IAA Newsletters

Well, hasn’t this year started with a bang! Who expected industry regulation (in the form of the News Media Code) to be everyone’s family catch up topic this month? Not since Wikipedia went dark have we seen such a stand from a major tech player on a regulatory issue.

We have had some success in our advocacy, too. Members are now being invited to participate in the ACCC broadband measurement program, and we’ve heard good news from members who participated in our round table with NBN Co on their onboarding challenges. Our next regulatory challenge will be Home Affairs’ “codesign process” for critical infrastructure regulation, so please send me your thoughts on that one.

We’ve also seen some great uptake of 100Gbps ports in the wake of us dropping the setup fees. In addition, members should also consider installing redundant links across exchanges to ensure service continuity, particularly into Cloud services. On that note, we’re happy to announce Amazon have expanded to ensure redundancy and capacity, and members wishing to peer and use Amazon services should get in touch with them pronto! If you’re on WA-IX or VIC-IX in particular, new capacity is available.

It was great to see our Tech Team Leader, Nick Pratley, clean out all the older gear and clutter in Perth’s QV1, too. A big thank you to our members who assisted with relieving us of the old gear and keeping him well caffeinated! Get in touch also if you like the masks he was modelling.

Our New Zealand presence is also growing with services now active across Chorus to present peering right around the country. More site planning is going on over there, too, so stay tuned!

On the topic of expansion, we are still office hunting though optimistic we’ll get somewhere before our new Policy Officer (Intern) starts. All the regulation changes mean we need the extra support, and we will be able to assist members more with their (our!) regulatory burden.

Don’t forget to tune into Apricot next week – see Apricot.net for the program.

Let me wish a hearty welcome to 2021 to all our members and stakeholders. Already we have been planning some more upgrades, old equipment removals, online events and hopefully in person ones later this year. We’d also like to hear from any members thinking of downsizing your office space in the North Ryde (NSW) area, as some space for the team on the east coast would nicely supplement our west coast space.

This was certainly the year for optimism, yet already we have seen some interesting developments: borders up and down within Australia and across the ditch, insurrection in the US capital, and the Australian government move on a proposed news web publishing code. While border closures simply mean here at IAA we have planned and cancelled travel three times already, events in the US capital have other ramifications across our industry.

The insurrection led to a spate of ‘de-platforming’ incidents which in turn reflects the increase in infrastructure shutdowns, given that it wasn’t just the social media services that acted, but the upstream suppliers of authentication and compute platforms. Does this mean that in the future, Australian members may choose to switch off compute or other infrastructure for serious offenders? Or face their own service disconnections as a result of user actions? Aside from your general right to do business with whomever you choose (subject to anti-discrimination legislation), in Australia s313 of the Telecommunications Act requires us to do our “best” to prevent our networks and facilities from being used in the commission of offences, so it would appear that similar de-platforming would be within the law here.

The industry has, for some time, had clauses in contracts limiting liability where required to cease service at the request of law enforcement, but these cases of ‘de-platforming’ show just how far up the supply chain this can go. We encourage all members to review their terms and conditions and seek legal advice for your specific situation, for both upstream and downstream services. Ultimately, should you decide (or be required) to terminate customer services – you don’t want to be liable for damages.

On that note, I can only wonder where the proposal for Google and Facebook to pay when showing links to Australian news media articles will lead. Will we end up with all new Australian search engines? Will the big providers pay us for links to our own content? I doubt any of us will knock back that bit of extra revenue, but I can’t help but think this sounds a bit like the disintegration of the Internet as an open platform for innovation.

As ever, I am always keen to hear member thoughts on issues affecting the industry!

Narelle Clark

IAA CEO

This month we increased capacity in our major capital cities and announced a fantastic partnership for our friends at NZIX.

Read the full newsletter here.

This month we welcomed our new board members and asked members for their thoughts on NBN pricing changes.

Read the full newsletter here.

Well, here we are in the last gasps of 2020, and a year we’re glad to see the back of, that’s for sure! Over here at IAA, we’re getting those last few upgrades into place before the team head off for a bit of a break. It’s great to see those intercapital links coming on stream at last, with new capacity lighting up between Sydney and Melbourne as well as Melbourne and Adelaide. You’ll also be glad to hear that we’ve increased the capacity between our content networks so that your customers can all enjoy their streaming services full pelt over the holiday season. We’ve already seen an uptick of some 20Gbps throughput out of the most popular services!

Speaking of content, we have also just got the new Sourceforge mirror up, and soon we expect to see FreeBSD mirrored, as well as a new DNS root source on our network. Melbourne peers should also be enjoying the extra capacity into our Google cache by now, too.

We have had our last Life Under Lockdown event, and we are in the process of organising a member round table with the Minister for Communications’ office on the topic of NBN onboarding for RSPs. If you missed out on an invitation, do get in touch so that we can add you to our list.

Well, that’s it from me for the year. May you all have a much less stressful, far more profitable 2021.

Happy peering!

Narelle Clark

After a lengthy build up, it’s a relief to say we held our AGM for FY19-20 on 27 October, and with our first ever published Annual Report. I would like to thank all members who attended and hope you enjoyed the format. I would personally like to thank the staff and Board members who put so much into the event, and in all the effort over the year. Especially my thanks go to Nathan Brookfield who is stepping down from the Board after five years’ service.

The rest of the month has contained our usual member catch ups, and meetings with politicians, including the Minister for Communications. We’re expecting to meet with NBN Co soon, so please send your feedback in. We’ve also got more on the way in the form of extra network, caches and content. Also, don’t forget our end of year embargo, so get your orders in now.

Happy reading,

Narelle Clark

This month we announced our guest speaker for the AGM, looked at how good our internet is and welcomed the new 100G Facebook cache.

Read the full newsletter here.

We have had an exciting and challenging month this month with numerous projects and events. Our RPKI activation went completely smoothly, so now we can all be smug that our routing is as clean as can be. We also welcomed Sean Riordan from the ACCC with SamKnows for a lively session on broadband performance measurement at our latest Life Under Lockdown online event, and I presented at APNIC 50 giving a recap of the Australian ISP industry’s survival tactics during the pandemic. I’ve continued to meet with members on an individual basis, and also added some politicians and other stakeholders this month.

Our strong stance on the resumption of CVC charging has paid off, with NBN Co announcing it would extend the discount. We will continue with this advocacy, and I have raised it directly with the Minister for Communications. I also raised other issues including the challenges our members see in NBN onboarding – if you have experienced difficulty with the onboarding process, please get in touch as we will be following up on this issue further with both the Minister and NBN Co.

Unfortunately, we did have to postpone the AGM to make sure that we are squeaky clean in our approach to enabling voting. Your voice is genuinely important, so we thought it best to withdraw the special resolutions. The delay also means we will be able to have a guest speaker, and I am proud to announce that Jari Arkko, former head of the IETF, and current member of the IAB and Ericsson Research, will be talking about the evolution of the internet and hopefully will include some fun observations about his adventures with IoT.

Nick and the team have also completed some more upgrades, so you should be enjoying faster, more reliable route services. Well done team!