Turnbull’s Low Definition Broadband Crystal Ball

Malcolm Turnbull is at it again, criticising just about anything published by anyone that is in any way supportive of the National Broadband Network (NBN).

This is despite ample evidence provided by anyone who challenges his alternative plan, and people actually building the NBN that he is completely missing the point.

His plan calls for “up to 80Mbps” through an FTTN/VDSL network, though the actual viability of such speeds depends on a number of factors, including the quality of the existing copper network, which has been barely maintained for years:

“Other infrastructure leaders subsequently concurred and pointed out that maintenance to Australia’s copper networks (both PSTN and HFC) has practically collapsed over the past three years because there has been little reason for commercial companies to spend money on maintaining networks that are scheduled to be ripped out of the ground.”

Only the people closest to the FTTN cabinets would get this target speed.

Indeed, you would see people living next door to each other getting different maximum possible speeds, which creates the ridiculous situation where services one home will be able to get, might not be available to the home across the road.

The FTTP NBN is designed for speeds of 100Mbps and beyond. Malcolm often asks what applications will need 100Mbps.

Well, here’s one for you now.

There are currently two forms of Ultra-High-Definition Television (UHDTV) in the pipeline – known as “4K” and “8K”.

“4K” has a resolution of 3840 × 2160 (8.3 megapixels, approximately four times the resolution of current HDTV), and “8K” has a resolution of 7680 × 4320 (33.2 megapixels, approximately sixteen times the bandwidth of current HDTV).

That’s a lot of pixels.

With respect to current HDTV technologies, according to Motorola at least 6Mbps of bandwidth is required for streaming HD content:

“Recent tests show excellent picture quality at 7.5 Mbps, so ADSL connections that support 6 – 8 Mbps may be able to carry HDTV to consumers.”

LG has already announced plans for a 4K television to be made available in Australia, to compete with an existing Sony 4K product:

“The 84-inch TV, which was launched in Korea late last month [August 2012], will be competing against Sony’s similarly specced Bravia 4K, which will be available “before Christmas”. Both TVs have 3840×2160 resolution, or quad full HD, which is one of the many standards currently being bundled under the banner of 4K.”

If at least 6Mbps is required for current HDTV, based on current compression technologies, at least around 24Mbps will be required for a single 4K UHDTV stream, and at least around 96Mbps would be required for a single 8K UHDTV stream.

These numbers are likely to drop with improvements to compression, but the bottom line is the future of television, as it is already mapped out, will see a huge increase in the required bandwidth.

Given Turnbull is “promising” around 80Mbps – (though many experts agree that number will be extremely difficult to attain under his FTTN plan) – a single 8K UHDTV stream should be enough to completely saturate one of his connections.

How many televisions are there in your house? More than one? Do the maths.

Do the maths for 4K UHDTV as well, and see how many televisions, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones will be able to be watching video content at the same time under Turnbull’s plan.

How soon will we see these next generation televisions? Well, we’ve already seen that 4K is more or less available now.

Sharp demonstrated 8K televisions at CES2012 in January:

“Sharp indicated that they, and NHK, were shooting for the year 2020 for 8K actually come online on the consumer level as a lot of factors, such as broadband infrastructure and movie studio and TV broadcasting support needs to ironed out.”

Sorting out the broadband infrastructure? By around 2020?

That’s about the time the NBN build should be nearing completion – and we’ll be ready to go.

But not if we listen to Turnbull, who expressed an opinion in a recent Lateline interview that not only should we implement his inferior FTTN plan, but that should be enough for around 20 years:

“Now, you may say in 20 years time things will be different. Well, if they’re different in 20 years time, we’ll make some further investments in 20 years time.”

Emma Alberici asked in the same Lateline interview:

“What is wrong with having the highest possible ambition for Australia for broadband? What’s wrong with leading the world and having the highest possible speeds?”

Indeed. What is wrong with that?

You could argue economics as Turnbull usually does, but as we’ve seen, the technology requiring speeds beyond what his plan will offer is here now.

Turnbull went on to say:

“Now what we can do – particularly in the areas where we can do fibre to the node – we can bring people up to very high speeds that are more than adequate for all of the applications that are available now or foreseeably available, and we can do that very quickly.”

