The Buzz is all Broadband

Image by Brett L. via FlickrFrom Reuters:

Australia has slower and more expensive Internet access than many other developed countries, and though penetration rates are on a par, officials and experts have warned Australia may fall behind in competitiveness without faster, nationwide coverage.

They're not telling anyone in Australia anything new. Expensive broadband with poor service has come to be expected. Leading the race to the bottom is the company that can most affect service: Telstra.
There is even a term: fraudband, to describe ADSL service sold for too much but slower than dialup.
Some people in the technical field consider all Australian ADSL service fraudband because of the coverage maps. Coverage maps are published online (supposedly) showing where ADSL in different versions is available. There are two problems with the maps:

1. Commonly where coverage is shown, the telephone exchanges are too far away. Although full service is indicated within 4km of an exchange, past 1.3km or so, the quality (read: speed and reliablity) drops off dramatically.
2. The out of date, or just poorly wired, exchanges are full. ADSL may be offered in an area, but you take out a lottery ticket to get service. Some homes almost next door to an exchange have waited over a year.

IHT picked up on the story:

Australia could be a step closer to building a high-speed broadband network after the government canceled a deal for a rural system that would have overlapped with the one planned nationwide. The scrapping of the rural network plan, which was to cost 958 million Australian dollars, or $888 million, came as the government planned to invite bids for a national network as early as next week.

Hate to tellya, folks, but that's been going on for more than 5 years.
The government has commissioned Telstra to provide outdated service to regional (rural) areas, then realized the service would conflict with other plans - wasting years and hundreds of millions of dollars. Regional users are forced from one flaky plan to the next (CDMA to NextG is the latest.) and still have dropouts and poor service.
The government has looked to private enterprise to pick up some of the slack by offering grants and special loans. Satellite service and free service expands too quickly for these small firms to keep up. One abandoned network is cobbled onto the next, creating a nightmare for customers and those companies that took the bait.

Like the old AT&T in the US, Telstra is great at the big projects:

Australian telecommunications company Telstra has begun the arduous task of laying a 9,000 km undersea internet cable from Australia to Hawaii.

Again, that's not the whole story. Telstra is laying that cable, not out of social consciousness or entrepreneurial zeal, but out of monopolistic necessity. Telstra has been buying bandwidth from old rival Optus for years.

If you can't even get email, why bother to open up a business online? An inspiring example is as passion for beauty.
There is no question some companies have braved the madness and succeeded though. Relatively, for a country that needs reliable communications from coast to coast like no other, Australia has made the road to success unnecessarily hard.
There are many words to describe the slosh of media in one direction then the next, with only miniscule real progress: most of them 4-letter words.

SEO/SEM in Australia is a special issue for so many reasons. Join me was we explore. It will be a fascinating and informative journey.

Sphere: Related Content

Oh, those competition-crazed aussies

SEO/SEM in Australia is a special issue for so many reasons. Join me was we explore. It will be a fascinating and informative journey.

Competition-crazy Aussies hain't got no chance (already)

IF THE race has started to develop really fast broadband in the Asia-Pacific area, Australia has already all but lost, a leading telecommunications analyst says.

And if that situation is to change, the Government has to encourage investment in taking optical fibre cables not just to street corner nodes, but all the way to homes, he says. (The Age)

No kidding. Most of us in the technology and media trades have been saying that for .. 5-7 years?
Leith Campbell makes a legitimate point though: "..The political will to invest in broadband isn't there..." Political will? Australia has politicized a fear of the Internet. Internet-phobic as become a syndrome of every election.

Helen Coonan has illustrated repeatedly that she is lost when it comes to understanding the Internet. The numbers seem meaningless to her. Even easy ideas such as the rest of Asia, US and Europe already enjoying broadband speeds of 100 times or more what is available here, seem to just make her eyes glaze.

Telstra has called on the Minister for Communications, Senator Helen Coonan, to cease and desist distributing misleading and incorrect information, and is demanding she put the record straight.

