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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. 

If you’ve been looking for resources designed by industry experts to help you upskill or maintain skill currency, then you should check out APNIC’s Academy! With so many resources to choose from including virtual labs, workshops, live webinars, online courses and more, this educational platform is designed to help individuals in our industry acquire new skills and knowledge. These resources cover a huge range of topics, and we encourage you to explore the Academy to see if any are of interest to you. If there is something that you would like to learn more about, but can’t find it there, please get in touch with us at admin@internet.asn.au, and we will do our best to assist.  

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. 

Thank you to all Corporate and Affiliate members who have completed our member survey. As a member-run association, your input is vital to ensuring that we provide the network you want and need. As we have seen a good amount of growth across the exchanges, we are wanting to expand our network into Hobart, Darwin and other data centres. We’re also keen to get your input on the content you would like to see on the network, so if you haven’t completed the survey yet, please get to it! The survey closes on Friday 4th March 2022, 5:00pm AEDT.  

One of our staff members caught up with founding member, James Bromberger, to learn more about the history of WA-IX. Here’s what James had to say: 

What was the fundamental reason for building WA-IX?
WAIA, the former name for IAA, was founded in 1995 principally to represent the civil liberties of Internet users and organisations that wished to have private communications. With network engineers and stakeholders from the fledgling ISP and Telco sector involved, it became clear there was a need for a non-profit, carrier-neutral peering exchange. Up until this point, the incumbent telco in Australia had been charging volume based carriage fees for inbound and outbound traffic; this was making connectivity expensive for those who received traffic – which possibly was not solicited or requested by them. For example, if someone sent you a large email, you’d be paying to receive it, and the sender may not have optimised the email down to cost less (think of attached images not being scaled to a smaller resolution/file size). 

Did you think that WA-IX would be as large as it is today? Why did you think that?
I recall the first organisations being the ISPs, as they were shouldering much of the comms bills from the growing ISP subscriber base, but it was when some of the commercial organisations, particularly in the mining sector, started to connect to the exchange we saw there was a real solid future for wider customer use. CoLo providers extended the peering fabric to multiple facilities, and then more and more end organisations started to swell the throughput. Given a fixed, predictable monthly cost, the service expanded rapidly. 

What was the uptake of the exchange like in the first ten years?
Within a few years, nearly all of the smaller ISPs had connected locally in Perth. It seemed to be a right of passage to connect in and then subsequently be consumed by iiNet! 

What would you say was WA-IX’s most significant contribution to the Internet in Australia today?
Ensuring that B-party charging was not extended to the Internet bill of consumers was a key element of opening up the Internet to consumers; in a country of the size of Australia, making communications more affordable with less personal cost risk to consumers meant the adoption surged in the community. This drove scale, and further reduced cost, to the point where consumers were being offered unlimited volume download (and upload) plans. Prior to this, traffic quotas were commonplace, and consumers would make decisions if it was worth sending or downloading content. With large content providers and CDNs putting cache nodes within the peering network meant that consumers would start to use large amounts of local traffic without making a conscious decision to do so, further driving the ISP-incurred bandwidth costs down. 

With the expansion to multiple peering fabrics across Australia, we saw the fundamental economics of the digital online ecosystem become more commodity, accessible, and thus spurring the digital skills; most people now have email, browse websites, do online banking, and order groceries. If the adoption of online services had continued to be throttled by a single organisation, then society would still be using fax machines, and the ability to comfortably isolate during the pandemic would have been much harder. 

There’s still progress to be done in the telecommunications space in Western Australia. For customers in the north of Western Australia, there is very little (i.e. no) peering locally between telcos; that traffic often comes down to Perth, jumps across providers, and then transits back to the North of Western Australia, a round trip time that is at times a performance impact on applications. Having a small community peering in Port Hedland, Carnarvon, Geraldton, Broome and asking the ISPs servicing these areas (typically via NBN these days) to exchange traffic locally could have a cost-saving and performance improvement, but thus far, we don’t see this happening. 

[CEO comment – if you agree with James’ view on the utility of regional peering, don’t forget to complete our survey!] 

On Wednesday 9th February, Google (AS15169) went live on VIC-IX with a 10G port! Now, you and your customers can access a wider range of Google content via our network.  

We’re keen to add more content providers as it is an important part of building a more efficient, open and reliable Internet. If you have any content providers that you would like to see on our network, let us know at peering@ix.asn.au 

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