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It’s been a very funny couple of days on Australian television. First we had this “apology” from Channel Nine over their “exclusive” news watermark:
Then came this bombshell from Channel Ten newsreader Belinda Heggen towards sports anchor Mark Aiston:
But to top it all off, comes this “Four Stooges” routine from Karl Stefanovic, Lisa Wilkinson, Georgie Gardner and Ben Fordham on Channel Nine’s “Today”:
Pure. Television. Gold.
While he might have gotten the exact rollout dates wrong, Google – in the shape of CEO Eric Schmidt – (the same man Stephen Conroy thinks is the “founder” of Google”) – has delivered glowing praise towards the NBN at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
| Google Chairman Eric Schmidt Loves The NBN |
“Let me start by saying that Australia is leading the world in understanding the importance of fibre. Your new Prime Minister as part of her campaign and now as part of her prime ministership, has announced that by roughly I think 2015, 2016, 93% of Australians – which I guess are all the folks in the cities – will have gigabit or equivalent service using fibre, and the other 7% will be handled through wireless services of a nature of LTE. This is leadership. And again, from Australia, which I think is wonderful.”
Whether or not you understand the NBN, or believe the FUD created by certain heavily right-leaning sections of the Australian media, such praise for the project is hard to ignore.
With NBN services taking something very close to their final form, it is time to start listening to people who know what the network will mean for our country, rather than listening to the political luddites who wouldn’t know social and technological advancement if it bit them on the posterior.
There has been a valid and interesting debate with respect to the rollout of the National Broadband Network (NBN). Why is it we need to replace what is almost a complete monopoly wholesale network provider – (Telstra) – with another complete monopoly in NBN Co?
How does replacing one monopoly with another promote competition as the government claims?
On the surface, it is not perfectly clear, but not that difficult to see either. In the current environment, Telstra plays in the wholesale market, and also the retail market. This gives them a massive advantage in the overall telecommunications market.
They can very easily – (and have a history of) – squeezing their retail competitors by upping the wholesale costs to those competitors – (who in most cases have no other option than to wholesale from Telstra) – thereby making their own retail offerings as attractive as possible.
Almost every copper based access service to any premise in Australia is served by Telstra in the “last-mile”. Therein lies their massively rosy market position.
The NBN will eliminate Telstra’s ability to artificially twist the market for fixed line services in their direction. The NBN will be a near-monopoly also, but will not operate in the retail space, and as reiterated recently by CEO Mike Quigley, NBN Co will offer the exact same wholesale pricing to all retail service providers. NBN Co have also asked the government to ensure that the legislation precludes NBN Co from operating in the retail market.
NBN Co is not interested in the retail market.
So couldn’t we just legislate that Telstra offers the same pricing to everyone?
We might be able to – but their shareholders will more than likely not cop that, and is probably not even legally possible – however the decommissioning of the Telstra copper network and replacing it with the fibre of the NBN for 93% of all Australians has a number of benefits over and above helping to make the market fairer.
First and foremost, the NBN will provide uniform access to all Australian premises to all retail service providers, with the 7% not covered by fibre to be reached with wireless and satellite. This is a big win for consumers, and will foster massive benefits to competition in the retail market.
But the biggest advantage to removing Telstra’s market dominance is a little more abstract – ask yourself the question “what if Telstra actually completely disappeared?”
Now, while I am not going to suggest that Telstra is about to go belly up, who is to say that Telstra will not someday face an accounting scandal of the magnitude of say, Enron? Enron was a massive company that no longer exists, and this happened in the space of a very short period of time.
If something like this happened to Telstra, the obvious course of action would be for it to go into the hands of administrators, who would be tasked to recover lost funds on behalf of creditors. The only way to do that ultimately would be to sell Telstra assets to the highest bidder and recover as much as possible.
Would it recover everything? Probably not – eleven years later, the administrators of Enron are still hunting for funds. In Australia, a parallel would be Ansett Airlines, of which many creditors – (including former employees) – are still waiting for their money, ten years after the initial collapse of that airline.
The imaginary administrators of Telstra might try and sell some assets, and then reform a new company to try and trade to make up the shortfall in lost funds, then sell the new company – as was attempted with Ansett, the so-called “Ansett Mark II”.
There is of course a sticky precedent with our telecommunications industry, namely One.Tel. The legal wrangling also continues in that case.
First and foremost, they would try and sell Telstra in its entirety as a going concern. As one of our biggest companies, it is hard to envisage a single other Australian company buying all of Telstra, in the face of the debt, and the costs to rationalise and run the company afterwards.
The only option might be a large overseas company – but foreign investment rules would probably prevent that.
So more than likely, Telstra would be broken up and sold to many different buyers. Do Optus buy the copper network in capital city areas? Maybe AAPT buys the network in regional areas?
