Catching up With Long-time Member, Aubrey Adams
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).
