IAA Newsletters

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). 

This month’s meet the member segment features our wonderful Chair, Matthew Enger. Matt is the Managing Director of X Integration and Leaptel and joined IAA in 2016 as a relative newbie in the Internet industry. He joined after being told that this peering idea is a ‘good thing to do’ and looking for a way to reduce his transit bill that was costing him $20 per Meg! He has come to learn what peering is and just how important it is to us as a country.

Matt became interested in the Internet when it was a new thing. He was in secondary school at the time and moved his school from a dialup modem being shared by everyone to a Linux box running IP masquerade over a 64k ATM link and remembers thinking – WOW! From there, he got involved in things like ml.org offering free DNS and played with website hosting and built his own interactive website with Perl and later PHP. After living in Hong Kong, he returned to Australia and was accidentally invited to help a customer of a friend with their dialup ISP. Since then, he’s been hooked!

Throughout his career, Matt has achieved many things. After his first internet company didn’t make it as selling dialup for $16.95 per month in an all you can eat fashion wasn’t sustainable, he ended up moving into business IT, but with a side of ADSL. The business owner at the time wanted to move on and handed him the keys to the kingdom and its customers – X Integration was formed. From there, he built up a business customer base, and after a few disasters (Veridas dying overnight, ISPOne collapsing), he looked at his customer base and realised he could do this ADSL thing himself. They began selling ADSL and NBN via an aggregator and established Leaptel. Since then, they have moved into mainstream Internet, and he has been learning and growing his network skills to support a national network with five datacentres and lots of customers! They also recently connected to 121 NBN POIs and have a direct relationship with NBN. This means they have lots of CVC (1.5G x 121 POIs), so if anyone wants fast Internet with no congestion, please sign up!

All business aside, when Matt’s not working, he splits his time between family (two girls aged 10 and 6) and Scouting. He really enjoys Scouting and finds it exciting to see 3000 kids attend the recent Victorian Jamboree in January and have such a great time after two years of being locked down due to Covid. He says he is lucky in his role as the Victorian State Commissioner – Scouts to have a significant positive impact on the lives of kids throughout Australia.