Why is Industry Behind MT?
Update: It should be noted that this is an ‘opinion‘ item. I would like to add that I’ve never even spoken to MT, I don’t read his twitter feed, I simply observe the piles of abuse that is thrown his way, so thought that an “in your face” item that draws some rather startling conclusions might be of interest – WTW
Pick a random bunch of 50 industry geeks from around Australia, put them in a round room and ask for a show of hands of who’s for the NBN and supports Mr C, and it won’t be hard to guess what the answer will be…. a sea of hands.
Take take the leaders of industry aside quietly and poll them with the same question and you’re not going to find much of a chink in the party line…
But what happens if you start to make them think and ask questions about their personal history and future and suddenly you’ll find no one that wants to engage you in a conversation. Read the rest of this entry »
NBNCo response to Kiama issue…
This just in from NBNCo…
NBN Co not charging residents for cable-laying in First Release Sites
17 June 2011
NBN Co today labelled as incorrect the suggestion that householders in the Kiama Downs First Release site who “don’t sign up with an internet provider before the trial concludes” could be charged part of the cost of laying cable to their homes.
The front-page report in today’s Sydney Daily Telegraph, which is labelled an “Exclusive”, goes on to suggest that failure to sign up would expose residents to part of the cable-laying cost, “estimated to be $900 a day – to gain access to broadband”.
A spokesman for NBN Co said this was not the case:
“Sadly this report is merely another in a long line of myths and misconceptions about the National Broadband Network. There is no cost to consumers for a standard installation in Kiama Downs, regardless of whether they have elected to have a line connected during the rollout or not.
“Even those residents who have elected not to have a connection, but may wish to do so to when commercial services become available, can simply place an order with an appropriate telecommunications provider, and NBN will provide the connection – again at no cost for a standard installation.
“The only bills people on the network should expect to pay will be those generated by the phone companies and internet service providers offering services over the NBN when commercial services are available. But there is no charge to consumers from NBN Co for standard laying cables to their homes.”
Any equipment or connections beyond NBN Co’s in-house installation are the responsibility of the home-owner or retail service provider.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sydney-nsw/join-the-nbn-or-youll-be-digging-deep/
Clearly the DT is stepping up to help push network traction with some good old fashioned FUD.
It’s got half a point… if people don’t sign up then those who do are going to have to be paying more so that NBNCo can deliver the 7% ROI.
Is Conroy Fueling the Flames?
This press release just in from the minister…
Coalition wastes more time and money on smear campaign
The Coalition has forced NBN Co to commit tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayers’ money to respond to a futile and malicious smear campaign against CEO Mike Quigley, the Minister for Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy said.
Senator Conroy said the Senate Estimates hearing last night again vindicated Mr Quigley and proved he had not been involved in any wrongdoing at Alcatel-Lucent.
“Mike Quigley has been the victim of an appalling smear campaign and the evidence provided to the Senate Estimates hearing last night should end this matter once and for all,” Senator Conroy said.
“As Mr Quigley explained yet again in a detailed statement to the Senate Estimates hearing, he was never involved, never investigated and never questioned about the corrupt activities of his previous employer.
“Last night’s Senate Estimates hearing generated no new evidence that Mr Quigley had anything to do with the wrongdoing of Alcatel-Lucent in Central America seven years ago.
“The Coalition wasted the vast majority of the four hours of Senate Estimates time allocated to NBN Co, by attempting to re-litigate a five year investigation by the US Department of Justice and the Securities Exchange Commission which cleared Mr Quigley of any wrongdoing.
“The Coalition spent just 17 minutes on the rollout of the NBN, including questioning the priority given to regional Australia.
“The Coalition are hypocrites. They demand detailed answers and then complain about the cost of preparing them.”
Date: 17 June 2011
My first question was simply, ‘is the minister just fueling the flames on purpose to push Mr Quigley out?’
Digger V’s Copper
This is what you get when the digger operator just ignores the little blue line that says there’s a 50 year old copper cable in the ground…
Go Live in Armidale and Finally Marketing Gets Some Life!
Well we got to find out some more about that the NBNCo marketing department have been up to finally!
http://medianet.multimediarelease.com.au/bundles/0fca4296-d21b-4ee5-9970-b4c9b39f03f1
An exciting array of new video material to show off the NBN and explain why it’s a great idea.
The “NBN_mainland_switch_on_animation” video is a bit frightening and made me think of War of the Worlds or other disaster movies but was quite cool visually and reminded me of Telecom New Zealand ads from a decade ago.
I was left with the impression that NBNCo have a much greater vision of more and more of us being locked up in our houses working and learning from home rather than gathering in community buildings such as work places, schools, universities and other social settings.
