Late last week, professional members received a Professional Member Benefits survey. This survey is designed to help us improve your membership experience by enabling us to identify the member benefits that you want and need.

As a member-run association, we put our members at the heart of what we do. To help us make your association better, please complete the survey before it closes on Friday, 5 August 2022, 5:00pm AWST/7:00pm AEST. Don’t forget that all members who complete the survey will go into the draw to win an IAA swag bag.

Complete Survey

This year’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) will be held in October and is planned to be slightly different to past years as the meeting is set to coincide with WA-IX’s 25th Birthday celebration. Official communications will start coming out in August, so please keep an eye on your emails, Facebook and LinkedIn to keep up to date with what’s happening.

This is also a good time to remind everyone to make sure you have updated your voting contacts! Please also check in with your organisation’s voting contact to ensure they receive all the important communications: if they have unsubscribed from our emails, your organisation might miss out on your voting instructions!

A few months ago, one of our staff members caught up with Adrian Chadd, an eager lover of tech who assisted with the setup of WA-IX. 25 years on, Adrian has moved to California and now works for Facebook on a number of virtual reality and augmented reality prototype projects and continues to help with networking using his wide range of expertise.

Starting out in his first Internet job at PSINet, he met a lot of people, and as a young, enthusiastic type, he looked up to the entrepreneurs who built their own ISPs. He said, “I was the annoying little kid that was enthusiastic about learning”. He began with coding and admin work, then later moved into peering as it became more prominent, eventually being remote hands for smaller ISPs, and continued working in different roles on several projects and development work until he moved to California in 2011.

When asked about his recollection of the early days of WA-IX, Adrian recalled that some initially found it hard to connect to WA-IX as they were used to CCIEs and relied on staff who had the expertise to do it, but thanks to Adrian, along with a couple of others, they were able to get connected. He went on to talk further about the earlier days when ISPs weren’t working together, just purchasing upstream: “Although there were several attempts over East to make peering work that didn’t seem to take – eventually, Perth ISPs decided to do it themselves”. He also recounted the time he set up a 2Mbps wireless link between the Synet building in Subiaco and Paradox Digital in the Bank West building and remembers being on a ladder at the very top of the Bank West tower connecting a cable to the antenna… We’re really pleased you survived that one, Adrian!

He finished off by sharing his thoughts about WA-IX and peering in general, “I’m glad that peering in Australia is still a thing. That people in Australia take it seriously, and it has moved from commercial transit interest. It sort of seems like there is this side to peering that is fundamentally Australian ‘of getting shit done’. It all started in a cheap closet that turned into an Internet hub. Everyone connected, however, they could, some by fibre, some by ethernet [copper] or whatever they had on hand. It really all started with people getting connected any way they could to get shit done.”

This month’s Meet the Member segment features one of our fantastic Board members, Nate Garr. Nate currently works as a Senior Network Acquisitions Planner for Amazon IVX / Twitch and joined IAA as a Corporate member when he worked for a previous organisation where he was pleased to see that the best performing IX was IAA. According to Nate, “the coverage and number of peers being one factor, but the operational efficiency and support we received set the team at IAA apart.” He subsequently became a Board Member in 2019 as he wanted to start giving back to the Internet community.

Nate, by default, fell into the Internet industry around 1996 as a former telecommunications technician, with his first venture into the industry deploying circuit switches throughout the western USA. This was, of course, in support of the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), while the Internet was in its infancy, but SS7 switching and seeing his first Cisco router being commissioned meant there was no turning back.

Nate started his career installing Nortel DMS systems in support of the PSTN, then transitioned into a technician role for a regional ISP/CLEC in Northern California. Right around that time (circa 1998) a large start-up was funded to deploy the “first ever” all fibre optic IP network in the United States (Level 3 Communications) – it was the scale and commitment to packet-based tech that drew him to that opportunity. The next 11 years were a mix of IP engineering, colocation product development, and ultimately running operation teams in the field. He also took turns committing to other areas of regional and local communication service organisations and spent time deploying a significant amount of carrier ethernet/MPLS supported services to cell towers. The capacity they needed as users started feeding off their phones was what led him to content and organisations caching and serving it.

Taking his operations/engineering background to both sales support and acquisition (sourcing buying) has rounded out his experience in our industry. From deploying some of the first POPs for Fastly’s content distribution network throughout APAC/Oceania to securing intercity dark fibre in support of facilities-based backbone initiatives for AWS, it really comes down to a love of network development, peering/interconnection and vendor relations. Seeing first-hand the amount of capital and effort it takes to build a network, and the general support (is it love?) for our Internet, is what drives his commitment to peering and pulling networks together. His primary objective today is site selection in support of the Twitch service and the ever-budding growth of Amazon’s IVS/Twitch product!

Nate is not only passionate about his work but is an avid outdoors enthusiast that was ultimately drawn to rivers. During his 20’s and 30’s, when he wasn’t working, you’d find him enjoying white-water kayaking. He’s had the pleasure of experiencing nature’s more difficult and breath-taking waterways across the entire Americas, Nepal, Thailand and China. These days, while the heart is willing, the body tends to wear its tear, so the white-water has tamed down a bit.

Now a proud father of two young boys, with his wife, as a family they enjoy much of their time finding ways to navigate those particular forms of nature while they reside in beautiful Eagle, Idaho in the United States.

Well, here we are entering into a new financial year already. The team have been hard at work completing a few projects from last year, as well as the final phases of testing on our new member portal! It all looks so elegant and simple, it’s hard to see the huge amounts of effort that have gone into the layout, neat new calculators and extra functionality! That’s the secret of good design, really, isn’t it. We’re also just about to announce our new switch vendor to take our core to the next level: once again, all the hard work the team have put into avidly testing and configuring (not to mention deliberately misconfiguring) will yield us a significant extra capacity. Fingers crossed the supply chains will deliver before we do actually hit some ceilings. 

One surprise I did get this month, and not a pleasant one, was the announcement of new obligations for cyber security reporting. While we knew they were in the pipeline, we had expected a bit more discussion and even negotiation before they came into effect. Indeed, the message that these obligations were not coming into immediate effect was repeated by the Department of Home Affairs in their briefing to affected industries held on 30 June 2022. A week later, the Minister declared a new licence condition for carriers and carriage service providers to establish a mandatory reporting regime for cyber security incidents, with the federal government using provisions in the Telecommunications Act to bring the industry into line with other critical infrastructure sectors. Just when we thought there was a new Sheriff in town… Thankfully our team is on the ball, and you’ll see new guides on our web site to explain what you need to do. 

Happy new year everyone 

Narelle