Biography:
Bill Campbell is one of the founding members of TorIX along with Vince Mammoliti, Jason Lixfeld and Jim Mercer. He has been in the Canadian Internet business since the early 90s starting off with Internet Direct; later creating Tucows and then Hostopia. He was Ernst and Young's Entrepreneur of the year in 2005.

He has a lot of solid board experience including serving on the first TorIX board of directors, serving on the board of two public companies and on the board of several private companies.

Election:
Bill Campbell is for an independent Canadian controlled TorIX.

Biography:
Bill is the CTO of Telnet Communications, a growing CLEC and ISP operating in the Greater Toronto Area of Canada. Bill has over 14 years of experience in the ISP and telecommunications industry with expertise not only in technology but also regulatory and business processes.
Bill has spent his entire career working for Telnet Communications since he founded the company in 1996 after attending Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada. In his current role, Bill's responsibilities include the design, deployment, and operation of all aspects of Telnet's network and overseeing Telnet's application development department.

Bill currently serves on the TorIX Board of Directors. In addition, Bill also serves on the ARIN Advisory Council, and is a member of the MetaSwitch User's Board which liaises between all MetaSwitch customers worldwide and MetaSwitch's engineering department and executives. Bill's group governance experience is rounded out by his position as Vice President of the Whitby Dunlops Senior AAA Hockey Club.

Outside of work Bill enjoys hockey, rugby, scuba diving, and piloting his Cessna aircraft to exotic destinations around North America and the Caribbean.

Election:
I am honoured to be nominated and stand for re-election to the TorIX Board of Directors.

As TorIX continues it's rapid growth it faces many hurdles and challenges. I am proud of the work that that current board has accomplished since the last election but there is still much hard work to be done. If re-elected I look forward to working hard with the other board members and the community to solve these challenges and to ensure that the exchange continues to flourish and operate with the high levels of stability and efficiency that the members expect.

I believe that the members should be consulted and updated regularly on all matters relating to the exchange whether they are operational, technical, financial or otherwise. It is through these regular consultations with the member community that the board can ensure that the wishes and concerns of the members are adequately addressed.

Please feel free to contact me at 905-409-5228 or email me at bill@sandiford.com if you have any questions or wish to discuss the issues that face TorIX now and into the future.

Biography:
Like most of us geeks, I've playing with computers since I was but a wee lad. For me, it was early on in public school where I was using the PET and the C64. The first computer I had at home was a C64, then in 1989 I pleaded with my dad to buy me one of those smoking hot new 486 machines with a US Robotics Courier 16.8 Dual Standard for my birthday. The BBS thing was where it was at. There was this cool group of folks who called themselves Razor 1911 or something like that. I really wanted to join, because being a part of anything with the word Razor in it would surely get me chicks, right? We talked all /<-r4d 371t3 and drew sigs in ASCII, but still got beat up in school. Ah, those were the days!
In the early 90s, I got a job working at a computer store and they had a BBS as a side project that they were trying to Internet'ify. That whole idea of now only having to dial into a local BBS to talk to my friends around the world was a much more cost effective way of doing things. That sure saved me money on phone bills! Dialing into Europe and the US for hours every day cost me a fortune! Too bad there was never a way to make LD calls for free! Now that would have been Phreak-y!

In 1994, having spent a couple of years working at this computer store, I thought that I had this whole building and selling computers thing figured out. It was time to try to do something useful with all this experience, so I decided to start a computer store of my own with a couple of buddies. At the store, we had a spare closet, so we built a small little ISP too. We used NetBSD, a Digi board, some outboard modems and a guy named David Maxwell to glue it all together. We got our Internet over a couple of ISDN lines from a cool cat on Bay Street named Matt Harrop who ran this company called Interlog. That was fun times. And then we got robbed. Yep, I thought I had this whole computer store thing all figured out. I guess I kinda did, except for the part where you buy business insurance.

Months later, after spending some time being unemployed and living in my folks' basement spending all day wrapped up in EDM and being a DJ, I decided their allowance was too low so I figured I had to go get another job.

I wound up interviewing at this proper Internet company. I got a job as a Client Services Representative and was answering phones helping people with their billing issues. My bosses kept a close eye on me because I was a little more tech savvy than the rest of the folks in my department given my computer store and piddly little ISP background. They thought that my experience could come in handy for them at some point. Handy it was. The higher ups eventually decided to write their own billing system, but quickly realized that having a billing system written by a bunch of coders was going to end badly because they had no idea how the interface should look and feel. Enter Lixfeld. As a geek, I could relate to the coders in the Tech office, but because I had short hair and wore button-up shirts instead of black Anthrax Ts I could relate to the folks in Corporate too. I was the perfect liaison between two groups of people who always stood at separate ends of the dance floor.