“NBN_mainland_switch_four_minute_video” does start out with the best explanation I’ve seen yet for why the fibre FTTH NBN project is actually needed, the realisation that Australia needs to keep pace with global partners and not leave Australians in a dark age while other countries romp ahead.
Hopefully more and more of this communication will start to flow from NBNCo and will start to drive the message home to average rural Australians about why they actually need to connect to the network and not just stand by and think about it while they just watch the construction companies toil away installing it.
Residents are progressively being connected to the network as part of customer trials by four telecommunications providers who have already completed the certification process: iiNet, Internode, iPrimus and Telstra. – NBNCo Media Release
Finally we see Telstra on board as an RSP, but Mainland Australians won’t be getting $3.80 telephone lines as Exetel seems to have vanished?
* The speeds actually experienced by end-users will depend on a number of factors including the retail broadband plan they choose, their equipment and their in-premises connection. – NBNCo Media Release
I noted with some interest, and amusement, that NBNCo, even in press releases are now being more careful about setting clearer expectations of performance on the network.
This is great in my view because even their own technical documents say that depending on network configurations you’ll never get more than 79mbit’s per second over a 100mbit layer 2 connection.
We want uptake numbers!
Now I’ll put out a call for action for NBNCo to release monthly uptake figures and stop being afraid of the impact of slow up take but help empower those pro-NBN members of the Internet community to start to help push uptake through their global networks.
FTTN Lies… Is FTTH the best solution for today?
And the reason being that Telstra floated a FTTN model that cost a bomb, “remonopolised” the network, and they wanted government to subsidise this charade that would have taken Australian comms back 30 years. And every major street corner would have a power hungry fridge sitting there. No thanks, maybe the kiwis would like that? – LoosestPing
Reading these comments this morning, I was almost lost for words.
The constant lies that those against FTTN post in public forums just makes me angry because eventually it gets found out and discredits the idea of FTTH even further.
4w = A power hungry fridge!
A fully loaded Whisper node uses 4w per subscriber as I understand it. 4w! That’s hardly a ‘power hungry fridge’, but if that’s how much power fridges in Australia uses these days then I want to know who supplies those because I can see a global market!
2 Nodes per Suburb = 1 on every street corner?!
At 300 subscribers per node, that is hardly a node on every street corner either. It’s more like a couple in every suburb unless the housing density in Australia has radically changed since I was last in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.
Two simple lies in my view.
Why do the pro-ftth lobby seem to constantly spread lies about fttn to back up their business case?
How many other lies have been spun against FTTN?
Is FTTN simply a better immediate solution?
Do the FTTH lobby know this and are so scared of it, they’ll just go to what ever lengths to sell their lies hoping that the confusion will keep focus away from what is actually a better technology solution for a very large chunk of Australians today?
Is most of Australia going to be in an Internet back water for another decade?
Should the Australian Government be focusing on building its own network or on driving the existing providers to simply step up and deliver better services to Australians today or face regulatory changes, such has happened in New Zealand?
How Many Service Providers Will Your House Have?
iiNet do free iTunes, BigPond do the motor racing and have heaps of free content, Internode do free uploads and IPv6…
With ADSL you had no choice, you had to make a choice, but the NTU has 4 ports and they’ll add more ports if you need them for you can have as many or as few RSPs as you choose to pay for.
Will you sign up for a big data plan with just one RSP or will you choose a the smallest plans for 4 providers and take up the free offerings?
What about people living in MDUs such as apartment blocks? Will you get together, put a cheap $100 router in the basement, connect up 4 different RSPs with 100/40 plans and give everyone a better experience?
Routers that will do just this, and throw all the correct billing information at a billing company already exist for less than $150 and billing providers are already ramping up systems ready to empower these ideas.
How are providers going to leverage points of difference?
How willing are consumers going to be to sign up for term contracts? Will 4 ports on the NTU turn bundles into a joke or a thing of the past? Today you get a mobile, TV, fixed broadband and fixed telephone in one package and get a discount. That locks you into the provider for all the add ons, such a pay for view movies.
Under the NBN you’ll be able to pick up an ISP for an hour, a day, a week, a month, without compromising your other services.
BigPond in October for the Bathurst, iiNet from June to August for movies over the winter, Internode for the free uploads at Christmas so you can upload all your home movies from Christmas day to YouTube for grandma and a basic service from Optus that you use for email, your Femtocell (so your mobiles and tables work properly) and to get a discount on your ‘cable tv service’.
One thing is for sure, RSPs are doing the sums on this stuff and figuring out how they can cut deals in the future to get as much ARPU from you as they possibly can!
Is NBNCo Throwing The Wrong Satellite In To Space?
