The Story of New Zealand's Internet

Transcription

John Houlker – Sector Manager – ICT, New Zealand Trade & Enterprise

“Initially folks at the Internet Engineering Task Force looked upon what we were doing as foolish. Actually in the early days they told me it was impossible. They said that on the packet net XXXX (0:11) you can’t do volume charging. I couldn’t understand why we couldn’t so I had one of our programming team write up some code to do it and it was pretty easy. And when the IETF folks found out we had done it, they thought we were just foolish. But it was about a year or so later that folks in the Chilean academic and research network also had similar problems with funding their network and looked at adopting our approach. Thereupon, folks in the IETF were very upset and there were emails going around that ‘the poison from New Zealand is spreading’. But given enough time I can explain why we did it and, in a sense, our volume caps today are part of the same issue.”