The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> WIM DEGEZELLE: It seems we are okay to start. Welcome, all of you. It's great to see you here in the room. Apologies we started off a little bit late, but we had to wait on a late incoming flight. Welcome to this year's bet practice forum into the exchange points. My name I'm Wim Degezelle. It was a pleasure for me to work with the group of people that were involved in this year's best practice to come up with not only documents, but also organize this workshop and some other work. We will tell you about. I will quickly take you through the agenda of today's meeting. I will give a short introduction on BPFs and let you know what we have been done and then the main part of our work will start.
First of all, we will have Bastiaan who will tell you for the people that are not coming from an IXP and he'll clearly explain what an Internet exchange point is and why it is important and why it can be great value to have one in your community. After that, we will have a long are panel discussion. I will leave it to the panelists later on to introduce themselves. Who will explain ‑‑ who will explain what I have been doing in their IXPs and their communities and come up to discuss best practices that can be used in other parts of the world so that people can learn. And last but not least, we will have a little look out on where there are other forms, other possibilities to find information on IXPs and exchange best practices. I don't know. You can move the slide. I think we ‑‑ you can go already to the second slide.
So the best practice forms for people that are not aware of the concept is part of the IGF's Intersessional work. You have one IGF meeting and then a year almost nothing. And then the next one. Intersessional work started to get the community involved, have people work discussing on specific topics. So there is something happening in between the sessions and the longer continuation. Specific for best practice forms is that it starts from a very, very simple concept namely the concept is there is a lot of knowledge. There is a lot of experience in the community, but it's not spread equally everywhere. Not everybody in every organization or in every part of the world has the same knowledge, has the same experiences. Best practice forms are there to collect those knowledge and bring those people together so that it can exchange their information, but also collect it, produce it, put it in one resource and then in a way give it back to the community so that they can use it, can look into it and look at what's happening in other parts of world and use it to their benefits. Next slide.
Sell best practice forms started to the work after the last IGF meeting. It continued its work that started last year. They started to work and I think it's very important to look at the forms in terms of their outputs. I think their outputs are not only documents. They're first of all the information sharing that happened during the year. The fact there was a mailing list where people came together to discuss best practices, the fact that it were regular virtual meetings that were open for people from the community. Where they could come up and say look. This is something interesting. This is an important example to share with other people in the world. Also because they're proud of the work they have done and others could make use of it. So I think the that's the first very important output of the best practice form for the process to bring people together to discuss.
The second part is have people in the room and you will hear from experience from the panelists, but also hopefully we'll get some input, further input from you, experiences from your country. I think that's on its own a second input. And then last but not least, there will be a document that there is a draft document online on the IGF website with experience with the input. That document will be produced together with additional information we get today. It will be finalized after the IGF meeting and will be available to everybody online on the community to make use for it. Okay.
I think that's enough from me to give you the boring lecture on what we have been doing. I think it's time to hear more interesting story.
First we'll hear from Bastiaan who will give a brief description on what's a United States point and the second element as important that you all understand the value of it and why it is important and what it is comparing to the community. Bastiaan?
>> BASTIAAN GOSLINGS: Thank you very much, Wim. Good afternoon, everyone. I am Bastiaan Goslings. I work for the internet exchange and the regulatory fair as a spokesperson. As we mentioned, I was asked to briefly introduce this session and touching on the topic of IXPs, what are they and what functionality do they perform. Most importantly, of course, what are the benefits of having one? What can be the spin off of having a well functioning IXP. And there are some other points I would briefly want to talk to you about. I have to say that both the definition and the advantage of having one. I took from the draft document that Wim referred to best practice form on IXPs outcome document. I would highly recommend anyone to read it and to give you feedback on it. But that's a starting point I took especially chapters 1 and 3. So before I talk about an Internet exchange, I would rather first look at the internet itself. After all, we are at the internet governance forum.
I'm sure all of you are aware that once you Connect to the Internet, maybe if you had the hotel Wi‑Fi network or you fool you are able to contact with every other end point connected to this wonderful big thing called the internet. A machine or an application running on a machine, everything is available. Actually, it is no one thing the internet. It is a collection of thousands of independently managed networks which we call autonomous systems. There are more than 55,000 of them. So, if you have 55,000 of those independently managed and run networks, how is it possible if you Connect to the Internet experience ‑‑ for you it feels like one thing. Well, the way that works is that these networks need to Connect to each other. Seems very obvious, but there's a lot of them. So how does that work? As a document describes, there are two forms of underconnecting IP networks. The first one is called transit, a paid for service. It is willing to Connect to the rest of the internet and there's a large everybody network that sells a transit service to the smaller network. You pay us a certain fee and then we will see to it that you are reachable with the other networks and you as a customer network will be able to reach the rest of the Internet. So that's called transit. And there's necessarily mean that this particular transit provider has global Connectivity. So they will need to Connect with other networks as well. But I don't want to make it too complex at the moment.
