In an era where technology trends are dominated by AI, cloud computing, and software development, network engineering—the backbone of our digital infrastructure—has fallen from the spotlight. This keynote addresses the critical challenge of attracting and developing the next generation of network engineers while making sure current teams remain competitive in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.

Drawing from real-world experience and industry trends, we'll explore effective strategies for making network engineering appealing to young talent, demonstrate practical approaches for mentorship and skill development of early in career engineers, and discuss how to bridge the gap between classical networking fundamentals and emerging technologies. IT leaders and senior engineers will leave with actionable frameworks for talent development and concrete methods to showcase the continuing relevance and excitement of network engineering in today's technology landscape.

This presentation is about understanding one of the key frustrations of internet users—slow DNS response times—and how routing inefficiencies contribute to high latency. We’ll explore how keeping DNS traffic local can vastly help improve user experience, reduce delays, and increase security.

Using data from RIPE Atlas and measurements of AuthDNS, we’ll show how additional localised anycast points of presence help avoid unnecessary global routing, making DNS faster and more efficient.

By examining real-world measurements and discussing tools like RIPE Atlas and RIS, we’ll highlight practical steps network operators can take to optimise DNS performance and keep traffic local.

This presentation is based on this analysis by Anand Buddhdev.

This presentation explores how ISPs can leverage IP Address Management (IPAM) systems as a Source of Truth (SoT) for automation workflows driven by Ansible.

By centralizing network data such as IP addresses, VLANs, and device configurations within IPAM, ISPs can ensure accurate and consistent deployments across a multi-vendor environment. The presentation focuses on practical implementations, featuring examples of automating Mikrotik routers, Huawei switches, Juniper MX480, and Cisco NCS routers.

Key highlights include:

Dynamic generation of configurations directly from IPAM data. Automated deployment of simple queues, VLANs, and interface settings using Ansible playbooks.

Real-world scripts for updating bandwidth policies on Mikrotik devices. Best practices for integrating IPAM and Ansible in large-scale ISP operations.

This paper introduces the basic concepts of coherent optical technology to non-Transmission operators, who are very likely to encounter coherent pluggables or equipment as their bandwidth needs grow to 100G and beyond, in the coming years.

This talk outlines current IETF activities on modelling, use-cases, and control of “small form factor coherent optical pluggables” inside packet devices (Routers), encapsulating all significant properties of optical pluggable. It further delves into initiatives related to use-cases driven by network operators and multi-layer multi-vendor SDN controller for such network.

Various standard organizations like IETF, OpenConfig, OIF, ITU-T, T-API, and TIP have started addressing this. The IETF's objective is to scrutinize the work of these standardization bodies, focusing on capabilities, configuration, and telemetry data of the packet over optical network to establish a comprehensive set of pluggable attributes. The goals also include various options for life cycle management of coherent pluggable in a multi-vendor multi-layer IP over DWDM networks.

In an era of rapid technological advancement, the world of cybersecurity is facing an unprecedented challenge: the rise of quantum computing. Traditional encryption methods, once considered impregnable, may soon be vulnerable to quantum threats, posing significant risks to our digital security. In this session, we will delve into the exciting realm of quantum-resistant encryption and why quantum computing poses a threat to current security systems. The session also delves into the details of solutions available today and the long-term approach.In this session, attendees will:

• Understand the impact of quantum computing to cryptography and how it impacts network security
• Understand the need to act now to make your networks future-proof from quantum computers
• Understand current solutions to safeguard the networks from quantum threats

In an era of rapid technological advancement, the world of cybersecurity is facing an unprecedented challenge: the rise of quantum computing. Traditional encryption methods, once considered impregnable, may soon be vulnerable to quantum threats, posing significant risks to our digital security. In this session, we will delve into the exciting realm of quantum-resistant encryption and why quantum computing poses a threat to current security systems. The session also delves into the details of solutions available today and the long-term approach.In this session, attendees will:

• Understand the impact of quantum computing to cryptography and how it impacts network security
• Understand the need to act now to make your networks future-proof from quantum computers
• Understand current solutions to safeguard the networks from quantum threats

We (the network operators) depend on optical stuff everywhere, that is the modern glue to stuff we run. But most of us are now running all the same kinds of signals down the optical transceivers. As part of my need to "Trust, but verify" I wanted to check my assumptions on how the signalling end of modern SFP optics worked, so join me in a adventure of sending weird signals many kilometres, and maybe set some records for the most wasteful bandwidth utilisation of optical spectrum in 2024!

