michaelwyres.com.au | musings of a geek

82% of NBN Users Choose Higher Speed Tiers

In something of a surprise at last night’s Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee Estimates hearing, it was revealed that a much higher than expected number of initial NBN users a choosing the higher speed plans available on the fibre network.

Both NBN Co CEO Mike Quigley, and Jim Hassell – (Head of Product Development and Industry Relations) – stated that within the current population of fibre users, only 18% have chosen the basic 12/1Mbps option – with 35%, 10%, and 37% uptake rates for the 25/10Mbps, 50/20Mbps, and 100/40Mbps speed tiers respectively.

Hassell stated in the hearing:

“In the 2010 corporate plan our assumptions were that the 12:1 service would be something like about 53 or 54 per cent.”

With the higher prices NBN Co charges ISPs to provide the faster speed tiers to their customers, the potential revenues the network will generate will be much greater than first anticipated.

As Greens Senator Scott Ludlam commented towards Quigley and Hassell during the Estimates hearing, with respect to if such uptake rates of the higher speeds were to continue:

“If they do you are running a much more lucrative business than the minister was hoping you would.”

NBN Co initially projected around 50% of connections would be at the slowest 12/1Mbps tier. 82% of current NBN fibre users are shying away from the basic speed plans.

The indications are clear that more people are favouring – (and likely to continue to favour) – the higher speed tiers as people connect to the network over and above original expectations, and this is expected to be reflected favourably within an updated NBN Co business plan, due to be released before the end of May.

These results, though still early, are very positive news indeed.

Wet Behind The Ears?

Was just mildly amused by the sequence of events described on the front page of the Ballarat Courier website, in regards to some wild weather interrupting the Australian Masters Rowing Championship on Lake Wendouree.

At 8:35am, racing on the second day of the event had been cancelled – (as circled in red) – yet at 12:12pm, the second report – (circled in green) – suggests there were boats on the water competing and capsizing due to the weather.

Apparently either despite the cancellation earlier in the day, proceedings went ahead, or rowers took to the water anyway.

Either way, their own fault?

Link Baiting At Its Worst (Best?)

Keen to get a boost from the popularity of the Australian version of the singing contest, The Voice – on which British performer Seal is a judge, The Age came up with this headline for a story:

Of course, when you click on that link, you get:

Link baiting much?

Does Australia Really Want The NBN?

I love local newspapers. In many many cases, they are lovingly created by people who just want the best for their communities, and want to make sure they are informed as to the issues in their local community.

The issues that the big metropolitan newspapers don’t give a damn about; issues that are presented without the political agendas of the Fairfax’s and News Limited’s of the world.

Take for example the three-year rollout plan for the NBN, and the disappointment many communities are feeling, since finding out they aren’t in the initial plan.

No political “white elephant” rhetoric, or “biggest infrastructure project in Australia’s history” whining. Just people calling out for what they really want for their suburbs and towns.

Let see some examples of what local communities are saying about the NBN:

Moe, Victoria:

“Mr Buckley said in an interconnected municipality like Latrobe, Moe’s omission would ‘disadvantage’ the area, with ‘integrated institutions’ like Latrobe Community Health Service and the education sector unable to effectively utilise the technology across its services.”

Esperance, Western Australia:

“The Esperance Chamber of Commerce and Industry is complaining to the Prime Minister over being left out of the initial roll out of the National Broadband Network.”

Bendigo, Victoria:

“I wish to register my dismay at the federal government and its decision to exclude Eaglehawk from the NBN fibre network roll-out in Bendigo. The education and health sectors have been used in their promotion as examples of how beneficial the NBN would be. Why is my secondary college the only one to miss out?”

Berrigan/Jeriderie, New South Wales:

“‘For the Berrigan residents and business owners there were concerns that Berrigan had been left of the map – similar to what had occurred when natural gas was installed in the towns of Finley, Tocumwal and Barooga.”

