In the spirit of celebration of WA-IX’s 25-year milestone, we’ve been catching up with founding and long-time members and this month; we’re sharing our catch up with Aubrey Adams. At the time of joining WAIA, Aubrey was teaching a technology management unit in the MIS Bachelor course at Edith Cowan University in Perth and was completing his post-grad diploma in computing. He had started using this new ‘World Wide Web’ thing to do research and became very interested in how it all worked and what it would mean for doing business and education. Many businesses were starting to have ISPs host their web servers off-premises, and he encouraged his students to think about what it would mean for a business to no longer have direct physical control of its data and the public’s access to it. As such, Aubrey searched for an industry association for ISPs and found WAIA and contacted them to arrange a guest speaker for his class. Kim Heitman came out and gave a talk to the students. Since then, Aubrey joined as a professional member as a way to keep himself informed of developments in the new world of the Internet.   

Although Aubrey was not involved in setting up WA-IX, he recalls the announcement at a quarterly general meeting and thought that it was a type of local ‘sub-Internet’ and recalled that the rationale and benefits to ISPs that were presented about the IX were very clear.   

When asked about his opinion on the most significant impact WA-IX has had on Australia’s Internet, Aubrey stated that “reducing data transit costs are very significant and that it contributed to the Internet and all its services becoming a ubiquitous feature of our life today. It has allowed ISPs to manage data delivery and create things such as ‘non-quota’ services, examples such as Netflix not being counted in a customer’s download limit. This model has then been implemented across Australia (and NZ) to benefit all users in some way.”  

Aubrey credits WA-IX’s growth and expansion over the past 25 years to the members and technical staff who saw the need and had the vision to implement and manage that growth. He describes being able to stream live matches of the Women’s Cricket World Cup from New Zealand on his smart TV using Kayo, with a picture quality that is outstanding. Although he acknowledges the NBN and advances in-home Wi-Fi all contribute to this, it’s infrastructure like WA-IX that enables that data, and a myriad of other services, to be available on-demand at an affordable cost.   

In future, Aubrey hopes to see more of the same – providing exceptional peering and efficient data transit for all members and users. He also stated how IAA’s recent advocacy work has been excellent, and he hopes that that continues and that he would like to see more informational/educational sessions for professional members in an online format will happen (if you would like the same, let us know at events@internet.asn.au). 

This month’s meet the member segment features our wonderful Chair, Matthew Enger. Matt is the Managing Director of X Integration and Leaptel and joined IAA in 2016 as a relative newbie in the Internet industry. He joined after being told that this peering idea is a ‘good thing to do’ and looking for a way to reduce his transit bill that was costing him $20 per Meg! He has come to learn what peering is and just how important it is to us as a country.

Matt became interested in the Internet when it was a new thing. He was in secondary school at the time and moved his school from a dialup modem being shared by everyone to a Linux box running IP masquerade over a 64k ATM link and remembers thinking – WOW! From there, he got involved in things like ml.org offering free DNS and played with website hosting and built his own interactive website with Perl and later PHP. After living in Hong Kong, he returned to Australia and was accidentally invited to help a customer of a friend with their dialup ISP. Since then, he’s been hooked!

Throughout his career, Matt has achieved many things. After his first internet company didn’t make it as selling dialup for $16.95 per month in an all you can eat fashion wasn’t sustainable, he ended up moving into business IT, but with a side of ADSL. The business owner at the time wanted to move on and handed him the keys to the kingdom and its customers – X Integration was formed. From there, he built up a business customer base, and after a few disasters (Veridas dying overnight, ISPOne collapsing), he looked at his customer base and realised he could do this ADSL thing himself. They began selling ADSL and NBN via an aggregator and established Leaptel. Since then, they have moved into mainstream Internet, and he has been learning and growing his network skills to support a national network with five datacentres and lots of customers! They also recently connected to 121 NBN POIs and have a direct relationship with NBN. This means they have lots of CVC (1.5G x 121 POIs), so if anyone wants fast Internet with no congestion, please sign up!

All business aside, when Matt’s not working, he splits his time between family (two girls aged 10 and 6) and Scouting. He really enjoys Scouting and finds it exciting to see 3000 kids attend the recent Victorian Jamboree in January and have such a great time after two years of being locked down due to Covid. He says he is lucky in his role as the Victorian State Commissioner – Scouts to have a significant positive impact on the lives of kids throughout Australia.

