won’t be measured. Also, if you do join, your first measurement quarter will be disclosed privately so you have the opportunity to check all is correctly in place.

We invite our members to contact the ACCC directly on BroadbandPerformance@accc.gov.au to express their interest in joining the program. This is a fantastic opportunity for greater Internet performance transparency, allowing smaller ISPs to actively participate and be included in the MBA reports, and give you the opportunity to include speed and technical quality in your marketing alongside the big guys.

Goodbye and Thank You SR2

A year later than scheduled (thank you COVID!), on Friday 19th February the power and aircon was turned off at Perth’s QV1 SR2 room for the first and final time. A big part of our history is now retired.

After quite a few on again / off again moments, our Tech Team Leader, Nick Pratley, took advantage of the borders re-opening and jumped on a westbound plane to complete the shutdown and clean up at the QV1 datacentre.

With coffee (LOTS of coffee in fact) and a fair amount of brute force, SR2 was cleared of old servers and other networking gear, some of which found its way to new homes for a second lease on life. This means we have now consolidated our presence at the site into a single facility that is fit for purpose and vacated the repurposed storerooms and miscellaneous racking.

The work also involved moving some transit networks over to P1 and general tidy ups and rearrangements. The lights are now out, and the air con is room temperature in one of our oldest facilities.

A very BIG thank you to our many long-standing members who took the time to swing by, rehome some kit, say hello to Nick, and supply additional necessary coffee. Job done.

Model IXP in the Lab

IAA engineers have been busy this month installing six new devices for physical lab testing and to assess different automation stacks for our upcoming portal redesign work.

Whilst currently using a single switch vendor within our peering networks, challenges with automation mean we need to look at a range of vendors including those that support open-sourced methods of automation. As such, we have put three different sets of kit into our lab so we can fully check out what we need to do to provide the solutions for our automation requirements into the future.

Each device has two ports dedicated as ‘member’ ports which go back to a dedicated NIC on a vmware cluster and through to individual VMs running various router software e.g. RouterOS.

This lab will also test the feasibility of newer layer two technologies such as VXLAN and EVPN for use across the IX, and layer three technologies such as Segment-Routing (SPRING) to improve our core network and intercapital management. Our plan is full future proofing as we grow.

Grow your services with Amazon

Members with services and customers using Amazon should take advantage of some recent expansion and redundancy going in across IX Australia. In particular, Perth’s Amazon connections were recently expanded, so those members on WA-IX should contact Amazon to jump on board. Those members on VIC-IX should similarly bring up new sessions as there is bandwidth aplenty, and nicely reliable redundant services across the exchange. As ever PeeringDB.com has even more detail should you need it.

Get in touch with Amazon via peering-apac@amazon.com

From the CEO’s Desk

Well, hasn’t this year started with a bang! Who expected industry regulation (in the form of the News Media Code) to be everyone’s family catch up topic this month? Not since Wikipedia went dark have we seen such a stand from a major tech player on a regulatory issue.

We have had some success in our advocacy, too. Members are now being invited to participate in the ACCC broadband measurement program, and we’ve heard good news from members who participated in our round table with NBN Co on their onboarding challenges. Our next regulatory challenge will be Home Affairs’ “codesign process” for critical infrastructure regulation, so please send me your thoughts on that one.

We’ve also seen some great uptake of 100Gbps ports in the wake of us dropping the setup fees. In addition, members should also consider installing redundant links across exchanges to ensure service continuity, particularly into Cloud services. On that note, we’re happy to announce Amazon have expanded to ensure redundancy and capacity, and members wishing to peer and use Amazon services should get in touch with them pronto! If you’re on WA-IX or VIC-IX in particular, new capacity is available.

It was great to see our Tech Team Leader, Nick Pratley, clean out all the older gear and clutter in Perth’s QV1, too. A big thank you to our members who assisted with relieving us of the old gear and keeping him well caffeinated! Get in touch also if you like the masks he was modelling.

Our New Zealand presence is also growing with services now active across Chorus to present peering right around the country. More site planning is going on over there, too, so stay tuned!

On the topic of expansion, we are still office hunting though optimistic we’ll get somewhere before our new Policy Officer (Intern) starts. All the regulation changes mean we need the extra support, and we will be able to assist members more with their (our!) regulatory burden.

Don’t forget to tune into Apricot next week – see Apricot.net for the program.