Drysdale/Clifton Springs, Victoria:

“Drysdale and Clifton Springs will submit a formal request to be included in the next rollout of the national broadband network, according to a community group.”

Orange, New South Wales:

“The long wait for the National Broadband Network (NBN) in Orange may be a hurdle for establishing Charles Sturt University’s (CSU) medical school.”

Sunbury/Macedon Ranges, Victoria:

“Mayor Henry McLaughlin said he was disappointed that the shire was overlooked.”

Port Douglas, Queensland:

“Council officers have been in discussions with NBN Co. with regard to rollout in the Douglas area. While these discussions have been positive, we can’t speculate on any impending announcement by NBN Co.”

Mildura, Victoria:

“It’s extremely disappointing. I would have thought Mildura, as a major inland centre, and at a major crossroads for transport, communication and other services would have been included in this first stage.”

Heathcote/Axedale, Victoria:

“Heathcote Tourism and Development president Wayne McKay said while Heathcote and surrounding communities welcomed the news of the rollout, it was disappointing the local region would not be included.”

Dunkeld, Victoria:

“Dunkeld Primary School principal Pat Gleeson said the lack of a roll out would affect his students in the long term.”

Kimberley, Western Australia:

“I don’t know whether we’re in the mix for later, but it’s disgusting that we’ve been left off. They need to revisit what they’re doing. In our Shire, there’d be over 10,000 people and that’s Derby and Fitzroy Crossing and surrounds. It was supposed to make things faster and better.”

Casey/Cardinia, Victoria:

“I want the ministers to come and hear for themselves about what residents in Berwick, Narre Warren and right across my electorate need. Our area is one of the fastest-growing parts of Melbourne.”

So, does Australia really want the NBN?

From this cross sections of articles – (which were gathered together over only about 30 minutes of searching) – the message is loud and clear.

Yes.

When you subtract all the “tasty soundbites” from each of the government, the opposition, and the various slants of the major news outlets, and actually listen to Australians, it is wanted and it is needed.

And listening to what people want sounds like a reasonable idea to me.

State Government Padding Out Announcement?

Who would have thought a government might pad-out an announcement to provide more bang for the buck with the press release?

Not you? Yeah, me neither.

Amongst the “features” of the new contract, we have:

Major bridge modifications at Dynon Road, Moonee Ponds Creek, Lloyd Street and Dudley Street.

A new twin track rail bridge over Dudley Street in West Melbourne.

Looking at existing information, the “new twin track rail bridge over Dudley Street” is apparently already apart of an earlier contract, awarded to Activate, a joint venture between John Holland and Coleman Rail.

This will probably – (or not) – come as a shock to the new contract awardees, a consortium consisting of John Holland, Abigroup, Coleman Rail, AECOM & GHD, who will be surprised to see the new bridge over Dudley street almost completed.

Here is the new bridge under construction on January 17th 2012:

The work to modify the bridge at Dynon Road has also been underway for some time.

But people won’t notice this embellishment, will they?

More smoke and mirrors from Mr Mulder? Who’da thought?

Of course the previous State Government used to do this kind of thing too, announcing a new hospital for Geelong, twice.

Message to the politicians – the internet never forgets.

NBN: Me First! Me First!

Ever since the announcement of NBN’s highly anticipated three-year-rollout plan in March, there has been much jumping up and down from political leaders in various areas not listed within the three-year plan.

Here’s another from Latrobe City councillor, Sharon Gibson, after Moe was left out:

“Cr Gibson will lobby her fellow councillors to support a motion at Monday night’s council meeting calling for the Mayor to write to the Federal Minister for Broadband, Senator Stephen Conroy and urge him to include the Moe-Newborough district in the initial rollout schedule.”

Exactly why should Moe be bumped up the list? What about all the other locations that want to be bumped up the list?

