Stilgherrian » broadband

Telstra, you goddam bloody idiots!

Stilgherrian — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 23:27:42 +0000

Once more, Telstra demonstrates its appalling arrogance. They’ve just been excluded from bidding for Australia’s National Broadband Network for submitting a non-compliant bid, and now try to deny it despite their own clear evidence.

The Australian IT reports today:

In a statement to the stock exchange, Telstra said it had been excluded from the bidding process because its proposal submitted on November 26 did not include a plan on how to involve small and medium-sized enterprises in the building of the network.

26 November was the closing date for submissions, published well in advance. And yet:

Telstra chairman Donald McGauchie said the reason for its exclusion was “trivial”…

“Telstra provided its SME plan to the Government in early December and, in Telstra’s view, in accordance with the RFP (request for proposals),” said Mr McGauchie.

No, you fuckwit. The closing date was 26 November. Supplying information in “early December” means your submission was missing key elements. Morons.

Did you ask the teacher for an extension? Did you have a note from your mother? FFS! I stand by what I wrote in October: Get over yourself, Telstra!

If you can’t even provide your goddam submission on time, why the hell would we be stupid enough to give you $4.7B of our money?

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Kruddiversary: The internet thanks you for 12 months of achieving nothing

Stilgherrian — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 02:31:34 +0000

[This article was first published in Crikey on 27 November, but I forgot that I hadn't re-posted here.]

Evidence-based policy! National Broadband Network! Australia 2020 Summit! After 11 years of Howard’s opportunism and fear-mongering, Ruddish mantras sounded like… well, like “Fresh Thinking”.

But one year on, precisely none of the NBN has been built. The Summit produced nothing. The Cyber-Safety Plan is trialling (again) unworkable internet filters while Senator Conroy accuses everyone of being a pervert.

Tenders for the NBN only closed yesterday, and Telstra’s off-grid bid means we’re probably in for months of legal battles. Although the network is intended to cover 98% of households, David Kennedy from Ovum Research reckons it’ll take three years to reach the first 50% — that’s 2012.

Even then, the NBN will only deliver 12Mbit/second. France, Korea, Japan and perhaps others are already moving to 100Mbit/s. France Télécom reckons that over the next five years some 40% of the French population will have four companies competing to deliver fibre all the way to the home (FTTH), not the NBN’s fibre to the node (FTTN).

The OECD estimates that “Average demand of a household for bandwidth is expected to be around 50 Mbit/s downstream and 10-50 Mbit/s upstream for the period 2010-2020,” needed for the parallel consumption of HDTV, radio, videoconferencing, security — and as Crikey reader Brefney Ruhl wrote yesterday, everything connected with cloud computing.

During the Howard years, Australia dropped from the world’s third-best Internet infrastructure after the US and Finland to somewhere completely out of the top 10. Rudd’s building a below-average network, incapable of delivering even a quarter of the needed bandwidth. Or if Telstra gets its way, the bandwidth but to only 90% of the population.

When he starts building it, that is.

The Australia 2020 Summit was hardly aware the internet existed. The “governance” section of the Final Report of the Australia 2020 Summit mentioned it just twice seriously, and then only to say that, hey, it could be used, somehow. The other streams were equally clueless.

Then there’s Senator Conroy’s Rabbit-Proof Firewall. Despite wishful thinking by protect-the-children lobbyists, the government’s own research shows how deeply flawed any ISP-level filtering would be. This week The Greens announced their opposition to filters and Liberal Senator Nick Minchin labelled them “misguided and deeply unpopular”. The legislation won’t pass the Senate and, as one analysis suggests, without legislation it probably can’t be done.

But the government is continuing with more trials. Tuesday night @KevinRuddPM even tweeted “We’re waiting for tech evidence from a live trial but we’ll have more info online soon.” But the evidence already shows that filtering can never work. Asking the question again won’t give a different answer.

Sounds to me like they’re stalling. Or completely, utterly clueless.

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Oh FFS get over yourself, Telstra!

Stilgherrian — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 02:35:33 +0000

Australia’s new National Broadband Network is the country’s biggest infrastructure project in years, and there’s (up to) $4.7 billion in government subsidies up for grabs. But our largest telco Telstra says it won’t tender if it faces “functional separation” into wholesale and retail divisions. Diddums.

Geoff Booth, managing director of Telstra Country Wide says:

We cannot submit a tender, we will not submit a tender… people think we’re playing a bluff here, but I spoke to the chairman yesterday, and the CEO this morning, and the message is clear: we will not bid if separation is not taken off the table.

Well, Telstra, don’t bid then! [shrugs] Honestly, no-one cares.

What’s the “bluff”, Telstra? That the government will just choose another entity to give the funding to? One which doesn’t piss away their time and energy with all this bitching and moaning? One which doesn’t have the overhead of a bloated, inefficient workforce working within bloated, inefficient silo structures?

Ooooh… I’m so scared!

Dear Telstra, the sooner you realise that you’re no longer the only telco which can do business in Australia, the sooner your senior executives stop acting like spoiled-brat children with all this attention-seeking tantrum-throwing, the sooner you simply shut the fuck up and get on with the job of offering value-for-money services to the Australian public and therefore making a healthy profit for your shareholders, the happier everyone will be.

Oh, and while you’re at it, just drop this whole “We’re a content company” bullshit. I know that television is a whole lot more sexy than building comms networks, but you don’t have the experience and you’ve got more important issues on your plate. Stop with the “look at the shiny objects” routine which is — clearly! — a strategy to distract shareholders from the core problems which you really, really need to address.

Telstra does have some good bits. I’ve been playing with the NextG mobile broadband network and I’m impressed — I’ll write about that another time. But too much of Telstra believes its own hype about being a “premium service” when the service is exactly the same commodity comms that other telcos provide, but with less-effective customer service.

Honestly, Telstra, you have the key advantages of the biggest market share, the biggest mind share and inheriting a massive taxpayer-funded infrastructure. What else do you want? If you can’t make it work with this huge head start then just piss off and leave it to someone who can.

Meanwhile Michael Egan, the chairman of competing NBN bidder Terria call’s Telstra’s attitude a dummy-spit and says.

The National Broadband Network should be completely independent of any existing retailer, or even upstream user like a media company or content provider.

Agreed.

We’re talking about the national data network here… the very nervous system for our nation’s future. It’s too important to be left to “market forces” and a bunch of squabbling schoolchildren.

[Disclosure: Telstra Country Wide provide me with a free NextG account and HSUPA card.]

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Rudd government delivers yesterday’s broadband

Stilgherrian — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:08:30 +0000

One of the Rudd government’s election promises was a national fibre-to-the-node (FttN) broadband network, putting at least 12Mb/sec download speeds within reach of 98% of the Australian population. Tuesday night’s Federal Budget kept that promise. I think.

Here’s how I wrote about it for Crikey yesterday:

Of $4.7b promised for the National Broadband Network, only 0.16% has been committed: $2.1m this financial year and $5.2m next for “establishment and implementation”. The remaining 99.84% — you know, actually building the thing — is all “nfp”. Not for publication. We’ll get back to you.

Spending is now “up to” the pre-election $4.7b figure. Broadband is competing with run-down roads, railways and ports for a share of the $20b Building Australia Fund, where “disbursements… will be subject to budget consideration, and will be spent responsibly, in line with prevailing macroeconomic conditions.”

Whatever the final budget, Australia will still be rolling out a 12Mb/sec network in 2012. Other countries are rolling out 100Mb/sec networks now.

It really is building yesterday’s network, isn’t it.

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Government releases broadband tender documents

Stilgherrian — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:47:16 +0000

The government has released the tender documents for the national 12Mb/second broadband network. As Richard Chirgwin notes, “I don’t think the minister will get 98% of the population, since that last 8% covers a very big geography. And I think that October for announcing the winner is a very slow process. And that a 5 year rollout is a real snail’s pace. But things have started…”

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My submissions for Australia 2020

Stilgherrian — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 02:19:58 +0000

For various reasons I didn’t have much time to write submissions yesterday. Yet I’ve said so much about still believing the Australia 2020 Summit to be important — despite plentiful shortcomings — that I felt obliged to write something. In 500 words or less. So I wrote from the heart…

What emerged were two pieces:

For the governance topic: Managing continual, rapid change with a clear framework of values.
For the topic on “the economy”, which is where discussions of broadband policy ended up: Broadband: It’s about symmetry, not speed.

I’m well aware that they don’t really provide a properly-researched, well-argued case. Nevertheless I hope that in some way they’ll help influence debate. Comments appreciated — perhaps over where the submissions themselves are blogged.