The Pacific Network Operators Group

PacNOG was established initially as a mailing list for ISP operations engineers in the Pacific region who participated in the ISP Routing Workshop held prior to the APNIC 18 conference in Nadi, Fiji in August 2004.

PacNOG's History

A Network Routing Workshop for ISPs was held at the Tanoa International Hotel in Nadi, Fiji, in August 2004 in what was to be the fore-runner for the PacNOG meetings. The Workshop was made possible because APNIC 18 was being held in the Pacific for the first time, in August 2004, at the Sheraton Denarau. Given that the APNIC 18 event was to be held in the Pacific, Dr Philip Smith of Cisco Systems CTO Consulting Engineering Group proposed running an ISP Routing Workshop for the network operators in the Pacific who were planning to attend APNIC 18. Savenaca Vocea of APNIC proposed the opportunity of the workshop to PITA (Fred Christopher).

Led by Dr Philip Smith, the Workshop was held at the Tanoa International Hotel in Nadi, and hosted by PITA in conjunction with the PITA-APT Regional ICT Meeting and other technical PITA events around that time.

Fellowship to attend this workshop was available for all Pacific Islands and was provided by ITU.

There were 26 attendees at the Routing Workshop, from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Tuvalu, Tonga, Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, New Caledonia, Samoa, Federated States of Micronesia, Niue and Vanuatu. The three members of the APNIC Training Team also took part (Miwa Fujii, Champika Wijayatunga and John H'ng).

At the end of the workshop, and following the extremely positive feedback from the participants, Philip, Save and Fred proposed creating a mailing list so that the participants could keep in touch after the workshop, and promised to investigate ways of holding more training events of this nature. This mailing list was set up as the PacNOG mailing list, leading to the creation of the Pacific Network Operators Group.

Hence the PacNOG community commonly referring to the workshop held prior to APNIC 18 as PacNOG 0.