Network Operator Group meetings are not only a great place to learn about and discuss current best practices, but also to socially network with peers, or in our case, APNIC Members.
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to extend my visit to Hong Kong, where I attended HKNOG 7.0, to meet with several of our Members in Hong Kong, as well as across the border in Shenzhen, China.
Shenzhen is a major city in the Guangdong Province and forms part of the Pearl River Delta megalopolis, bordering Hong Kong to the south, Huizhou to the northeast, and Dongguan to the northwest. The city hosts the Shenzhen Stock Exchange as well as the headquarters of numerous multinational companies such as Tencent, ZTE and Huawei.
I visited three Members over two days, including Tencent, the founder of WeChat. It was the first time we had visited these organizations at their offices in Shenzhen and it provided a great opportunity to:
- Help answer their questions regarding deploying IPv6, RPKI and acquiring IPv4 through the transfer market
- Update their whois details
- Create ROAs
- Inform them about recent changes to APNIC policies.
Read: Changes to APNIC IPv4 Maximum Delegation Size and IPv4 Recovered Pool Waiting List
In one meeting, I casually brought up my plan to attend HKNOG the following day. They had never heard of HKNOG (even though it has been running since 2013 and was only a short train trip) but by the end of our conversation, this Member had registered to attend — hopefully the start of many visits from the region.
Figure 1 — High-speed trains make the trips between Shenzhen and Hong Kong super easy.
Overall, I find that Members really appreciate these face-to-face meetings and talking in their native language, especially compared to the conversation through email. It’s also easier to explain topics such as RPKI and show them how easy it is to register a ROA.
In this instance, it also provided an opportunity to bring together neighbouring communities, which in turn provides HKNOG more exposure, and the opportunity for our Members from Shenzhen to meet and network with a broad range of potential customers and business partners during the conference.
HKNOG 7.0
As for the conference, it was another fantastic turnout with close to 180 Internet professionals attending the one-day event.
The day started with a presentation by Anup Changaroth from Ciena, who discussed case studies of new transmission rates of ethernet cables. We learnt that AT&T has successfully completed testing a single wavelength 400 gigabit ethernet service across its production network. This has established a future network blueprint for service providers and businesses. In future, there are plans to bring the speed up to 800 Gbps in 2020, and 1.6 Tbps in 2030.
This was followed by other technical presentations from:
- Cheuk Fong Wai (NETSCOUT Arbor), who discussed how to get ready for the next wave of DDoS attacks
- Kelvin Cheung (Equinix), who talked about Network Challenges on Multicloud
- Tom Strickx (Cloudflare), who shared his view on Technical Debt: An Anycast Story
- My colleague, Che-Hoo Cheng, who presented on the benefits of deploying RPKI (slides below)
- Walt Wollny (Hurricane Electric), who presented about peering security
- Kenneth Chan (HKIX), who gave an update on HKIX, including their support for blackholing for anti-DDoS.
Wong Weng Yew, the Chief Peering Officer of one of our newest Members from Malaysia, JBIX, also presented on Malaysia’s second Internet Exchange, located in Johor Bahru, and how they are positioning Malaysia as a hub for cost-effective transit.
Read: New IX on the block launches in Malaysia
In addition to taking in the presentations, one of the most valuable parts of a NOG meeting is the ability to ask questions, which allows for knowledge and experience transfer with other network operators.
As always, networking was a key component of the event with everyone enjoying catching up between breaks in the program and at the closing social event. It also gave me the opportunity to assist our local Hong Kong Members with their membership and IP address needs.
The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC. Please note a Code of Conduct applies to this blog.