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NetThing – Round Table

Have you heard about NetThing? We are excited to announce that we will be facilitating a round table focusing on Internet as an Essential Service and how this classification would affect the rules and regulation for broadband Internet services.  

We plan to explore what classifying the Internet as an essential service would entail and its broader implications for digital inclusion, minimum service level requirements and digital infrastructure investment. We will moderate a discussion incorporating the perspectives of consumers, civil society, regulators and the various players right across the internet industry.  

Our participants include representatives of the ACCC, Communications Alliance, Legal Aid NSW, Infrastructure Australia, Arnotts as well as consumers and service providers from right across the spectrum. 

This event should be both insightful and incredibly useful if the rules for service change!   

Register now if you would like to attend our round table or any other events NetThing has to offer. 

Scams Awareness Week

This year’s Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) and Scams Awareness Network’s Scams Awareness Week will be held 8 – 12 November 2021 and our association is proud to be a campaign partner again this year.  

Throughout the week, we will provide several resources from the ACCC that you can use to protect yourself and others from falling victim to scams. We encourage all our ISP members to read through the content and share it with your customers. 

The theme for this year is let’s talk scams, to encourage all Australians to talk about scams with family, friends, and colleagues to raise awareness, educate, and empower consumers to protect themselves.  

ACCC’s Scamwatch reported that Australians lost $176.1 million to scams last year, up by 23.1 per cent from 2019. Statistics like these provide a good reminder that scams are ongoing, very active, and are becoming more sophisticated.   

If you would like any further information about current scams or would like to see scam statistics within Australia, please refer to the ACCC website.   

Equinix’s PE3 Hard Hat Tour

Our Perth team were fortunate enough to attend a Hard Hat Tour through Equinix’s PE3 site on Tuesday 19 October. Still under construction, Equinix’s Global Solutions Architect – Phil – took them through the building to see everything from the rooftop right down to the loading dock!  

The first phase of the site has an estimated cost of A$76.6 million and is targeted to open in Q4 2021. When completed, this new data centre will provide 1,650 cabinets and a colocation space of more than 10,600 square metres.  

Due to the proximity to Southeast Asia, two subsea cable links – Australia Singapore Cable (ASC) and the Indigo Cable – terminate directly inside the Equinix Perth campus. 

Thank you, team Equinix, for showing us through your new data centre, we look forward to seeing it all finished! 

Three New Letters – LTD!

One of the biggest developments over the past month was our official registration as a company limited by guarantee with ASIC. The change from the Associations Incorporation Act 2015 (WA) to the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth), was necessary as it reflects our national growth as an association.  

From the initial consultation with members to the Special General Meeting (SGM), this process required much effort from the Board, staff and members. The SGM held Wednesday 28 July 2021 saw the required majority of votes in favour of the transition.  

We remain proud of our Western Australia roots and hope to continue the good works of the Association in the form of both advocacy and services.  

QV1 Building Renovation

As the main lobby in the QV1 Building received some TLC on Saturday 16 October, power to the main distribution board that feeds our Point of Presence was scheduled to be turned off. Thanks to our fantastic member – Ciphertel – organising electricians and a generator to mitigate the extended outage, we stayed primarily online with a minor four-minute outage.  

We would like to thank Ciphertel for all their efforts to keep all of us with services in QV1 connected.  

 

WLG-IX Launches!

Unfortunately, last month, New Zealand Internet Exchange’s plan to launch the much-anticipated WLG-IX was pushed back due to lockdown restrictions preventing important work needed to get it up and running. Thankfully, as Wellington lifted to level three restrictions, work resumed, and the new IX is now completed and in production, with the official launch date set for November 1 2021. WLG-IX is starting with a 12-month FREE period. Happy peering! 

All those eager to hear about the launch should keep an eye out on NZIX’s social media accounts.

 

Google Joins VIC-IX

We are excited to announce that Google has joined VIC-IX! With Google being only one hop away across VIC-IX, your customers can now access a wide range of their favourite content through our network.  

It’s always good to have quality content providers joining. If you have any content providers that you would like to see on our IX’s, we would love to hear from you! 

 

Policy Updates

October’s Advocacy Corner Update

The Federal government is continuing to ramp up its program of legislation aiming to control the perceived and real threats from the online world. We’ve written about our participation in the defamation workshops, but just recently it has become clear that the government would like to see defamation regulated the same way as it wants to regulate more obviously dangerous material, ie through the eSafety Commissioner and alongside the Online Safety Act. 

There are some very real risks we see with this approach: it is not clear where the liability and responsibility for defamatory material will lie, nor even whether this can be efficiently or effectively implemented. It became increasingly clear throughout the workshops that while it was accepted that straight carriage service providers won’t be liable (as “mere conduits”) other services usually included in an internet access service such as DNS, email, and web hosting, where ISPs have no effective part in the publication of material, may well have liability. Rest assured, we are doing our darndest to reinforce the fact that making a domain name available via the DNS is not an act of defamation, but unfortunately there are no guarantees that legislators won’t do something really stupid. They seem to find it difficult to separate certain large social media platforms from “the Internet” and are increasingly keen to enforce takedowns further and further down the technology and infrastructure stack. 

An amended Critical Infrastructure Bill through the House of Representatives last week. Introduced as part of the PJCIS’ report on the Critical Infrastructure Bill, this legislation will see the introduction of a new mandatory notification scheme for cyber incidents. It will also provide Home Affairs with the power to issue information gathering, intervention and action direction requests. Part II of the Bill, which will focus on risk management plans and the declaration of Systems of National Significance (SoNS), is expected to face further consultation with industry. 

Communications Alliance released a new code C666:2021 Existing Customer Authentication, which provides an improved framework to authenticate the identity of customers making transactions involving their telecommunications service. So new rules there for people to apply when gaining or transferring customers. 

Submissions

Recent Submissions

In October, we made submissions to: 

 

Open Submissions

Reporting of Telstra delivery of voice services | Department of Communications 

The Department of Communications has proposed that Telstra should improve their reporting of their voice services delivery in regional areas and provide quarterly reports to ACMA and Department of Communications relating to service quality and delivery. 

Record Keeping Rules Consultations | ACCC 

The ACCC is consulting on changes to the Record Keeping Rules for Telecommunications Infrastructure Assets. The Record Keeping Rules requires specific carriers to report on their core network and customer access network infrastructure to help the ACCC analyse competition within the telecommunications market.  The ACCC is seeking to update their list of record-keepers and introduce new reporting requirements for end-user equipment and mobile infrastructure.  

The ACCC is also seeking to amend the NBN Record Keeping Rules, including introducing reporting for enterprise ethernet services and businesses satellite services. They will also gather additional data on CVC capacity and utilisation data and ask NBN Co to report on performance against service standard commitments set out in the Wholesale Broadband Agreement. The latter agreement is still open to review, despite some members reporting they felt pressured to sign version five already.