Remember, when you walk into a busy bank at lunchtime, and there’s 30 people waiting for service, and only 5 tellers operating, you have to wait.

A complicated construction project like the NBN simply can’t all be completed at once, as construction resources are limited. Like when there’s only 5 tellers operating in the bank.

Or a house that might be built in one day, if there were enough contractors available to do all the work in one day – generally of course, there’s not.

Writing to Stephen Conroy isn’t going to help either – NBN Co determines the rollout plan, not the minister.

Neither he, nor NBN Co are going to change things to suit everyone’s wishes, even if they could and/or wanted to. Bumping a location up the order sets the precedent, then everyone will want their area bumped up.

“We really don’t need to be isolated from the rest of the Valley.”

Isolated? Really?

It’s not as if existing broadband in Moe is going to stop working when Morwell is connected to the NBN. You’re not going to be “isolated”. Moe is in the fibre footprint.

You just have to be patient.

Like everyone else.

Mulder Has No Interest In Where The Buck Stops

Late on April 30th, I finally received a response from my March 8th complaint direct to the Victorian Minister for Public Transport, Terry Mulder, about the state of infrastructure at Newport station.

I wrote about this complaint a few days later on the 14th, after failures at Newport on both days.

I might add, his response arrived just a few hours after I released another article which took a broad swipe at the minister, in which I complained about the lack of response to my initial complaint.

Coincidence much? Mind you, it’s dated six days before I received it. But anyhow.

Here is Mulder’s mostly canned response:

“Metro is currently delivering a project to increase the amount of train stabling sidings at Newport. Part of the project involves changing the junction between sidings and the main line. Work on this project can affect the reliability of signalling equipment at Newport. Metro expects to complete this project by mid 2012.”

Really? The bottom line is, this is mostly bullshit.

The project to install new stabling sidings at Newport has been going on for quite some time, and actually, appears to have been completed for some time.

Courtesy of the awesome NearMap, which records mapping and aerial photography over time, letting you go back and look at old imagery, lets see how much derp is in Mulder’s statement.

Here is the work site as it appeared on January 7th, 2010 – clearly work had not started:

Here is the work site as it appeared on February 20th, 2010 – work had started, though had not progressed very far:

Here is the work site as it appeared on April 16th, 2010 – work is moving along, mainly on the more southern of the two new stabling yards:

Here is the work site as it appeared on October 20th, 2010 – work is progressing well, and in fact, the more southern of the two new stabling yards is apparently complete, with a train shown in one of the stabling roads:

Here is the work site as it appeared on November 17th, 2011 – both the new northern and southern stabling yards are complete, with trains stabled in each:

So as of no later than November 17th, 2011 – (and earlier photos show the site apparently complete in mid-October 2011, though no trains are seen using the northern sidings until November 17th) – the project to add new sidings was complete.

Yet Mulder is saying they won’t be done until “mid-2012”. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve not seen any workmen in the area for months. The “mid-2012” statement seems more than a stretch to me.

Also, as of January 7th, 2010, the project hadn’t started. Once again, I don’t know about anyone else, but the problems at Newport have been going on for a lot longer than this. Blaming Metro for the problems with respect to the new stabling sidings seems one hell of a cop out.

Even if the stabling project was the problem, how much confidence should we gain from the fact that six months after its completion, it is still causing major problems at this location?

Not much from me.

“To address some of the delays that affect V/Line trains in the metropolitan network, the Coalition Government is proceeding with the Regional Rail Link (RRL) project. RRL is a major new rail line that will provide capacity for enough extra trains to carry thousands more passengers across the rail network in peak periods.”

RRL is a fantastic idea, but the Coalition did not initiate it. It was one of the very few decent transport infrastructure projects initiated by the previous government. It also won’t be ready until at least late-2014, with some estimates putting it as late as early-2016.

What do we do in the interstitial four years? Just put up with all the failures? It’s not just V/Line customers getting shafted here, it is Werribee and Williamstown line Metro customers as well.