Next to transit, we have another concept called pairing. Pairing is the direct InterConnect between two networks where they exchange traffic of themselves, of their own users and customers. They agree with each other and feel they are interested to do so. They agree let's InterConnect directly and exchange traffic and we do so without any further payments. So most of the time it is then free of charge because it is in both the networks. So end users can exchange with each other. They have providers and it means ‑‑ they may be called private InterConnect. Networks directly Connecting to each other. You can imagine if those networks Connect to each other and do so, it will become very, very complex. There are too many connections you need to manage.
So then a second form of that comes to mind. That's what we call public pairing. Public pairing brings us to the concept of Internet exchange. There is a community exchange. You can find out on the IXP website. That's the global relation of ‑‑ internet exchange association. A meeting at exchange point is network facility. You have a connection of more than two independent systems primarily for the purpose of facilitating the exchange of Internet traffic. So it is a network facility and it interconnects more than two autonomous systems. We established that. We know the network too is connected. Otherwise we don't feel that it is one that we ‑‑ first of all, connected to an Internet exchange can reduce networks operational costs.
We established the fact that if you use a transit, you have to pay for it. We also established the fact that managing a lot of private interconnects is complex, but it is also going to be costly. Every InterConnect will cost you a router port. The Internet exchange you can Connect with all the other networks that are present there. So that means you are stating your network operation costs. Another important point of having an Internet exchange is when local networks connect to you and traffic exchange traffic with each other and that particular traffic can stay local. That's also beneficial in terms of cost. Who knows what happens. Maybe it goes international and then it comes back. The so‑called effect that's being mentioned a couple times before today. Local is an important part of it. And can you imagine it networks directly Connect to the internet and exchange traffic with each other, that particular performance imagining the content provider and content is delivered much faster, at least potential works much faster than having ‑‑ having via transit provider. This protection is also very important. The fact that the networks Connect via the Internet exchange gives it more control.
You know you appear and you know who you are exchanging your prefixes and your prefixes and you determine your peering policy and that means you have more control of how your traffic is routed. You can imagine paying a transit provider for it. Have good enough quality for a good enough price, but actually use and have control of how the traffic is routed. So that's also a benefit of pairing. Having control of your routing offers more stability as well combined with the fact you have InterConnects, you have transit and the Internet in a particular period. You have connections available. That increases the stability especially stability of your local internet. As I mentioned because of the cost savings, you can reach the Internet exchange as a network. These cost savings will trickle down. So that's been beneficial for the local Internet community. The last advantage that we touched upon is a good exchange and all of the developing things that we mentioned will contribute and stimulate local developments. So it comes to long‑term investments in the infrastructure and we mentioned the fact that we had a performance and enterprises and usage. That would be available and it has developed that head off, but also local content that would be made available. So it's like a case that (inaudible). I think ‑‑ I had a couple of other points. I would like to allow because I am out of my time. I hope it gave you some review of what it is to Connect some I am going to have the functionality and exchanges. Thank you very much.
>> WIM DEGEZELLE: Thank you very much, Bastiaan. Very interesting. I'm pretty sure that most of the people or a lot of people in the room know very well and probably know way better than I do what an IXP is doing and how it is functioning. I think it's ‑‑ thank you very much also to via the benefits for the local community and the function to touch upon the team of the IGF to say look. If you have an IXP, it can help to develop your local Internet community. That way it can contribute to inclusive growth of the Internet. So the team of the IGF. I think it's time now to go and dive into concrete examples, hear what people are doing and how they are running their IXP. Before we go there, I want to make one specific point. The BPF, the best practice form really practice on everything that is not the technical part of how IXPs work because there are plenty of other forums with very specialized people that can help you with that.
The best practice form is there to really look at an IXP and how it is run. Last year we focus more on the environment and how can the right environment help to develop an IXF this year. That's still important, of course, but we try to move further and dive into how an IXP can be managed and successful and what can be done to help them grow and play their role at the fullest. Time now I give the floor or panel and our panel lead is Jane Coffin. Thank you very much for joining and also for participating in the work of the forum. The floor is yours.
