SteveJ-restore-test

Malcolm Turnbull trotted this out and it really needs to be highlighted and responded to in and of itself: it's is so fundamentally flawed as to be inconceivable for an informed person, let alone the expert commentator he'd like to portray himself as From Malcolm Turnbull's "Comms Day" 2012 speech : Another takeaway is that ‘inside the house’ costs for FTTP can mount and become a serious economic factor. These costs tend to fall over time, and vary from place to place, but in the UK ‘inside the house’ expenses have been estimated to be 20 per cent of total FTTP costs.  The Telstra fibre rollout in South Brisbane likewise indicates this expense is likely to be material – Telstra this week confirmed industry reports that it is using up to a day of technician labour at each residential premise, adding up to $1000 to the cost of the cutover.  It is not clear NBN Co has budgeted for this expense anywhere. If it has, it would be instruct...

At 'Comms Day' 2012, Malcolm Turnbull asked : [ more audio ] "Why do we need to run fibre into every home?" We aren't building a network for 2010, but one able to easily handle the demands of 2020 and upgradeable as needed during its 25-30 year life. There are 3 reasons we "need to run fibre into every home", beside the obvious [3G/4G networks are perfect for mobile devices and exactly wrong for fixed services]: Storage (Disk & Flash) drives demand for bandwidth, especially upload capacity. A Cyberwar will be won or lost in 3 minutes. Defences must be automatic and "full-coverage". Australian Telcos don't just not co-operate, they actively self-harm to attack competitors. There is also a wild-card: Just what will Apple come up with in 2013 to follow on from the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010. Will it be "TV done right" as Walter Isaacson implies, or something closer to the "Knowledge Navigator"? Either way, we'...

AUSTRALIAN TELCO BUSINESS PRACTICES Australian Telcos aren't just uncooperative, their behaviours are pernicious, obstructive and often perversely self-injurious. This (and the GFC) is why Telstra's share price fell around three times pre-NBN, and has recovered over 10% in the short time since the NBN arrangement has been completed. There are 4 incontestable examples of this: Telstra/Optus cable rollout. ISDN only as a 'premium service'. ADSL 1 (ACCC intervention), ADSL 2 turn-on and ADSL 2 DSLAMs & ULL (non) churning. Mobile roaming. The massive and predictable waste of money caused by Telstra purposefully overbuilding the Optus network, even as they deployed, was sheer bloody-minded behaviour. When they'd beaten Optus to a standstill they proved that to "queer the pitch" (prevent others from 'scoring') was their only objective by never completing their own cable network. Telstra had the resources and capability to finish their roll-out to 85-...

STORAGE DRIVES DEMAND FOR INTERNET USE. Since IBM introduced the first disk (5MB, RAMAC) in 1956, demand for storage has grown relentlessly, as demonstrated by yearly total disk sales. Disk Vendors have collapsed to 2+1 as we enter the end-game. Storage drives demand for bandwidth, both for data exchange/transfer and backups. Bandwidth demand will track storage sold, lagged by 1-3 years. The proliferation of smartphones with video has driven the explosion of content on social media, and You-tube's "60 hours of video uploaded every minute" is only set to get higher. By 2020, the last 10-fold scale-up of disk drives will be complete with 3.5" drives maxxing at 20-40TB: 1-10,000 hrs video [or for 'action' HD, ~500 hours with MPEG-4 variable encoding/bitrates.] Flash is also in its last 10-fold scale-up and starting to suffer the same scaling problems that began in 2004/5 for DRAM. There are at least 3 candidate technologies to replace Flash and fuel further grow...

CYBER-WARFARE and the Australian NBN. We know from "Stuxnet" that Nation States are actively building and deploying Cyber warfare tools, applying them to National Security concerns and running them as Military, not technical, operations. This includes accurate reconnaissance and network topology and vulnerability mapping. The worst case is that attackers will gain access to the network control tools and infrastructure. Recent coverage suggests that Obama denied a US Military request to launch a cyber attack on Syria's infrastructure during the recent 'troubles'. From the "slammer" worm, we know that any Cyber warfare attack will be fully developed within 3 minutes, and any attack will be launched at the worst possible time for defenders, possibly accompanied by physical distractions. Recovery from "munitions grade" worm/malware compromise will be long and expensive. Experience is that malware infections is as damaging to businesses as a fire: W...

Whilst reading this piece today I 'had a thought'. " Militarisation of cyberspace: how the global power struggle moved online ",  Nick Hopkins, guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 April 2012 15.00 BST One argument in support of the NBN I've not heard is about Security , but not the "how to keep your bank account and credit card safe" kind - the usual direct theft or Identity Fraud talked about at Cyber-Security conferences. The National Security kind that interest the Intelligence agencies and Military, a.k.a. "Cyber-warfare". This is as far removed from normal Cyber-security as guarding bank vaults is from fighting a war. Attack, and hence Defence, is taken to a whole new level: because the resources employed and what is at stake is taken to a whole new level. The Y2K debacle/non-event conclusively demonstrated a number of things, one of which was Federal Government "front office" functions (normal day-to-day tasks) were completely dependent ...

Yesterday I read Robert Gottliebsen's, " Who wants a poor man's NBN? " and thought, "Am I the only person who remembers why we had to have the NBN?" We got the NBN for a number of reasons, few of them necessary or good, in my opinion: At the end of 2008, Kevin Rudd implemented a three-part Economic plan to shore-up Australia in the face of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Phase 3 of Rudd's recovery plan was long-term infrastructure developments. Like ports and the NBN. It has to be remembered that: the Australian economy is still weak, becoming obviously "3 speed". Phase 3 of the Rudd/Swan plan was big investments to support the economy long after the impact of the first two phases had worn-off. Rudd and Conroy had issued a tender for "Fibre to the Node", expected to be ~$5B. Telstra offered a 1-page response, although it had prepared an extensive response internally. The Rudd Government realised that while it could build to the No...

Can the Smart-Grid and Carbon Trading create a new, economically viable marketplace in saving power? In 1997, Amory B. Lovins co-authored a book with a radical new idea to address the Energy Crisis and our Environmental problems (now it might be "Climate Change"): the negawatt negative watts of power consumed by creating lower demand through more efficient power use. It is still much cheaper to "save a watt" than for a Power Generator to "build a watt", and the marginal cost of production and distribution is zero to the Generator. The consumer still has to maintain and replace their infrastructure investment. So why hasn't the negawatt market happened? What's different now that it could work? There are perverse economic incentives at work that mean no Utility Provider, especially Power Generators, will willingly invest in reducing demand: Less demand is less income , which wipes out profits and threatens the company. This is because the bi...