Who buys their mobile business? Does that get broken up too and sold to more than one buyer? Maybe not, because the mobile business on its own would be a very attractive proposition, possibly to an overseas telco.
Who buys their business hosting services? Who buys their retail business?
Very quickly, any failure of Telstra would create a very fractured and difficult telecommunications environment in Australia, and that will be of massive detriment to the economy as a whole. The economy depends on communications, and complicating it like this would create inefficiencies and waste that no nation can afford in the current world economic climate.
The government could buy the network business back to protect the economy, and leave the carcass of the retail arm to be picked over and scavenged by the rest of the market – but that leaves the government with a massive operational cost – (maintenance and other upkeep) – of a deteriorating 60-year-old asset.
That’s what Telstra really does face right now. Repairs are delayed as long as possible, and sometimes done in piecemeal fashion when they eventually happen.
The government is finalising arrangements to pay Telstra around $11b to decommission the copper network and move customers to the NBN – so the government is effectively buying the goodwill of Telstra’s existing network business, and moving it onto new fibre infrastructure over the next nine years.
Eliminating Telstra’s dominant position in the market by establishing the NBN actually provides a level of protection to the telecommunications market – and in turn the entire economy – that Telstra alone could never hope to provide.
So ask yourself the question again – “what if Telstra actually completely disappeared?”
Telstra actually is about to disappear from the wholesale market – and they get a $11b cash injection for the privilege – probably fair payment. Some call it market interference, but that is not necessarily a bad thing in the long run, and I believe it will be very valuable in this instance.
The economy as a whole will no longer be at risk of the albeit unlikely demise of Telstra, and in nine-years we get world-leading communications infrastructure as a valuable public asset. To that I say “Yes please”.
Die Telstra, die.
Hot on the heels of the divisive mandatory internet filtering debate in this country, comes yet more government control being exerted over the content of media – with the news that the government will require the next operator of the Australia Network to provide advance notice of programming guides to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), and even allow programming decisions to be made by the foreign minister, currently former prime minister, Kevin Rudd.
| Rudd to Vet Asia TV Guides |
“Potential tenderers for a new 10-year contract to run this service will have to provide DFAT with a programming schedule for every timeslot over a seven-day cycle, which will be assessed by the department to determine whether it represents an “intelligent mix of the best of Australian content”.”
“This includes news and current affairs where DFAT will require a detailed quality and quantity breakdown to enable it to decide whether this and business programming supports the government’s regional objectives.”
There already is double standards in regards to their filtering policy, and television standards anyway, but this basically sounds to me like the Australia Network now has the potential to become an international propaganda machine for the government, right?
Who else agrees?
Following up on my previous post in regards to the shape of end-user NBN services, I thought I would discuss a few interesting comments made by NBN Co CEO Mike Quigley at the morning Q&A session at the NBN Customer Collaboration Forum last week in Melbourne.
While I will be presenting his comments as “quotes” – they are not exact word-for-word quotes, only regurgitated from my notes and I’m not the best shorthand note taker in the world! The content is however 100% accurate. Comment number one was about volume pricing, in which he stated:
“No single service provider will receive any wholesale volume pricing from NBN Co.”
This is a very important result for the industry. In simple terms, on a connection by connection basis, the wholesale price of NBN services to Retail Service Providers (RSPs) will be the same across the board. An RSP with 1,000 customers requesting an end-user service of a particular dimension from NBN Co, will be charged the exact same price for that service as an RSP with 1,000,000 customers requesting a service of the exact same dimension.
Size of the RSP will not be a factor.
What this does for the industry is allow every RSP to compete on equal wholesale customer access terms with every other RSP.
The big players will no longer be able to squeeze the smaller players on wholesale price – a practice currently common in the industry. Telstra – (as the incumbent dominant wholesale provider) – has a record of ACCC intervention when presenting retail pricing to Bigpond customers that is LOWER than their wholesale pricing to other ISPs. Most recently, Internode has had a very public spat with Telstra over wholesale pricing.
The structural separation of Telstra, and the common wholesale pricing structure under the NBN should eliminate these unfair practices forever.
Next up was a statement in response to a question from the floor about extending the reach of the fibre footprint beyond the 93% coverage in the current plans. Quigley confirmed:
“We are open to extending fibre beyond 93% coverage to interested groups willing to share the cost.”
The specific example he gave in responding to the question was that, for example, a group of farmers along a road who might be in the 94th percentile of the total NBN footprint, might be able to get together and provide the gap funding.
That is, NBN Co would look at funding the build for their situation as if they were part of the 93rd percentile, and as a group the farmers would need to fund the gap to get the build completed. This will interest a lot of communities just outside of the 93% fibre footprint who would otherwise receive wireless or satellite service from NBN Co.
