Join us on Tuesday 20th April as we take a look at digital connectivity in regional Australia. Digital Networks in Regional Australia – Field of Dreams or Highway to Hell will focus on the issues surrounding regional communities and their access to the internet.

Regional Australia is a vast area with great distances between population centres, often with low population density. Despite this low density, regional production value rivals that of metro production. NBN, however, has chosen population density as its metric for technology delivery resulting in almost all regional Australia’s internet demand being served by two Sky Muster geosynchronous satellites with fixed capacity and limited speed.

DPIRD’s Digital Economy Manager, Robert Smallwood, will review the challenges faced by West Australians and discuss the initiatives being delivered by the WA Government to provide world-class terrestrial broadband networks across the vast areas between population centres.

This session will be preceded by a short update from the IAA Tech Team on some of the recent BGP gotchas for young and old in the world of peering.

Members and non-members can register via Zoom.

IAA is excited to announce the first event in our 2021 program.

Join us on Thursday 25^th February as we ask a panel of experts for their predictions on what we should be looking out for this year. Technology Outlook 2021 and its Impact on the Internet will look at new technologies, gadgets, as well as emerging regulation trying to constrain technology.

5G, Artificial Intelligence, online courts, and an increasing number of weird items forming the Internet of things are just a few of the technologies that have been playing out in our industry over the last year, but what will have the biggest impact on Internet networks in 2021?

We are fortunate to have secured Professor Katina Michael from Arizona State University, Professor Lyria Bennett Moses from the University of NSW and technology commentator and well-known gadget man, Trevor Long to join us to discuss the topic.

Members and non-members can register via Zoom.

Send us your questions ahead of the session and we will get them answered up front.

We were hoping to resume in person events in the new year but given our unpredictable travel situation, we will continue the program online, for the first few events at least.

Our most recent (and most lively!) event featured our new IAA Board Secretary, Matt Enger, relating his experience building an ISP from spare parts and a handful of customers to 10,000 customers, multiple POPs and high reliability on a shoestring budget. Members and friends enjoyed a lively discussion afterwards on the various technical and operational approaches for keeping to budget whilst maintaining high customer retention and satisfaction. It really rated as one of our best events yet, so keep an eye out for the video.

As Melbourne emerges from lockdown, we are continuing our online event series, this time looking at building an ISP on a budget.

Life Under Lockdown: Roll your own ISP, how to build a scalable, reliable ISP from low cost components will take you on a journey from start up to successful service provider.

IAA Board member Matthew Enger runs X Integration, an ISP that he started and has grown from a few hundred customers to thousands. Join Matthew as he talks us through obtaining and repurposing the parts, operating and scaling his network, and the gotchas he has seen along the way. From dDoS to regulation, this will be a useful and entertaining “how to” for everyone in the industry.

Date: Tuesday 24th November 2020
Time: 2pm AWST/5pm AEDT
Location: Zoom webinar and social

Come along and share your experiences or maybe get some ideas for a future start up project.

Members and guests can register via Zoom

IAA members were treated to in depth look into how the ACCC’s broadband monitoring system works during this month’s Life Under Lockdown event. Presentations from the ACCC and their performance testing provider SamKnows explained the rationale and technology used to assess Australia’s broadband network performance.

Sean Riordan, Head of the ACCC’s broadband performance monitoring program, explained that as the economic regulator of the communications sector, the ACCC’s main objective has been to promote the long-term interests of the users of internet services. The monitoring program aimed to promote competition and consumer outcomes by providing transparency on the quality of fixed line broadband services on offer to consumers via different NBN retailers.

The SamKnows system comprises a small ‘white box’ that NBN consumers install on their home networks. It simply measures rates of transfer without interfering with download performance and the company has been working with internet companies to create specific performance tests well beyond simple ping times.

Feedback following the event showed attendees were impressed by the comprehensiveness of the measurement system and its ability to track performance and were interested to see the changes in traffic and advertising, after the monitoring program started.

The event was also live streamed to our Facebook page. If you missed it on the night, it is still available to watch.

Our Life Under Lockdown events are proving popular and we are trying to bring topics that interest members.

Please feel free to circulate our event notices within your organisations, amongst your colleagues and friends we would love more of you to attend. If there are any specific topics you would like covered or speakers you enjoy – get in touch and we will do what we can to schedule.

Australians are now spending over $4 billion per year on fixed line broadband services. With the internet being such an integral part of everyday life, it is important to be confident in the information available to assist consumers in choosing the plan that best suits.

IAA’s next Life Under Lockdown event, on Tuesday 22 September, “How Good is our Internet?” will be looking at the performance of Australia’s broadband network

Hear from Sean Riordon, head of the ACCC’s broadband performance monitoring program on their approach to measuring performance. The session will include a summary of the regulator’s function, why broadband performance monitoring was adopted, an overview of how it works, and the results they have collected.

The event will also include an in-depth presentation from SamKnows who provide the technology behind the ACCC’s testing program.