Asia Pacific Internet Summit In Nepal Started

The Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) 2018 is being hosted in Nepal during 19-28 February 2018. Asia Pacific Internet Association (APIA) and Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) along with the local support of Internet Exchange Nepal (NPIX) are organizing the mega event.

The event will bring together about 900 Internet technologists from all over the world to discuss advanced networking topic during the 10-day festival. The summit is a combination of Asia Pacific Operations Forum, APNIC Conference and Members meeting, South Asian Network Operators Group (SANOG) 31 as well as sessions for security communities of FIRST, APCERT and other Asia Pacific Internet Organizations.

The event is supported by Nepal Telecommunications Authority in the public sector and local IT organizations. Global Companies including Google, Facebook, Equinix, VeriSign, DE-CIX, Netflix, Telstra, LINX, Airtel, Juniper, Amazon Web Services and others are global Sponsors for the event.

The International opening keynote for the conference is Mr. Amir Khan, co-founder of Viptela, an SD-WAN pioneer that was acquired by Cisco last year for 800 million dollars. Mr. Khan will share his experiences of the previous two decades and what he sees shortly.
Mr. Will Charnock, co-founder of Packet Fabric, in his closing keynote will take a future view of the evolution in networking technologies. Mr. Charnock previously builds much of the network for Soft Layer, which was acquired by IBM in 2008.

Dr. Pun will talk about: Crowdsourcing the National Innovation Center Over the last four decades, my experience taught me that only homegrown and locally adapted technologies are sustainable in Nepal. Since 2011, I have been on a mission to create a center for Nepalese innovators and tinkerers. The vision for the National Innovation Center is to be the last startup school for those who want to improve the lives of people in the country. It’ll be a nurturing center and will help creative and innovative people to develop prototype, product and commercialize step by step.

Frustrated by the lack of government support due to political instability, in July 2016, I embarked on a crowd-sourcing effort to raise money from all those who love Nepal, with massive success and interest from all over the world. The keynote will cover the work being done, how it’s moving forward and how we can all do our little innovations to contribute to our societies.

The event starts with five days of pre-conference workshops on the 19th and will conclude on the 28th with the closing ceremony. Renowned instructors will teach pre-conference hands-on workshops on IoT, Wireless Sensors, Security, Routing, Virtualization, and Network management during the first week.

It will be followed by conference and tutorials with topic including DNSSec, Secure Routing; Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) on the technical side. Non-technical discussion on cross-border co-operation, enhancing government to Internet technical community co-operation will also take place.