IAA Newsletters
Another fantastic AGM took place this month, it was a hybrid event so those near and far could join.
After an Acknowledgement of Country, we had updates from Chair Matthew Enger, Deputy Chair Brett O’Hara and CEO Narelle Clark. Matthew extended a thank you to the Board and staff for all their hard work; Brett presented a snapshot of the audited financials; and Narelle Clark delivered an insightful and interesting walk through of the past year.
The motion that Crunch Auditing be adopted as the IAA auditors for FY22-23 passed and Company Secretary Kitty Hibble, acting as the Returning Officer, announced the results of the 2022 election. Congratulations to Nathan Brookfield on your appointment to the IAA Board and Matthew Enger on your reappointment.
We would like to thank all the members who voted in the election and attended the meeting – in person and online via Zoom.
Here’s to another busy and effective year ahead!
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This month’s Meet the Member segment features one of our exceptional Board members, Matthew Moyle-Croft, colloquially known as ‘MMC’. Matthew currently works at APJ Imperva Inc, managing the company’s infrastructure strategy for APAC, Africa and the Middle East. He first joined IAA in 2018 when he was approached to run for the IAA Board. Keen to contribute to the local Internet industry after many years living abroad, he joined as a professional member and was elected.
Matthew’s journey in the industry started at the University of Adelaide, where he completed a Computer Science and Mathematics degree with honours. Towards the end of this degree he was asked to work for the university-owned Camtech, which had been formed to commercialise some of the things the department had been doing – including being a very early dialup ISP. He took the opportunity without a lot of thought other than ‘well, this looks kind of fun’.
Over his 28-year career Matthew has done a lot of cool stuff – everything from building high speed networks on planes to having a tiny involvement with NASA JPL (now Perseverance). First up, Matthew was engaged in a bunch of interesting things that Camtech did aside from being an ISP (which it sold to Ozemail in 1998). There he did everything from consulting, training, selling Sun Microsystems and Fore Systems ATM network gear to the departments of Education and Defence, and getting into the very early credit card transactions on the Internet.
Next, Matthew worked for a few years mainly doing Cisco Call Manager tasks for a network integrator that was eventually bought by IBM, before getting back into the Internet industry at Internode in 2005. There, Matthew built out their DSLAM network, helped bootstrap NodePhone, and was heavily involved in the international network and setting up peering across the globe. This led Matthew (just before Internode sold to iiNET) to move to AWS in Seattle where he spent six years running much of AWS’ global peering and acquisition of network capacity, as well as some of the new Cloud regional development. Following that, Matthew returned to Australia in 2018 and was employed by Oracle to perform similar work until he moved to Imperva in 2021.
Today, Matthew says he is lucky enough to live in Adelaide again and enjoy South Australia’s wine regions – he doesn’t mind a good drop! He has been married for almost 20 years and has two teenagers, one of whom is likely to follow his footsteps into a career in ‘IT’, just like Matthew followed his dad’s.
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This month we welcomed Lisa Nelson to the team. Prior to jumping on board as a Communications Officer for IAA, Lisa worked as a freelance writer and journalist for the Kalgoorlie Miner newspaper and other publications within the West Australian Newspapers group. Her experience extends to marketing communications and content creation for businesses and the not-for-profit sector. Lisa is also a certified Les Mills Body Balance instructor.
When she’s not working, Lisa loves running, hiking, bouldering, reading and listening to podcasts. Her 10-year plan involves climbing the Seven Summits – the highest mountain on each continent. After summiting Africa’s Kilimanjaro in 2018, she has 6 left to tackle!
We are thrilled to have you join us Lisa.
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The IAA team is growing – along with our network – so we needed more space! This month we relocated our office from 108 St Georges Terrace in the Perth CBD to 28 Ruse Street, Osborne Park. With more space and better access to parking, this is a far more economical office for the team, and we welcome member visits.
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If you want to join us at one of our fabulous End of Year Member Events, get your RSVP in before the event’s closing date. Complete your registration via the IAA Member Portal. We hope to see you there!
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We proudly sponsored NetThing 2022 this year, which took place online with a program full of fantastic sessions and keynote speakers. Our panel discussion: Defamation for Internet Service Providers and Other Internet Intermediaries, moderated by Sophia Joo, was 45 minutes of engaging discussion that sought to unpack the long-debated question of how to balance the responsibilities placed on different sections of the Internet industry to appropriately protect individual end-users, while also ensuring the smooth running of the Internet. Our panel included Daniel Joyce (UNSW), John Morris (Internet Society), Sunita Bose (DiGI) and Christiane Gillespie-Jones (Communications Alliance), each sharing their perspective on questions posed by Sophia, with some incredibly insightful responses leaving us with much food for thought!
If you missed out, head over to the NetThing YouTube channel – happy viewing!
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The findings from the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) Independent Review were released earlier this month. After consultation held in May this year, the review looked into the TIO’s compliance with the Australian Government’s benchmarks for industry-based customer dispute resolution.
The TIO has accepted the majority of the 26 recommendations made by the review. However, it did not accept Recommendation 4 which suggested the removal of the refer-back process within the complaints handling model. IAA supports the refer-back step remaining as part of the scheme. In the absence of sufficient efforts by the TIO to guide consumers on the requirement to not only raise their complaint with the telecommunications provider first, but also give the provider a reasonable time to respond prior to raising a complaint with the TIO, it is crucial that, at the least, the TIO is able to refer consumers back to providers where it is clear that the complaint can be handled more easily and quickly directly, without TIO assistance.
Although the review did consider the concerns raised by IAA and other industry representatives regarding this point that consumers were raising complaints with the TIO without first trying to resolve the complaint directly with the provider, it is disappointing that they seem to have missed the point. While the TIO Terms of Reference explicitly states providers must be given a ‘reasonable opportunity to consider the issues’, IAA raised in our submission that this is not always happening. Nowhere else on the TIO’s website or complaints form is there a reference to this illustrious ‘reasonable opportunity’. The review suggests that consumers making a complaint, formal or not, is sufficient, but where does the opportunity come into play for providers to consider and respond so the issue does not have to be referred to the TIO?
If there is a gap in how industry, consumers and the TIO interpret what is a ‘reasonable opportunity’, then this is something that should be addressed so that everyone understands and uses the same process.
We are hopeful that other recommendations made (and accepted) including the call for the TIO casework staff to collect more relevant information at the commencement of a case, increased systematic investigation and increased publication about the performance of the TIO will mean that the overall operation of the TIO will improve. Other concerns that IAA heard from our members during the consultation period to inform our submission centred on the lack of efficiency and a recurring issue where RSPs were being held accountable for network failures outside of the RSP’s control.
IAA recognises the importance of an industry ombudsman and believes it to be a critical role in our industry. However, with the review suggesting that the TIO should play a greater function in the industry, taking on a more regulatory role instead of being primarily responsible for dispute resolution, it seems there is a need for a broader discussion within industry regarding the future of the TIO.
You can read the review, TIO’s response and submissions on the TIO website.
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The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission has published guidance material regarding the carrier separation rules. The explanatory guide has been prepared following industry consultation – to which IAA responded – and is aimed to assist industry’s understanding of the superfast fixed-line broadband network carrier separation obligations.
Read the guidance material here.