Join us for the NZIX social, in Christchurch for a fun evening of nibbles, drinks and socialising.

Committee Members Dave Mill, Chris Browning and Simon Allard will be there. We can’t wait to catch up with you and share all our latest news!

When: Thursday, 15 Feb 2024, from 5.30pm 
Where: Cassels Brewing Co, 3 Garlands Road, Woolston, Christchurch
RSVP: via the Members Portal now or drop us an email to events@ix.nz

We hope to see you there!

This year’s Embargo Period is from close of business, Friday, 22 December 2023 through to Sunday, 7 January 2024 (inclusive).

Please be advised that we won’t be provisioning new services or changing existing ones during this period, and all orders and change requests must be received by Friday, 8 December 2023, 5:00pm NZDT.

Rest assured, support staff will be on call to deal with urgent issues or network emergencies should they arise.

If you would like any further information or have any queries regarding the network embargo period, please get in touch at admin@ix.nz

We wish you a well-deserved break!

On Thursday 27 July the Committee of the New Zealand Internet Exchange Inc (NZIX) held its 2023 Annual General Meeting.

This was our third year of holding a hybrid AGM and we welcomed our members and industry guests, both in person at the Longroom in Auckland, and online via Zoom.  We thank all guests who attended, but particularly those who braved the wind and rain to join us in person!

Society Chair, Dave Mil of Searchlight, commenced the formalities of the AGM by welcoming everyone and giving his Chair’s Report. He provided an update on the Auckland IX Expansion project, MDR floor move, launching of our new Datacom PoP and our new IX in Wellington.

Treasurer Chris Browning was pleased to announce that at the end of the 2022/23 financial year NZIX had $417k cash on hand, $219k profit before depreciation, $93k net profit and $552k equity. Also notable is that we carry no loans or other debt.

Jocelyn Bateman stood in for Tom Paseka (who was unable to join us in-person from California this year) and ran through NZIX membership growth, policies changes and confirmed there will be 3 Committee seats up for nomination next year. The new Societies Act 2022 will prompt some changes to our Society Rules and we expect those changes to be ready to vote on at next year’s AGM.

Aaron Chidiac from IAA delivered the technical report breaking down each IX and reporting on peers, traffic, routes and ports. Auckland IX had big changes over the year, with the Auckland Expansion project completing. Whilst the other two exchanges remained relatively unchanged, but ticking along nicely.

With no elections or voting this year the meeting concluded with a member discussion and everyone at the Longroom enjoyed a few drinks and nibbles as well.

We sent out a post-event survey that returned some overwhelmingly positive feedback and a couple of notes of improvements. Thank you to those who completed the survey; your feedback is valuable and always welcome. For those who were unable to attend, if you would like to see the AGM slides, they are available by request.

If you would like any additional information, or have any feedback, please do not hesitate to reach out to the team via info@ix.nz.

It was well over a year ago when we let all our members know about our plans to expand and upgrade the AKL-IX. And if we’re being honest, the planning and quoting and planning and quoting started awhile before that.

We are so happy to confirm that all the planned work has been completed and you can now find the IX has:

  • A new POP at Datacom Orbit Drive
  • A diverse west path (avoiding the bridge)
  • 400G redundant and diverse ring!

And looks like this . . .

A diagram of a computer network

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This project took many man hours from both the NZIX Committee and the IAA technical team and after some unexpected delays, we are delighted to close off this project and move onto the next one.

Thank you to everyone involved in making this happen and we hope our members enjoy their new AKL-IX redundant and diverse ring!

We’re delighted to announce our newest Member to the NZIX — Telstra Global (AS4637) — taking up their first 10G port in AKL-IX! This is great news for our smaller networks and kudos to Telstra for taking the initiative on joining our peering fabric and establishing a session with the route servers!

As it stands, Telstra have only dipped their toes this side of the pond by announcing their international only prefixes as domestic Australian prefixes (AS1221) are yet to be seen, but we’re optimistic they will in time and this should permit a better alternative for networks connecting to Telstra AU domestic rather than routing via Singapore, here’s hoping that this is a taste of bigger things to come!

The NZIX Committee were able to reconvene last month on the Gold Coast to hold their second annual Strategy Day.

We’ve become quite an international team over recent years, and more so with Jocelyn joining the Committee at our last election. AusNOG was a great opportunity to have everyone in the same room for a whole day.  We talked strategy, governance and technical matter and it was a really productive day.

