IAA Newsletters
The newly formed IAA Public Policy Advisory Panel (PPAP) had its first meeting on 14 April 2022. After an initial round robin, the panel began road-mapping future goals and plans for IAA’s advocacy team, discussed IAA’s draft Public Policy Principles and 2022 Election Wish List, and outlined upcoming consultations IAA will be involved in. It was a great opportunity to meet the panel members, and the IAA advocacy team greatly benefited from the panel’s insights coming from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences.
The IAA Public Policy Principles are a set of guiding principles that reflect IAA’s values and will shape the work and responses of IAA’s advocacy team. The 2022 Election Wish List will be taken to political representatives in the lead up to the upcoming federal election to share our thoughts on the issues that permeate the sector. Both documents have been revised following the meeting and are awaiting the board’s approval.
The Advisory Panel will meet quarterly and discuss issues facing our members and the internet sector of Australia more broadly and will assist IAA’s advocacy work in the sector. We look forward to continuing to work with the Advisory Panel and once again express our gratitude for their time and effort.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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Sabrina Chang-Rozario joined our Admin Team earlier this month as our new Administrative Assistant. She will be assisting the Admin Team with various tasks including event organisation and has taken over our wonderful Tanzia’s role as the Executive Assistant to Narelle. Coming to us with over 15 years of international not-for-profit experience in stakeholder relations, program and event management, and relationship building, she is already an asset to our team.
In her spare time, Sabrina enjoys Pilates and yoga, dabbling in photography, reading the classics to her children and travelling – Covid dependent at the moment, unfortunately!
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On Wednesday 16th March, Narelle and Sophia represented our association at the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security hearing that comprised several panels of stakeholders affected by the proposed bill. This hearing allowed industry representatives to provide feedback and raise concerns about the proposed federal government’s critical infrastructure cybersecurity obligations. This includes laws that could require organisations to install third-party software to gather information from their systems in the name of national security and report them to the government when the government deems them technically incapable of providing such systems information.
During the hearing, Narelle did a fantastic job representing member interests. She explained that technical systems go through a number of upgrades and revisions and that capabilities change, meaning that any requirement to install software on behalf of Home Affairs needs careful and ongoing security and interoperability testing. She further raised the concern that the legislation is unclear, very complex and very difficult to work through and raised a number of specific concerns about the data this software could capture. She expressed that we need to trust in the type of software that goes onto our systems and that we must be able to read the code, assess the code, test the code, and check interoperability and security before it is installed and at any time it is installed.
The hearing was an excellent opportunity to hear the different perspectives of various stakeholders. We hope the Parliamentary Joint Committee was able to gain enough industry insight for its review so that the inquiry can assist in constructing a Bill that is measured, effective and will improve our national security. If you would like to know more about the contents of the hearing, the transcript is available for download. So far, it seems the PJCIS has taken some of our views on board, so we live in hope the legislation will improve.
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In the spirit of celebration of WA-IX’s 25 years, one of our staff caught up with founding member Rod Bland. Now a Digital Marketing Consultant helping people grow their online businesses, he recalls joining WAIA as a founding member during the initial meeting at DIALix and some of the conversations about the construction of our very first IX.
Starting as a customer services representative for Panther Computers, Rod’s founding membership was based on his casual interest in the Internet. He continued his membership for the next three years while working for PSINet and gradually moved on into different roles. Over 26 years, he went from systems administration to owning his own business – RamCity – to now running a vibrant consultancy business.
Rod recalled conversations with numerous individuals, including Mark Hickey and Adrian Chadd, a young, highly intelligent young man who, at the age of 15, helped set up the BGP routing protocols on the IX. According to Rod, you could count the number of ISPs in Perth on one hand at that time, and they were being charged the earth for their previous services!
Although he was not directly involved in the set-up of WA-IX, he contributed to the administrative duties of WAIA, and thanks to the contributions of founding members like him, we now operate the longest running, most efficient and reliable network of Internet Exchanges in Australia.