Pacific INET Report 14/12/02

Report to InternetNZ

Status: Received at Council Meeting 021214

I've just spent three days in Fiji attending part of the first ever Pacific INET meeting organised by the Pacific ISOC Chapter. I took the opportunity to ask what barriers had they had to overcome to run the meeting and for people to get there. There were people from Fiji, Noumea, Niue, Tuvalu, Tonga, Australias and New Zealand and other places. Many of them travelled long distances and times to get there and come from countries that are not wealthy.

There were 30 - 40 people there at various points over the four days. These were techcnical people working for small telcos, NGOs and govt departments. A common thread in the discussion was that as the event was not sponsored by one or more of the aid agencies then it was difficult to get funding to attend. But when the event is funded by the aid agencies it's usually a policy talkfest that attracts managers and people from large telcos who have agendas that don't help promote Internet connectivity.

I think we need to find ways to promote a bottom up approach by providing training within a region and trying to get people with relevant experience into the area to teach the courses so they see what the problems facing the trainees is.

I spoke on deploying IPv6 and ran a practical session for the attendees. At the end of the session we had an IPv6 tunnel connected to the 6bone with four of the participants laptops connected via a Linux gateway.

The people at this workshop were sharing a 256k circuit to the local ISP and thence to Australia. For most of them this was the fastest Internet connection they had ever seen by a large margin.

Getting these people to something like Apricot isn't the the answer. They get lost in the crowd and there's little useful content there anyway.

So I'd like to see InternetNZ work on ways to help fund small regional workshops in developing Pacific countries which show them how to do things cheaply but effectively.

Thanks to InternetNZ for supporting my travel to this event.

Andy Linton

© 2001 InternetNZ
Last updated 03 December 2002