Tag: broadband

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Weekly Wrap 21

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and places — and what a productive week it has been!

Articles

  • You know super-fast ain’t so super: Optus, and…
  • ACCC says Optus pitch is misleading, for ZDNet.com.au, both covering the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s case in the Federal Court in Sydney against Singtel Optus for allegedly misleading or deceptive advertising. I particularly like Optus’ lawyer saying that broadband is not a bottle of shampoo, and the argument that even if an advertisement is technically misleading in and of itself this can still be “cured” with more information later in the sales process. The judge’s decision is expected early in the coming week.
  • Turnbull v Conroy: how Coalition broadband plan stacks up, for Crikey, comparing the Coalition’s new broadband policy with the Labor government’s National Broadband Network.

Podcasts

Media Appearances

Geekery

Corporate Largesse

  • HTC threw a more-than-adequate BBQ with plenty of drinks for the Australian launch of the HTC Desire HD smartphone. The venue was the Astral Bar and Restaurant at Star City Casino.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Sydney CBD at dusk, taken from the Astral Bar and Restaurant on level 17 of the Star City Casino in Pyrmont.]

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Selling the NBN: couldn’t you do better?

I’m reviewing the week’s news about the National Broadband Network (NBN) and I’ve come to a conclusion. Labor government spokespeople, and communications minister Senator Stephen Conroy in particular, have been dismal at selling the concept. Couldn’t you do better?

The government’s expensive-looking TV adverts are nothing but vague generalities.

Back in August, Conroy was enthusing about his smart dishwasher that negotiated cheap electricity, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it wouldn’t need any more bandwidth than dial-up. I haven’t heard anything specific from him since then, just more hand-waving about improved health and education.

Even NBN Co chief Mike Quigley, in an interview for KGB TV at Business Spectator, couldn’t present a compelling scenario that’d make sense to a “normal” voter. Just waffle about video conferencing.

[W]e are at an age now where video is just beginning to really come into its own online. So we are going to see more and more video applications and not just entertainment, but applications such as teleconferencing. Right from here in NBN Co in Sydney we’re using a system that’s high-definition, low-latency to our Melbourne office, three big 1080 screens. That requires quite a bit of bandwidth and that is going to become more and more widely used, I believe, even for people for teleworking, for example. So I think we’re going to see more and more video, which is going to drive the requirements for bandwidth up, and there are not many infrastructures that can carry that type of traffic successfully. Fibre is one of them.

None of this explains why we might want or need vastly more bandwidth than is available today. None of it explains why the NBN should be a taxpayer-funded project for all Australians, not just the few who might want video conferencing and could pay for it commercially. None of it explains why we might want the cities to cross-subsidise the regional areas.

And yet there are applications sitting there right now, or that will emerge any day now. Real applications crying out for more bandwidth. And not just gaming and more TV. It shouldn’t be hard to list a few. And that’s why I want your help.

I’d like a few examples for tomorrow’s Patch Monday podcast. If you can list them here, great. If I can record you saying it in your own words for a minute or two, even better.

So what have you got for me?

[Update 10.00pm: If you’d like to leave your suggestions as an audio comment for the Patch Monday podcast, just Skype to “stilgherrian” or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733 and leave voicemail.]

[Update Monday 25 October 2010, 1.40pm: This week’s Patch Monday podcast has just been posted: Why can’t Labor sell the NBN’s benefits? Enjoy.]

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Weekly Wrap 20

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, for those suffering from early-onset dementia.

Articles

  • Is Brisbane’s sewer broadband a crock of …?, for Crikey. Believing that the National Broadband Network will take too long to solve Brisbane’s internet problems, Lord Mayor Campbell Newman has signed a deal with the i3 Group to run fibre through the city’s sewers. As you do.
  • Cloud security? Better get a lawyer, Son!, a 2000-word feature for ZDNet.com.au. As the intro says, “Moving your data into the cloud creates a raft of security challenges, but according to information security specialists, those challenges are less about hackers and more about data availability and signing the right contracts.”

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 61, “Microsoft exposes the botnet threat”. My guest is Microsoft Australia’s chief security advisor, Stuart Strathdee.
  • A Series of Tubes episode 117. Richard Chirgwin’s podcast returns after a bit of a break. Apart from my usual natter about stuff, we hear from i3 Group’s CEO Elfed Thomas about that Brisbane sewer-based fibre project.

Media Appearances

  • Again it’s not strictly “media”, but on Tuesday I took part in a lunchtime discussion about the future of book publishing, hosted by Blurb. I haven’t had time to write it up yet, but here’s Ross Dawson’s summary.

Geekery

  • Wait for it…

Corporate Largesse

  • Blurb paid for Tuesday’s lunch at History House on Macquarie Street. And very pleasant it was.
  • I was invited to a few other things this week, but I was a tad crook and didn’t go. Ethics are restored, or something.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Staff of The Duke, Enmore, dress up for The Village People concert at the Enmore Theatre. I won’t link to a higher-resolution version. We have suffered enough.]