In letters being sent out to 500,000 households throughout the country spruiking the Government's OPEL sweetheart deal, the Minister is incorrectly claiming there is no wireless broadband service in areas where Telstra's Next G™ wireless broadband service is clearly available. (07 Sept)

Telstra went out to the addresses the Minister complains about, and found broadband available. One city she mentioned had been funded for broadband through her own Communications Ministry!

And, the raving debate, - like hyenas to a corpse - rages on: the ACCC has been accused of retarding investment in infrastructure by imposing upon Telstra to share its infrastructure network cheaply.

The ACCC's justification for giving competitors cheap access to Telstra's copper lines was the "stepping stone" theory - allowing new entrants to gain sufficient marketshare to invest in their own infrastructure as they step up the "ladder of investment". That theory has been completely shot down - if the evidence of the low levels of telecommunications investment in the chart below wasn't enough.

The fact that government leadership failed for years to cause the problem doesn't seem to be a popular topic. Or is just that soppy-eyed leadership is taken for granted? Maybe a little more coffee will help...
Sheesh, how am I supposed to make a peddling websites in Australia? Folks gotta be able to see them first. Sphere: Related Content

Spinning WiMax in Oz

The SNAKE TALES shows a red biplane burning out as it swirls one way then the next. The snake and the doggy look up. "Spin doctor!", says the doggy.
Obviously a political commentary, it could as well describe the problems of the Howard campaign as the debate about WiMax technology in Australia. 'Course, it's alll sorta tied in anyway.

Howard caught flat-footed
The Internet caught the Howard government. In the last year, Labor candidates Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard used FaceBook to kick off their team candidacy for PM. Rudd and Gillard are far more attractive onlne than Mr Howard, who seems to have a very hard time giving a straight answer.
In 2000, John Howard resolved all of Australia's questions about the Internet with: "The Internet in Australia is just fine." --and that, was that.
In those days, only 30% or so of Australians had access to the Net; and nearly all of those were on dialup. Dialup over phone lines that needed to be replaced, either because they were old or because they were poor quality when installed.

NBT
The NBT (next big thing) in Australian politics is always either the 'Bush' - referring to regional Australia -or the Aboriginies. References to anything positive in those directions are good for a short polling bump, at least.
Internet access to the Bush is an active debate right now because big name competitors are looking to supplant Telstra's highly politicized and outdated efforts.

Behind the scenes, a lot is going on.
Telstra wanted in 2002 to dismantle its CDMA and HSPA systems without offering the 3G alternative. That would leave millions in the outback without reliable access to the Net. For once, the regulators stepped in for the consumers and forced Telstra to keep the old system running until NextG was available.
Telstra owns about half the exchanges in regional Australia; the rest belong to AusStar.
OPEL (Optus-Elders consortium) has won the $959 million tender to provide WiMax to the Bush, and urban areas. Telstra was pointedly forbidden to be part of the bidding, and has launched a public campaign against WiMax.

What is WiMax?
Confused yet? You should be. Seems everyone else is.
Intel will introduce chipsets for WiMax in 2008. When something has been committed to mass produced hardware, you gotta think it really is "coming." ('Scuze the sarcasm, pls...)

An information sheet issued by the government says: "WiMax chip sets will be incorporated in a range of electronic devices, including PCs, cams, personal music devices and PDAs.

Chinese techs call WiMax "4G". They're installing it all across the country.

Is it WiMax?
Technically, WiMax is not 802.11n. It is 802.16e. Another source of confusion is 802.11n - incorporating advances for wireless networking devices - covers a similar radio spectrum (bands 2.3GHz, 2.4GHz and 3.5GHz, and 5.8GHz.) Experts are all over the Net saying 11n will make all cabling, even fibre optics, obsolete - and many writers are calling 11n 'WiMax.'
Further complicating the issue is that all of the radio spectrum is regulated in Australia. In the US and Europe, many countries leave these frequency bands open for public use.

Then the fine print tells us the proposed Australian WiMax rose will only encompass the 2.3GHz, 2.4GHz and 3.5GHz bands.

