There have been a few changes - part of this is driven by post-pandemic decreased travel budget in many organizations, part by industry changes and consolidation, but also a fair bit seems to be because the tone of NANOG has changed and become much more of a polished, sales-y feeling event than it used to be….
Here is the current NANOG agenda:
Here is the agenda from 20 years ago:
This time I've received at least 6 phone calls along this line of "Hi, I'm [person] from [company]. We are a NANOG sponsor and we'd like to personally invite you to a very special [breakfast/lunch/dinner] with our [CEO/CTO]. They'd love to explain how we can solve your [security/inventory/DDoS/automation/documentation] needs…"
There would alway be business stuff done at NANOG, but it used to be more along the lines of "Hey, we have too much traffic in [location]. I saw you have a cage in [location] too… If I hand you an Ethernet, can we peer there? Great…" or "So, I have a Foozle-1205 with the Turbo-forwarding(R) option, but when I configure hyperspace-bypass mode, fire comes out…. I know you also use Turbo-forwarding(R), but it looks like you still have your eyebrows. Any hints? Oh… cool, I didn't know that you could use wormholes to avoid the hyperspace issue. Ta."
W