Philip Smith

Philip Smith has been working in the Internet industry since the early 1990s after catching the Internet bug in the mid 1980s while at University. He runs his own consulting company, PFS Internet Development.

Philip spends some of his time working for the Network Startup Resource Centre as a Senior Network Engineer and Training Coordinator, assisting with Network Operations Groups coordination, and providing network design assistance and training around the Pacific, South and South East Asia, the Middle East and Africa. .

He previously worked at APNIC as Learning and Development Director, where his team’s responsibilities ranged from Training, APNIC Conferences and Events, Network Operations Group support, Technical Programmes such as IPv6 Deployment, Internet Exchange Points, and Rootname Server deployments, and the Information Society Innovation Fund grants programme. .

Before APNIC, he was a member of the Internet Infrastructure Group in CTO Consulting Engineering of Cisco Systems for more than thirteen years. He also served for 3 years on the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society. .

Prior to joining Cisco, he spent five years at PIPEX (incorporated into UUNET, and now part of Verizon’s global ISP business), the UK’s first commercial ISP, where he was Head of Network Engineering. As is common with startups in a rapidly growing marketplace, Philip gained deep experience in all of the engineering roles in an ISP, from support engineer, network operations, engineering, and development, before assuming responsibility for the entire UK network operation. He was one of the first engineers working in the commercial Internet in the UK, and he helped establish the LINX Internet Exchange Point in London and played a key role in building the modern Internet in Europe.