Finally, one for the financial boffins, and what would be done with any “profits” generated by NBN Co:
“Any ‘profit’ above the expected IRR of 7% will be used to push wholesale pricing down, and not used as ‘profit’ as such.”
Quigley was quite strong on this point, reiterating that NBN Co are not interested in profits per-se – their primary goal is to deliver the IRR of 7% to the government to repay the debt funding used for the NBN build, as described in their corporate business plan, released late last year.
As long as the 7% IRR is reached to repay the debt, the “profits” over and above the 7% will “fund” lower wholesale pricing to the RSPs – in real world terms, this means as more and more usage develops on the network, the wholesale pricing will be able to be reduced.
With an announcement today that Telstra and NBN Co have agreed to commercial terms for the decommissioning of the Telstra copper network and the migration of existing Telstra customers on to the NBN, the question of just where NBN uptake will come from has been largely answered.
Prepare for the future.
Well, it seems like the good guys and gals over at the Australian Christian Lobby are up to their good old fashioned tricks of censoring the debates they start themselves.
| Explain Attempt to Censor On Line Opinion Website |
At 3:52pm this afternoon, I posted a comment against this hypocritical article – (hypocritical since the ACL are a constant ally of Stephen Conroy in his push for a mandatory filter of the internet in Australia). As I write this, it is 8:19pm, and this comment is still “awaiting moderation”.
Take a look at this screen grab of the article just a few minutes ago in which you can see my comment awaiting its religious freedom – click for larger view:
As you can see, a “positive” response to this article from “Ben” was posted at 8:06pm, and cleared for publication by 8:10pm – after four long minutes – yet my “non-positive” comment is still waiting after more than four long hours. Note the time on the clock in the bottom right of my screen.
I guess I should quote the exalted Jim Wallace from the article:
“If we are to have a full debate on this issue it must be that,” said Mr Wallace, “not one closed down by abuse and deceptive tactics or corporate pressure and collusion to limit free speech, as we have seen used here by homosexual activists and their apparent allies.”
Free speech? A debate closed down by deceptive tactics? Who are you kidding ACL?
If you want to “have a full debate”, allow comments from both sides of the debate, right? Isn’t that what you’re saying?
I might add, this is not the first time you’ve closed down comments that are contrary to your position. How about this one or even this one?
If you’re going to call-out the ANZ Bank or IBM on filtering the debate on the subject, how about getting your own house in order first?
As noted anti-filter campaigner Mark Newton very succintly put in this tweet: “Matthew 7:1-5”, which reads:
“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
The front cover of the “Viewpoint” magazine shown on the site calls for “courage and integrity in public office”. How about a little courage and integrity of your own? Why are you afraid of the debate?
Credibility zero.
About this time last year, Stephen Conroy made a potentially embarrassing gaffe on ABC Radio National’s Breakfast with Fran Kelly program, in which he said “you can’t regulate the internet” – before quickly stepping back and qualifying the statement as relating only to IPTV.
While his comment was not strictly in the context of his stupid and much-hated policy of mandatory internet censorship, the minor stink I created with the snippet below from the interview did spark a response from the minister’s department, courtesy of iTNews.
Well, seems he’s done it again today, with the following quote made at the launch of a new HP data centre construction in Sydney, and presented in this Delimiter article:
“…Australia’s a vibrant democracy, where the government doesn’t control the internet…”
So in February 2010 it is “you can’t regulate the internet”, and in February 2011 it is “the government doesn’t control the internet”.
If the mandatory internet filter is not the government trying to “regulate” or “control” the internet, what exactly is it Mr Conroy?
Ministerial facepalm.
In the first of a series of posts after attending the National Broadband Network (NBN) Collaboration Forum yesterday in Melbourne, I will discuss what has now become completely clear in terms of what services will become available to users once they are connected to the network, progressively over the next nine years.
As I discussed yesterday, I managed to get a few minutes to look over the network termination units (NTUs) that will be deployed, and heard explained in some detail what kinds of services will be available to end users through various service providers, from out of the same NTU.
There are two specific types of NTU – an internal and an external version – with the vast majority of installations so far being – (and expected to continue to be) – the internal type. As far as the network is concerned, each will operate identically.
Pictured below is the external type I played with yesterday – it is much easier to see the various different interfaces from this photo than the photo I have of the internal type – click for larger view.
Each NTU contains an input from the network – (whether it be from fibre, fixed wireless, or satellite) – and presents six interfaces into the customer premises. Two of these are exclusively for voice services, and four are for data services, or for voice and data services combined.
Each interface is called a UNI or User Network Interface, and are suffixed with “V” for voice ports, “D” for data ports, and a sequence number. The photo above clearly displays “UNI-V1”, “UNI-V2”, “UNI-D1”, “UNI-D2”, “UNI-D3”, and “UNI-D4”.
