Big Plans for the City of Sails

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.

May 2020
May 2021
May 2022

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More Peers, More Traffic!

We’re happy to report that Wellington has been off to a great start and continues to see more peers connecting every month. We are expecting more content providers to come onboard in the next few months, and we expect to see the traffic notably increase again! We’re always keen to see more content providers onboard as they are vital to good connectivity, so if you would like to see any particular CDNs on our network, let us know at admin@ix.nz

A quick reminder that it’s free to peer on WLG-IX until Tuesday, 1 November 2022 – get in quick to make the most of the free connectivity!    

December 2021
May 2022

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AGM 2022

With the closing of another financial year, we are reminded that our Annual General Meeting is drawing closer. We are yet to announce the date officially; however, we are looking at hosting a hybrid event again this year at a venue in Auckland and are planning for it to take place around mid to late July.


We can confirm there will be an election this year, with two Committee positions becoming available. One of our outgoing Committee members has confirmed they will not be seeking nomination again, so we are putting the word out early for new nominees. If you would like to give back to the Society and become part of the Committee, please keep an eye out for our communications, as they will let you know when and how to nominate yourself for a Committee position.

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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.

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CHC-IX Chorus EdgeConnect Member Survey

We’re keen to get your feedback about our Chorus EdgeConnect peering service. Launched back in November 2020, we created this service in collaboration with Chorus, to enable Chorus customers to communicate directly with other NZIX members on the same exchange despite a physical connection to NZIX exchange switches. The survey contains three questions and will take less than a minute to complete! Please note, the survey closes on Friday 8th April, at 5.00pm NZST.

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Traffic Continues to Grow on WLG-IX

Wellington IX continues to grow and set a new record speed of 1.8Gbps in late February! The uptake of the IX has been promising, and we’ve noticed a good amount of growth in data volume over the past four months. On Thursday 21st October 2021, the data volume was 1.20TB compared to Monday 21st February 2022, when the data volume was 6.43TB – that’s a whopping 435.83% increase!  

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Improving Redundancy in Auckland

We are busy planning the next PoP in Auckland, with feasibility is underway for the AKL-IX expansion to Datacom Orbit Drive. NZIX engineers are laying out and designing potential solutions for improving fibre paths to reduce single points of failure, improving redundancy by assessing options via a western/non-harbour bridge path, and increasing capacity to meet the demands of an ever growing IX!

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NZNOG – Are you Coming?

NZNOG is happening in just under seven weeks! It should run from Wednesday 18th May – Friday 20th May at the Intercontinental Hotel in Wellington. The NOG can theoretically take place now at the red level, although orange would be preferable. Nevertheless, we are looking forward to (hopefully) seeing as many of you as possible and handing out some NZIX swag!

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Facebook Joins NZIX

Welcome to NZIX, Facebook! With local access to Facebook, users can enjoy scrolling through their news feed with less lag! If you would like to establish a bilateral agreement with them, please note that Peering DB states they are not on the route servers, and you will need to reach out using Peering DB contacts https://www.facebook.com/peering/. A little tip, when signing up to peer with Facebook, you cannot be logged in to Facebook – does that seem a little ‘fight club’ to you? You may want to use incognito mode.

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NZNOG Postponed

We are once again proudly sponsoring NZNOG! This annual conference is vital to the internet community in New Zealand and is highly regarded for bringing the community together and providing valuable content.

We hoped this year’s NOG would run from Wednesday 26th to Friday 28th January 2022; however, due to the recent change in our alert level, the NOG has announced the conference will be postponed to the backup dates in May 2022. Please see their website for more details.

If the NOG goes ahead in May, we encourage members to come along as the conference is a great place to exchange technical information and network with others in the Internet and Online Services areas.

In the meantime, you will all have to wait to get your hands on some of our great swag, including our new hoodie and thermal drink bottles!

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