Well, 4K is almost upon us, and 8K is apparently foreseeable by 2020 according to the manufacturers.

We’ve already seen that 80Mbps won’t be enough. It is apparently “foreseeably available”, despite Turnbull’s belief that nothing will require the speeds the NBN will offer and that he can’t even foresee the need for such speeds.

Malcolm is quite right in saying:

“We don’t know what will be available in 10 years time.”

But he is ignoring what we already know is coming in television technology, and his 80Mbps network won’t cut it.

If we wait the 20 years he suggests before we make “some further investments”, UHDTV will have been with us for around 15 years, and we won’t have the bandwidth to cope.

At that point, it would take almost a decade – (as long as the NBN is slated to take now) – to rollout the network he would deny us NOW, and some people will be 25 years behind the times when it is finally completed.

His interim investment in FTTN would also largely be wasted, because so little of what he would build would carry over to a full FTTP network.

We already know that a full FTTP network will be cheaper to maintain than the existing copper network – the same existing copper network his plan relies on.

More and more it becomes apparent that his objection to the fibre NBN is nothing more than politics, because clearly the technical facts have defeated his lack of technical understanding and foresight.

In August, Turnbull said that he had a fully costed alternative policy document ready to go with respect to his FTTN plan.

A few short weeks later he back-flipped, saying that it was “difficult to provide a fully-costed alternative”.

He won’t even release his detailed plan – (costed or otherwise) – for scrutiny.

It surely isn’t reasonable to relentlessly spout his plan as the better alternative to the NBN, and attack the NBN mercilessly, when there is nothing officially available to be able compare the two plans on an equal footing.

Despite repeated requests from all sections of the media to release his plan, Turnbull refuses. A cynic might say he has something to hide.

Hopefully someone will come up with a 4K crystal ball for Malcolm really soon.

His current crystal ball clearly isn’t providing a very clear picture.

UPDATE 21/11/2012 15:21: Apparently, NHK may even be implementing 8K UHDTV at 500Mbps compressed. Time to seriously revisit your thinking on bandwidth requirements, Mr Turnbull.

How To Incompetently Not Find A Water Main

At about eight o’clock yesterday morning, my phone line went dead. Obviously, this brought down my ADSL service with it.

This isn’t entirely uncommon – given the age of the copper phone lines in my street – (predominantly installed in the 1950’s when the estate was established) – and the slightly down hill nature of my street, when it rains the Telstra pits often fill up with water and short all the phone lines until the water drains away.

Except it wasn’t raining yesterday, so I was scratching my head.

I wasn’t home at the time, but I could see from tools provided by my ISP that the ADSL was down, and calling my home number gave a busy signal.

I did have a theory though.

In September, we received a notice from our local water authority, Barwon Water, that a company named Infratec would be, between “early” and “late” October, connecting temporary water mains in our street while the actual water main was replaced.

There have been many incidents of ruptured mains in our street over the last few years, so this seemed like a good idea.

They never actually showed up for the first time until late October. They connected up all the temporary water pipes – (hoses running down the street and into each water meter) – and in the process of the work managed to sever a gas main.

Incompetency number one.

They weren’t seen again until yesterday – and of course we are now in the middle of November, some weeks after the work was supposed to be finished.

Given they showed up yesterday morning at about the same time as my phone line went dead, you can probably see where this is going.

It has become apparent that they have severed the phone lines in a number of places.

Incompetency number two.

Here’s a hole in the ground in front of a house a little up the street. See the severed lead-in phone line to that house? (Click photo for a larger view).

Here’s another picture of the same hole, showing clearly where they have pre-identified the two phone lead-in lines emanating from the Telstra pit – (which still has ‘PMG’ on it, showing its age) – including one that leads directly into the hole.

Yet they still dug the hole, knowing the line was there, and severed it. And as you’ll note from the first photo, they didn’t manage to actually find a water main in that hole.

Incompetency number three.

So seriously, what the ‘eff Infratec? Are you really that bad?

Even if Telstra fix the lines today, how confident am I that Infratec won’t dig another hole and sever some more phone lines in the street as the work progresses over the coming weeks?

Not very.

UPDATE: 20/11/2012 13:02: The phone line was restored at around 10:50am this morning. Given Infratec’s record so far, lets see how long it takes them to do it again as they move along the street!