500ms latency will make for substandard quality voice calls – even with the VOIP traffic prioritised. If enough of the traffic is voice (peak times) which is to be prioritised, prioritisation won’t help. (Will my VOIP traffic have priority over yours?) – Jason
Page 20 of NBN Co Customer Collaboration Satellite Forum presentation talks about users having a 52.6kbps ‘mean busy hour throughput’.
When I’m using my VoIP telephone service my router chugs though ~80kbps and I have a 23ms ping time to my VoIP provider not 500ms, so I do see Jason’s point.
But the NBNCo document assumptions on pages 19 and 20 throw up all sorts of questions about pricing as well. They’re talking about assumptions having 20,000 customers and we already know that even providers as large as Internode only come up with 4.5% of the market share, 9,000 customers, once all the 200,000 customers are on board. Then I have to question the CVC allocations, we already learnt from the Tasmanian trail that you need more head room than NBNCo typically suggest – 200mbit v’s 150mbit in the case of the fibre.
Now don’t make the mistake of getting me wrong here people… I’m not saying the assumptions are wrong, I’m simply saying that after reading what Jason had to say and reviewing the linked PDF from NBNCo, it just doesn’t add up in my head and I’m already wondering if another billion dollars will have to be thrown up in the sky 5 years later to fix the problems caused by assumptions today?
Fixed or Mobile – Chrome Book?
Chrome notebooks don’t use installed software other than the browser that connects to applications hosted as services in the internet “cloud.” – Glenn Chapman
Last week an IRC mate told me that to fix my Internet problems I should just set up my own Internet, after all, that’s what Larry and his mate did!
Google’s latest attack on a world once dominated by Microsoft is clearly the Chrome book, telling the world that software as a service is the answer to all their computing problems – at least that’s how it appears to me.
The question is where are we going to want all those 1′s and 0′s and how will they have to get to us?
Is the Internet in our part of the world anywhere near good enough for these products yet?
Will fibre to our homes be the answer for these products or are we doing to want, need, demand super fast 1′s and 0′s everywhere that we might park our notebooks, tables and smart phones?
Sure, you can make your net fast with fibre to the home, but at what cost and will we pay for super fast at home and then also pay for fast mobile data so we can use our devices everywhere else that we exist?
Or is the plan that we become locked up in our houses because that’s the only place our devices work well?
Fibre to wireless nodes (such as mobile towers) makes sense. Mobile technology that lets you connect in lots of different locations and pay for your share makes sense.
A world where you don’t keep data on your device, but keep it in the cloud, how is that going to work in a fixed network?
The New Estate Message Just Isn’t Out There Yet.
I am building in an estate that has Fibre to the home. Now the NBN isn’t scheduled to arrive here at all yet, so what internet to I get? Do they jig something up so that I get ADSL, or do the stick me on shitty wireless? – Kab
The message about what’s happening in new estates and for estates that already have a fibre solution still hasn’t been nutted out properly and communicated effectively to the communtiy as is apparent from the ongoing number of questions that are raised each week in public forums.
13 May 2011 – NBN Co has appointed Fujitsu Australia Limited as its prime alliance partner to deliver fibre infrastructure to New Developments. – Rhonda Griffin – NBN Co, Manager Communications
Are existing users just jumping the gun?
NBNCo have only just sorted out the spec for doing new development installations and appointed a contractor to work with to build them.
But what does happen in these existing developments? Are there going to be dots on the map where you can’t get services from the promised range of NBNCo RSPs?
Is it safe to say that home owners who purchased property in these new ‘fibre enabled’ developments expected they were going to be future proof, but now you should avoid them like the plague just in case you’re left with only one choice of retail provider?
Is NBNCo just going to over build these areas so that those Australians can be assured of fixed line service choice? Would that then destroy the investment of those providers who stepped up and where the first to push Australia forward?
What we do know is that the demand for faster and more 1′s and 0′s just keeps growing. The evidence so far is that those with the least are getting the most first.
So does this suggest:
- Fibre Homes – You’re on the end of the queue to get NBN speeds and retail choice. So you could be stuck on over priced, under spec’ed plans for a decade and a half?
- HFC – You’re next back in the queue, but at least you have a choice of two providers in many cases?
- DSL – Who knows where you’re at! If you’re on the door step of an exchange then you can get 18mbit… err unless there’s no ports left or there’s not enough copper to get you a connection at all?
- 3G – As long as you’re not in an ADSL area, you’ll be served sooner?
- Dialup – Top of the rank!
But what is the noise on the public forums really about? Are there really many home owners out there who really care, or is the noise really being generated by owners of existing networks wanting to talk up some noise to drive more action in the direction of selling their existing assets to NBNCo at the hot prices that are already being mooted about Telstra’s copper deal?
If there really was demand for broadband services in these locations then they’d be point to point wireless providers tripping over each other to deliver services to these estates today, wouldn’t there?