While I was working as this liaison, I got a chance to spend some time on the other side of the company where all the really cool stuff happened. I saw all the modems, all the servers, all the fibre and the fridges full of Jolt. I also got a chance to work with the technical folks and the CTO of the company; a charming young man by the name of Bill Campbell. Bill's Technology group was growing like crazy. Since the best place to hire is always internally, Bill eventually stole me away from the Client Services folks and dumped me right into the middle of the Tech group. That's where it started to get really interesting.

Everything that this ISP was, was built and run by this odd Hungarian dude named Laszlo. Laszlo was a really smart guy, but he didn't like sharing very much. I was a curious lad and wanted to understand how all this stuff that he built actually worked. Las would have none of that, so I sort of went behind the scenes and tried to figure it out for myself. So I'd go around unplugging stuff and breaking it and Las would run around behind me fixing it. I'd learn lots. Las would lose more hair. It was a perfect system.

One day Bill pulls me into his office and tells me that Laszlo had just esigned and that it was now all my show.

*gulp*

Sure, I had poked and prodded around, but I really didn't have a very good understanding of how this all actually worked. I was about to get a crash course.

As I got more experienced, I quickly gained an affinity for the network portion of the ISP. Servers were cool, but I was never a coder and it wasn't really something that I cared to learn.

In my next few years there, I sharpened my teeth and was quite adept at making this stuff work when it was all said and done.

In early 2001 after the bubble had burst, the axes started to fall. When my company needed to downsize, they, like most others at the time, sorted the employee spreadsheet by the salary field and lopped off as many as they needed in order to keep their head above water. Alas, my days there were done. Near the end of 2001, with my severance almost all dried up, I got a job running the network for another company who wanted to build a big network for the purposes of streaming audio and video. I spent a couple of years with those folks, but they eventually changed their focus and had to downsize too. When I was again jobless, I decided that I wanted to focus on many different kinds of networks, not just ISP networks. The best way for me to do that was to contract for different companies, so in 2003 I decided to venture off into the world of being a consultant and continue to do so today. This gig has proved to do exactly what I expected it to - let me get involved in all sorts of different networks that do all sorts of different things for all sorts of different types of businesses from service providers to the enterprise to small business.

Suffice it to say, I think I'm pretty good at this networking stuff

Why is any of this important? It's really not. I just like to hear myself talk

Seriously though, let's rewind a few years back to about late 1996. Bill Campbell pulls me into his office and tells me about this thing called CanIX. It's this magical place under the floor in UUNet's space at 151 Front where all you have to do is pay for a port on this switch and you can exchange traffic for free with other ISPs who are on this switch too. It's called Peering. All googley eyed and swooning at the idea, we tried to get into CanIX, albeit without much success at all. We eventually realized how naive we had been; thinking we could just run a cable and exchange free traffic with the likes of Bell, UUNet and friends. We wondered to ourselves how many other people were in this same dilemma. We wondered how many other networks in Toronto could benefit from exchanging traffic with each other for free. We really didn't know, but we knew that it wouldn't cost us anything to find out. We already had space at 151 Front. We had a switch. We had a power bar. Why not? We figured it would be a cool experiment, right? We decided to call it TorIX. We let people connect to our switch for free and do whatever they wanted to do. Volunteering much time over the years, picking up other volunteers along the way, our band of merry men grew TorIX out of nothing to be something pretty important to a-couple-hundred-and-change Internet related businesses around the world.

And that's my bio. Terribly abrupt ending, I know. Good thing I don't make movies

Election:
I have been a volunteer for TorIX since it's inception in about 1997. TorIX has grown tremendously in the last 12+ years, but from my perspective, the idea of TorIX sits in a state of risky flux at the moment.

Switch and Data has put forth a proposal to take over the management, day-to-day operations and future architecture and expansion of TorIX. Put simply, I do not support this proposal. I believe that TorIX is in a position where it needs to be very concerned with future growth and the economics that will make such future growth possible. I also believe that these challenges can be solved internally instead of farming our exchange out to a third party. To that end, my goal for a term on the board is to establish a means to generate revenue that TorIX can use to fund it's operation and expansion indefinitely.

Biography:
Jon Nistor is a Sr. Systems Engineer for Arbor Networks and sits on the TorIX board. Over the past nine years Mr. Nistor has been involved in numerous aspects of the exchange from day to day assistance to troubleshooting for peers along with operations, design and automation to bring a better self service framework to the members of TorIX and its board. He has nurtured the exchange from sub-1Gbps to nearly 30Gbps.

Election:
At the last elections there were concerns brought up surrounding different aspects of the exchange. Throughout this short time numerous challenges and solutions have resulted from this.

If you recall my previous set of goals for the exchange, they focused around policies/procedures, permanent locations/contracts, revenue streams, design challenges and branding. We have tackled a very large overhaul within the Bylaws and elections for the members; and being a founding part in the operational group we have been able to provide a more robust team that can meet the needs of peers. There are some sections which have not been addressed as well as I would have preferred and the current board had been thrown a wrench in the plans. With more discussions surrounding Switch and Data the board had to focus on these tasks and have not been able to focus on other items. I strongly believe that we can make an exchange just as large and reliable as some of the industry leading counterparts.

TorIX still has challenges ahead of it, more formality, added efficiency and cost effectiveness for members to connect, a fee structure that allows for self sustainability and more work around promoting ways for the exchange to get its name promoted, especially in the enterprise space.

The members need leadership that is reliable and gives TorIX the attention it needs. They need someone who has proven time and time again that endurance and perseverance will pay off. I hope that you see me as one of those people and will elect me to keep moving the exchange forward. Your business depends on it.

Biography:
Kevin Blumberg is Co-Owner and CTO of The Wire Inc an Independent ISP specializing in the small and medium business market in Toronto, Ontario. Over the past 9 years he has shaped the growth of both the network and server infrastructure including deploying full service DSL, webhosting, mail and colocation solutions.

Kevin continues to expand the company's product roadmap and is constantly working with customers and vendors to strengthen solutions in the ever expanding internet space.

Kevin has been an active Torix member since 2005.

Election:
I am pleased to be able to run as a candidate for the TorIX board. As a member since 2005 I have seen the membership and fabric grow significantly. I feel that consistent growth that TorIX has had over the years is healthy but requires more attention as we grow.

I believe that a working board with a strong direction from its members is crucial to a healthy organization.

I urge members that have questions to email or call me.

Biography:
Kris Foster is a network operator with over 10 years experience. He has in the past held operations, engineering, and planning positions with C1 Communications a former Toronto based CLEC, TELUS Communications, and Rogers Cable. He is currently the network manager for BitGravity, a global content distribution network. In addition to his responsibilities at BitGravity he is a member of the NANOG Communications Committee, and is a board member and Secretary of TorIX.

Election:
I have been serving on the TorIX board of directors since June 2009. In the short time since starting in this role I have worked actively to refocus the board on its primary objective: governance. This means ensuring that the corporation accurately reflects the will of its members. That is:

• removing obstacles to transparency
• protecting the interests of the members from external threats
• ensuring individuals operating on behalf of the exchange are accountable
• building a sustainable organization

Biography:
Martin Hannigan is part of the Network Architecture team at Akamai Technologies, Inc., the largest CDN in the world. Some of his career highlights include providing management consulting services to Network Operators in the Caribbean and founding the data center industry in Iceland. He has held a variety of management and technical leadership positions at companies including Level(3) Communications, Internap and VeriSign. Currently sitting on the ICANN ASO AC/NRO AC as the appointed member from the ARIN region, he's involved in the formulation of v4 and v6 IP address numbering policy regionally and globally.

Election:
I don't have an agenda other than to help insure that the IX is operating in the interest of all of the members; my experience speaks for itself, twenty years of management, financial and engineering Internet leadership. With the Winter Olympics approaching, and as a community member and potential BoD member, I am looking forward to being able to significantly contribute to the team effort insuring that things go smoothly for the IX and for all concerned.

I Appreciate your vote

Biography:
I was Born and raised in southern Ontario. In 1995 I started working for Raco at 151 Front. In 1999 I moved to New York City to manage Raco's new facility at 60 Hudson. In 2001 I moved back to Ontario and took over management of Raco's Sonet and Data network in Toronto. When Raco was sold to Switch And Data I remained on staff for a time. Five years ago I noticed a need at 151 Front for a cost effective way to interconnect between suites. Standard Connections Ltd was created. I was able to Provide Torix with an unrestricted access point that allowed them to grow to the size that they are today. I continue to support the community by providing space, power and cost effective access. To date we have over 65 Data Switch customers and over 25 Sonet customers. I continue to work at 151 Front on a daily basis and actively work to introduce new services to further help our customers.

Election:
From my business experience I hope to help Torix become self sustaining through a reasonable port fee implementation. Once established I hope to develop a plan that will allow Torix the ability to accommodate it's members for years to come. I have attended all the Torix meetings and worked directly with a number of Torix members. I am dedicated to improving communication to the members as well as establishing monthly meetings for the board to remain focused and on track. I believe I can help Torix grow to become one of the largest peering exchanges in North America while keeping to the basic concepts that it was founded on. Thank you.

Biography:
Paul Stewart is the Senior Network Administrator for Nexicom. 18+ years of managing service provider networks. Currently serving on TorIX Board since 2009 and seeking re-election.

Election:
Since being elected to the TorIX Board in 2009, I have furthered my understanding of the challenges ahead for the exchange. While it has been a short time frame spent on the existing board, I am proud of the contributions I have been personally able to make to date. This has included being a part of the S&D discussions, the formation of an operations group, working on the foundation of the upcoming architectural group, new corporate bylaws/streamlining of future elections, and more. During my previous platform speech I promised 6 specific items that I would pursue: regular communication, lack of committees, technical group formation, branding, open finances, and documentation. The current Board tackled some very difficult and very time consuming issues literally within minutes of being elected and I believe made great progress in general. Should you continue to support me with your vote, I will endeavor to continue pursuing these original items and new challenges as they come forward. Thank you.

Biography:
Tom Scholl is a member of the AT&T Global IP/MPLS backbone design & development team where he designs routing architectures for the AT&T core network as well as various network integration projects such as AT&T Mobility, U-Verse and SBC Internet Services. Tom has spent his last several years at SBC and Ameritech working in both operations and network engineering roles. He has presented several times at NANOG and always makes time available to help peers as well as provide education where needed. Tom is also currently serving on the NANOG Program Committee.

Election:
I am running again for the TorIX board because I would like to make TorIX an even better exchange for all of its members.

Since the events of last year, I believe TorIX has made several steps forward in terms of member communication and setting a plan forward with regards to TorIX development. There has been an increased amount of communication on controversial topics such as the S&D proposal, a distributed exchange and a variety of other items. There's also been the creation of an operations team, which clearly defines the individuals involved with the day-by-day operation of TorIX.

That said, TorIX is moving in the right direction and I would like to help from a technology and leadership perspective.

Here are some of the key items I would like to focus on:

An enhanced route-server that provides per-peer views, so the route-server does not make the best route selection (and gives you the freedom to decide). Already Quagga and the new BIRD routing daemons have this functionality. I think it would be useful to get this into TorIX to provide a similar level of service already experienced in several European IX's today.

Improved infrastructure security with regards to L2 spanning-tree loops and BPDU filters. We've seen this happen multiple times in the past and it remains a risk to members on the exchange. We must implement some of these features along with the capability of the operations team to easily move member ports to a quarantine LAN for further analysis. It would also be good to publish information regarding these events so members can look back to determine why their port may have been down. Reading the list may not be feasible if you already receive plenty of email notices already on your operations role accounts. Perhaps a web interface that lists significant TorIX events or tickets would be useful.

The deployment of a sflow statistics server so individual members can see what traffic they do to each individual port. This would also require an ethernet switch that supports sflow, which should be considered in any future hardware evaluation. This can also be used to detect if a rogue member decides to static-route or default route traffic to you that you are not advertising at the exchange.

Better outreach when it comes to attracting new peers as well as attempting to solve larger issues. Enticing new peers to come to TorIX and keep Canadian traffic local still needs to be a high priority for the IX. This involves outreach at various conferences to inform networks of the benefit of coming to TorIX (plus, the portal is great in comparison to may for-profit IX's). In addition to simply attracting new peers, there's also the issue of problem resolution. Who is going to go to Bell Canada at a higher level to discuss with them the impacts of their metro-ethernet disruptions on the IX? This is a problem that impacts all members when multiple peers are hit at the same time. TorIX also needs to be more active in standards bodies by providing valuable input in what is mostly an academic & vendor operated space. Poorly written standards result in headaches for operators. Using the collective operator experience at TorIX could provide a good voice or at least a method to inject clue into the standards process. When some new knobs for BGP come along, it would be nice if we could get TorIX members to chime in with their thoughts.

I'd like to try to make TorIX better and I believe the above describes some of the key areas I'd focus on. By improving the infrastructure, scaling the IX and improving the level of service TorIX will continue to grow with the pace of its membership with stability.

Biography:
My name is Vince Mammoliti, commonly known as vince@cisco to the Torix community. I have been in the Information Technology field for the last 25 years, designing products and services that are deployed throughout the world.

With Cisco Systems since 1995, I currently am a Technical System Architect and an expert on Carrier Architectures and Subscriber Services Deployment. My current area of focus is Interprovider Real-time Services. This technology allows for the real-time call setup of life-sized high-definition video to third parties around the world in the same fashion that current telephone systems work. I also have extensive knowledge of Broadband and Subscriber Management services in xDSL, Cable, Outdoor Wireless Mesh, WiMAX and IP Broadcast Video delivery systems.

I've contributed to the industry as a whole, authoring several IETF RFCs, and contributing to multiple DSL Forum Technical Reports. I currently hold a few patents and several more pending.

My experience and understanding are unique to the industry. I offer both a deep technical understanding, along with the business awareness to accurately analyze the financial feasibly and sustainability of services.

Election:
I currently serve on the Board of Directors for the Toronto Internet Exchange Community and I am seeking re-election for another term. I've been on the board since it was formed and I am one of the originals that helped pull this great community together. In my role, I have provided guidance, knowledge, leadership, equipment and vision as the membership has grown from 2 in 1997 when the first switch was taken from my trunk in front of 151 Front Street to over 123 active peers today.

As we move forward, TorIX will also have to evolve again to accommodate growth and accept some of the dependencies of the traffic that cross the switching fabric. In the coming year, a peer's connection into TorIX will become a major interconnect point for many, if it has not so already. Because of this, 'best effort' of volunteers may not be sufficient to address future needs of some of the task. Most of the tasks are more than just technical and architectural issues. For example they included billing and collection for example. All of this does require further investigation and one of bigger issue the new board will have to address. My early thoughts are that I do see a happy medium of a mix of volunteers and contracted employees and/or companies where it makes sense for taking on some of the future tasks to maintain the TorIX infustructure. This all does come with a price and a likely hood will require an adjustment in the funding model.

If re-elected I will leading in this direction and keeping TorIX as successfully as it has been in the past.

Biography:
William F. Maton Sotomayor was born in a little-known part of Toronto called East York. He is currently employed as a Network Engineer and Special Projects Manager at the National Research Council of Canada. He is also the operator of the Federal GigaPOP, a niche, purpose-built high-performance Internet Exchange for Science-based government organizations and agencies which takes its cue from the Ottawa Internet Exchange.

Prior to that he worked as a network architect in charge of a small group running the network and UNIX servers of the Industry Canada lab, Communication Research Centre in the Ottawa West-end. Before that he worked as a UNIX system administrator and in the distant past, a software engineer.

In his copious amounts of spare time he also helps run the Ottawa Internet Exchange, a small but critical piece of Internet Infrastructure that connects several area ISPs in the nation's capitol. He also dabbles in noise generation (music), electronics and photography.

He still remains in denial about residing in a suburb of Ottawa.

Election:
I am honoured and privileged to accept a nomination for election to the Toronto Internet Exchange Board of Directors, which is key not to just to Toronto but also the Greater Toronto Area and beyond.

TorIX is about providing network connectivity to the region and has the potential to be an influential player throughout the province. It does this not only in the provision of network connectivity, but also playing a role in being a part of Canada's critical network infrastructure.

The role of the Board is to simply ensure that the organisation continues in the direction that its membership want to go in and make course corrections where necessary. Therefore I very much believe that the Board should operate as a sort of trust on the member's behalf for the good of the community (or as someone once called it, the public weal).

That said, TorIX should pursue a policy of going forward, not just in technological areas, but also in terms of growth by reaching out to larger and key domestic content providers, such as banks. The best way to accomplish this is to illustrate the strategic and security importance of having a local network access point in a commercial area such as the GTA.

I also bring a great deal of experience in performance monitoring and research into Internet operations (BGP table growth for one, multicast configuration and content provision for another). I believe my experience in running the Federal GigaPOP and OttIX and operations in general will help to advise on the direction that the TorIX can take as it faces as it faces ever newer growth in the ever newer growth in the future. In that manner, I hope to be useful to the community.