Tag: wi-fi

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Weekly Wrap 7

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets.

Articles

  • ‘Open Government’ declared in Australia for Crikey. Buried in the news just before the Australian election was called last weekend, Lindsay Tanner, the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, issued the Declaration of Open Government which had been called for by the Government 2.0 Taskforce. Someone ought to tell the Attorney-General’s Department.
  • Two other articles have been written but are still in the production pipeline, one for Crikey and one for ABC Unleashed. And I’ve been researching a 2000-word feature for ZDNet Australia. So I’ve been very busy, you just haven’t seen the output yet.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 49, “The software patent controversy explained” with guest Kimberlee Weatherall. She teaches intellectual property law at the University of Queensland.
  • A Series of Tubes episode 112, in which I chat with Richard Chirgwin about the Declaration of Open Government, the Privacy Commissioner’s findings on the Google Street View Wi-Fi incident, and how the Pirate Party fell at the first hurdle. Also, Internode’s John Lindsay explains the class action they and iiNet are involved with concerning Testra’s wholesale ADSL2+ pricing, and Steve Chung, consultant at Ruckus Wireless, talks about Wi-Fi privacy.

Media Appearances

[Photo: “Paddy Maguire’s Hotel“, at the corner of George and Hay Streets, Haymarket, Sydney, taken from a bus window on 23 July 2010.]

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Sydney Airport passes the buck

Photograph of jet aircraft approaching Sydney Airport

Sydney Airport has responded to my email about interference with our Wi-Fi and Next G reception. In standard corporate style, they begin by reminding me that “aviation safety — both in the air and on the ground — is paramount”. It gives some useful information — but passes the buck firmly to Airservices Australia.

The full text is over the jump.

Yes, the email arrived a day later than their 3-day stated turnaround time, but that’s OK considering I did say this would all be published.

Airservices Australia runs stuff like air traffic control so, yes, this does perhaps belong in their court. As they’ve been suffering some problems themselves, it’ll be interesting to see their response.

Continue reading “Sydney Airport passes the buck”

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Where are your manners, Sydney Airport?

Photograph of jet aircraft on landing approach for Sydney Airport runway 16R

Our home in Enmore is under the approach path to Runway 16R at Sydney Airport. We can cope (just) with the noise, but the electronic interference annoys the shit out of us. Time to fix that. Here’s an email I just entered into their website contact form.

Dear Sydney Airport,

We live in Enmore. When you turn on your electronic stuff to help the heavy jets land on Runway 16R, it often knocks out our Wi-Fi network. (It also overloads the pre-amp of our digital TV receiver, but since we’ve pretty much given up on broadcast TV this is less of a concern.) We can even predict the imminent arrival of a heavy because the network goes down about 15 or 20 seconds before we hear the approaching aircraft.

This happens on two different 801.11g 802.11g frequencies, two different brand wireless access points, and on whichever computers we’re using. Your comms or navaids, or maybe the aircraft themselves, can also interrupt a Telstra Next G data connection, so even switching to our alternate data link is problematic.

I understand that, for obvious practical reasons, we can’t shut down the airport. So I assume you’ll be sending someone around to resolve this interference with our legitimate use of the radio spectrum?

The disruption has of course been more frequent since the work on the cross runway has increased the daytime traffic over our home. Again, I understand that this work needs to be done.

However, like someone doing noisy renovations or holding a noisy but perfectly legitimate party, the polite, neighbourly thing would be something a bit better than sending us generic corporate propaganda. The polite, neighbourly thing would be to make good somehow. Give us the keys to your holiday shack while work’s in progress. Invite us over to see the new family room once it’s done. Send around a slab of beer and some grilled chicken breast fillets.

Or, just fix the problems you’re causing.

I look forward to your response. Like this email, it’ll be posted at stilgherrian.com. If it’s a bunch of legal or PR jargon which fails to acknowledge that the problem even exists, we’ll laugh.

Regards,

Stilgherrian

I’ll keep you posted if and when they respond.