>> JANE COFFIN: Thank you very much. Welcome to the IXP practices. I will try to speak slowly because I have a tendency to speak very fast. We will speak slowly. The panelists will have five minutes each to explain their perspective of the best practices and what the situations in the countries that they're coming from. I just want to note that last year has been said that it was more of a start up phase of IXP. We're now looking at thing out phase and looking at professional IXP on some of those best practices. As a level set, the IXP can help create as Wim had said this whole Eco system not only keeping local traffic local for better quality of service, faster traffic, a better Technical Community as well because you have experts being trained from IARs to other IXPs. We have many people in the room from Cabasy that IXP in Argentina to my colleague Christian and they do some work with respect to IXPs as well. So we have lots of experience in the room. Can everyone just raise their hand if you're either an IXP, have worked with IXPs in the past? You can see ‑‑ if you have questions, please ask afterwards as well. I want to note that in this region, we have IXs like the one in Ecuador that's deploying our PKI. There's training that goes on from team to team of IXPs and again with the IARs. Local content development can be accelerated thanks to local hosting which can be triggered by having an IXP. Value added services like time servers, route mirrors and local hosting companies coming is go the IX. So we will focus on what that leveling experience is and I will turn over first to BDIX of Bangladesh to Sumon Sabir. It is over to you for five minutes.
>> SUMON SABIR: Thank you, Jane. Bangladesh in the 1990s well they started the internet, it is connected research and somebody is down looting to Singapore and some in Hong Kong and some in Frankport. They may be sitting in an apartment, but if they want to transfer a file, it travels almost the whole world. So we thought we should have one. Otherwise we cannot survive. We had a lot of discussion, debate, finally before we agreed to an item and we set up an IX.
In the very short time, we saw the performance that all IXPs started to join, it was a membership built. And we have an opening policy and I try to PCH to help us technically as well as a policy relations. So we didn't do some mistake with some of the IXP we saw earlier. From the beginning, we would have our data and all in a very short time. They're considered as another good IXP. It keeps local and performs amazing from this time or that time. Now actually we move to 1 gig in activity. That's the beginning. Only five minutes time. We have around 75 plus member. All IXPs, development, controllers, content providers and it becomes a hosting place for the route servers and some like that last and some order. So enables environment for the internet. So we get to any kind of query every ‑‑ all the still lead and four servers are there. So for that local (inaudible) is really playing an amazing role at this moment. Now, we have a channel seeing why they became interested and would like is to have a license at this point. There's a stretch policy that all the IXPs should be purely digital. They're starting to cover a little bit physical at all. Now you understand and now it is time to make the government understand that it is not a very good idea to do that at this point. Thank you very much.
>> JANE COFFIN: Give me a minute. I have to reset the clock here. Thanks to the team in Brazil. I want to make one point about the government. For IXP, it is very important to work with government to develop a good relationship and I think this is something you're highlighting because if you don't, you may misunderstand your role. And that's an important thing. And then you have something to say.
>> WIM DEGEZELLE: Yes. I want to say the different case studies or the different people talking on the table here there is a larger case study or a case study in our document. If you want to read more about what we have today, they're reflected with? You can find it also by the Internet governor ants website home page. Next is Antonio Moreiras. This is one ever the larger systems of the IXP. Brazil is a very big country, but I think you have 26 now. Over to you. They don't want to hear from me.
>> ANTONIO MOREIRAS: The non‑profit organization that is related to the true internet committees that is stakeholder committee that is the most important lookout organization in Brazil. We have network BR a lot of functions related to the internet. We manage the local CCLD. We are the local, the national internet registry. It means that we registered with the IP on the autonomous systems working together with lock need. We have a lot of projects and true foster development of the Internet in Brazil. One of them is IX.VR. The Internet exchange. So, we found the Internet exchange with the money that comes from the domain names. The domain names we charge about $12 per year, per domain. Dot com, dot VR. There are about 4 million names registered. So it is our source of financial research for all other projects Nick.VR takes care of including IX. We have 26 exchange points in Brazil. We have a model where we at Nick.VR create and manage this Internet exchange, but we have an agreement to private or even government university that the centers host points of connection of our IXPs. So, we call it it's a point of interconnection for the IX. So for example, in Sao Paulo, we have Internet exchange that have very different points of connection. One of them or two of them are data centers that are own it by Nick.VR. They are the center of the Internet exchange. But the others are our commercial data centers that collaborated to create it. So, they give us the space, energy, et cetera. We put the implement. Very well. For now, we don't charge the parts of the Internet exchange for our users. It's free of charge for them. And we are starting to think of more sustainable because we have the money domains growing this way kind of a linear way and we have the money that we have to spend with internet exchange going this way. Some sometime in the future, the two things we will cross, we have a problem. Then we are trying to get more sustainable model and we are going to charge for the parts at least in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. We have a lot of concentration in Sao Paulo. There are two or three million IXPs and the other are malware ones. We are also working to ‑‑ trying to attract the CDNs and the other content to this mother IXPs in order to be more interesting for IXPs to Connect and for them to grow more in a more sustainable way. Please next slide.
