The following is an excerpt from the Initial Operating Policies and Procedures of IOPS.ORG. For more detailed information about membership, please see the Initial Operating Policies and Procedures of IOPS.ORG.

Qualifications for Membership

To become a Member of IOPS, an organization must be willing to state publicly that it has a commitment to support the Charter of IOPS and must meet the criteria listed below for the respective class of membership.

Primary Member

To be a Primary Member of IOPS, an organization must meet all of the following:

1. provide commercial Internet access and/or commercial Internet transport services to the public;

2. announce routes at public peering points (i.e., interconnections) to other ISPs (Internet service providers);

3. have a network operations center which is professionally staffed 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, in order to ensure prompt and effective responsiveness to Internet problems;

4. as a guideline, provide, on a continuing basis, at least approximately 0.2 full-time-equivalent (i.e., an average of one day per week) of a professional-level network engineer with at least three years of experience to participate in IOPS technical working groups or other IOPS technical activities. This technical contribution is in addition to the Member's participation in the management or administration of IOPS; and

5. participate in the preliminary testing of at least some of the technical solutions under consideration by IOPS.

Associate Member

To be an Associate Member of IOPS, an organization must meet all of the following:

1. provide commercial or not-for-profit Internet access or transport services;

2. announce routes at public peering points to other ISPs; and

3. have, or utilize, a professionally staffed network operations center.