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.

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.

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!  

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!

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.

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!