NetActuate was represented at this year’s Global Peering Forum (GPF) by Kate Gerry, our Director of Global Networking. The event took place at the Marriott San Juan, starting with a meet and greet at 5PM, providing a platform for discussions with network representatives from over 35 countries.
The forum’s schedule was packed, beginning with an insightful presentation from Jeff Brandt at the Puerto Rico Internet Exchange (PRIX). Jeff discussed PRIX’s role as a community-supported internet exchange and its status as the region’s largest IX. His talk also covered the expected growth steps, including increased connectivity between islands.
Following the keynote, sessions included updates from PeeringDB on their Admin Committee and a discussion by John Brown from Team Cymru on the importance of implementing security procedures such as BCP38 and the distributed Remote-Trigger BlackHole system. These measures are vital for preventing DDOS attacks across the internet.
The “peering personals” segment allowed Internet Exchange Providers to share updates and benefits of expanding into their regions. Kate then moved into a series of one-on-one meetings with representatives from Airtel, Cogent, JPIX, Cloudsmash, Arelion, MorePeering, Cloudsmash, and Sunbreak Electronics, discussing current partnerships and potential collaborations.
On Tuesday, Kate attended a TeleGeography update, which offered the latest data sets to help update our expansion roadmap. Conversations followed with representatives from Verisign, NTT, Hurricane Electric, BICS, colocation providers in Mexico and Northern Germany, Telecom Argentina, and Amazon AWS.
The event continued with a social dinner at the Antiguo Casino in Old San Juan, where discussions focused on the week’s learnings and future collaborations.
The conference concluded with talks on current industry issues, including a significant presentation on the challenges between AWS and Subspace by Alejandro from Telecom Argentina. Following this, Ben from WorkOnline discussed the latest IETF drafts important to the internet community, touching on topics such as BGP (draft-ietf-idr-bgp-sendholdtimer) and routing security (draft-ietf-sidrops-aspa-profile, draft-ietf-sidrops-aspa-verification, and draft-ietf-sidrops-rfc6482bis).
Post-conference, Kate engaged in discussions with WorkOnline about the ongoing fiber cuts in Africa and the Middle East, AMS-IX about their remote-IX extension for NetNod, and Zenlayer about their Cloud and network solutions. A final meeting with NTT addressed recent network challenges they faced.
After GPF, Kate traveled back, with insights on the evolving internet infrastructure, reinforcing NetActuate’s dedication to leveraging these learnings for our BGP anycast network strategies and customer solutions. We anticipate further engaging with these developments and exploring new opportunities at next year’s GPF in Denver, Colorado.
Some photos from the event:
