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Frequently Asked Questions

Below you'll find links to results and analyses from various NANOG community Frequently Asked Questions. We hope that making the results widely available will give you some insight on what's been suggested so far, and what needs to be done to keep NANOG headed in the right direction.

Question 1: Who runs the NANOG meetings?

Answer 1: NANOG grew out of meetings Merit Network held with the U.S. regional networks during the NSFNET project, which ran from 1987-1995. Merit Network managed the backbone service, and in that role held periodic "regional techs" meetings with the operations staff at mid-level networks such as SURAnet, NYSERnet, BARRNet, Westnet, and many others. In 1994, the "regional techs" group revised its charter to include a broader base of network service providers, and subsequently adopted NANOG as its new name. Merit continued as the coordinator of the group, and still plays that role today.

       
         
         
         
         

Merit Network, Inc., a Michigan non-profit, coordinated the NANOG meetings from 1994 through January 2011. 

In February 2011, NewNOG, Inc. was created to take over the management of NANOG. As of February 7. 2011 an agreement was reached between Merit and NewNOG, and corporate documents allowing NewNOG to do business as NANOG we filed.

Question 2: How is NANOG funded?

Answer 2: All NANOG funds continue to come from conference registration fees, sponsorships, and donations from vendors. Recently, under NewNOG, a new source of membership fee has been collected.

Send further questions to [email protected].

Question 3: How are the agenda topics and speakers selected?

Answer 3: The NANOG Program Committee publishes a Call for Presentations as well as proposes topics that address current operational issues. The committee's criteria for selecting talks are outlined on the Call for Presentations: the talks focus on large-scale backbone operations, ISP coordination, or technologies that are already deployed or soon to be deployed in core Internet backbones and exchange points. Popular topics include traffic engineering, applications of new protocols, routing policy specification, queue management and congestion, routing scalability, caching, and inter-provider security, to name a few.

Question 4: How does NANOG choose cities for meeting and hotels with big enough rooms for the General Session, tracks and tutorials?

Answer 4: Meeting sites selection depends on a number of criteria. In North America, meeting space is provided for free when the conference commits to reserving a number of guest rooms. NANOG works to identify cities where hotels can provide a plenary meeting space for 900 attendees in a mixed classroom and theater setup and at least 300 rooms per night. Special care is given to choose a location where a connectivity partner can be identified and able to bring a dedicated 500Mbps circuit to the hotel. NANOG tries to alternate meetings between coasts so the meetings are 'close' to everyone's home cities once in a while but also tries to visit cities that have not been previously host to one of our conferences.

Depending on results from the recent attendance trends and meeting surveys, we may eventually see even bigger meetings, requiring even larger hotels.

As the past few meetings, we've seen an increase in the number of people attending tracks and tutorials, and attending for NANOG for the first time.

Learn more about hosting a NANOG meeting. 

See the Hotel Logistics page for details about NANOG's requirements for conference hotels. Please send your site suggestions to [email protected]