Chair’s Update

I am excited to report the continual growth of our newer exchanges – WLG-IX and CHC-IX – both hitting new record speeds in February. It’s great to see these regional exchanges continue to grow, and as they do so, they will have the potential to attract more local cloud infrastructure. NZIX continues to work with all types of members to encourage regional infrastructure improvements to the Internet, from sharing existing ISP caches with the IX to new cloud deployments into the regions.

In January, I announced that the committee is looking at the future strategy for the Auckland exchange fabric to allow for growth into the future, especially around 100G peering popularity. It’s important to note that we are still in the early stages, and no decisions are final yet. Still, I can share that the committee is narrowing down on plans that give us a clear path to scale up fully diverse 800G capacity between Mayoral Drive, The DataCentre (220 Queen St), Datacom Orbit and Vocus DC Albany. This plan allows us to expand as required by adding additional waves of light to a fixed, diverse fibre footprint as we grow. Hopefully, we will be able to present a concrete plan of the network design at our AGM, which is not too far away now.

Every now and again, it’s worth reminding the membership that not all members establish peering sessions with the NZIX route servers, or if they do, only announce a subset of routes via the route servers. This reminder is timely as NZIX has gained two significant new members, Packet Clearing House bringing new root DNS (in addition to Cloudflare which also brings root DNS to the IX), and Facebook/Meta. Check out their articles for more information – especially on how to peer with Facebook.