Newport NEEDS to be fixed.

Moreover, if “work on this project can affect the reliability of signalling equipment at Newport”, I would suggest that the entire stabling siding project was utterly mismanaged, and reasonable risk mitigation techniques were not used. Reasonable risk management in this instance, would ensure that this work did not affect main line operations.

So I fear for the delivery of RRL too. After all, the same people are likely involved.

“RRL will separate regional trains from metropolitan trains, giving Geelong, Bendigo and Ballarat trains their own dedicated track through the suburban system from Sunshine to Southern Cross. The project will deliver improved reliability for V/Line trains on the Geelong line.”

But do nothing to help in the meantime.

Some of the management issues with the Newport project might be attributable to the previous government who initiated it – but Mulder recently stated “the buck stops with me”.

Yet here, in his weak response to a simple question, he passes the buck straight onto Metro.

You fail Terry. You fail hard.

I will be making a formal response to his feeble attempt to respond to my initial complaint – and I shall be sharing it with you all!

Chrome ‘Weak Signature Algorithm’ Solved

For people who have – (or have automatically had) – their Google Chrome installation upgraded to version 18 or later, you may have noticed the following error message on some sites you are accessing over SSL/HTTPS:

This has been mostly the case for people – (developers in particular) – accessing sites with self-signed certificates, like I do with a number of development projects I deal with.

At lot of people suggested that it is a bug with the latest version of Chrome – and it still may well be – but there is a workaround.

This error seems to occur when the self-signed certificates are hashed with the MD5 algorithm. This is not uncommon, as the example certificate creation routine supplied by OpenSSL, which most people follow, runs through an example that uses the MD5 algorithm, which Chrome appears to be declaring to be too weak a hashing algorithm.

Honestly, that’s probably correct too. However, if this isn’t a bug, it seems that Google has made this call arbitrarily.

The solution?

Change the hashing from MD5 to SHA512.

If you create your certificates directly from the command line, use the -sha512 switch instead of the -md5 switch – for example:

“openssl req -new -x509 -sha512 -nodes -out server.crt -keyout server.key”

If using an “openssl.cnf” configuration file, make sure all “default_md” directives have “sha512” as their values.

“default_md = sha512”

Your new keys should now be signed with SHA512 instead of MD5, and no more complaints from Google Chrome about the weak algorithm.

Andrew Laming: No Criticism Please

Federal Liberal MP Andrew Laming went on a trolling warpath earlier this month in regards to his perception that the National Broadband Network (NBN) was being rolled out in the Brisbane area on a politico-geographic agenda.

“The cold, hard reality in Brisbane is that households in Labor seats are eight times more likely to get the NBN than those in Coalition seats.”

“Worse, the odds are around 50 per cent better if your Labor MP is a minister. This is a save-the-political-furniture strategy. They are not targeting marginal seats here. They are just trying to survive.”

Of course, there are many reasons why his position was completely wrong, as I highlighted in my article last week on how the Coalition – (deliberately or otherwise) – manage to get their facts on the NBN completely wrong.

Constantly.

At the time of his rant – (spread throughout the media over several days) – myself, @CameronWatt and @Gwyntaglaw engaged in a terse dialogue on Twitter with Laming, pointing out clear, well documented facts in regards to the NBN and its rollout schedule, that were contrary to Laming’s own beliefs on the matter.

He ably demonstrated his inability to grasp even the basic concepts of how the NBN works, how it connects together, and how technical matters – (in most cases) – dictate which parts of the network are rolled out first.

He clearly didn’t like being shown up as being wrong about it.

In fact, he hated it.

How much did he hate it? Well, he blocked me on Twitter, a fact I discovered when putting together the aforementioned article last week.

The dialogue centers around this tweet, but as he has blocked me, I can’t see the entire conversation any more.

So what’s wrong Andrew? Why don’t you want to hear the facts?

