Executive Director's Report to Council 18/12/04

— filed under: Broadband

Peter Macaulay

Overview

The year is refusing to end gracefully, and we are experiencing a workload avalanche which will ensure a reduced level of silliness for the silly season. Between now and the end of January, we are:

producing the draft of the anti-spam code of practice
drafting the full Code of Practice.
responding to The Telecommunications Act review
starting the APTLD secretariat.
launching an ISP Action Group.
We have found 500 CBD beds and many meeting rooms for ICANN 2006.

Fortunately we also have some new staff.

While frustrated at the slowness of some external processes that we are obliged to accept, we are tracking properly and are pleased to be closing a satisfying year.

People

Our current team of Isabel, Gale, John and Pete, will be usefully enhanced by Stuart Meiklejohn, who has joined us as a temporary researcher working on Code of Practice. Jordan Carter, currently working in the DNC office joins us on December 13. We will need to take on one more temporary person to co-ordinate the Telecommunication Act Review response
As Gale is having her baby sometime in mid April, we are planning staffing to cover this.
We were thrilled with the quality of applicants for both the temporary and permanent research roles, and as a result have excellent new team members. For the permanent role we engaged Tony Walsh of Momentum Personnel to handle the advertising and short-listing process. This generated three excellent candidates, of which Jordan was the best choice.
Staff development continues, and we are now managing the interim web site internally following HTML and Dreamweaver training for Gale and Isabel. Thanks to Dean from Katipo, and Stuart (borrowed form the DNC) who made this transition smooth and simple. All staff are expected to complete first aid training, and we are also providing training on other applications as and when required. The benefits to the society from higher productivity and staff satisfaction make this a true investment.

APTLD Secretariat

From January 1, 2005, InternetNZ will be operating the APTLD secretariat, managed by Jordan Carter. The transfer processes are under way with APTLD Ltd being registered and bank Accounts about to be established. I traveled to Perth on October 4 to attend the last APTLD meeting. Debbie Monahan, Peter Dengate Thrush and I met several times with the current APTLD secretariat team of Joanna Tso and Ian Chiang, to plan the handover. In addition we attended the APTLD meetings, which gave us a better picture of how the organization works. Joanna and Ian will be visiting Wellington in early January to finalize the handover. Their last task in their secretariat role will be to host the February meeting in Kyoto.

Interop

A separate report is provided on the Interop project.

ICTUS

A separate report is provided on ICTUS

Peering

The peering study has not shown any financial benefit, or loss from carriers participating in peering exchanges. However, this does not reduce the ethical, practical, political, and future benefit case for peering. To help support this case we will publish the Covec report, but more important we are bringing one of the foremost proponents of peering to NZ. Bill Norton will address the NOG conference in February, and will be available for commercial and government sessions

ISP Support

Over the last few months the number of issues we are being asked to address that affect ISPs has grown rapidly. At my meeting with Douglas Webb, the Telecommunications Commissioner, we were presenting the society position regarding the poor quality and volume of broadband delivery, when we were asked if we felt it was a good idea for the commissioner to meet ISPs to glean positive input. Following the meeting, we provided email address for all ISPs. The commissioner promptly set up workshops for the ISPs in Auckland and Wellington. I attended the Auckland meeting on December 2. Although much of the ISP contribution was anti-Telecom rant, there was a sense of useful contribution, and the group of more than 20, suggested that InternetNZ should collate response, and the commissioner asked us directly to do this. We have agreed and an initial message (attached) has been sent to start the ball rolling.

Telecom

Following my reported roasting of Telecom for poor performance in delivering broadband, and suggesting that the ball was in their court, I have been given the opportunity of meeting their senior management. I have spoken to Teresa Gattung, Rod Snodgrass, Chris Thompson and Bruce Parkes. Initially grumpy about the press coverage, recognition dawned that we were "begging" Telecom to behave, rather than demanding that government intervene (although we are asking for that too). The explanation I have is that Telecom are so focused on the 250,000 customer target that they don't have a lot of energy for multiple solutions. Right now more than 800 broadband (their definition, not ours) customers are being rolled out each day. While we must applaud this, we are also concerned that the level of wholesale activity is almost below the margin of error, at around 5%. We need this to rise to at least 30% to ensure we have a competitive market. At the present Telecom ownership rates the market is fully captured. I will continue to meet with Telecom management to press for change, but am not holding my breath.

