From the CEO’s Desk

Well, wasn’t that a fun-filled month! The longest election campaign in recent history is over at last, and we have a new government. We can say goodbye to unwanted vile political text messages, nasty social media memes and pork barrelling, and we’ll move to a new regimen of well-articulated policy discourse by a polite and caring political class motivated by the nation’s best interest, not simply the retention of power. [Yes, I know it’s a dream, but I live in hope.] Seriously, we congratulate the new Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese and look forward to deepening our relationship with Michelle Rowland as the expected Communications Minister. We also wish Paul Fletcher and his team well and thank them for their service.

You may have noticed we issued an election wish list and rated the political parties’ policy platforms in the lead up to the election. One thing we asked for was that the new government restore trust in our political processes. While an integrity commission is a key component of a trustworthy system, our issue is with the government’s approach to engagement with industry: we’ve had too many tokenistic consultations and rushed legislation rather than constructive engagement towards effective, efficient regulation. We’ll keep on asking.

Last month I also managed to attend NZNOG in Wellington and caught up with our NZIX colleagues and many of the NZ based ISPs. If you get a chance, have a look over the many useful presentations, such as the OpenLI, security and 800G sessions. They also had a number of sessions given by government which had me feel I was in some parallel universe with genuine, constructive government-industry relations. Sweet as!

Looking forward, we’re doing some heavy analysis to properly scope out our program of upgrades and expansion. In the wake of our cracking the 900Gbps level, our member survey on sites, and looming equipment shortages, we will need to do some rearrangement, and it may well mean the closure of one or two POPs where there are no members present anymore. In this way, we can ensure we have the capacity you want in the places you want, as well as ensure efficient cache fill and plenty of head room for intra-IX traffic. So here’s the challenge: how about for the 25th anniversary of WA-IX next month we break the TERRABIT barrier? Come on, you know you can do it!