Shouldn’t you be listening to the people?

Of course, all of this goes against his own “social media guide” on how a politician should be dealing with their communities on social media networks, where he declares:

“Politicians reaching out to their communities via social media should avoid getting into public slanging matches with critics.”

You got yourself into a very public slanging match on Twitter, didn’t you Andrew?

Further, he also declares that:

“…disconnecting or blocking constituents is ‘the most damaging thing a candidate can do’…”

Oh dear, really?

Politics will always come with attached criticism – that’s a given – but if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!

Especially when you break your own social media rules.

Mulder: The Buck Shoots Straight Past Me

Thousands of regular commuters on the Geelong line have had their travel plans massively disrupted on numerous occasions over the last couple of months, with signal and power failures shutting the line for hours at a time.

People – (quite rightly) – have been complaining long and hard about it. It is apparently news to transport minister Terry Mulder however, who hasn’t made a single statement about the fiasco.

Sorry. Fiascoes.

Ignoring the ongoing infrastructure problems at Newport Station, the first major incident was on April 2nd, when a cable cut shut the line down during the evening commute for many hours.

“The high-voltage cable, which supplies power to the signalling system, has been buried for 25 years and appeared to have suffered a break.”

“That was little comfort for the passengers who were stuck on board the trains without food, unable to get off for hours on end. Thousands of other passengers were affected when trains on the Geelong line were cancelled throughout the evening.”

Not to rest on whatever ever laurels might have been earnt that night, just over a week later, the same cable failed again, shutting the line down for almost 24 hours.

Commuters were loud in their disdain:

“The State Government need to get involved now last week we were stuck for five hours on the train, people were pushing the emergency buttons so much they ended up turning them off.”

“The lateness of the trains is an issue for me and getting into work late, they always say it’s a signal faults but I don’t know what that means.”

Of course, you would expect the opposition to jump on such a debacle, and transport spokesperson Fiona Richardson chimed in with this pearler:

“The contempt that the Liberal Government has shown to commuters on the Geelong line by failing to acknowledge that there is even a problem is disgraceful.”

Of course the problem is, the state opposition have absolutely no right to complain about the state of Victoria’s public transport infrastructure, as it was thoroughly neglected by them throughout the eleven years they were in office prior to the Baillieu Government coming to power.

Richardson’s statement is empty political rhetoric, though she is correct about one thing – the lack of comment from Mr Mulder’s office.

Nothing. Nada. Zip.

As of writing, there is not a single press release on the matter on Mulder’s press release website, and it has been almost a month since the first of the two major incidents on April 2nd.

Of course, the apparently crappy power cable isn’t the only ongoing issue affecting the Geelong line, and I have previously written about the obvious infrastructure issues at Newport.

As I discussed in that article from several weeks before, I sought comment from Mulder’s office about what Geelong – (and Werribee and Williamstown) – line commuters could expect to be done about this issue. The response was:

“Thank you for your email addressed to the Hon Terry Mulder MP, Minister for Public Transport and Minister for Roads, concerning the above. I wish to advise that a response will be forwarded in the near future.”

Almost two months later, and no response has been received.

Nothing. Nada. Zip.

I’ve even politely reminded his office of their promise of a statement in the “near future”, to which I’ve received no response at all.

Transport failures were a major factor as to why the former Brumby Government was ousted in Victoria, with Mulder promising in opposition to fix the problems. He has even declared recently that “the buck stops” with him.

Terry, we want our dollar back, okay?

We appreciate and accept that things go wrong from time to time – but when the same things happen over and over again, and nothing ever gets done about them, and you say nothing about them, you look like an ass.

Pull your finger out of that ass and tell us what you’re going to do – at the moment your conduct is worse than the succession of ALP transport ministers that came before you.

They did nothing – but at least they told us what they wanted, but wouldn’t ultimately do for transport in Victoria.

Your silence is deafening.