Hi all, I have had verbal confirmation from John Russell of IHUG and Andy Miller of Xtra that IHUG and Xtra are keen to participate in an exchange at the Sky Tower. Between us, CLEAR, IHUG and Xtra should bring a significant amount of Auckland traffic to the exchange, and make it well worth joining. CLEAR hopes to have packet access to the 48th floor in the tower within the next four weeks, ready to peer with anybody else who cares to join us. The reason for choosing the 48th floor is that it turns out another project within CLEAR had already funded a cabinet there, so it's a handy place for us :) For those who took the tour the other day, the 48th floor is one of the glass-walled floors, ideal for radio shots back to home base without the planning approval that's required for external antennas. If the 48th floor turns out to be wildly inconvenient for anybody else we can always trunk our connection elsewhere. To talk about pricing either dedicated cabinets or space in community cabinets on the 48th floor, Warren Harding's your man: 025 338-392, 09-306-1599x706, warren(a)jda.co.nz. On a related note, I will be talking to Steve Donnohy of Sky City about the ground-level (well, basement) colo facilities in the building, in case it makes sense to do something down there. If anybody else has a desparate itch to attend the discussions, drop me a note (I'm meeting Steve at 9am, Friday 9 April). I will summarise whatever I find out to the list in any case. I am also on the lookout for someone to donate a switch to the exchange (if anybody has any pointers, please let me know). In the mean time, and at least to get things started, CLEAR will have 10baseT switch ports available on the 48th floor. Longer term I suspect someone will want to sell them rather than give them away, but I'm certainly happy to look elsewhere while people string cat5 into the cabinet to get things running :) Most importantly of all, we can't possibly start peering at the Sky Tower unless we have a cool name for the exchange. Sky-IX? MAE-Auckland? Sky-NAP? Mmm. "The Tallest Internet Exchange in the World" :) Joe --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog