RIPE NCC Member Lunch Athens

The Greek community is very strong - RIPE 67 was held in Athens in October 2013, and since that time GRNOG has emerged as a vibrant forum for the Greek technical community, with the recent meeting drawing together more than 100 networkers in May 2017.

This lunch provided an opportunity to discuss the RIPE NCC's services and other issues around IP address management and networking. The Greek industry is very interesting, not least for the strong IPv6 deployment that they have seen since 2011 (a fact highlighted in our RIPE Labs article in May 2017). Nevertheless, there is a strong desire for more training and education, as many in the Internet value chain continue to come to terms with the fact that IPv4 addresses are now a scarce resource.

Alexander Stamatis, Chief Technology Officer of HostMeIn ΙΚΕ, summed up his feelings about the lunch: "Since it wasn't crowded or in a rush such as in trainings or RIPE Meetings, it was better for discussing issues regarding RIPE and catching up with other LIRs here.”

Discussions during the event indicated that there is a desire for Greek LIRs to get more involved in the RIPE Policy Development Process and in RIPE NCC processes, such as the General Meeting. There was also discussion around RPKI deployment in Greece and further afield. This is valuable feedback for the RIPE NCC, helping us to shape our future engagements with our members in Greece.

GRNOG is currently planning to have its second event for 2017 in November or December, and the RIPE NCC is looking forward to this as an opportunity to follow up with the members we met last week in Athens, and well as the many other network operators, engineers and other Internet stakeholders in Greece.

The RIPE NCC currently has four member lunches scheduled in our service region – Krasnodar, Glasgow, Stockholm and Bucharest. If you are a RIPE NCC member and interested in coming to one of these events, see our Member Lunch page for more information and links to the registration forms.