Air Travellers Cop Bad Systems Architecture

After a major systems failure in 2010 of the Navitaire New Skies airline booking and check-in system used by Virgin Australia, another failure yesterday has left thousands of Australian air travellers inconvenienced and angry.

This time the problems were not limited to Virgin, with the crash also affecting Jetstar, Tiger, Rex, and other associated airlines.

It is a fact of life that things go wrong from time to time, but when these things happen repeatedly, one must start asking questions.

In the aftermath, Navitaire blamed a “a blackout in a third party data centre in Sydney” for the outage.

While this may well have been the correct and real reason for the outage – (equally, it may not have been – sometimes it’s much easier to blame someone else if you can) – as a systems engineer/developer with a background in networking, I can’t help but wonder about how Navitaire handles system redundancy.

When designing any production system, particularly a mission-critical system such as an airline booking/check-in system, one must consider redundancy very carefully.

There are a number of different redundancy concepts, such as N+1, or High Availability (HA).

You want to architect your system in such a way, that in the event of a failure of a single component of the system, the system is able to continue to operate fully, or even in a degraded state. It should never collapse completely.

The “blackout in a third party data centre in Sydney” should not have brought the system down, unless the system is badly architected, inadvertently or otherwise.

When developing systems, sometimes corners are cut to save money. If Navitaire hasn’t properly considered systems failover, and it was for cost cutting purposes, given they reached a confidential financial settlement with Virgin after the 2010 failure, they might not have saved as much as they hoped.

Whatever the status of failover systems, it is reasonably clear that they didn’t work yesterday. There should be at least two data centres involved, so that when one goes out, as happened yesterday, the other should take over and allow normal business operations to continue.

Naivtaire have some questions to answer.

This time round, they will have even more airlines asking the question.

Why?

Ding Dong The Wicked (Internet Filter) Witch Is Dead!

In a significant backdown by the Australian Government, the mandatory ISP-level internet filter previously proposed for Australia, has now been officially buried.

It will be replaced by the internationally recognised and accepted Interpol Access Blocking “worst of” blacklist service, and enforced on ISPs under Section 313 of the Telecommunications Act, 1997.

While the mandatory filter was placed on the back-burner some time ago, it was still considered official government policy.

No more.

The wicked witch is dead.

Finally.

The internet community in Australia and around the world – (lead by Electronic Frontiers Australia) – rallied heavily against the draconian filter plan, primarily championed by Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy.

The original proposal provided for no visibility. The contents of the blacklist would not be made public, and penalties could apply for publishing its contents. It also provided no simple appeal mechanism for the de-listing of material incorrectly listed on the blacklist.

This raised concerns that the filter would be able to be used for governmental purposes – (such as censoring of content unfavourable to the government) – and while Conroy insisted it would not be used in such a way, the existence of the system, by its very nature, provided for this possibility.

Given the lack of transparency, if it were used in such a way, we might never know – and this would go against the very nature of democracy.

The government did react to the pressure, and commenced formulating an appeals structure, but did not budge on the point of keeping the blacklist secret.

In recent days, it has been revealed that Russia has a similar secret blacklist.

Even before the announcement, there have been signs and speculation for quite some time that the government might have been planning to drop the filter completely, despite publicly reiterating that it was still part of their official policy platform.

In June 2011 it became apparent that the branch of the department dealing with the filter had been quietly shutdown:

“The former branch head responsible for mandatory, ISP-level filtering in the Department of Broadband (DBCDE) has seen his branch abolished and now leads another area, according to its most recent organisational chart.”

We also saw the National Classification Scheme Review, designed to look at what changes needed to be made to Australia’s clearly flawed media classification system on which the filter was to be based.

The whole process has been littered with stupid contradictory rulings, international ridicule, a litany of inaccuracies and misrepresentations, and has seen Australia labelled as an enemy of internet freedom by Reporters Without Borders, alongside countries such as Saudi Arabia, Burma, China, North Korea, Iran and Vietnam.

Special interest groups, including the ACL, have repeatedly called for the plan to be pushed forward – (including as recently as yesterday) – or for it to be made even more restrictive than first planned.

Personally, I have long felt that the Classification Review would be used as a convenient excuse to quietly shut the whole filtering policy down, writing in August 2010:

“The recent announcement that the filter would be delayed until a review of the classification system is completed provides the out for the government.”

