Transcript - APNIC Services
Transcript - APNIC Services
Disclaimer
While every effort is made to capture a live speaker's words, it is possible at times that the transcript contains some errors or mistranslations. APNIC apologizes for any inconvenience, but accepts no liability for any event or action resulting from the transcripts.
Frank Salanitri: Good morning, everyone. Can I ask the speakers for this morning to come up and take a seat at the front desk.
Just some housekeeping rules. As usual, please put your mobile phones on silent and during the question and answer session, after all of the speeches, if you come up to the mic with a question, please state your name and affiliation clearly into the microphone.
The closing plenary will start at 3.30 pm in Tanglin ballroom next door this afternoon.
APRICOT 2013 Closing Social, the event will be held in CMPB at Dempsey Hill this evening. No tickets are required. You need to have your delegate badge to enter the social area and buses leave the Shangri-La at 6.00 to 6.15 pm.
Tomorrow morning we're going to have the APNIC AMM. That will be held in the Jurong Ballroom tomorrow morning, that's this room. There will be a registration desk outside from 8 am on the opposite wall. You'll need to register your name and you'll get a free gift from APNIC. You'll still have your same name tag, but you just need to register your name.
There will also be on-site voting for the APNIC EC election. That's also held tomorrow. Ballots are available for collection at the voting desk which will be on my right outside the ballroom from 8.30 am onwards. If you have any questions, you can talk to the APNIC staff at the member services lounge.
Now, this morning we have an APNIC Services update. This is for any new projects or initiatives that APNIC are currently undertaking.
First we're going to have Sanjaya. He will be talking about IPv4 address transfer update, followed by Miwa Fujii talking about IPv6 at APNIC. Thirdly, I will be speaking about a quality management initiative at APNIC. This will be followed by George Kuo talking about local community engagement. Finally, Nurul Islam will be talking about the eLearning update.
Without further ado, I'd like to hand over to Sanjaya. Thank you.
Sanjaya: Thank you, Frank. I'm going to give you an update on the IPv4 transfers. We have this policy since 2010, so this is an analysis of the last few years since we implement this policy.
I'll start with what IPv4 transfer related service we have in APNIC. Then there's subsequent policy changes and practice, impact to the transfer trends, a quick look at the transfer statistics by economy, and late last year we implemented the inter-RIR policy, and have some experience, initial experience, to share and some interesting observations.
Since the implementation of the IPv4 transfer policy, we have implemented a few different services throughout the year until now. So we now have support for both intra- and inter-RIR transfer. We also have a pre-approval service. This is very useful for those who want to be evaluated first before they go out and look for a source.
The new policy allows for up to the 24 month requirement being evaluated. This pre-approval can be listed publicly, so a potential source or seller could contact those who need it.
We have a broker listing page. Four brokers have been registered so far, so these are brokers who will facilitate the transfer compliance to the APNIC policies.
We have a mailing list called apnic-transfers@apnic.net where people can say if they have spare resource or they need resource, they can just use that.
We maintain the public transfer log, of course, capturing every transfer into a public log that can be analysed. We also have a transfer fee applied now, announced by the EC, I believe in Cambodia meeting. So it's 20 per cent of the transfer block's annual fee, other holdings not included in the calculation and it's payable by the recipient in general or if it's transferred out of APNIC, it's actually payable by the source.
Let's look at the impact of policy/practice change throughout this year. Since we implement the prop-050 in November 2010, there hasn't been much policy change, but then in November 2011, we implemented the prop-096 which is the demonstrated need implemented. At the time, I think there is a bit of a dip down, because of the demonstrated need requirement, but then it quickly picks up again.
Around August 2012, ARIN approved this inter-RIR, so finally APNIC has a partner to do a transfer. There is also a transfer fee implemented around the Cambodia meeting. I don't know. I mean, it looks like there is a slight impact on the transfer, but I don't think it's significant.
Transfer mailing list announced, I don't believe it also provides a significant increase. The red bars on the right are the inter-RIR transfer. As you can see, there's a bit of delay since ARIN approved the inter-RIR until actually the first inter-RIR happened. So there's about two months delay before someone actually used that service. We had one in October, three in December and two in January, so altogether six have been moved from ARIN to APNIC.