Customers detect the network problem then we troubleshoot. Operators repeatedly encounter this issue over time. Why legacy network performance monitoring solutions cannot detect the application experience?

The network fabric is built on top of IP. The nature of IP is ECMP (i.e., there are many ECMP Path between the edge nodes that connect our customers). Legacy network performance monitoring solutions cannot measure the customer experience due to the lack of scale to measure all ECMP Paths and relying on metric such as min/max/average which doesn’t reflect the experience of all customers.

In this talk we explain the various challenges to measure IP networks and explain the proposed solution to overcome these challenges.

Developing Internet resilience requires considering multiple significant factors, not just the speed of your Internet connection or your connectivity footprint. These factors need to also include the underlying utility that supports all industries—electricity. This is becoming particularly important for countries in South East Asia which are rapidly increasing their data center footprint to support its growing ICT and Internet service industry.

In this session, we will discuss the resilience measures that the power, Internet, and data center industries are taking and how we must collaborate more closely to strengthen each other's resilience and sustainability.

BGP is the de facto inter-domain routing protocol to ensure global connectivity of the Internet. However, various reasons, such as deliberate attacks or misconfigurations, could cause BGP routing anomalies. Traditional methods for BGP routing anomaly detection require significant manual investigation of routes by network operators. Although machine learning has been applied to automate the process, prior arts typically impose significant training overhead (such as large-scale data labeling and feature crafting), and only produce uninterpretable results. To address these limitations, we present a routing anomaly detection system centering around a novel network representation learning model named BEAM. The core design of BEAM is to accurately learn the unique properties (defined as routing role) of each Autonomous System (AS) in the Internet by incorporating BGP semantics.

As a result, routing anomaly detection, given BEAM, is reduced to a matter of discovering unexpected routing role churns upon observing new route announcements. We implement a prototype of our routing anomaly detection system and extensively evaluate its performance. The experimental results, based on 18 real-world RouteViews datasets containing over 11 billion route announcement records, demonstrate that our system can detect all previously-confirmed routing anomalies, while only introducing at most five false alarms every 180 million route announcements. We also deploy our system at a large ISP, China Telecom, to perform real-world detection for one month. During the course of deployment, our system detects 497 true anomalies in the wild with an average of only 1.65 false alarms per day.

This presentation will given an overview of testing methodologies and how they can be applied to network operational use-cases. A live-ish demo will be used to highlight how operators can use open-source, Python testing frameworks to codify and pipeline network changes and improve success rates with declarative, repeatable and reliable testing processes.

It has been over 20 years since the publication of RFC 3535, and more than a decade since the introduction of key management protocols and models like NETCONF, RESTCONF, and YANG. These innovations have significantly shaped network management practices, but it is now an opportune moment to reflect on their evolution and assess how well they align with the current needs of the operator community.

This presentation delves into the outcomes of the IAB’s “Next Era of Network Management Operations” (NEMOPS) workshop held in December. It will explore the historical context of network management specifications defined by the IETF, key insights and takeaways from the workshop, and their implications for the future.

Finally, the presentation will conclude with a call to action for the APRICOT operator community, encouraging active engagement in shaping the next era of network management.

DDOS attacks are becoming very common against network operators. They are many mitigation techniques at the network layer. This talk aims to show a unique and effective method using fingerprint technology across the whole stack and also its use in client side and server side technologies.

