IAA Newsletters
IAA would like to congratulate our Board Chair, Matthew Enger, who was recognised at the 2024 ACOMM Awards, winning the Communications Ambassador Award. This coveted award recognises outstanding individuals who show strong leadership and make a significant and visible contribution to the Australian communications industry.
The annual Australian Communications Industry Awards – the ACOMMS – recognise excellence in the wider communications industry. Hosted by Communications Alliance, the role of Communications Ambassador is considered the industry’s most prestigious accolade.
As Chair of our Board and Member of the NZIX Committee, we see how hard Matt works for our community and are thrilled that he has been recognised through this award.
The IAA Team attended the Awards Dinner in Sydney where the evening’s keynote address was delivered by the Federal Minister for Communications, The Hon. Michelle Rowland MP. It was a memorable evening, and we could not be more proud of Matt! Well done to all the winners!
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In May, our CEO, Narelle Clark, gave a presentation at the Data Centre Real Estate Summit in Sydney. Whilst data centres were once considered an alternative asset class, they are becoming more sought after by investors.
The Data Centre Real Estate Summit focused on real estate and investment strategies, bringing together all the key global and local players to discuss the national data centre market, new developments and acquisitions, supply and demand dynamics, construction, development, and design trends.
Narelle gave an informative and, by all accounts, entertaining talk on the evolution of data centre design and advancements in technology and solutions. Her insights underscored the critical role data centres play in today’s digital economy. She closed by putting the audience’s skills to the test, to see how good they were at identifying a data centre when they saw one.
Head to this IAA YouTube clip of the talk to test your skills.
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100G-LR optics offer for NSW-IX Members
We’re pleased to introduce single-lambda 100G-LR interfaces in select NSW-IX points of presence. This upgrade offers our Members a cost-optimised solution for 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) connectivity.
Here’s what you can expect:
Simplified Design, Lower Cost: 100G-LR uses a single-wavelength architecture, eliminating the need for complex and expensive optical designs found in older 100GbE technologies. This translates to a substantially lower total cost for transceivers.
Seamless Integration: Fully compatible with a wide range of routers and switches equipped with QSFP28 electrical interfaces, 100G-LR allows for easier network upgrades without significant hardware changes.
Future-Proofing for your Network: As demand for 100GbE grows, 100G-LR provides a scalable and efficient solution to meet your evolving bandwidth needs.
If you’re interested and connected to the NSW-IX contact support@internet.asn.au.
Compute stack renewal
After thoroughly evaluating virtualisation solutions, our tech team has successfully migrated our virtual machine (VM) infrastructure to a Proxmox virtual environment. Transitioning to the advanced open-source virtualisation platform demonstrates IAA’s commitment to reliable, efficient, and scalable services for our Members. Of course the price comparison between VMWare and an open source solution was pretty favourable too!
Here are the key benefits of Proxmox for Members:
- High availability and minimal downtime.
- Greater efficiency, as it’s easier for our engineering teams to provision, monitor and maintain VMs.
- Scalability of our virtual infrastructure to meet Members’ growing demands.
- Customisation to meet specific needs with access to the latest features and security enhancements for future-proofing.
Our tech team will continue to innovate and enhance our services to provide you with the best experience possible. Of course, Nick also enjoyed taking the system apart and rebuilding it afresh!
Equinix SY3 - extreme makeover edition
Confession time! IAA had a dirty little secret: Equinix SY3. A tangled mess of cross connects well over 10 years old. As you can see in the before photo from 2020 there was an ugly number of low-density SC panels, as well as an old Cisco 2901 used for OOB purposes. The pièce de résistance was the stacked Extreme x670s, prone to crashing spectacularly (see the notorious Incident Report of 25 February 2021), which subsequently led to the stack’s removal (as detailed in this Scheduled Maintenance Report).
Then, this year, our intrepid tech engineers (namely Aaron) embarked on an ambitious mission to clean up the rack. They boldly removed the final x670, deftly mass-migrated peers off that box, and permanently deleted the SC panels! The rack has now been tamed!
As the connoisseurs amongst us will attest, there is still a bit of work to do to achieve perfect cabling order, such as better cable bars, proper cable lengths, replacing the 100G CR4s with LR1s or CWDM4s, and moving the higher-density LC panels further up. Regardless, we’re proud to declare that the rack is ready to welcome a shiny new Arista to our 800Gbps core.
Mission accomplished!
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We are excited to announce the latest updates to the Member Portal:
Streamlined Payment Flow: The payment process has been completely overhauled to make adding payment methods and paying invoices more accessible and convenient.
Pre-order Ports: The membership application form has been updated to allow Members to pre-order ports when onboarding as a member.
Improved Functionality: We continue to enhance the Portal’s functionality with the main achievement being we’ve added Arista configuration support to our existing network automation system. This enables network automation on the new Arista switches and 400Gbps ports.
We remain committed to providing our Members with the best possible experience and welcome your feedback on these new features.
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Formed in 2022, the IAA Public Policy Advisory Panel is an advisory body of IAA Members that help inform IAA’s public policy and advocacy work related to the telecommunications sector.
Involvement in policy and legislative reform in the Internet and broader telecommunications landscape is a critical part of IAA’s work. Indeed, the Western Australia Internet Association, IAA’s precursor, started as an advocacy body. That’s why we hold the Panel to be so important to our advocacy work.
The Panel meets quarterly to discuss live and upcoming policy issues affecting the Internet industry. The feedback provided by our Members via the Panel greatly informs our responses to the various consultations held by Government and regulatory bodies on matters that affect our industry, and therefore you, our Members!
We have found the Panel immensely helpful for our advocacy work since its formation and believe it has had a genuine impact in shaping telecommunications/Internet policy. For example, we couldn’t have participated as meaningfully during the NBN Co SAU reform process without the input of our Panel, the outcome of which we believe resulted in an SAU that is fairer for smaller RSPs, especially on matters related to NNI.
IAA is also regularly invited by government and regulators to be the voice for smaller communications providers in the industry. More recently, we have been championing our Members in discussions surrounding the security and resilience of telecommunications as part of Australia’s critical infrastructure ecosystem. The Panel has again been of great help, serving as a sounding board for proposed reforms.
Most recently during our last quarterly meeting in June, Panel Members engaged in spirited discussion over the TIO’s complaints handling processes and TCP Code reforms, and more broadly, our concerns about growing calls for direct regulation from regulators, consumer groups and government.
As the telco sector faces increasing regulatory pressures, it’s more important than ever to make sure that the voices of smaller ISPs are heard and able to influence policy makers. We greatly appreciate the Panel and encourage IAA Members to get involved to contribute to IAA’s advocacy efforts.
If you would like to know more about the Panel, please reach out at policy@internet.asn.au.