In terms of transfer size, we really don't see any pattern; it's quite random, really. There's a lot of small transactions. We have never seen anything too big. The biggest one is back in October, I think. Well, it's 1.2 million, close to a /10.
Transfer activities by economy is interesting. Japan and Australia are the most active. But Japan is primarily within the country. Because JPNIC hasn't really implemented a policy, allow a policy to transfer in and out of their country. So a lot of it is happening within Japan. Australia, the majority also are transferred within Australia, with only three transactions going to Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore.
The rest of the economies are mostly transferred within itself. We can see the red one on the left are inter-RIR transfers, six of them; basically from United States to Australia two, to Hong Kong one, to Japan two, to Singapore, one.
The inter-RIR experience has been good. We have completed six transfers as of end of January this year. Transfer time, including evaluation, usually takes us between one to two weeks. Some of them actually make use of the pre-approval, so it's even quicker that way.
We actually have successfully transferred a live network from Bank of America in US to Bank of America in Hong Kong. That seems to be working fine, with no downtime. One thing that we observe is ARIN and APNIC stats file overlap by one day. Both of them still keeping the resource that is being transferred, because of time zone difference, but after 24 hours, then it disappears from ARIN and only appears in APNIC's stats file. Just be aware of that. There's nothing we can do, really, because of the time zone difference.
Interesting observations. We saw a group of companies actually has been observed to be transferring between themselves in circles. We suspect it might be to avoid paying the annual fee, but we don't know. It's just a suspicion. But it stops after we implement the transfer fee.
Then we also observe that new members are created to receive last /8 allocation and then quickly transfer to an existing member, maybe the parent company or something. This is a topic that is being discussed by the policy prop-106. We want to discuss more about this. Let's do it later today in the afternoon.
32 out of 2,110 delegations from the last /8 have been transferred. That's about 1.5 per cent. In a normal comparison rate, we have about 1.8 delegations being transferred. I don't think that has been a deviation from the normal. But this is something we really need to watch. The latest count has been like 15 APNIC members actually have more than a /22 from 103/8, so they might receive a transfer and the highest number is one account that has five /22s in one account.
We are observing this and we'll keep on reporting, if there's any pattern coming up that could become problematic like, for example, it consumes the last /8 too much, then we would definitely report it to the community and ask for guideline.
That's it from me. Thank you.
Frank Salanitri: Thank you, Sanjaya. Does anyone have any questions for him?
If not, we'll move on to Miwa Fujii discussing IPv6 at APNIC.
Miwa Fujii: Good morning, everybody. My name is Miwa. I'm just waiting for the presentation to be uploaded.
Let's start. I'd like to give a brief update on IPv6 at APNIC. Today's agenda for my talk is IPv6 support provided by APNIC. I would like to show some of the new features of website of IPv6@APNIC and also I would like to conclude my presentation by talking about the way forward.
As all of you know, IPv6@APNIC has several functions, and number 1 is distributing IPv6 addresses. It's done by APNIC Services team. I'm sure George will talk something about IPv6, v6 training and education delivered by APNIC training team. Details can be explained by Nurul after me.
The monitoring IPv6 deployment, this monitoring activity has been conducted by APNIC's R&D team, led by Geoff Huston and George Michaelson. Some of you may already see so many different statistics for different economies, AS numbers and regions uploaded into the website.
Supporting IPv6 deployment, I usually conduct this area of work of APNIC's outreach activities by organizing several different conferences and events and going out to the region and community to meet the people amongst different stakeholders.
I'd like to give a brief update about the website now. APNIC's website for IPv6 was recently renewed. The objective for this site is to support real and tangible IPv6 deployment in the AP region. The current main contact of this page including key IPv6 message of APNIC and key message will keep evolving with reflecting the IPv6 deployment status in the field and we always need to catch up with the most recent developments and put those developments into our messages and to deliver to the community.
IPv6 data and statistics, v6 transition stories, v6 for governments, v6 best current practices and about CGN. We also use the new tool called scoop.it! The site is available from www.apnic.net/ipv6. I cannot toggle between my PDF presentation file and the website at this podium, so if you can go to that website, that will be great. I would like to give some introduction.
