The Middle East Network Operator Group Meeting & Peering Forum (MENOG) – the largest, non-commercial, technical, educational and community-oriented event in the Middle East — is set to take place on March 15-19, 2020 in Manama, Bahrain. The 20th edition of MENOG will bring together key Internet industry players from the region to discuss core operational issues, share knowledge and expertise, and facilitate regional cooperation. MENOG is an open event for the entire technical community including Internet service providers, mobile operators, content providers, cloud and infrastructure service providers, as well as government regulators, academics and key business decision makers. The plenary sessions will include talks about IPv4 run-out, IPv6 deployment, peering and interconnection, DNS operations and many other topics. The event will also feature a number of workshops that tackle key operational issues faced by network professionals such as routing security and IPv6 adoption. Khaled Samara, chair of MENOG Program Committee, said: "It has recently become clear that the uptake of peering and interconnection in the Middle East has been stagnating. Less than half of the countries in the Middle East have a functioning Internet Exchange Point (IXP), and many of the existing IXPs are far from reaching their full potential. Many operators still send regional traffic to be exchanged out of the region. This is why the MENOG team decided last year to formally establish itself as the Peering Forum for the region by dedicating more time to the issues of peering, interconnection and IXP development." MENOG is hosted by the Economic Development Board (EDB) in Bahrain and sponsored by AWS, Facebook, Netflix, Linx, Decix and the Bahrain Telecommunications Company (Batelco), among others. Bahrain is a regional leader and encourages digital transformation through the introduction of a number of policies like the region's first nationwide Cloud First Policy and regulatory Sandbox. Most recently, AWS announced the launch of the MENA region's first hyperscale data centre in the Kingdom. Bahrain was also among the first in the region to introduce commercial 5G in early 2019. For More information about event is available at: https://www.menog.org/meetings/menog-20/ — SG