Okay. No slide. No time too. No problem. Just one marking. With ‑‑ we have a vision about the development of the Internet. So we had in the first place the Internet core with TR one networks and the other autonomous systems connected to the one. Then we evolve to a model that we call done it Internet where the IS or the smaller IXPs and autonomous systems in the border that connected between and help with that a lot.D consideration DN is on the content and infrastructure is growing on the Internet. I think our IXPs have to think about this to create conditions for the CDNs and the content providers to put their caches inside the IXP or connected to the IXP so the content be available. I think this is the main challenge.
>> JANE COFFIN: Thank you very much. That was Antonio from Nick.BR. We now have an IXP. Carlos Rivera. Carlos, por favor.
>> CARLOS VERA: I am Carlos Vera. We are helping to the IXP Ecuador to be in data way. I have light presentation. Please next slide. We finished the situation and we have four or five big players for Internet in Ecuador like in English countries. 2 or 300 small IXP. So in a sorry symmetrical competition and prices for sure in a short time, and known friendly and users for IXP. Ecuador is a small country that you can see there. The lines ‑‑ the letters in white and in yellow and the points you can see where the notes of the IXP are now in this project we are developing or help to develop it. So with this situation, the economy of the small and mediums ‑‑ small IXP was not so good and then we have ‑‑ we rephrased the situation or the economic scenario was the worst. So we decide to organize these guys in order to make ‑‑ in order to share or to add one capacity from one small IXP to another and have the numbers that they need or ask to give us a servers. But we have two or three main problems in order to do that. The first one goes the lack of knowledge of technical knowledge. So we go to ISO, Internet society has a lot of papers about this shade, a lot of experiences. We see six different mods of how to incorporate and IXP from an NGO for mode and we analyze some best practice. They show around the world. So we learn a lot from this kind of paper. Also help a lot of people like Christian. All the time was advising us and shading knowledge, answering e‑mails and talking with different actors. That's a rollover organization as like ISOC. So we solve in this way the lack of knowledge of technical knowledge interferes.
The second weakness was a lack of speed. So this small IXP doesn't understand why they have to corporate. They know they must do, but because of the different education from providers, for example, some years ago, they ask for 300 mega bytes in order to give you a server. Later one gigabyte. Then two gigabytes of traffic, I mean. And now somebody told 4 gigabytes. So we need every time more people, more IXP working together. That's why we were to Google. We work with Google also and they are helping in order to have the first server in Santo Domingo. So we deal several notes around the country and we InterConnect those notes also. It seems it is going to be working fine. Finally we find an investor, who provides the service to the majority of the small IXP. So they provide the sixth capital that goes to new places. They need servers. They need UPS. They need more things, et cetera, and even need to pay for administering people and technical proposals for public ITs or ASM. So they have found them. The company. We have a company like IXP, but in the conceal of the company are all D200 small IXP. So the decision is executive, but not ‑‑ we hope to have a bit of news for you and the next year when we have a new meeting with you. Because of the time, thank you very much.
>> JANE COFFIN: Thank you very much, Carlos. What you are hearing from the panelists is the change of the Eco system of the IXPs from cutting down milliseconds in Bangladesh and dealing with a more sophisticated level of government and what you're doing in Ecuador. Thank you very much, Carlos, Antonio and Sumon so far. That's a local of people. We've had three speakers so far. Next up is Thailand. Before if was started, Thailand has nine transit IX and not all of them connect to each others. So we saw the need to have a neutral exchange in Thailand to help create local Eco system with help from ISOC. We received donation from loosens and Cisco. We also received a lot of help from other organizations like NSIC and Google. We had national broadcasting and telecommunication. They support our idea and hosted two of our meetings with IXP. The Connects was launched in February 2015. So we asked they were 2 years old. Clearly we have 10 members. One more operator has connected since last year and we will get two more early next year. That will make the top more operators become our members in term of the 11 new. Can they get funding support from the foundation for operations so far. Last year, we offered one year for E‑connection to all members and just started to collect a fee from members in the last few months. IXP think that we should try to get haven't from the manager BTC in, which we will try in our proposal ‑‑ MBTC, which we will try in our proposal. Some members have atomized cash. But we put ‑‑ we have 500 mixed from IAG to cache and we distribute 2.5 gig to our members. So we are trying to get some so IXP can become our becomes city and cache few is knight a bit cost is to us and we are looking at a cost. The peek traffic is 16 gig in September this year. And we are excited to see next year traffic as we are getting more members. We are running to about now. It is a bit far from down town. As we face a lot of fiber cable cut between mechanics and member problem in the past, the idea was in the years. So that member can have alternative connection to mechanics and to promote the idea. We gave this call to members that want to have the second part at the port in town to attract them. We organized ‑‑ next slide, please. We organized the next forum in May 2016 with more than 130 participants from all over the world. And we were organizing the next building 15 to 16 in May ‑‑ visit mechanics.‑‑
>> JANE COFFIN: This is an example of a really fast growing not only IXP, but region. The number of the amount of traffic, the number of customers, the IXPs is growing every year and your testament to the importance of the IX. By having appearing forum, BK brought many players where they need help as well and it was a great place to exchange. In AP, Nick, the registry in the region in that peering forum also had an excellent training session. PH opened and Phillips Smith who many ever you may know who's a guru on BGP and many other things on setting up IXPs was there. So it's just a really interesting environment. This also happens at meetings, right meetings, other peering for in the region. So it's important to know there are other places you can go. As Bastiaan had said, the internet registries and the IX federation very important roles as well. So the next person up is Allan MacGillivary. We will turn it over to you.