On top page, you can see the IPv6 -- basically this top page provides you the entrance for all APNIC Services on IPv6, like I mentioned, distributing IPv6 and statistic and data measurement, training and IPv6 program and you can go into those different services from this top page.
On the right-hand side, you can see IPv6 info, a small square box. This is the new introduction. This is the information which showing the most up-to-date news and technology update and interesting content on IPv6 gathered through scoop.it! Scoop.it! is a small tool to allow us to ... news announcement. So this portion of the small box is constantly showing the new information. It's archived by us.
Next, if you click on the left-hand side, in the green box, it says the "IPv6 data and statistics". You can go into the next page, which is showing the various different statistics source. IPv6 deployment is picking up momentum and we start gathering enough information and data which allow us analysis.
This page gathered some interesting and authentic information. The No. 1 APNIC lab.apnic.net link and next one is RIPE NCC's measurement link and the next one is Eric Vyncke and Mark Prior and Google and Cisco IPv6 lab. This data could be quite useful when you engage with your own members in your region or economy and this data will provide some indication where you are now, particularly in comparing with the other parts of the world.
If you click the next one, "IPv6 transition stories", this website provides you some anecdotal experience sharing conducted by different stakeholders. In this page particularly we focus on the technical stakeholders. ISP, mobile operators, content providers and the network equipment vendors. We gather this information in last couple of years through different technical forums and a lot of interesting information is available. This needs to be studied by actual people who deploy or who are deploying IPv6.
We gather that information. Obviously this page is not static. It will be a dynamic page. Whenever we have new information available, we put archive data into here for easy access and if you click next one, "IPv6 for governments", you can see APNIC has been engaging with individual governments or inter-governmental organizations very proactively in the last couple of years on IPv6.
There are so many interesting initiatives coming out from various different individual governments and some of the activities are presented at APNIC's past Conferences or APIPv6 Task Force's meeting and this data is archived.
In here, I picked up the authentic information links for various different government activities on IPv6, so in this page, currently, we have Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, Taiwan and US and also from inter-governmental organizations, like APEC SPC. Every one of them are authentic links and particularly like APEC and SPC, APNIC is heavily involved to contribute to increase their awareness, government's awareness towards IPv6, so that we can gain their support for the industry to transit onto IPv6.
If there are any economy's information which is very authentic information and not listed in here, please feel free to email me that data. I love to have those additional information into here.
Next page, if you click the "IPv6 Best Current Practices", this page is showing the current best practice information, particularly targeting the network operators who are deploying IPv6 or planning to deploy now or in the future.
As you know, the best current practices is not static information, it's dynamic and keeps evolving and we need to catch up with what is happening in the actual industry and operational field and reflect that new information into the best current practices pages as soon as possible, so that information, important information, will be widely shared amongst the technical community members to support their implementation on IPv6.
The next page is about the CGN, carrier grade NAT. There are many different types of carrier grade NAT, but this document specifically focuses on IPv4 to IPv4 platform carrier grade NAT. Sometimes we call this NAT444. If any network operator is just focusing on deploying NAT444 only and not deploying IPv6 transition technologies, it doesn't help them to transit to IPv6. If you are not deploying IPv6 simultaneously with NAT444 that is only extending IPv4's lifetime and it's not deploying IPv6, it's not extending the actual availability of IP in their network operations. That has a significant consequence, and any network operator who is making decision just deploying NAT444 needs to be informed so they can make an informed decision.
For that purpose, we develop this document and again this document will keep evolving too. That's the APNIC's new website.
Now I would like to conclude my presentation by talking about the way forward. The APNIC survey 2012 revealed collective input from Asia Pacific's Internet community. The respondents said clearly APNIC should step up efforts regarding IPv6 deployment and training.
The complete element what they said is best current practices information to be shared on IPv6, advice and consultation on v6 deployment, more practical hands-on training on IPv6 deployment and raise awareness amongst stakeholders in v6 and more facilitation with the community on v6.
Also, the respondents mentioned the reason why they come to APNIC Conferences, because they are interested in IPv6 Conference sessions and half and full-day tutorial and technical topics and multiple-day workshops with detailed content, and APNIC is responding for this kind of requests from the community.