On Friday, (Communications Minister Helen) .. Coonan tried to downplay debate over standards, saying people did not care about the technology, only the service they received.

Too true.
That dog bites both ways, Ms Coonan. Ignoring the technology for spin is not a decision-making process. Someone in the government has to understand the technology and make the right decsions.
Last year, the raging debate over who would provide FTTN (fibre to the node) only served to disgust the public with the whole process. In the end, no one could decide. Telstra and OPEL-lite were further undermined in their submissions by a German company that had already done FTTN for a decade.

Best answer
No matter what technology is employed, it will still mean shared bandwidth. Shared bandwidth means congestion at times. It doesn't seem too hard to see that whatever system is chosen it has to provide for expansion and for high peak traffic.
The fact is no matter what wireless protocol is pursued, it will have to be supported by a reliable connection, and that connection is obviously a fibre optics cable system. This simple fact seems to have escaped the debate somehow.

If dear reader, you want to delve deeper into this morass, I'll give you the link to my search on AustralianIT. Enjoy the great white cloud.

Before Australia can be competitive in the Asian or US-UK markets, the country needs reliable access to the Internet at speeds that make the Internet more than an aggravation.

SEO/SEM in Australia is a special issue for so many reasons. Join me was we explore. It will be a fascinating and informative journey. There is too much room for spin in this debate. It really is like a swirling old biplane about to crash. Sphere: Related Content

IT daws fewer students

The news is always a conversation.
This morning, the Herald Sun reports half as many VCE students have chosen IT compared to last year. As an Internet/IT proselyte, that is disappointing. I can't help feel these decisions are shaped by the government's Internet-phobic attitude in national advertising.

IT less attractive
There is no question IT has become a less-certain path professionally.
Since the dot-com bubble burst, job listings have become miniscule. HR departments are listing jobs requiring a laundry list of skills for much lower pay scales. (Some of the listings are comical: requirements for years of experience in technologies which have only existed for months, or a year or two.)
The media has given a lot of coverage to out-sourcing to India and Pakistan by large institutions and banks. It's a discouraging job market. No one seems to be reminding these banks and financial institutions that there are no privacy laws in those countries. Reports have reached Australia of CDs full of credit card and bank details being sold in open air markets!

TAFE enrolment drops
The same article reports "TAFE colleges are failing to meet the nneeds of the private sector and should be overhauled," according to Federal Vocational and Further Education Minister Andrew Robb. -- It's bloody well about time, Mr Robb.
TAFE enrollments dropped 13% between 2001 and 2006.

Australia's institutionalized vocational training has been centered in the TAFE (Technical and Further Education) system. The system was a good idea initially. A fast-track public-private partnering to produce the skills Australia desperately needed. But the TAFE system has become bureaucratic, unweildy, and political -- incorporating the worst of Australia's mateship and corruption.

TAFEs take on the affects of colleges and universities. The names chosen for these for-profit businesses are at best deceptive. There may have been the intention to encourage entrepreneurship originally, but by putting 70-85% (depending on source) of government funding into the TAFE system as opposed to spreading the funds around for small, better-focused organizations, the TAFEs have become as much a hinderance to flexible learning as examples.
Because large TAFEs are publicly well-funded yet remain private businesses, these institutions become competitors in the open market with an inordinate advantage.
Projects which would be funded on their merits privately are subsidized by using (not employing, using) students. Instead of paying for skills on the open market, the TAFE lets the government and the students pay for the right to develop entrepreneurial projects.
The result quashes new ideas and entrepreneurship, especially for Internet entrepreneurs.

TAFE means business
Public funding 'initiatives' are formed based on the submissions from TAFEs to suit the TAFEs. TAFE executives and employees sit on the decision-making boards, and direct the funds from private initiative to the TAFEs. (e.g., WiMax technology is planned to provide broadband speeds for regional Australia in 2008.)
Business entitites are formed specifically to take advantage of this public trough feed.


SEO/SEM in Australia is a special issue for so many reasons. Join me was we explore. It will be a fascinating and informative journey. Sphere: Related Content