APANA Sydney Annual Report for 2001
Prepared by John August and Craig Dewick
Presented to Members at the 2001 APANA National Annual General Meeting
The past year has seen APANA Sydney in financial crisis, with little assistance from our landlord, or from the rising costs charged by Telstra for ISDN and other mandatory services needed to handle member's permanent links and dial ins to member-access sites.
which was held at Sydney University on Saturday, August 11th, 2001Membership levels have dropped. This seems to be mostly due to a larger number of members leaving (presumably) to join commercial ISP's for cheap access to high-speed modem dial-in and cable/dsl services that we are unable to provide due to the high costs of dedicated digital access servers and the required telco services to feed into them.
Nevertheless, the core of active members (especially the current RC) is continuously improving in ability to deal with hardware and other issues that arise. More involvement from more people in APANA Sydney would be nice, but we are coping reasonably well, and the contribution from the admin group and committee has been great.
A number of major infrastructure changes took place during the last 12 months:
Another initiative we have started is training workshops with an internet and/or networking focus:
- - We changed upstream ISP from Telstra BigPond to Goanna Internet formerly SGT),
- - We installed and commissioned several Netcomm ProRack modem arrays that were donated by Nick Andrew of Zeta Internet (not part of Pacific Internet). These modem racks replaced the array of individual member-owned modems and give much higher levels of reliability for member's permanent link connections to the hub,
- - Craig Dewick established an ISDN-based link between his network that contains Jedi) to the Sydney hub to work out limitations on analogue modem connects caused by Telstra's exchange equipment at Waterfall. In the last few months he successfully upgraded his link to work at 128 kbps via a pair of Cisco 1003 routers using untimed data-over-voice calls with Telstra's Onramp Home Highway service used for the ISDN line at the far end of the link.
On other fronts, we are almost ready to modify the configuration of our main ISDN-based PPP link to our upstream ISP so we can draw on Craig's success with untimed data-over-voice calls using Onramp Home Highway, which will further lower our recurring costs. This will involve Telstra changing our outgoing ISDN line at the hub from a TS-013 based Microlink to an ETSI-based Onramp Home Highway service sometime in the near future.
- - Recently, we have conducted an HTML course in conjunction with Community Activist Technology Sydney (CAT), and David Fisher and myself have attended CAT's activist fair, where there was very healthy interest in APANA.
- - We plan to run Perl/Linux courses in the near future.
An extra benefit of the change to ORHH and the ability to reduce the Telstra-side costs of our ISDN to very low levels is that we have pursued and now secured a deal from our current upstream service provider to upgrade our Internet feed from 64 to 128 kbps once the ORHH conversion is done. We have decided to stick with our existing provider for the 128 kbps + DoV upgrade after considering similar offers from other providers.
Another plan we're considering is to perhaps co-locate with CAT in a rent for bandwidth type swap, but we need to wait to see where CAT relocates too. If this does not happen, we will look at alternate arrangements for accommodation.
The unfortunate side effect of having to relocate would be the costs to re-establish all the Telstra services, etc. At present this is not economically feasible until recurring costs for the main ISDN link are reduced significantly, and a solution is found to attract more new members into the fold.
During the year we tried paid advertisements in various publications (for example, we ran an ad for three consecutive months in 'Computer Market' magazine), but these have been largely unsuccessful; the activist fair and other grass-roots exposure seems like it will be a much better way of doing things, but there is still a place for low-cost paid advertising if it's well-targetted.
We have also introduced fees for the hosting of websites, email services, etc. for non-profit organisations (.org.au or .org mostly). The Sydney Speleological Society is a group that has joined the APANA Sydney network, and we are optimistic about more coming on board.
Craig Dewick has started an initiative with Jedi to offer extra services that will allow the construction of more dynamic websites. These services will include SQL and PHP as a starting point, with more extensions planned for the future. Hopefully this will be an attractive feature to other non-profit organisations that are looking for more than just a simple website hosting service.
It would be foolhardy to ignore the fact that as the Internet matures, it's becoming a more dynamic and interactive environment, so non-profit organisations will want to take advantage of that just like commercial organisations. APANA Sydney is in a good position to capitalise on the growing maturity by offering extra services on top of the basic membership options.
These service extensions, combined with other initiatives such as the workshops being conducted with CAT, should hopefully result in a significant turnaround in membership numbers, and a consequential improvement in our region's financial position in concert with reductions in the costs for the main ISDN link, over the next 6 to 12 months.
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