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Weekly Wrap 18 and 19

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, for those who haven’t been paying attention properly. Once more I’ve skipped a week, but I haven’t been all that prolific so I’ll think you’ll cope.

Articles

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 60, “Credit cards risked by standards failure”. My guest is Mark Goudie, head of the forensics practice for Verizon Business in Melbourne. I also chat with journalist and telco analyst Richard Chirgwin about the NBN opt-out issue.

Media Appearances

  • While it’s not strictly “media”, the panel No Man’s Land at the National Young Writers Festival the other weekend went remarkably well. I did make a crappy phone-quality recording of the session, and if that can be turned into a podcast I will do so. Eventually.

Geekery

  • I finally completed the migration of all my Prussia.Net internet hosting clients to a new server. For those who care about such things, it’s a leased dedicated server at ServePath running CentOS and the cPanel/WHM hosting control panel. I had its security improved by the good folks at ConfigServer, and Bobcares continue to provide user support. I’ve also used Linode to supply a bunch of secondary DNS servers.

Corporate Largesse

I’ve decided to introduce this new section, where I declare who’s bought me food and drink or given me gifts, so you can properly judge whether I have been influenced by them in my media coverage. In the last two weeks that’s:

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Realising her full potential, a billboard which caught my eye at Town Hall station in Sydney. For having “realised her full potential”, this young woman seems remarkably unexcited. Plus I’d have thought that “full potential” is only realised once you get into your career, not just when you get your Bachelor of Commerce or Economics degree.]

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Weekly Wrap 17

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, for those who haven’t been paying attention properly.

It’s a bit thin this week. After doing 30+ hours and a couple of all-nighters last weekend for that server migration I mentioned last time, I’ve been taking it slowly during this week. And I’m getting this post done on Friday night because I’m heading to Newcastle first thing tomorrow.

Articles

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 59, “Opening up the cloud”. My guest is open-source software developer and advocate Jeff Waugh. In a wide-ranging conversation they cover Linode and OpenStack; as well as DevOps, a new software development paradigm that involves operational staff in the entire development process; a DevOps tool called Cucumber, and its plug-in cucumber-nagios, written by Australian developer Lindsay Holmwood; and the social source code management system Github. And Richard Chirgwin debunks the myth that optical fibre only lasts 15 or 20 years.

Geekery

I’ll tell you more about what I’ve been doing next week.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Making TV at Aria: Lisa Creffield of Sky News Business interviews Peter Baxter from AVG at Aria Restaurant, Circular Quay, Sydney, following a lunchtime media briefing.]

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Why Wotif founder Graeme Wood is an arsehat

Wotif is, undoubtedly, an Australian internet success story. But that doesn’t mean its founder Graeme Wood’s opinions about the future of the internet are worth listening to.

Wood spoke at the 21st World Computer Congress in Brisbane yesterday and, as Fairfax reports, he said this about the National Broadband Network:

If all you do is download the same stuff — only faster — how can you justify that as an investment?

If the mix of the normal usage — email, music, video, Facebook, gaming, stays the same, but just happens faster — is there an economic or social benefit in that for the private user?

See that “if” part? His whole critique is based on the premise that if you have broadband a hundred times faster that what anyone has now, there still wouldn’t be any new applications. Really?

All arguments depend on their assumptions, and at least we can credit Wood for pointing out what his assumptions are. But his assumptions are crap and should be ignored.

If the moon were made of something different and were a different colour, then it would be green cheese. But it’s not.

If vastly faster bandwidth were available then new things do become possible. The fact that you, Mr Wood, can’t think of them isn’t a critique of the NBN. It’s a critique of your limited imagination. Or, even if you have no imagination yourself, your inability to stay in touch with the people sketching out those future applications.

Let’s invert that and go back a few years to the mid-1990s. Instead of the 10Mb/s or more ADSL2+ connections that suburban homes have now, and that most regional users still dream of, we have 56kb/s dial-up links.

Remember 1995? No VoiP telephony, unless there’s no-one else using the internet link. No Skype. No video chat. No AJAX-based software as a service — including Wotif’s own rich interface for booking hotel rooms. No streaming video from the ABC’s iView. No waiting for rich, graphics-filled web pages for news sites. No YouTube. Sure, there were MP3 files, if you were prepared to wait half an hour for each one. Waiting hours to download your monthly Windows updates.

And everyone else in the home waiting until you finish, so they could have their turn.

Wood would be there, saying, “If the mix of the normal usage — email, Gopher, FTP downloads of a text file, web surfing to GeoCities stays the same, but just happens faster — is there an economic or social benefit?”

Of course there is. Even with no new applications, everything happens faster. So everyone can consume faster. Generate profits faster. Do work instead of waiting for software to download.

That someone who purports to be an entrepreneur on the internet has forgotten all this so quickly is appalling.

Thank you for playing, Mr Wood. Now fuck off.