“After the “review”, the government will have an excuse to change its position. They’ve saved some face BEFORE the election, and the policy will be – (they hope quietly) – taken outside and put out of its misery.”

“I feel Conroy and Labor are bluffing. They know its doomed, and what they’ve done [by initiating the review] is made sure that they can clean things up as quietly as possible later.”

It would seem that this apparently has come true – and long may it stay that way.

The introduction of the established Interpol mechanisms means that the list of regulated sites will not be beholden to a government, so that the filtering system cannot be secretly used for governmental purposes.

While we will still have a level of internet filtering, like other pundits, I feel that seceding to the Interpol list and therefore taking the control out of the hands of government, the necessary transparency exists, and instead of just blocking sites, via Interpol the people responsible for the sites will be able to be tracked down and prosecuted.

People will still be able to get around these filters if they so choose – which is the point the pro-filter campaigners don’t want to understand or accept. Conroy will also likely claim victory in that he got a filter into place.

Significantly though, it is not the filter he wanted, and we feared.

Most importantly of all, the government controlled mandatory internet filter is finally – and officially – dead.

As Conroy himself once famously said, you can’t regulate the internet.

So despite it all, it seems he was right about something after all.

UPDATE 09/11/2012 15:15: The full press release from the minister is now available online, confirming that the Classification Review recommended that the “Refused Classification” category be re-defined in such a way as to make the Interpol list the appropriate mechanism, exactly as predicted. The Classification Review became the escape from the policy Conroy was seeking.

Upload Your Personal ‘Important Documents’?

With the launch yesterday of Australia Post’s new ‘Digital Mailbox’, I took particular interest in how the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy described how it can be used.

From the ministerial press release:

“Use the Digital Mailbox as a personal digital vault to store important documents.”

Given Australia Post’s status as a government business enterprise, and the government’s proposed data retention scheme, would I be wanting to store my personal ‘important documents’ under the auspices of what is ultimately a government entity?

Given their current appetite for our personal information?

I don’t think I would be wanting to do that.

I suggest nobody else should want to do that either.

So don’t do that.

Hurricane Sandy Duh Moment

People might die?

Duh!

Of course, people have already died throughout the Caribbean as a result of Hurricane Sandy, so this is a moot point anyway.

Why Is A Quarter Of The NBN Being Constructed Aerially?

Given the kerfuffle that has broken out today between NBN Co and the New South Wales government over access to power pole infrastructure when rolling out aerial portions of the NBN, it is probably a good time to explain why around 25% of the NBN won’t be built underground.

According to the current NBN Co Business Plan – (on page 15) – approximately 25% of the NBN is expected to be constructed aerially.

But why?

Basically, the reason comes from a decision many years ago to run the original copper network underground only down one side of many streets, to speed up the original rollout of the Customer Access Network (CAN) – better known as the existing Telstra telephone network.

By only having to trench down one side of the street, and not both – and run copper phone lines to the other side of the street aerially via the power poles – a great amount of time and money was saved by only having to dig half as many trenches.

In effect, it made it as cheap and as fast as possible to deliver, by slashing construction times. By all means, this wasn’t done everywhere, but it was in many areas.

Like my street.

As you can see from this first photo, Telstra pits are only visible on the right hand side of the road:

This is a close-up of the pit you can see in the middle of the first photo:

This is the second power pole up the street, showing the Telstra copper lines coming up out of the ground – (inside the white conduit) – and heading up the pole:

And towards the top of the pole, you see the phone lines distributing out to the houses on the opposite side of the street:

This situation is common. Since NBN Co expects about 25% of the network to be built aerially, it’s reasonable to extrapolate that approximately 50% of the streets around the country fall into this category.

Given NBN Co has negotiated to use all of Telstra existing ‘pit and pipe’ – (and in this example, ‘pit-pipe-and-pole’) – the foresightedness that was shown 60 years ago by the old Postmaster General’s Department to save time and money when building the copper network – (and get Australia back on its feet after World War 2) – will do the same for NBN Co now.

It will save them time and money.

NBN Co won’t have to dig any trenches, or erect any new poles.

Quite rightly, NBN Co has refuted the cost claims made by the NSW government with respect to the ridiculous standoff that has just eventuated – which has most likely come about for political purposes.