The two voice-specific ports will not be made available for configuration in wireless or satellite serviced locations, with the inherent high latency of services over these mediums declared unsuitable for voice services. This of course does not preclude the use of voice services over the data ports – (VoIP/FoIP) – but the issue of latency will remain.
In terms of voice services, there are a number of options.
A single service provider wishing to provide only basic telephony can provision a 150Kbps/150Kbps service to terminate at an ATA inside the NTU, and emerge as an analogue POTS service through either UNI-V1 or UNI-V2, using the SIP protocol to trunk the call to the provider’s voice servers.
A second option will be to provision that 150Kbps/150Kbps service against one of the UNI-D ports, and provide an external ATA to provide the FXS port to plug your old analogue telephone into.
Although this option exists, it is considered that it will be rarely used, as the chances of both UNI-V1 and UNI-V2 being both in use through other services to force a third basic telephony service onto a UNI-D port would be very slim.
The third option is for a provider to provide basic telephony and basic internet services over the same service, but have the voice component directed to a UNI-V port, and the data component directed to a UNI-D port. This enables bundled basic services equivalent to current bundled services, at the least possible cost.
Voice will be carried throughout the NBN infrastructure at the highest available priority traffic class, while basic data will be at the lowest “best-effort” priority.
The NBN will have four traffic priorities, from highest to lowest: Real-time (voice), Interactive (IPTV, Video conferencing), Transactional (Business data, gaming data), and Best Effort (basic data/internet services).
So what does all this mean?
In the end, it means you can choose to take only what you want/need from the network, and nothing more. A-la-carte if you like.
For example, you may choose to keep a fixed telephone service through Telstra on UNI-V1, a basic internet data service through, say, Internode on UNI-D1, and an IPTV service through Foxtel on UNI-D2. You still have UNI-V2, UNI-D3, and UNI-D4 available for other services, through other providers.
Does your boss want you to work at home three days a week? They could provision a WAN connection they control back to your home on UNI-D3, and maybe a fax line on UNI-V2. Done.
And you’ve still got a port left over – perhaps an e-health monitoring service to aid your ailing mother who lives in your back room on UNI-D4?
What it means, is complete flexibility, and consumer choice.
Fed up with your Internode data connection? Switch to iiNet at the drop of a hat – presuming of course you are not under a contract with Internode.
Telstra put your voice pricing up to a level you don’t like? Switch to Optus at the drop of a hat.
The network will no longer be the limitation that it has been for many years.
The network will be completely agnostic, and you are free to take on as many services as you want or need – (within the six available ports) – and not be hamstrung by bandwidth constraints or physical barriers such as pair-gain and RIM situations, both of which have prevented many from receiving anything other than very basic internet services – (if anything at all) – up until now.
At initial rollout, basic internet and telephony will be the only available services. Every six months, NBN Co plan to drop more services into the network – starting with multicast IPTV, then services focussed on the small to medium business space, and then the large enterprise space.
Over time, more and more service types will be developed and added to the mix.
For the market, this means that the providers who innovate and deliver the best products over the network will emerge on top. The competition will be furious.
And the consumer will win.
Attending today’s National Broadband Network (NBN) Collaboration Forum in Melbourne, I managed to get a few moments with the hardware that end users will receive when their premises are connected to the network progressively over the next nine years.
Firstly, we have the externally mounted network termination unit (NTU). The first shot is an external view with the front closed.
Next we have an internal view of the top part of the unit, clearly showing two voice ports (UNI-V1 and UNI-V2), and the four data ports (UNI-D1, UNI-D2, UNI-D3, and UNI-D4).
The final shot shows the lower portion of the inside of the NTU, showing where the backup battery will be mounted, and a wire block for status indicators.
Next we have a single shot of the internally mounted version of the NTU, which is smaller than the external version, and a little bit larger than an average existing ADSL/ADSL2+ broadband router. Once again, clearly seen are two voice ports (UNI-V1 and UNI-V2), and the four data ports (UNI-D1, UNI-D2, UNI-D3, and UNI-D4).
Finally, a single shot of the battery backup unit that would be supplied for an internally mounted NTU.
While which unit you receive – (internal or external) – will be largely up to the end user, NBN stated today that the experience in the pilot network in Tasmania is that only three end users have so far chosen the external unit.
I’ll have more on the forum tomorrow once I get my notes together.
UPDATE: Here is my more detailed write-up on the NTUs.
A light hearted one for Australia Day, I just saw this on Facebook. Circled in red we see “Application Requests”:
So I clicked it, and the box popped up to say they had moved.
Nope, it’s in two places. Facebook is cluttered enough without putting things all over the place. I’m sure people would find them without the pop-up!
Not that I accept application requests anyway!