>> ALLAN MacGILLIVARY: Great. At 50,000 feet, I had the same story at Nick.DR. We're the ccTLD manager in Canada that gives us revenue. We have taken that revenue and foster IXPs. Run like Nick.DR, we don't own them. We don't run them. We work as a catalyst to see them started. I think this goes back to 2012. Canada had two IXPs, which when I did the kind of benchmarking and a lot of order countries, I don't think our government would be pleased to be standing there in Brazil, for example. So we chose to see what we could do to create some more in the country. And here's the end of the story. We actually went from 2 to 7 and I'm gonna try and extract what some of the things we thought helped us get the success we have. Jane told me this is non‑technical. So I'm a non‑technical person. I don't know what the letters BGP mean. Okay. But ‑‑ so just very ‑‑ so these are lessons learned. So it's not a narrative on what we did, but number 1 lesson, you have to work with the local community. Right? You can't run it. Canada is the second biggest country in the world. Each of these communities are small. You go in. We call the first meeting. We have contacts in the industry. And yes. We're helping a little bit financially. We bought switches. We paid transit in some cases. So we had a little bit of leverage and we said you're not ready yet. We're not giving you the switch. And so ‑‑ and that moves to the second point. There has to be trust. I mean, we see some of the debates on some of the communities where one ISP has network close to that, but not the other one. So you have to wait and they have to work that out and you just have to wait until they work it out because they are the people establishing the IX, but they're also going to run it. All of these are volunteer basis and no stuff. That's the second lesson. It took some cases four years before they worked this out. So that's the second lesson is build trust. The third lesson is what I'll call good governance. My company is not for profit. We have a board that is very strong and we certainly didn't want to find a situation where we donated $100,000 switch and then it's gone. So we ‑‑ they were very serious about making sure there was a accountability and financial management. So for example, where we were making a financial contribution, we insisted they incorporate so that any financial contribution or switch was given not to some very well meeting local technology guy, but actually a corporate entity. Through that and through this leverage, we could insure they put if place proper governance structure. So one of the things we try to insist on is they have a director. You get the four technology guys and they're so enthusiastic, but maybe they don't have the right business acumen to run this. So that's something we did. Third thing is we insisted upon a minimum of what I call business planning. Even the fact just to do a budget. And they're often surprised that some of the things they would have to spend money on like insurance for the service agreement for the switch. In Canada, you have insurance for the directors. You have to pay to have your books audited. There are costs that are not anticipated. So, we knew all of these because over time, we developed a template. And so that worked quite well. And then, of course, then they have to have offsetting revenues. So question to port fees comes out. There were different approaches. We have one that still has not moved to port fees. I am not saying this is all universal. The third part of business planning is some rudimentary marketing. And we worked with people who didn't know where to start and just to them find as in your neighborhood. And just make a list and certainly what we do in Montreal on the board in Montreal is we just make a list and everyone gets on the phone. And so ‑‑ so far, five years later, they're ail still running. So far so good. We're calling CAIX. So that we can kind of finalize a bit the interchange that I think we've created and we're very proud to work with these people. Right on the money.
>> JANE COFFIN: Thank you very much, Allan. So thank you very much for what you're doing. Many have noted, ccTLD is part of that Internet Eco system and Internet expertise. We are now going to turn to a panel discussion. And we'll have about 20 minutes for that roughly. And I'll start off the questions and perhaps, Allan, as you have spoken and it is embedded in your mind, can you just enlighten or elaborate on why an IXP need a business plan as you said before? Can you highlight more on that?
>> ALLAN MacGILLIVARY: I can't engine them trying to run it without that. They might make it a few months into the business and then they have to pay for the colo. There has to be some money somewhere. And this is very simple. I'll just say, for example, we did a spreadsheet. One page. Expenses, revenues. That's it. It's not sophisticated, but it really forces a thinking within the board and this is all run by the boards. So I can't imagine them doing without it. Even though it's simple, I haven't added any information. I'll have to think about it.