So reflecting those communities input, the plans in 2013 for us is to increase more hands-on IPv6 training and providing engineering assistance on IPv6 deployment, constantly updating the newly updated just I introduce you, the new IPv6 website, with more complete real and tangible information that helps the technical community to move on and also outreach to the various stakeholders of the Internet community.
We keep providing the cutting edge IPv6 deployment stories from the field at the future APRICOT and APNIC Conferences. So I'm quite open to hear if you have any interesting suggestions. I want to hear this kind of stories, I want to learn from this kind of operators. If you have those kinds of interesting ideas, please feel free to email me or contact me. And we continue community outreach on IPv6. Thank you.
Frank Salanitri: Does anyone have any questions for Miwa?
Miwa Fujii: The next speaker is Frank. He will talk about quality management initiative.
Frank Salanitri: Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Miwa.
So ISO 9001 accreditation, it's an initiative that other RIRs have been looking at globally. We assessed it in December, in terms of the requirements and the work, what was involved and we decided to proceed. At the moment, as you'll see, the progress, we're in the stages of developing the QMS documentation.
What is ISO? The international governing body, the International Organization for Standardization. However, you might wonder where does this ISO come from? It was because the acronym was a little bit difficult or different in different countries, in different languages, so in English, the acronym was ISO, which doesn't roll off the tongue very well. In French, it's OIN, Organisation Internationale de Normalisation. So the founders of ISO decided to agree on ISIS, derived from Greek, meaning equal. This is where we get this ISO acronym from.
So there's many different series of standards. 9001 is the quality management system standards. The 14000 series is to do with environment and 18000 series is to do with health and safety.
You might ask, so where does the 2008 come from? The version of ISO 9001 that we're implementing, it's current as of 2008. Every six to seven years, they revise the standard, so the next one is due in about 2014, 2015, around then.
Why does an organization want this ISO 9001 certification? From a customer's point of view, if I'm dealing with that organization, I know that part of the standards, part of the philosophy of the standard encourages an organization to continually improve their performance and coordination. I know that ISO 9001 ensures greater focus on organizational objectives and expectations. It requires an organization to standardize procedures, so as to ensure the same service is delivered at the same standard every time. Of course, ISO 9001 gives an organization international recognition through the certification with an independent conformity assessment body.
What are the basic three principles of ISO 9001? It's about saying what you do, do what you say, improve it. The "say what you do" is about developing this quality management system or the documentation behind the system that's implemented in the organization. The "doing" is actually the implementation, the adoption of the quality process throughout day-to-day work. It's not just a manual that sits on the side. It's actually procedures, policies that are used every day in normal working processes.
The "proving it" is the records showing that you actually follow that quality management system. It's the records in the form of checklists and even records of non-conformity. There's nothing wrong with a process or something that has non-conformed, as long as we're able to record and show, yes, we're able to deal with these non-conformities, we can record them, discuss what went wrong and take corrective action.
Even the development of induction training, which includes aspects of the quality management system, that all goes to prove that we actually used that process.
The whole process, the role of the organization is certification. What we do, the first stage, which we are working on at the moment, is to develop and implement this quality management system. It's about looking at our policies, our procedures, all of our forms, our checklists and documenting them in the one place.
The next step will be conducting an internal audit. We have got an external consultant that is assisting us in this process. More than likely, he'll be conducting this audit to see how this quality management system reflects against what the organization is doing. From that, there will be of course findings and we'll action them and make appropriate corrections.
The fourth step is actually selecting a conformity assessment body. It's a third-party certification that will come into the organization. I'll talk about what a conformity assessment body is shortly. Of course, once we pass, it's matter of maintaining that quality system and undertaking annual audits from a conformity assessment body, CAB.
What's this third-party certification? The overall governing body in Australia/New Zealand is JAZ-ANZ. It's a government appointed accreditation body. They are responsible for providing accreditation and conformity assessment bodies in the fields of certification and inspection. JAZ accredits approximately 106 organizations and they in turn certify about 80,000 different companies, organizations in the region.
