PLNOG is much more than just a conference, it is rather the experts’ meeting. PLNOG attendees take part in heated discussions with people who greatly influence telecom industry in Poland. Based on the opinions of PLNOG 2008 attendees, who really appreciated the opportunity to meet with UKE President, Anna Strezynska, we decided to add more panel discussions:

• IPv6, peering, data retention – UKE, Police and KIKE representatives lead this discussion. The debate concerns implementing European Commission’s guidelines about IPv6 protocol, solutions to the problem of unifying polish laws about data retention, as well as currents peering issues. Recently the danger of running out of IPv4 addresses forced European Commission to be more active in persuading European countries to finally implement new communication protocol. This May the Commission announced that till 2010 about 25% Internet users in Europe will use IPv6 protocol. This goal can only be reached with the cooperation and effort of the whole community. Later on during the panel the problem of data retention will be discussed. In March of 2009, the plan of adjusting Polish laws to European standards was released and the problem has never been discussed since. The government keeps working on amendments that are much too broad and will never be useful as they give only the general guidelines instead of clearly stating what should be stored and for how long. Those activities create an absurd situation. In the times of frequent cyber crimes, those who want to stay fair should collect all data, which is obviously impossible to do. We hope that this issue will be discussed with details and possible solutions will be proposed. The representatives of The Main Police Office will share their ideas and experiences with all PLNOG attendees. The issue of Internet exchange will be discussed as well. We will rise the question when it is lucrative to keep traffic in country’s borders and when and why is it impossible or does not pay off. There is no official policy stating what operators should do, but the general policy should be definitely established ASAP.
• Peering session – this session is dedicated to the presentation of the biggest Internet exchange points in Europe. That includes: DE-CIX, AMS-IX, LINX and PLIX. IXs will discuss their plans, potential and future prospects. All those who have any question or doubts concerning IXs activity on the market, are more than welcome to join the discussion.
• Blackholing in operators’ networks – blackholing is nothing more and nothing less but an attempt to make the Internet more secure. We invited top industry players to take part in the debate: Lukasz Bromirski, an author of BGP Blackholing PL project, Konrad Pilch (Polish Telecom) and Przemyslaw Jaroszewski (NASK). These are the people who are committed to increasing IT security. They will shortly describe their projects and explain what should be done to filter unnecessary or malicious traffic in the Internet.