Well, wasn’t that a fun-filled month! The longest election campaign in recent history is over at last, and we have a new government. We can say goodbye to unwanted vile political text messages, nasty social media memes and pork barrelling, and we’ll move to a new regimen of well-articulated policy discourse by a polite and caring political class motivated by the nation’s best interest, not simply the retention of power. [Yes, I know it’s a dream, but I live in hope.] Seriously, we congratulate the new Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese and look forward to deepening our relationship with Michelle Rowland as the expected Communications Minister. We also wish Paul Fletcher and his team well and thank them for their service.

You may have noticed we issued an election wish list and rated the political parties’ policy platforms in the lead up to the election. One thing we asked for was that the new government restore trust in our political processes. While an integrity commission is a key component of a trustworthy system, our issue is with the government’s approach to engagement with industry: we’ve had too many tokenistic consultations and rushed legislation rather than constructive engagement towards effective, efficient regulation. We’ll keep on asking.

Last month I also managed to attend NZNOG in Wellington and caught up with our NZIX colleagues and many of the NZ based ISPs. If you get a chance, have a look over the many useful presentations, such as the OpenLI, security and 800G sessions. They also had a number of sessions given by government which had me feel I was in some parallel universe with genuine, constructive government-industry relations. Sweet as!

Looking forward, we’re doing some heavy analysis to properly scope out our program of upgrades and expansion. In the wake of our cracking the 900Gbps level, our member survey on sites, and looming equipment shortages, we will need to do some rearrangement, and it may well mean the closure of one or two POPs where there are no members present anymore. In this way, we can ensure we have the capacity you want in the places you want, as well as ensure efficient cache fill and plenty of head room for intra-IX traffic. So here’s the challenge: how about for the 25th anniversary of WA-IX next month we break the TERRABIT barrier? Come on, you know you can do it!

After much speculation about the date, the election has finally been called and we are now in the longest election campaign for decades. While the media sit watching for gaffes and hunting for the most embarrassing candidate, the rest of us are left wondering whether we will see any real policy scrutiny. If a change in government comes, or if the pressure to appear tough on security lifts after the election, will we see any real change to the heavy hand of ineffective regulation largely enacted for appearance’s sake? Those of you who attended my AusNOG presentation will recall that I am not impressed with the state of our regulatory processes: we need to restore trust in government, and government needs to be worthy of that trust. Rest assured, I am banging on their doors to tell them ways to improve, and will be doing so again next week at the CommsDay Summit. Look out for our Election Wish List, which we will release soon. 

Speaking of AusNOG, it was great to catch up with so many of you and to hear of all the great projects conducted by our members and others across the industry. Everyone looked great in the IAA hoodies as well! Our IAA Systers@AusNOG program went down really well, so look out for any future versions and possible sponsorship opportunities. 

Sadly, also an AusNOG after event was marred by alleged bad behaviour and we thank the broader industry for your support in calling for change. The Australian Human Rights Commission study from 2018 reported that some 81% of employees in the information, media and telecommunications industry in the preceding five years had experienced sexual harassment at work. Compared with 42% in retail and 40% in mining. We clearly have an entrenched problem worse than other industries, and it’s utterly overdue this changed. We are working through what initiatives IAA can lead and what we want others to do. Either way, if you see harassment of any kind act to stop it, call it out as I did at AusNOG and protect your colleagues. We want this industry to be better so that all participants can enjoy and be productive in their working lives. Adherence to and promotion of codes of conduct are a good start, and stamping out this type of behaviour will go a long way to retaining great people within it. 

On the technology front, seeing us crack 800Gbps last month means we really need to get moving on our upgrades! The team are putting some more kit through our rigorous test plan in the hope of identifying the right upgrade path to a 400Gbps core, and even 400Gbps services. If only the supply chains could fulfil orders… we’re still awaiting gear we ordered last year! Rest assured, however, we won’t be out of ports or hit congestion for some time, as we still have good headroom everywhere. 

We’re also still working through our expansion options and trying to get a better understanding of what data centres are worth being in into the future. The newer ones are looking very attractive and are great pieces of construction and design. We partner with a number of them to provide services, so as you grow, we can grow into more locations. Don’t be afraid to let me know about your expansion plans or even just to bend my ear about how you’re weathering the industry storms! 

Til next month 

Narelle