I’ll be on radio Triple J’s current affairs program Hack this evening. They’re covering the National Broadband Network announcement from 5.30pm AEST. I believe I’ll be live in the studio after they’ve done all the set-piece interviews up front. You can access a live stream from the Triple J website.
WTF? National Broadband Network as FTTP!
Yes, the story of the day is the astounding news that Australia’s new National Broadband Network will be 100Mbit/second Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) — and government-owned!
I’m part of Crikey‘s massive coverage, which kicks off with an editorial, Bernard Keane’s Huge, historic and nationalised: broadband goes ballistic and Fibre To The Node becomes Fibre To The Nerd.
My contributions are A massive and much-needed catch-up and Crikey Clarifier: National Broadband Network.
My friend and colleague Mark Pesce also has 100 million bits per second: you call that fast? And there’s plenty more — some of which is behind the paywall.
As Bernard Keane says, “It will take days — perhaps weeks or months — to work through all the possibilities of this, technically, commercially and politically.”
It’s also a massive face-saver for the minister, Senator Stephen Conroy. Instead of being sacked for screwing up the original tendering process, he’s being given command of the biggest infrastructure project in Australia’s history. Just why does he get this lifeline, I wonder?
This is a massive shift in Australia’s communications policy. Stay tuned.
A Series of Tubes episode 80
This week’s A Series of Tubes podcast is up and running. Richard Chirgwin talks with Colin Goodwin from Ericsson Australia about 500Mb/sec DSL, and with me about Senator Conroy’s comments on the iiNet lawsuit, ACMA’s research into social networks behaviour, and the Vodafone-Hutchison merger. A Series of Tubes is part of the IT Radio family of podcasts.
Conroy dumped as Minister for Broadband
Senator Stephen Conroy has been sacked as Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.
According to early reports, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd remained tight-lipped when questioned about the reasons for Conroy’s departure. “Senator Conroy did a commendable job over the past 14 months, but it’s time for a change of direction”, he said.
The move leaves the government’s unpopular ISP filtering plan up in the air. Continual delays with the NBN tender and the exclusion of Telstra from the plan have been cited by analysts as key reasons for why Conroy has been dumped. Earlier this year, the Senator was found by a Whirlpool survey to be a less effective communications minister than his Liberal predecessors.
Conroy has been in the post since Labor took government in 2007, and was previously the Shadow Minister for Trade, Corporate Governance and Financial Services.
Links for 29 January 2009 through 30 January 2009
Stilgherrian’s links for 29 January 2009 through 30 January 2009, gathered by a poisonous frog:
- Study challenges AGs on predator danger | CNET News: A new study from the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use (CSRIU) challenges recent assertions by several state attorneys general that young people are at significant risk from online predators on social-networking sites.
- Co-generation Cyber-Cafe Internet coffee appliance | Link: The Link Institute today announced a breakthrough in energy saving to combat global warming: the “Cyber-Cafe”. This unit provides web services for a home or small business and uses the waste heat to keep coffee warm.
- What is so costly to Telstra about 38GB? | Core Economics: Joshua Gans asks the age-old question: if the first 60GB of a broadband plan costs $130, why does an additional 38GB cost $6000?
- ACMA rolls out cybersafety professional development program for educators | ACMA: ACMA’s Cybersafety Outreach — Professional Development for Educators is the national cyber-safety program designed for primary and secondary level educators. It's part of a wider education initiative which will, I contend, be money better spent than on Internet filters.
- Going private | Inside Story: The evidence suggests that publicly-listed media companies are digging their own graves. Does this mean a return to the age of moguls, asks Jonathan Este.
- Australia’s Holy Man likes a Good War | sydwalker.info: Syd Walker profiles Jim Wallace, head of the Australian Christian Lobby, former head of Australia’s elite SAS Regiment and now stormtrooper in the fight for Internet censorship.
- More of London from above, at night | The Big Picture: Boston.com’s The Big Picture is almost always beyond excellent. This set of aerial images of London at night is stunning. Photographer: Jason Hawkes.
- The next P-I might be electronic, and on a plastic sheet | Crosscut: The Hearst empire has been experimenting with epaper versions of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
- http://walterhiggins.net/projects/follower_mosaic.pl: A straightforward tool to create a mosaic of your Twitter followers’ avatar images. Produces HTML for pasting into a blog post or whatever.
- Australian Journalists on Twitter | Laurel Papworth – Social Network Strategy: Ms @SilkCharm has been compiling a list as indicated, with a very wide interpretation of “journalist”. Useful.
- TinEye Reverse Image Search: “TinEye a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.”
- The Phenomenon of Retweeting: A Deep Analysis | Pistachio: A numerical analysis of how people retweet — that is, pass on others’ tweets — on Twitter.
Telstra holds back broadband speeds. Again. (Revisited)
[This story was originally written for Crikey, where it was published on 12 January 2009. I’ve linked to it previously Here it is in full, along with a wonderful follow-up comment from a Telstra PR guy and my extremely snarky reply.]
Confused by Telstra’s rejected low-cal bid for the National Broadband Network? Let’s stir some new jargon into the stew: “DOCSIS 3” and “dark fibre”. Suddenly Telstra’s strategy makes sense — for Telstra — but it delays the rollout of high-speed broadband even further. Again.
DOCSIS 3 is a new system for cable internet which increases speeds from the current 17Mbit per second of BigPond Cable (30Mbit in Sydney and Melbourne) to 100Mbit or more. Last week Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo revealed that the technology is being deployed, but implied that it won’t be offered until they’re forced to by a competitor’s actions.
“We have [DOCSIS 3] as an option if somebody chooses to compete and to compete with us,” he told a conference in Phoenix.
“The only difference is we’ll be there a lot quicker a lot faster a lot bigger, a lot more integrated and with more capabilities than anybody else.”
How does Telstra do it quicker? By quietly stashing away its secret weapons, ready to be unleashed when a competitor tried to deploy their own big guns. Remember how Telstra didn’t sell ADSL2+ broadband, even from exchanges where equipment was already installed, until ISPs like iiNet started selling their own ADSL2+?
This time Telstra will do it quicker by using dark fibre — optical fibre cable that’s already in the ground but not yet “lit up” by the data-carrying laser beams.
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