Of course, the organization itself, they're the ones who develop, implement, they do internal audits of the management system and they engage the CAB to do the audit and then of course the conformity assessment body comes in, conducts a third-party certification through their audits, annual audits.
The actual audit process. Initially, there is an audit, so they come in, they do an initial audit. You either pass or fail. If you fail, we review their recommendations, make adjustments, and get certified -- well, get audited again. Once we are certified, the certificate is issued for three years and there's annual what they call surveillance audits in the second and third years and then the certificate expires after the third year, and we go through another cycle again where we get re-audited from scratch.
What's the role of the conformity assessment body? They actually audit us against the ISO 9001 standard and there's five separate headings of the standard. It's about quality management system, which is basically the documentation that's required to support the ISO, the 9001 QMS. That's the actual manual itself, but then there's other headings. They look at management responsibility and the sorts of things that they look at is the commitment from management. It's not just something that's forced upon employees and managers have got no part in it. It has to be driven top-down from management down to the employees.
They look at how much we're customer focused. In our case, we don't have customers. We have replaced the word "customers" with "members". Our members are our customers. It looks at our quality policy, it looks at our planning process and looks at management review. Is management reviewing the process?
Another heading is "resource management". Resource management, we're talking about human resources, we're talking about infrastructure, we're talking about the work environment. How are the employees able to perform their job? Are they provided with the right tools, the right infrastructure?
Another heading is "product realization". We don't produce a product per se, more so we provide a service, the distribution of IP resources across our region. So we see it more as providing a service, not developing a product. But under that banner of product realization, there's customer-related processes. So they're looking at how well we perform our customer processes, the various procedures for requesting additional address space or the procedures for becoming a member.
They look at our purchasing procedures. So for example, for vendor evaluation, making sure that we do appropriate due diligence when selecting a vendor; we're not just selecting someone's friend, but we have actually gone through and assessed who they are, the service that they provide, whether they're ISO 9001 accredited or not.
They also look at product and service provision as well. The last heading, "measurement analysis and improvement", they talk about monitoring and measuring our performance. They talk about controlling. They look at controlling non-conformity, how we control non-conformity of products and services, analysis of data and ongoing improvement.
So it's a very comprehensive list of, I guess, separate areas of the organization that together build APNIC as an organization, a functioning organization.
What do they do in these audits? They actually look at the system as it's documented in the QMS to ensure that it's followed through by all employees. They don't just go around and talk to managers, they want to talk to the actual employees doing the job. Managers might think they know what their staff are doing, but it's the actual staff who do the job, they know what they do. It is those people that they're interested in talking to.
They want to ensure that the quality is part of the business process, it's not just a manual that people pull out when an audit comes around.
They say that a lot of organizations might try to implement ISO 9001 and they will succeed in the first year, but then in the second year when they come for an audit, everyone has gone back to their usual way of doing things, everyone has forgotten about the manual, and that's where they trip up and they fail in the second year.
Going back to that point where quality and the whole quality management system, the procedures, they need to be part of the day-to-day business process, not just an add-on.
Our implementation timeframe at the moment, between January to May we'll be developing the actual documentation for the QMS, doing staff training. In June we'll be doing an internal audit. After that, we'll take corrective actions. The results of the audit, we will then take away and adjust our documentation, and then finally in July, we will be going for the actual certification audit.
A lot of people have been asking me: how much work is involved? It sounds like a lot. In fact, what I reply is that, you know, APNIC already does a lot of this without realizing it. It's just matter of tying it all together in the one place. So I don't see it as an extreme long journeyed exercise that will take years to implement. Definitely not.
As I said, we already do a lot of it, in terms of the sorts of things that we do. Our member surveys, they are very customer/member focused, our whole management process, that's based on customer feedback, the procedures in place that, say, George Kuo in the help desk and Guangliang in member services, all of their procedures that they have in place to ensure that our members get the best possible service every time.
So in summary, in my opinion -- well, that's my opinion, at the moment, APNIC is a well managed, has an outstanding member focus, it also has existing policies and procedures. So, you know, for the first time we'll be able to merge all of these into the one quality management document and we'll be able to be audited and accredited by an independent body.