TUANZ

The TUANZ Broadband forum was held in Hastings on November 7,8,9. A useful opportunity to meet similar minded people, and with some excellent presentations, I felt many issues had been buried to keep the conference away from several issues that concern InternetNZ. Just being there was of value, and the stream leaders (Simon Riley included) did a superb job of pulling together a cohesive result from a spaghetti like mass of threads. I believe that this is a potentially effective forum that needs to be reformatted and made more outcome focused. I leave a fuller report to the outputs from the stream leaders.
I am meeting Ernie Newman the TUANZ ED every 6 weeks, and have a good if sometimes testy working relationship. We are planning to have a joint officers meeting early next year.

ICANN 2006

Congratulations to Keith on developing a winning bid, and the whole team for selling ICANN on Wellington as the perfect spot for their meeting. On getting the news at 01:00 on Sunday morning 5/12 , we started the booking process. By midday on Monday Gale confirmed that we had more than 500 rooms in the CBD booked. By 10/12 we will have the contracts for these rooms in place. The total value of rooms is close to $600,000.

Code of Practice

Stuart Meiklejohn has joined us to draft the Code of Practice. As a result of MED pressure we will be drafting the ant-spam code before the rest. We are doing this component/chapter in conjunction with the Telecommunication Carrier Forum and the Direct Marketing Association. Stuart was thrown in the deep end, with a meeting between InternetNZ and the TCF on his third day in the job. We came out well, with a consensus on the way forward. The TCF has agreed that InternetNZ should draft the code for the other parties to review. We are intrigued to see Telecom come from denying the need for any code, to actually supporting InternetNZ drafting one. Admittedly we have not yet got their support for the full code. The position taken by the MED and the minister (see attached letter) was that the TCF should draft the anti spam code. We have a greed to use the TCF guidelines. Stuart and I are meeting with Vanessa Glennie of the TCF secretariat this week, to plan the process.
Concurrently we are researching other codes, engaging with the ISPs and aiming to deliver a draft of the full consumer code in late January.

Web Presence

With our interim site steadily improving, the heat came off the new site project. We continue to progress this and the RFI for the content management solution will be published in January. With both Gale and Isabel trained in Dreamweaver we are managing the interim site internally. I have received several complements for content, and only one brickbat (Steven Heath for slowness to publish).

Certification

We are in discussions with a major certification organization regarding the provision of an authority for NZ and the pacific region. With the current workload, I have parked the main effort on this until late January. We will present a discussion paper and proposal at that time.

Auckland Members' Event

On November 29 we held a meeting for Auckland members at our Auckland office at 75 Queen St. It was great to meet some members who I had not met before and reacquaint with old friends. The feedback from the meeting was that the verbal overview of the society's activities was most useful. We also gained a better insight to the views of the members, than we do through other media. Chris Lipcombe's discussion of the communications plan also gave the members a clearer picture of our direction. We will organize these events on a regular basis, and not just in Auckland.

Membership

While we are waiting for formal direction on growing the membership, the secretariat is studying the subject, and working with sibling organizations to foster joint membership. Gale's proposal on membership is attached.

Other Meetings

To give some idea of the type of meetings I attend beyond those listed under specific subjects above;

Netsafe regarding Hector Protector and our regular updates.
Netsafe/Microsoft Hector Protector launch
Mark Nugent form Department of Internal Affairs regarding the effect on NZ sites, users, and .NZ domains from the Gaming Act. The .nz component is being handed over to the DNC
ICTNZ board meetings. Seam Weekes is attending the 9/12 meeting.
Katrina Troughton, new CEO of IBM NZ
14 interviews for the two research positions
E-regions incorporation celebration.
Addressed the NZ Genealogical Association about Internet governance
Several meetings with NZCS around scholarships, working relationships and joint membership.

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