About how I tested with open source tools and tried something else while searching for a solution to one problem

In this session, we will explore the fundamentals and advancements in Passive Optical Network (PON) technology, a key enabler of modern FTTx networks. We'll begin with an introduction to what PON is and trace its evolution over time. We’ll break down the essential components of a PON network and dive into the conventional PON architecture, examining critical aspects of PON Network and then moving to Understanding the working principles of Traditional PON. With the stage set we will explore the new routed PON architecture, a significant shift in how PON networks are being designed for greater scalability and flexibility. WDM PON and the new technology of Digital Sub Carrier based NG-PON is also explained. Finally, we'll discuss the benefits of the new advancements in architecture, emphasizing how these innovations are shaping the future of fiber-optic networks. This session is for anyone interested in learning about the evolution of PON and its role in the next generation of broadband connectivity.

This is a journey path where Telekom Malaysia decided to pursue RPKI as part of the new protection mechanism.

It covers on the introduction of RPKI, the journey and challenges to deploy.

A simple deck that breaks down the basic components that make up a submarine cable system.

We seen to have lost our way - some twenty years ago there was a clear common purpose that we were performing a transition to take the Internet from IPv4 to IPv6. The registry stocks of free IPv4 addresses had been depleted and the Internet was clearly running on empty. The projections of growth in digital devices were unrelenting and the introduction of mobile devices such as the iPhone increased the urgency of this transition. Only IPv6 could save the Internet.

Twenty years later we are still in transition. IPv4 remains the dominant IP protocol for the majority of the Internet's users and few if any large scale service providers are ready to move to an IPv6-only platform. It seems that we have settled down to operate a dual-stack Internet that is permanently 'in transition'. How did we end up at this unexpected place? Why has IPv4 lasted way past any rational expectation of its useful lifetime? How has the architecture Internet changed such that any urgency of this IPv6 transition has largely abated? This presentation will explore some possible answers to these questions and in so doing will raise some deeper and somewhat scarier questions about the future of public digital networks that underpin the digital world's communications needs.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the premier standards development organisation for the Internet. It makes voluntary standards that are often adopted by Internet users, network operators, and equipment vendors, and it thus helps shape the trajectory of the Internet's development. With the upcoming IETF meeting set to take place in Bangkok, the panel would spotlight the need for fostering meaningful participation from the region and especially from the operator community.

Diversity in voices is essential for creating globally relevant standards that address the unique challenges faced by different regions, and to ensure these standards meet the specific requirements of your network and make the Internet work better, active participation is crucial. While APAC’s involvement in the IETF has grown in recent years, participation remains uneven, with significant underrepresentation from certain countries and operator communities. Despite having the largest and most diverse internet user base, the region continues to lag in active participation.

This panel will explore strategies to bridge these gaps, amplify operator perspectives, and encourage broader regional engagement to ensure the Internet evolves to meet the needs of all its users.

Measuring Internet connectivity helps us understand everyday performance and how it changes during specific events, including outages.Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) offer a unique vantage point into local Internet connectivity, which is traditionally difficult to measure using global measuring systems. For this reason, IXPs have the potential to help network operators and decision-makers understand local connectivity at a country, district, or city level. While some IXPs provide static traffic snapshots, others don't make any data available.In this session, we will discuss the challenges and opportunities for developing an open, standardized measuring system that IXPs can contribute to.

Routing security continues to be one of the most important areas in network operations. The industry is making steady progress in implementing routing security controls and in particular adoption of technologies based on RPKI. Yet, obstacles exist, both for large and small network operators, that slow down the adoption. Many of the challenges pertain to scale and topology of a network, customer demand, but barriers also result from a lack of coordination.

During the session the participants will share their experience in addressing the challenges mentioned above.

This talk documents Pakistan’s decade long journey in bringing together and encouraging local networks to peer and interconnect with each other, in an effort to keep local traffic local to improve end user experience, and in the long term, to attract global Internet companies to setup shop in Pakistan.

Since the first IXP workshop conducted by Dr.Philip Smith (NSRC) in 2016 and the launch of PKIX Islamabad in 2017, PKIX has now has presence in Karachi (2019) and Lahore (2023), with Multan location planned for 2025.

Pakistan is open for business is the key takeaway for global Internet companies and organisations.