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Dr Karen Lee, Senior Lecturer in the UTS Faculty of Law, is undertaking research into the ways in which service providers engage when codes of practice are drafted; and why industry participants choose to engage or disengage in code development.   

Using the development of the Telecommunications Consumer Protections Code (C628: 2019) as a case study, the research seeks to identify the consultation mechanisms used; the difficulties encountered; the barriers to participation that industry participants of all sizes and business types might experience; the effect these mechanisms and barriers have on the code development process, and measures that might be taken to improve industry rule-making activities.  

To schedule an interview with Dr Lee or for further information about the project (UTS ETH21-6356), please contact her at karen.lee@uts.edu.au.   

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. 

The newly formed IAA Public Policy Advisory Panel (PPAP) had its first meeting on 14 April 2022. After an initial round robin, the panel began road-mapping future goals and plans for IAA’s advocacy team, discussed IAA’s draft Public Policy Principles and 2022 Election Wish List, and outlined upcoming consultations IAA will be involved in. It was a great opportunity to meet the panel members, and the IAA advocacy team greatly benefited from the panel’s insights coming from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences.  

The IAA Public Policy Principles are a set of guiding principles that reflect IAA’s values and will shape the work and responses of IAA’s advocacy team. The 2022 Election Wish List will be taken to political representatives in the lead up to the upcoming federal election to share our thoughts on the issues that permeate the sector. Both documents have been revised following the meeting and are awaiting the board’s approval.  

The Advisory Panel will meet quarterly and discuss issues facing our members and the internet sector of Australia more broadly and will assist IAA’s advocacy work in the sector. We look forward to continuing to work with the Advisory Panel and once again express our gratitude for their time and effort. 

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. 

Sabrina Chang-Rozario joined our Admin Team earlier this month as our new Administrative Assistant. She will be assisting the Admin Team with various tasks including event organisation and has taken over our wonderful Tanzia’s role as the Executive Assistant to Narelle. Coming to us with over 15 years of international not-for-profit experience in stakeholder relations, program and event management, and relationship building, she is already an asset to our team.   

In her spare time, Sabrina enjoys Pilates and yoga, dabbling in photography, reading the classics to her children and travelling – Covid dependent at the moment, unfortunately!   

On Wednesday 16th March, Narelle and Sophia represented our association at the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security hearing that comprised several panels of stakeholders affected by the proposed bill. This hearing allowed industry representatives to provide feedback and raise concerns about the proposed federal government’s critical infrastructure cybersecurity obligations. This includes laws that could require organisations to install third-party software to gather information from their systems in the name of national security and report them to the government when the government deems them technically incapable of providing such systems information.  

During the hearing, Narelle did a fantastic job representing member interests. She explained that technical systems go through a number of upgrades and revisions and that capabilities change, meaning that any requirement to install software on behalf of Home Affairs needs careful and ongoing security and interoperability testing. She further raised the concern that the legislation is unclear, very complex and very difficult to work through and raised a number of specific concerns about the data this software could capture. She expressed that we need to trust in the type of software that goes onto our systems and that we must be able to read the code, assess the code, test the code, and check interoperability and security before it is installed and at any time it is installed.   

The hearing was an excellent opportunity to hear the different perspectives of various stakeholders. We hope the Parliamentary Joint Committee was able to gain enough industry insight for its review so that the inquiry can assist in constructing a Bill that is measured, effective and will improve our national security. If you would like to know more about the contents of the hearing, the transcript is available for download. So far, it seems the PJCIS has taken some of our views on board, so we live in hope the legislation will improve. 

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