Next time I see you, hopefully in APNIC 36 -- I expect all of you to be there -- I won't have to say "in my opinion", I'll be able to say instead that I know and can rest assured that APNIC is well managed, with documented policies, procedures and strives to deliver good, consistent customer service, as APNIC will hopefully and I know it will be, ISO 9001 certified and will continue to maintain that certification every year for the added peace of mind and benefit of our members. Thank you.
Do you have any questions for me?
No. In that case I would like to hand over to George Kuo, who will be talking about local community engagement. Thank you.
George Kuo: Thanks, Frank. Good morning, all. I'm George Kuo from APNIC Member Services. I'm delighted to be able to share this activity with you all this morning. What I'll be talking about is the local community engagement activity that we are doing. Briefly, the overview of my talk would be sharing what it is the local community engagement, exactly what it is and what are the benefits to our membership, to APNIC members, what are the message that we are bringing to the community engagement and a little bit of update on what we have done so far and what's coming this year.
What is the local community engagement? Just reading from the words, it's part of the big umbrella of APNIC's external liaison and outreach program and so through this local community engagement, we are able to participate and support and engage in the events, local events, Internet related events and we know or you have been following the activity. We participate in a lot of events, for example it could be a local Internet affair, it could be some forum and we participate through, say, in the way of having a speaker there, we have an APNIC stand and often we go out with APNIC training team, which is a valuable part of it, so our trainers will be there to deliver the training and at the same time, meeting APNIC staff.
What I think makes the local community engagement stand out a little bit from the other liaison activity is it's very much APNIC member focused and the reason why is that, because when we visit or do the particular engagement, we actually would have a member gathering and prior to that, we would send invitations and ask the members to come and join us and meet us there and we would have a member briefing specifically for the members in that specific economy, community.
I will talk a little bit about that in the upcoming slide.
Benefits to the members, we know that a lot of our members are busy operating the business with what they do, getting their business going on a daily basis, so they won't have the luxury of time to follow all the updates, in terms of APNIC services and policy changes and so on. So it's a good opportunity for us to be able to bring that information to them and deliver it to them and be able to share and discuss with them.
It's also a great opportunity for them to meet APNIC staff. We know that a lot of our members may have regular contact with APNIC staff through email or phone call, but they never see the person. So there's that human touch there.
I'm sure a lot of you who attended the Conference, you are probably talking to someone, your colleague on the other side of the world or the other economies and finally you get to meet the person, you can really talk about some issues that you are passionate about or you like to share.
So that is a great opportunity for the members to give feedback directly to APNIC staff and be able to tell us what they think about our services, what their concerns are, maybe there's things they like to clarify with the first-hand information, so to speak.
Just to give you some example of the information, the message that we are taking with us. We know that post-IPv4 exhaustion, there's a lot of questions floating around about IPv4 transfer, how do we do that, will there be any problem or concern and so on. So that's a good opportunity for them to be able to ask the question and clarify their doubts or myth.
Also, we keep hearing a lot of or getting quite a lot of questions on: so post-v4 exhaustion, is there any more IPv4 left? That's also, again, the good opportunity for us to explain to those members our final /8 policy, how IPv4 address space is distributed under that policy and so on.
On IPv6, and as Miwa mentioned, we have our key messages we have been proactively participating in a lot of events and promos. Naturally, in these gatherings, we give them a little bit of information about, for example, APNIC lab activity and we often actually, in all this engagement, my experience is very positive feedback on those v6 measurement, the lab activities, and we also try to create awareness of -- it's very easy now for them to get IPv6 by the kick-start or one click initiative that we have.
On APNIC Services, of course we talked about the MyAPNIC portal. It's a portal for all the members to use and it's a good, again, opportunity for us to be able to ask them what they think about the features and whether they have any problem using it or whether they have any specific suggestions or feedback.
We also talked about the training programs that we have. Just making them aware we have the weekly eLearning for those who don't have the chance to attend training or we have not been able to visit all the places that we would like to go, and those people would be able to use the eLearning and have the learning in their own space and in their own time.
We also try to encourage our members to look at the accuracy of their contacts, in particular in Whois Database. We explain to them the importance and often we also get some questions back on what should be done and how to do things and so on.
