SteveJ-restore-test

There's a counter-intuitive effect with marginal cost of Production Factors, like energy (and Teleco services) - using the factor more efficiently, consumes more of the resource. Because you make more profit, lower prices, produce more and demand for the resource increases. The Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate/Jevons Paradox: "energy efficiency improvements that, on the broadest considerations, are economically justified at the microlevel, lead to higher levels of energy consumption at the macrolevel." The structural reason is simple: the market is highly price elastic, so decreasing prices a little lifts total sales considerably. In economics, this is a well solved problem for non-monopoly markets, "Profit Maximisation" occurs when MR = MR (Marginal Revenue equals Marginal Costs). [For monopolies, MR = 2*MC, IIRC.] In the 70's & 80's at O.T.C., we made record profits each and every year - by exceptional marketing and sales strategy, which included drop...

A response to the "Public Sphere" run by Senator Lundy on "High Bandwidth for Australia". Previous comments on the National Broadband Network - about excess costs, poor design and addressing lost strategic opportunities. Future posts will be linked from here. Roger Clarke finished his presentation with a comment something like "the upside is obvious, the downside needs to talked about". Without bringing down the tone, optimism and vision of the event, enumerating the Barriers and Challenges associated with roll-out and adoption of 'universal' High Speed Broadband (HSB) in Australia allows for generating better designs/options, avoiding 'surprises' and anticipating routes around and out-of "bear pits", "Forewarned is forearmed". Who knows, new insights may emerge from this viewpoint. Alan Kay in his 2003 Turning Award speech identified the central importance of ICT: "our field is a field that's the next great...

1999/2000 saw the laying of the "Eastern Gas Pipeline" (EGP) - 795km from Longford in Victoria to Horsley Park in Sydney, at around $450M. It carries natural gas from Gippsland Basin (and Bass Strait?) and provides additional supply security to NSW. The mainline route is : close to the towns of Bairnsdale, Orbost and the Cann River, before turning north past Bombala and Cooma. From the eastside of the Snowy Mountain region, it travels northeast to the coast through Nowra, Port Kembla, Wilton and on to Horsley Park to its termination point on the outskirts of Sydney. Country Energy Gas is the NSW regional retailer. The Energy Networks Australia State Summary say this about the NSW country towns connected to Natural Gas: There are 24 210 km of reticulation mains serving 901 000 customers in the State’s major urban areas, and its large and small regional centres. Wagga Wagga, Tumut, Adelong, Cooma, Bombala and Gundagai, Albury Nowra, Bomaderry ...

Traditional Telcos, "phone companies", are exactly the wrong people to own and operate consumer Broadband networks, and their close relative, Cable TV. There is an inherent conflict: Telco Engineering is very different to Computer Data Network Engineering. You cannot be good at both or build networks that are good at both. The network & equipment designs and tradeoffs are antithetical and antagonistic. Telcos make money from phone services, which are relatively low bit-rate. It is against their commercial interests to sell high-quality, high-speed data networks at affordable prices. To expect them to cannibalise their most profitable line of business is asking for incompetent & irresponsible management, which puts them in jeopardy from corporate regulators and malpractice suits from shareholders. There has always been a fundamental conflict of interest in any Telco rolling out Internet broadband services: cost-per-bit charging either makes telephony effectively free o...

For many years I had the uneasy feeling that the Telco Engineers I worked with/for over most of a decade at O.T.C. did not actually understand Computer Data Networks. Here I attempt to formalise and explain that thought. The implications/ramifications won't be examined in this piece. History Telephone/Telco Engineering dates back to between ~1880 with the formation of the first phone companies and 1915 with the first US transcontinental (long-distance) calls. Dial phones were introduced in the US circa 1919, but automatic exchanges had been invented well before. The profession of Telco Enginering has around 125 years of tradition and practice. As a profession, they have been very good at doing what they do - creating reliable point-to-point voice communication. They have extended into high-availability point-to-point digital services. Modern Computer Data Network Engineering dates from around 1982 with cheap mini-computers and the IEEE 802.3 standard for Ethernet. Cheap PC...

During the week I had a fault on my phone line and got to talk to the Telstra tech afterwards. His view was naturally Telstra-centric, but contained wisdom & insight. It would make sense to have just one local access loop with just one maintenance organisation to which all Telco's have equal access. And it couldn't be owned by any one or two commercial players, that distorts the market. He described an asymmetry: how new Telco entrants can build their own infrastructure and deny access to all others, but Telstra was obliged to provide access to 'their' copper network to everyone. He sited the sad case of a pensioner needing a phone and waiting for quite sometime (and paying a big fee) while Telstra dug in a cable that the developer should've installed... All the time there was physical cable to the premises owned by another Telco, but inaccessible. The 1994/5 HFC cable TV rollout by Optus & Telstra (80-90% duplication) shows the insanity of Telecomms commer...