Building a nationwide carrier for <$1M - war stories & lessons learned

From 2006 to 2010, Jonny and Tim were part of a small engineering team that built New Zealands 3rd nationwide telecommunications network, laying multiple thousand …

From 2006 to 2010, Jonny and Tim were part of a small engineering team that built New Zealand’s 3rd nationwide telecommunications network, laying multiple thousands of kilometers of fibre and lighting up a DWDM transmission and MPLS telco network. They did this with 58 POPs on under $1M of routing equipment, while scaling to take a significant proportion of the internet traffic in the country. Requiring a fairly large amount of “creative engineering” and some Kiwi ingenuity, they’ll talk about how they managed to pull this off, some of the lessons learned, pitfalls, and hilarious stories involved in this achievement.