So don’t worry about aerial NBN connectivity. If you end up with aerial fibre, it’s because you’ve got aerial copper now. They are just following the existing infrastructure.

Nothing changes.

UPDATE (31/10/2012, 9:25am): In moving forward with aerial construction plans in New South Wales, NBN Co has moved to invoke Schedule 3 of the Telecommunications Act to break the impasse. This schedule “provides carriers with the power to inspect land to determine whether the land is suitable for the carriers’ purposes; install a facility on the land; and the power to maintain a facility that is situated on the land.”

Regional Rail Link Beginning To Take Shape

Regular travellers on the Geelong, Ballarat, and Bendigo regional train lines, and the Werribee and Sydenham/Sunbury metropolitan train lines, will most likely have noticed a lot of new tracks being laid between Southern Cross (SCS) and North Melbourne (NME) stations, as part of the Regional Rail Link (RRL) project.

While this work between SCS and NME is plain for all to see, what isn’t so obvious is some of the work further down the line.

The latest aerial photography of Melbourne from the fabulous NearMap – (taken on October 2nd) – has started revealing other less obvious parts of the project.

For all of the following images, you can get a closer view by clicking on the images.

Firstly, here is some of the work to take the new rail line under the Citylink tollway, showing an already in-place crossover, and the future alignment of RRL:

Next up, the earthworks in the Lloyd Street precinct, where RRL takes over the old freight arrivals alignment, and the existing Lloyd Street bridge was removed – (this bridge was actually replaced last Friday night):

The next most obvious area of work for most commuters is in the Joseph Road precinct in Footscray, where the Werribee line will be moved to the south, to allow RRL to take up the existing alignment of the Werribee line – and a lot more earth has been placed since this shot was taken. RRL will pass over the new section of the Werribee line on a kilometre long structure, which will also take it over the Maribyrnong River:

Now into Footscray proper, where the Nicholson Street bridge is under heavy modification, and footings for the bridge that will take the new alignment of the Sydenham/Sunbury line over the freight lines to the north of the current alignment into new platforms at Footscray, for which construction has just commenced. RRL will take over the existing Sydenham/Sunbury alignment through Footscray station:

Further out into the suburbs to Sunshine, work has commenced to move the existing Ballarat line slightly to the north, to allow the line to be grade separated under Anderson Road, removing the existing level crossing:

Further out again to Caroline Springs/Deer Park, where earthworks are under way in the median of the Deer Park Bypass, to allow for RRL to travel beneath the freeway, as it turns south towards the Werribee/Tarneit area:

On to Tarneit itself, where a long section of initial earthworks already shows the route of the brand new section of line, taking in the location of the new Tarneit station:

More works should commence in the near future, and I’ll try keep things up to date for those interested travellers.

The new line is definitely beginning to take shape.

UPDATE: Apparently the crossover shown in the ‘Citylink’ section is not RRL related, and has been moved elsewhere last weekend.

Special Opening Hours For Coles

Our local Coles supermarket is open seven days a week, between 7am and 10pm. Yesterday was Geelong Cup Day, and for most people who work in Geelong, a public holiday.

As such, many businesses close for the day, or have reduced operating hours. A responsible business would of course advertise their adjusted operating hours, so regular customers know when they are open and closed on the day.

Bravo Coles for letting us know your adjusted operating hours for yesterday!

Instead of opening for your regular hours of 7am till 10pm, you opened for the hours of 7am till 10pm on cup day!

Wait. What?

Why did you even bother?

NBN Wireless NTU

Following on from an earlier post where the nature of an NBN fixed wireless antenna was revealed, NBN Co’s blog has revealed the look of the Ericsson wireless NTU, used in the installations.

This NTU compliments the fibre version I posted in early 2011, which will be used within the fibre footprint of the network.

Similar to the fibre version – (manufactured by Alcatel-Lucent) – multiple services can be connected:

“As you can see I have two providers currently connected (one on the red cable the other on the blue).”

The green cable is clearly the feed from the external antenna, as described in my previous post.

The fixed wireless portion of the NBN is unlikely to be halted, even if the Coalition wins the next federal election, as all contracts to build the wireless network are in place, and the Coalition has promised to fulfill all existing contracts, should they come to power.