We are pleased to welcome Matthew Kobayashi, our newest Peering Engineer. Working with the tech team, he will be responsible for taking care of our network and assisting members with their technical enquiries.   

Matthew has a career that consists of various roles within the telecommunications and networking sectors, including working for Optus, Superloop and Megaport. He also has previous experience driving heavy vehicles as a licensed road train driver and worked for Australia Post.   

He also brings a passion for the Internet industry that started as he grew up and was fascinated by telephony and the evolving internet – wanting to understand exactly how our increasingly connected world worked under the hood, which still fascinates him to this day.  

In his spare time, Matthew enjoys going to the movies, indulging in his love for motorcycles – particularly his current ride, a 2020 BMW S 1000 XR – and is a student pilot. Although we won’t see him flying in the sky just yet, as he says, it’s a very expensive hobby!   

Our engineers have been busy testing a new Arista 400Gbps switch with the preliminary results looking promising. If testing is successful, this new switch may be installed into our NSW-IX ring to increase capacity, and eventually make its way to our other IXes. Last month, you would have read about our 800Gbps milestone, and with traffic continuing to see steady growth rates across the network, we need a 400Gbps switch that provides flexibility and choice for large scale cloud, routing transformation, and hyperscale IO intensive applications. 

Well, it’s happened, our network hit a whopping 800G during the month of March – twice! During the past six months, we’ve come very close and as we continue to seek more content providers to join the network, it won’t be long, before we will be at the next milestone of 900G. 

Work continues on the OoB project with SA-IX deployment taking place next week; WA-IX and ACT-IX are soon to follow. NSW-IX and VIC-IX are up and running with great results and arrangements are being made for the QLD-IX deployment, amongst other things that we can’t announce just yet – so stay tuned!   

Thank you to all the members who completed our member survey last month; your feedback is very valuable and will help determine where the next IX or PoP will go. We have collated the feedback and the Board is currently reviewing it. As this analysis progresses, we will keep you informed, so keep an eye out for updates in future newsletters and our social media posts. As you can well understand, some of these locations are difficult to service with some of the most expensive backhaul around. It may be we need to make compromises on our level of redundancy or capacity, but rest assured we will ensure the best possible standards are maintained.