Asia-Pacific's bringers of backbone bandwidth for broadband networks are congregating in the capital

Wellington is hosting a large number of Internet people, techies, administrators and decision makers, for the bi-annual Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre conference. The organisation behind the event is abbreviated as APNIC;  it is the member-led organisation that is our Regional Internet Registry (RIR), one of five in the world.

The others are:

• ARIN (North America)
• LACNIC (Latin America and the Caribbean)
• RIPE NCC (Europe)
• AFRINIC (Africa)

RIRs provide a range of services for its members, which are organisations that have their own networks. This includes Internet service providers (ISPs), data centre operators, banks, telcos, and similar, as well as local registries at the national level.

Through APNIC, they can apply for Internet Protocol (IP) address allocations which are groups of numbers allowing computers to find each other on the greatest general purpose communications network humanity has ever devised. I mean the Internet.

APNIC does several other things as well, like technical training and advocacy for Internet interests in the Asia-Pacific.

Long story short, without RIRs like APNIC, the Internet would be a very different beast to what it is today and arguably not anywhere near as well and tidily run.

The organisation has grown into its role since it was founded in 1993, and New Zealand was active in APNIC from the start. In fact, Auckland was in the running among the nine APAC cities to be the headquarters of APNIC. However, Brisbane was more keen, with Queensland offering tax breaks and the cost of living was lower so that's where APNIC's been domiciled since it started.

To say that APNIC and other RIRs play a crucial role in the running of the Internet would be a huge understatement. That role however, isn't usually directly visible to end-users on the Internet. As a consequence, few people outside the technical Internet community, are aware of APNIC and the work it does.

The Asia-Pacific is a huge area, with lots of economies (56) and people doing Internet-related work. This year, 351 attendees are in Wellington for APNIC 58.

There's much to go through at each conference, and APNIC 58 in Wellington is eight days long, packed with workshops, talks, and importantly, social functions. In real life, not virtual ones, thank goodness. 

Wellington's also the APNIC conference in which the organisation's new director general, Jia Rong Low, eases into the role he assumed this year. Low succeeded Paul Wilson who served in that role for 25 years at APNIC, and prior, spent 11 years with Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which is another important organisation that's involved in the running of our "intarwebs". 

If you're interested in things Internet (like why it's cool to spell it with a capital I instead of internet, both of which are valid names but mean slightly different things), routing, addressing, governance, performance monitoring and generally learning new things from some really smart people, you could do a lot worse than attending one of the APNIC conferences.

There's way more than that though, because humans do, err, interesting things. For example, I met Virgil Griffith, a crypto currency developer at one APNIC conference which was very interesting. Some years after that meeting, I learnt that Virgil had gone to North Korea to show the regime there what to do with crypto, which was a bad idea. I think he's still in prison in the US.