>> JANE COFFIN: I know you have been moving from a start up to a business model as well. Can you explain how you have added in a business element to what you are doing?
>> So start off that we also have like Excel file. We need to spend operating cost and then we try to come up with a fee and clearly we have ‑‑ the network we need to provide fees. So we then need to come up with a new business model so that we can share the cost with our members. We also want to get support from the agency that is another plan. So ‑‑
>> JANE COFFIN: I will ask Bastiaan because he's sitting next to me. The next question. How did you cope with grows at M6? It is one of the largest IXPs in the world. Can you give us an idea of what M6 did when they were growing?
>> BASTIAAN GOSLINGS: That's a very good question. I was very surprised. For us over here, we have to struggle. It was a technical challenge of dealing with a doubling, tripling of the amounts of traffic exchange. You plan ahead. I think it was emphasized by previous speakers or may be more the financial part of it. You have a great and you start planning for the next step. That was I think for us the most challenging part in terms of growth. We have been able to humble out very nicely. But still, we will run into the situation that technology does not ‑‑ the road maps of vendors is what we would like to see and support the growth. I'm not quite sure. This is maybe too positive of a story.
[Laughter]
>> JANE COFFIN: I think it's important. I think if your traffic does start to double and triple, what is your plan? This happened in a country in Africa that we know and they went from 300 gigs of traffic to go 800 in 2 and a half weeks as soon as the Google cache came in. At that time, they couldn't handle the traffic. So they had to go over to another ISF to help out ‑‑ ISP to help out. They also host banks. So you should know it is not just ISPs and content delivery networks, but banks and research and education networks coming into IXPs. I wanted to ask you. Do you have volunteers at your IXP or do you have staff?
>> We have a staff and monitoring and some new counts to have them out. That stuff we have. We support them for meetings and to exchange board members. We have a meeting every six months down the line, we get together and discuss issues. Just to point. We have a different experience initially. We get support and we entered a big room and set up everything. Initially, we made a plan to run with our cost. Especially from them, it is sufficient and we're running.
>> JANE COFFIN: How do you manage volunteer fatigue on the board? I hope you know what I mean by this.
>> It is a bit of a challenge I should say. All the surviving (inaudible) some people move to other businesses. But yeah. Still. We have a country of population. So you always find those that want to work. So far it's been fine.
>> JANE COFFIN: Allan, when it comes to your visibility and I will ask Antonio after you answer this question, the same question. With visibility and branding, do you know in Canada do the IXPs brand themselves? Do they market go to peering for them? Do you have an IXP form for people to get to know each other? What do you mean when you think of marketing for an IXP?
>> They're all very small. We have Torix, which is our oldest and most established IX in Toronto. We were not involved in establishing it. They get a little more active. They go to all of the peering forms within North America. The small ones that we helped establish really don't have the financial capability to travel and that's in part why we have established this CIX as I mentioned before, which is sort of moving from a list base forum to something a little more formal. We had an exploratory meeting this fall. It was there. As I said, marketing for a small guy is just a question of getting the AS numbers. I'm on the board in Montreal. QIX is what we call ourselves. Some of you know civilian. She's the real manager. At the start of the year, we have our targets for new peers and have our quarterly reviews about how we're doing and we happen to have a gaming industry in Montreal. We're engaging some of the gaming companies to actually who don't have an AIX number. Companies don't understand the value of having an IS number. There's a lot of education that has to go on and we're doing that ‑‑ I'm not personally involved in that, but has what we're doing in Montreal. There's quite a difference in Montreal versus Winnipeg.
>> We don't do ads and things like that, but very well. We do have training for systems including IXPs such as banks and government chances and universities. And this trainings about for example, good practice on BGP or IPD6. We do talk about the importance of IXPs. We are also present in the meetings of associations, IXPs associations in Brazil. And we talk about the importance of the bigger networks to become autonomous systems and to be part of this. We do organize and events national events about IXPs in Brazil. That is PTT forum. We started that and it was across for IXPs. We do participate in associations and international events to learn and also to know it by international companies that we would like to ‑‑ would like to Connect you to our XPs. For the next year, we are also planning to do meetings locally. Not yet for the 26th IXPs, but for some of them for at least 10 or 15 of this community. So we are going to start to organize and look at our event for the IXPs and other systems to come together and talk about the local reality and solutions for them.
>> Can I just make one more point.
>> JANE COFFIN: No.
[Laughter]
absolutely. Go ahead.
>> As I said, we have established an association and one of the projects we want to do this year is actually to develop marketing material on the value of IXs, which is we haven't done yet. This is ‑‑ you know, actually, people who are technology mind get it, but they're not the decision makers usually. If anyone has done this, I would very much like to hear from you because the story is the same around the world. If anyone has developed some paper, that would be very useful and we'd appreciate that. Thank you.
>> JANE COFFIN: It's interesting that you say that because we've had this internal discussion about the business case and how to promote that more. There's a small internet exchange point in the U.S. in Denver that just started up. And they're agreeing to work with us on sort of a slide deck. We would be happy to open that up to everyone to help us refine, but to your point, a one pager is also helpful. There are a lot of CEOs and IXPs if they're not peering already, they're skeptical as to the benefit. But once they see what pairing can bring, it's very useful for them to know this. Carlos? I'd like to ask you a question about technical sustainability. What are you doing from that site with the IXP and the IXPs in the country? How are you promoting to the technical sustainability as a team?
>> Carlos Vera: Thank you very much. I also have a question about that. We have a technical staff because the investor of the company is an Internet provider. So they have stuff. And we go to ‑‑ we go to (inaudible) and Carlos Martinez and how the technical things manage and we learn a lot also. And then later we went to CAVASI. They have a successful business model and technical model. And they show the system. We learn a lot also from them. And we are working in that way because we have emergency electricity systems, we have air condition. We have removed content. We have optical fiber. So this is a lot of money. So this initial money is the guarantee of the sustainability along the time. I would like to ask to Brazil and Canada because they say that the ccTLD funds the IXP in their countries. But I would like to understand if the ccTLD is the company, is the university, is the NGO because in our country, the ccTLD is a company. We were interested to know a little bit more about the model. The way they funded that through ccTLD the IXP. Thank you very much.
>> JANE COFFIN: I have one more question I would like to also ask here at the table, but if you could, Allan, one minute ‑‑ that would be great.
>> Allan: I don't think one can do justice to the question in one minute because every ccTLD is different and that's really my story. So I'm happy to take it offline. Our particular situation is we've not for profit, but in order to get the delegation, you need government approval. So in special countries, you're part of the government and other countries it's for profit and in our case is not for profit. I am happy to chat at another time if you like. Thanks.
>> We are a company not for profit that are related is to the internet cheering committee that is multi‑stakeholder organization. Get together with the government and to others.
>> JANE COFFIN: Ariel, what did you do to professionalize what you were doing? Do you have a board? How does it work?
>> Aerial: We have a board and we have a lot of monthly meetings, a lot of. A lot of. We have professional staff and also volunteers. In fact, I am a volunteer. But we run each month at least two meetings for each IXP. And one at least one meeting for all. And we in fact we are hiring an SCOO because we need it. It's a fact. And we are not for profit. So we cover our costs monthly and we recover from the monthly expenses that we have. And we are growing our staff because the size of our project. I guess it's a step by step that we need to complain and ‑‑ and do on a daily basis. We have both.
>> JANE COFFIN: Thank you for that. I think we need to give Sharada 10 minutes. So I want to ask him to maybe take the question. Would you like to ask a question? I'm sorry. I don't know your name. Could you tell us?
>> LASEAR: My name is Lasear. AX is not InterConnect. No interconnection is IX. The costs and events, the interconnection in the IX ‑‑
>> JANE COFFIN: I ask you. You speak Portuguese, yes?
>> LASEAR: Yes.
>> JANE COFFIN: Maybe this is something you can talk to Antonio about.
>> English. No problem.
>> JANE COFFIN: But it's a bandwidth question, yes?
>> Yes.
>> JANE COFFIN: They don't charge for ‑‑
>> (inaudible) for IXPs.
>> JANE COFFIN: Do you understand?
>> Yes.
>> The same request we had in the other workshop in the morning. Very well. In Brazil, we don't underconnect the different IXPs because of ‑‑ we don't want to compete with our customers because we would have regulatory problems. We don't want to be considerate, considerate telecommunications company. We are not today. We are part of in the Internet infrastructure and not the Telecom infrastructure. We would like to stay this way. We do foster the Telecom companies to offer this as a service. In some cases, they are doing a good job and in some cases, not so good job for it. There are in many cases options to participant in one and IXP to get to the other hiring some Telecom operator that is also in the IXPs to do this kind of servicing. So I think Cabaza has another kind of model.
>> JANE COFFIN: Would you like to take a minute? Thank you.