In terms of the network abuse reporting, we also have been able to explain to them the importance and also encourage them to try to do the right thing and also at the same time, being able to explain to them exactly how they can do it and so on.
Throughout the face-to-face interaction, we have also been able to get to know more about the member and therefore, encourage them to update the contact database, so we are able to keep in touch with them and been able to update them, send them information or receive the input and updates from APNIC.
These are some key messages we are bringing to our members, of course depending on the specific events or at the particular time we may also add on some other topics and messages as well.
This is just a couple of pictures to share with you. So far we have been to Thailand for the outreach activity and this is the gathering and hello to those Thai members who may be watching this webcast.
Coming up in 2013, we already have got a few trips planned and I think the closest one will be in Indonesia in April. What we will be doing is we will be sending out the invitation to the members in the particular economy or community and invite them in advance to come and join us for a member briefing, so that will be a good opportunity for us to get to know each other better.
So do keep your contact updated and we also like to know if there's any events that you think that APNIC can participate in, do let us know. We would love to be able to come to you and visit you -- of course, provided that time permits and other factors are considered, but we would love to be able to join whenever we can.
So please do let us know if you have any particular local events that are interesting. With that, that's my report.
Any questions?
Okay. Thank you.
Frank Salanitri: Thank you, George. Next can I call Nurul Islam to give the eLearning update.
Nurul Islam Roman: All right. Good morning, everyone. My name is Nurul Islam Roman, I'm the senior training specialist in APNIC now. I'll be doing some training updates that APNIC does, as part of the membership benefit.
APNIC is doing these training activities since the beginning of APNIC in this region. Initially, APNIC used to do the policy specific training and then slowly we move towards delivering technical trainings and obviously from the feedback that we receive from our members.
So when we are developing our training content, we always try to focus on some training objectives. Our objective, apart from the technology content, we also focus towards the best current practices that our members can use to build and operate their Internet effectively.
The training activities that APNIC does, we usually do two types of training, delivery, so the first one is the face-to-face that we are doing since long back. We usually work with our host or sponsors on different economies. They help us to kind of arrange some training venues and arrange the catering. We go there and send trainers and do interactive training with our members, engineers and also those who are not our members can also come. That face-to-face training is one way of delivering APNIC training.
The other one is eLearning which we have started since 2008 or 2009. This eLearning training is also become very, very popular. In eLearning training, what we do, we have a media room in the APNIC office, so from the media room we do the live webcast, and the members, you know, or the engineers who need to kind of watch the webcast, they just make themselves available and then log in to the website and they can watch the training or eLearning.
In face-to-face training, we do two types of training. One is tutorial. Tutorial is normally in a shorter version training, one or two days. That includes mostly the presentation and sometimes we do demos in some technology implementation. Sometimes we discuss the case studies, how they can deploy technology into their networks.
In workshop, we kind of spend more time, in five days or three days version and we bring our labs, so that members like what we present of what we teach them, they also can get some practice and hands-on knowledge from there. That is what our workshop in face to face, so that's two type of face-to-face training that we have.
Obviously those are subsidised in terms of cost. We have three cost structures for that training. It's based on the economic scale of different economies that we have in our region.
ELearning, when we do eLearning, we try to target different time zones, because from Australia, when we do the live webcast, we have on the east some economies, those who are ahead of APNIC time zone and some economies on the west, they are behind APNIC or Australian time zone and we have our south-east Asian economies, for example, Singapore, Bangkok, they are slightly like plus/minus with Australian standard time.
We target when we do eLearning different time zone, so that from different part of APNIC region, the engineers, they can make themselves available and participate in the online training.
We cover a number of topics, so IPv6 is one of the very popular ones. Routing is also and then we do our normal Internet resource management that is very APNIC specific policy and procedures.
Our eLearning training is free of cost, so we don't charge anything for eLearning. We do eLearning like each day we run three sessions and each session with one hour duration. So we can accommodate maximum 50 participants in that platform, and in future, if we need, we can increase that number of content participants.
As you can see on the presentation, this is sort of the front-end look when participants log in for the eLearning, they get this sort of interface and then the presenter, who is at the corner, they present the content.
We're using the same kind of platform that we're using in APNIC meeting to do the webcast.