The Committee discussed and approved implementing a more formal process for Asset Management. They finalised the society’s risk register and worked through some succession planning. IAA’s CEO Narelle Clark and Peering Engineer, Aaron Chidiac were in attendance to talk through a 3–5-year technical refresh plan and the Committee approved the move to an upgraded member portal.

Chris and Dave gave a Pacific IXP update, and all Committee members reconfirmed a desire to help wherever possible. Watch this space!

We closed the day with a discussion on how else NZIX could make improvements to the Internet in New Zealand. Given that the society is unlikely to grow much larger, the question turned to how else can we help: Governance? Education? Sponsoring? If you have any ideas, we would love to hear them, please drop us an email at info@ix.nz.

The Strategy Day was a huge success and reflected the NZIX Committee’s ongoing commitment to running a profitable, reliable and sustainable society for all its members.

Save the dates: 11 & 12 April 2024 we are pleased to offer our ongoing support of NZNOG by once again becoming a GOLD Sponsor. In anticipation of next year’s event being hosted in the stunning South Island town of Nelson, we’ve compiled an inspirational Top10 things to do!

Check out those big smiles! Maybe it’s because they were in SUVA. Last year in October, Chris and Dave attended a UN meeting at the United Nations’ office as part of a task force that is heading up a new IXP in the Pacific.

The Pacific IXP project is a new initiative that will form a multi-country IXP in the South Pacific region – built to Fiji, Samoa and New Zealand. In future, nine other countries can connect and will have better access to content within the region.

So far a task force has been formed, comprising UN ESCAP, Paul Brooks, Elly from APNIC, NZIX (Chris and Dave), representatives from the Samoan Government and SAM-IX and representatives from the Fijian Government and Telecommunications authority. They are hoping to create an organisation that owns the hardware and operates independently, but is run by a committee. Initial surveys with the countries that we’re targeting are on-going. So far, the responses are positive and it shows that there is interest from local ISPs in those countries to connect to the Pacific IXP.

NZIX is assisting in this project in a number of ways. Our Committee can offer valuable expertise in running IXPs and assistance in managing existing relationships with many content and cloud providers. There is also potential to provide pseudo-wires or similar to build the network.

For more information, you can watch an update that Chris provided at NZNOG here, and also Dave’s lightning talk from APRICOT, which you can watch here.

Stay connected with us on social media and keep an eye out for our future newsletters for updates on this great project.

The 2023 Annual General Meeting will be upon us very soon and we would like to invite all members to save the date. We will once again run it as a hybrid event in the evening, with hopes that members near and far can attend.

Date: Thursday, 27 July 2023
Time: 5.30pm, with formalities starting at 6.00pm NZST
Location: The Longroom, 114 Ponsonby Rd, Grey Lynn, Auckland (or via Zoom)

For the lucky members who will join us in person, canapes and drinks will be supplied, so be sure to turn up and have a good old fashioned face-to-face catch up with other members and the Committee.

RSVP to attend in person through the NZIX Members Portal or by emailing info@ix.nz.

RSVP to attend via Zoom, register here.

If you require any additional information, please do not hesitate to contact the NZIX team at info@ix.nz or phone +64 9888 9221.

Late last year we gave members the opportunity to pre-order ports at our new PoP in Auckland – Datacom Orbit Drive, followed by a happy announcement that services were up and running in late January. Datacom joins the network as part of a planned series of upgrades to our Auckland ring (project AKL_EX22) as traffic continues to grow and the demand for capacity grows along with it! Contractors delivered 1 x 96F MTP structured cabling to both telco rooms 1 and 2 with new dark fibre paths entering the data centre form separate entries and telco rooms, increasing diversity. With a current average daily peak of 370Gbps, AKL-IX is our largest IX and is set to get even bigger.

The new MDR <> Datacentre220 path was installed December 2022 and has been pushing traffic since. Our path between these sites is a diverse 2x100G path for a total of 400G of point-to-point capacity!

The goal of the AKL_EX22 project is to deliver a 400G redundant and diverse ring network with a path forward to the 400G Switch + 800G/1.2T ring into the future. Our DWDM 400G Muxponder has arrived, but unfortunately we’ve been hit with massive delays on the east and west dark fibre paths, that are being supplied by Vodafone. We had hoped they would arrive in December!

The East path has been partially delivered to us at the end of March 2023 and work is underway to get cross connects done, testing the line with ODTR then installing our DWDM hardware to bring the link up. The west path delivery is expected to take longer with works required in the middle of the highway and on top of this we are being asked by our DC provider, Spark, to relocate racks at MDR! An IAA engineer may be shipped over to NZ to get these big changes done.