Australasian Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (ATNAC 2013)

For approximately eight years starting in the mid-1980s, a seminar series called the “Australian Teletraffic Research Seminar” was run on an annual basis. In 1993 the last of those seminars was conducted at RMIT University, Melbourne Australia and at that point, Telstra management felt that there were three seminars in Australia that attracted similar people and that they would only support a combined conference which brought together the three seminars titled “Australian Teletraffic Engineering Research Seminar”, “Australian Multi-media Communications, Applications & Technology Workshop” and “Australian Broadband Switching & Services Symposium”. Each of these had their own separate seminar series that had been supported by Telstra and were run in Australia. From this amalgamation, ATNAC was born and the first one was held in Melbourne in 1994 with General Chair Paul Kirton from Telecom Research Labs. Several ATNAC conferences followed after that until it was delivered as a joint conference with the International Switching Symposium in Sydney in 1996. The next ATNAC conference was held in 2003 in conjunction with the re-formation of the Australian Telecommunications CRC. The Australian Telecommunications CRC CEO, Leith Campbell, suggested that ATNAC be revived as a flagship of Telecommunications research in Australia. This new revitalised series began in 2003 and has continued uninterrupted ever since. In 2007, a minor name change occurred but did not alter the name “ATNAC”. The first ‘A’ in ATNAC was originally “Australian” but was changed to “Australasian” and the first ATNAC held outside Australia was held in Christchurch New Zealand in 2007. The idea being to host one in every three conferences in New Zealand for the foreseeable future. The 2013 ATNAC will be held in Christchurch, New Zealand and the 2014 ATNAC may be held in conjunction with the Engineers Australia national conference in Melbourne, Australia in November 2013.