In our eLearning, we do a number of courses, so that includes our IRM, which is APNIC specific, and then we do IPv6, DNS routing and security and all. If you can go into our website, you can get further detail information of all the eLearning training that we do. You can just make yourself available if you think any of the content is interesting you.
From 2013, we are targeting to do the eLearning every Wednesday. So every Wednesday, in a month, we do the eLearning webcast. As I said, we will do three sessions on Wednesday. The new content that is coming in our eLearning webcast is cryptography and IPsec.
I would advise, if you are interested to participate in any of the eLearning training, so that is our eLearning training schedule, www.training.apnic.net/elearning. You can see all those training schedules. We publish those training three months ahead, so the next three months, what is the training that has been scheduled, you can have a look, register for that and make yourself available.
Apart from the training, the new initiative that our eLearning and development team is doing, they customize on-demand training for our members. Sometimes we get requests from our members, like can we do a customized training for them for their engineers. Yes, we can do now. We have done some pilot training last year and it was successful. So we can customize the training, depending on the requirement from our members. It could be DNS, it could be routing, it could be IPv6 security, we can do that.
All the customized training are obviously cost recovery based, so we'll just send some cost that is involved for that customized training, and that needs to be covered by the member who needs a customized training.
Apart from the customized training, other activities that we are doing which is post-training engineering assistance. When you go for training, like face-to-face training in different economy, we get requests from our members, can we help them to kind of optimize their network. Trainers who are available on site, they do some sort of informal consultancy with them during lunch or tea break, so we got lots of requests from our members.
Then we have kind of formalized this post-training engineering assistance, so if needed, we can stay back after the training and help our trainer to optimize their network. That is what we call post-training engineering assistance and that also works on cost recovery basis. If the trainers, need to stay a couple of days more, probably this part and logistics need to be covered by the member, who need the post-training engineering assistance.
To add values in our training delivery, we have a lab like physical lab that we have in Brisbane. So two 32U racks full of routers, switches and servers, that we use to kind of develop our training content, all those technical content, we do test on that lab and then based on that, we develop our training content and then hands-on exercises. Some places where Internet quality is good, we use that remote lab to do all those training activities. Some places we carry the virtual lab. So we build the whole physical lab in a virtual environment on a small computer and that lab we can carry with us. So in some places where Internet is not that good, we can use that virtual lab, make it available from the network and the participants can make use of it.
The virtual lab can be used for our purpose as well, so we are building our training partners in different part, so with the training partners, we kind of provide that virtual lab contents and all, so that they can do the training locally with assistance from APNIC.
This is how we'll try to kind of reach the coverage of our training delivery. If anyone is interested about hosting or training or building a kind of training partnership with APNIC, just talk to any of our staff, then we can put in touch with the right person.
From this year, we are introducing our new training website, that is much easier to navigate. We have a focus when we develop our new training website, our members can get access to the training information by using a very few clicks, like one or two clicks, they can get the required information. This is how we are trying to build our new training website.
Content will be organised on the training website and we're also building archives on the training website. What about the past training that we did? All those materials, pictures, reports, even like lab. Everything will be available on the archive. This is how we are trying to build our new training website.
Obviously, it's continuous improvement, we'll try to add more content so the training website can be a good resource for our members to get all that information from APNIC website.
Some statistics, what we did last year. In face-to-face training, we did 73 training courses in our region and this covered 33 cities in Asia Pacific and 25 economies. Our training, face-to-face training in terms of participation, it has increased 30 per cent and in terms of coverage, we cover 9 per cent more training than the previous year. We have trained around 2,347 engineers in 2012 in face-to-face training.
In eLearning training, we cover 19 courses, we have increased our sessions by 22 per cent, participants has increased by 19 per cent and we have trained around 932 participants in eLearning last year. As on the slide, we have delivered training on those topics that we have on the slide.
That's it. That's the update that we have from training team. Are there any questions?
If not, then thank you very much.
Frank Salanitri: That is the last presentation for this morning. We're running a little bit early. So please feel free to go outside and help yourself to morning tea.
The next session in here will start at 11.00. It will be the continuation of Policy SIG from yesterday. Thank you.