>> Yeah. We don't have customer. We have members. So we don't compete with our members like you say. I think it's the world wide model. Don't compete with the members or the customers. But in some cases, I want to say that that is not the best practice. It's a regular practice because case by case, you need to resolve problems. In country like Argentina where we have large amount of space without cover, we need to find a way to bring services. So ‑‑ also we don't came from nothing. We came from history. The incumbent, the Telecom incumbents company made history in Argentina. They don't want to participate in this project. They say that we are playing. We are not serious and they say that there is no way to bring the beginning they don't recognize Internet as a service. They say that. So they say that there is no way to Connect small CDs or small region far from Buenos Aires, which is the main capital of the country. So we find a way to do it. There is no other way to serve this region of the country. So there was a fact. The only way was make the network. And we have 21 InterConnected IXPs. And also, we are InterConnected now. Uruguay, we have some connections. We have members to bring the capacity. And this is the way that we did. But I say there is not best practice. Auto a regular practice. It's a practice that we can find to solve our problems and I'm thinking I know very well Latin America and I say every country has a different situation. And you need to solve case by case. And the best way that you find your countries is probably the best way you can solve the problems.
>> JANE COFFIN: Thank you for that. I will continue with the session, but I want to thank everyone for all the comments and the information for everyone in the room. It's very important to hear all this great data. So thank you. Give yourselves a hand round of applause.
[APPLAUSE]
And just to one more point is that we're hearing why IXPs are critical to Connecting the unconnected and I would like to also flip that paradigm and say the unconnected are helping Connect themselves when they come to you and others. Sumon, over to you for the rest of the program.
>> Sumon: I think we still have 5, 10 minutes left. So I don't want to scare you off ‑‑
>> WIM DEGEZELLE: We have tried to do a little bit in parallel today. We first discussed the IXPs and what they're doing and how they can help if they function well within their own community to build that Internet community and then support inclusive and growth like we had today. Then we had a good look in the PPF also very gross. If you know and start to run IXP, how can you make sure that after two years, after three years you see that you're growing and you are developing and you don't come to the conclusion that's what you have been doing was a nice try. So we focused on the work of our BPF of best practices, we collected case studies. A lot of the elements that have been discussed by the panel are also discussed in the document.
And in the last part of the document and last part of our meeting today, we also want to make very clear that the BPF may place where you find information because there's a lot going on in the world, a lot of organization, a lot of places where you can find information on IXPs and also where IXPs come together to exchange information to exchange best practices. On this part, this is the last ‑‑ very last part of our session. Let's give a very high level of what you can find and what you have to look.
>> Thank you. It was a great honor for me to be able to work as part of the best practice forum in IXP this year because I got to learn about so much that's happening in the world of IXPs. I want to go very briefly over some of the things that exist outside of the VPF where they can be multi‑stakeholder corporations. But at the regional levels, we have IXP associations and meetings. As IXP associations also have regional peering for that, like they have meetings that have ‑‑ that occur every year. We also have meetings that occur along side other meetings like labor 52ings and those happen around the year. Like we also have global collaborative efforts. We have one that is the VPF on IXP, but we also have study groups and interconnection for these. These are all places with collaborative work that happens on IXPs. Beyond that, there also projects. The Euro mentor IX program and the Euro X 29 program allows for knew IXPs to be mentored or partners IXPs so they're able to learn and be able to grow. That seems to be the theme of the session today. We have peering and PCH last, which we have great resources and the Euro is a great fellowship program. These are a few of the resources that occur for people that might be more interested in entering this area as I was when I started working with the best practice forum. There is a full list in the Anex as well as in the section that we described of the document that Wim has been mentioned all along where you can get more resources if you are interested in understanding or getting more involved in the IXP community. Thank you.
>> WIM DEGEZELLE: Thank you very much. This is also a great promotion for the document that we are working on. So it's time to conclude. I want to say what is the plan for VPPF? I think this was one of the important mile stones having this discussion online. To document that is open is still a couple of days open for review. So if you have additional comments or even if you have a case study of your own IXP, of your own, say this is really something interesting. It should go into the document please. Send the item to me or post it on the review platform. The document then will be finalized and I think it is important to just realize it will be published as part of the outcome of this Internet Governance forum. I will see if there's an extra channel. You'll have documents by the Internet Society by the IXP federations and associations by individual IXPs. Who explained ‑‑ that explained very well what IXPs do and I think it's important to realize there will be another document that is put together by the experiments from the community, but it has the logo of the IGF and the united nations. I think just having a document can be very useful to also use it to go to governments, to go to your organizations and your own country next to the existing information that is there as an additional resource.
Only left for me is to thank the panelists. Thank Jane for leading the panel. Thank Bastiaan for giving introductions. You didn't have to work so much, but Michael, thank you so much for the moderator. Well, I think ‑‑ well, if you would have had this session earlier on a large part of the world sleeping at this moment, I think that might ‑‑ lucky or unlucky for you might have been a better situation. Thank you all very much. Well, look out for the final VPF document that will be published very soon. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]