Work is now underway to begin the Auckland Expansion project – codename AKL_EX22 – as it has now been officially approved by the NZIX Committee! The new point of presence, Datacom Orbit Drive, is at the sign-up and rack allocation stage, and contractors are being lined up to deliver 1x 96F MTP structured cabling to both telco rooms 1 and 2. New dark fibre paths will enter the data centre from separate entries and telco rooms to increase diversity.

The new MDR <> Datacentre220 path has been submitted to Chorus with an estimated eight-week lead time. While we patiently wait, our optical circulators (basically an external BiDi) are on order and will be ready for installation once the fibre is tested and ready for production. This will give us true physical diversity on this existing point-to-point path and will allow us to expand its capacity to 2x200G giving us 400G of available bandwidth between the sites – WOOHOO!

As most of you are aware, hardware delivery timeframes are currently unreliable with the chippaggeadon, so we’re waiting to confirm the actual dates of our 400G Muxponder+Transponder big $$ order to be delivered before locking in delivery dates for other fibre orders via Vodafone.

We hope to deliver on the project’s promises before the end of the year – a 400G redundant and diverse ring network incorporating a new point of presence, Datacom Orbit Drive, with a path forward to the 400G Switch + 800G/1.2T ring future. We will keep you all up-to-date on the progression of this project through our social media channels.

At last year’s AGM, Chris set a challenge for everyone to come up with ideas for investing the Society’s funds into some new initiatives. Some offered ideas straight away, with one particular idea really standing out – an educational ISP. In a nutshell, this project will create an environment where you can be shown a national New Zealand network working, be a customer of this network, go in there, change it, figure out how it works, break it, fix it and most importantly, LEARN! The educational ISP will also allow engineers to test out new technologies and features such as EVPN, segment routing, QoS and more. In the interest of the day to day running of it, we’ve thought about supplying the environment to educational institutions as a learning tool and providing guidance to them through a curriculum.

This idea is based on current issues with NZ network engineers: the lack of skill, an appropriate way of learning these important skills, learning the old ways of doing things to ensure engineers aren’t solely relying on automated systems and gender diversity. With the wide usage of the Internet, residential ISPs are no longer a feasible learning ground. In the good old days, breaking Paradise Net, Max Net, or Rural Link was the way engineers learned, and in this day in age, breaking a network and wiping people offline is a big no-no! There is also the issue of current engineers holding on to their jobs, preventing new blood from coming in, but one thing at a time – let’s start with educating the next generation!

As NZIX is in quite a neutral position between large and small industry players, we felt it was a good opportunity to build something that could neutrally benefit everyone. To achieve this vision, we’ve done a bit of homework and thought that we could use existing relationships to get cheap/free transit and IX services (we have already received some offers) and enable learners to get a Chorus connection into an NZIX lab at cost, although we are aware that we do not want to undercut our current members in a commercial sense. We’ve tossed around the idea of members needing to sponsor the person in order to access the ISP, but there are a few more ideas that we can explore in this space. We’ve started to chat with various vendors to provide switches/routers/BNGs and provide AAA containers, providing bandwidth (we’ve had some success for this one already), support, and licenses for hardware at no to low costs.

We are happy to report that we received a good amount of positive feedback at the NOG, with more offers of support from various organisations. We look forward to sharing more information with you all at the AGM.

Over the past three months, plans to build the new western path through Auckland have continued to be discussed with IAA’s Peering Engineer, Aaron, providing a detailed overview of the draft 1-2 year plan at NZNOG in May. The plan’s end goal is to have a 400G redundant and diverse ring with massively reduced single points of failure. Potential new sites include Datacom – 6 Orbit Drive, Rosedale, Auckland and CDC Hobsonville.

The 220Q site is seeing steady growth with four recent 100G orders (2x Zscaler and 2x Starlink). Our priority for this site is to insert a new 100G switch, totalling two, to terminate either end of the ring on each switch – giving us greater resiliency and members requesting multiple 100G can terminate on both switches. 

The MDR site is maintaining solid growth and port capacity is limited! In the near future, we will deploy a new 100G switch at the site as we have already installed an additional 96F structured cabling to the MOFDF.

The VDC Albany site is experiencing slower growth, and as per Vocus’ request, we are planning to migrate racks within our datahall and exit the shared rack to ensure all customers are via our structure cabling MTP system. As with 220Q, this site is also set to get another 100G switch for the AKL Expansion to ensure ring paths land on different hardware and are able to provide multi-100G to members across different switches.

The Datavault site is experiencing slower growth; however, we have recently deployed a Packet Clearing House (AS42 and AS3856) DNS server – provided by them – to help serve critical DNS infrastructure!

Check out the increase in traffic over the past two years, looking at three different graphs from the month of May.