Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Totally Hot | Feb 24, 2006 07:27

Please be warned. The pictures displayed on this page I'm linking to may provoke intense feelings of lust, desire and sensual excitement. You may find yourself unable to tear your gaze away from these images. The oozing brown contours they depict may provoke an urge toward fulfilment and release that you will find impossible to ignore. Basically, they're hot.

Ladies and gentlemen, feast your peepers on Espresso Porn.

Oh. My. God.

And thanks to goodcoffee.co.nz for the link …

When you've re-adjusted your clothing, please be aware that my serious analysis juice is all used up for the week. If you're interested in some useful and informative contributions from your fellow readers (including one or two inside the Telecom citadel) on this week's telecommunications debate, you're waiting until Monday, okay?

Anyway, No Right Turn - who has been in great form this year - has more thoughtfulness than you can shake a stick at, and has posted a draft bill to abolish our old and irrelevant blasphemous libel law, now that the rather loopy group Catholic Action is trying to get a prosecution against C4.

And I'll leave recent events in Iraq to Riverbend. She doesn't even sound stroppy - she sounds scared.

I'm in the mood, rather, for highlighting various acts of flagrant copyright stupidity. There's London Transport's absurd action in taking down a very clever "remix" of the famous London Underground map, with every station name replaced with an anagram of itself. Duh! Naturally, good Internet users have responded by posting not only the banned map but a collection of other remixes.

Possibly even crazier (hat tip: Dubber) is the emergence of a new licensing requirement on club DJs in Britain. It requires them to pay an additional licence fee if they rip music they have legally bought to a hard drive for convenience. And then it just gets really silly. Yes, lawyers are now being paid to write rules precisely dictating how two songs may, or may not, be mixed together for the pleasure of an audience.

I only came in part-way through 20/20's 'Playground Pushers' story last night, but that was enough to form the impression that it was a fairly alarming piece of work.

It seems some youths have been using a bench at Grey Lynn Park, near the playground, to sell small quantities of marijuana (I guess property prices make tinny houses a bit tricky these days). That's certainly a fair enough story, but some of the gibbering hidden-camera silliness that followed was not.

The treatment was, at times, outrageous. Children around the several youths selling small deals of pot were being used as "cover" intoned reporter Hadyn Jones. An in-studio policeman helpfully observed that prams and dirty nappes were a good place to hide drugs: cue a shot of someone getting something from a pram.

Doubtless realising that the audience might not get sufficiently exercised over a couple of joints, Jones launched into a fit of speculation - without a shred of evidence - that the $500 calculated to have been reaped from small-time sales of marijuana would be saved and spent on P (which would then, presumably, be sold to schoolchildren or something). The policeman helpfully passed on an anecdote to the effect that he'd heard some gangs were now spraying marijuana "with a fine mist of methamphetamine".

Da-da-dum. Jones: "Do you really know what you're smoking?"

I'm sorry, but for fuck's sake …

Okay. I'm waiting for an assurance that no one working on 20/20 has ever casually bought marijuana. And that if they did, they'd all consider it a fair cop if a camera crew was to follow and identify them and later bail them up near their place of work, so a reporter could make patronising observations about their lifestyle.

Worst of all, one of the members of Nesian Mystik was filmed in the park talking to some of the group the included the tinny dealers. No evidence was offered that he bought or consumed marijuana. He stood guilty, it seemed, of knowing someone of roughly the same age and background as him in his own community. This was enough for Jones to run some ancient clip with the band saying they were role models and shouldn't give kids the idea that drugs were cool. His subsequent refusal to comment? Well, that just confirmed things, didn't it?

And finally, some fanboy madness from WFMU: Using Google Earth to find famous film locations. Anyone up for spending a few hours doing the same thing here?

Digg this Scoopit!

A long post on telecommunications | Feb 22, 2006 09:58

I'm inclined to believe that the Business Roundtable's submission of a column by its chairman Rob McLeod arguing against regulation of Telecom - without the fairly important declaration that McLeod is a director of Telecom - was an error, rather than an attempt to mislead the public. I'm less inclined to credit McLeod's argument.

The Business Roundtable has been a quite consistent champion of property rights and opponent of regulation - even to the extent of lining up against the political centre-right on the foreshore and seabed issue. Its view might be encapsulated in this paragraph from the column:

Marketplace competition seldom operates perfectly, but just because a fish can't fly doesn't mean a rhinoceros can do better. The heavy hand of regulation is often far worse.
Greater intervention by the government in electricity has led to the current unholy mess. Do we want telecommunications to go the way of state-controlled electricity and roads?

Let's put it another way: would we want our roads run like our telecommunications? You won't get many backers for that motion, Rob.

For nearly 20 years, New Zealand's official approach to telecommunications has been unique in the world, embodying a philosophy of "light-handed regulation", and (until recently) eschewing an industry-specific regulator. It's too long to go through here, but Auckland network industries specialist Paul Hewlett has an excellent backgrounder on events since the Post Office monopoly was broken up in 1987, and the network placed with a new entity, Telecom Corporation of New Zealand.

Although most of the horror stories about the Post Office era are true - it sometimes took two or three months to get the phone on - the old system had some successes. We had a very high penetration of phone lines relative to our population. In three years of public ownership, the new corporation made another important step; establishing digital connections to nearly every exchange in the country.

One of the most striking parts of the story is the then-Labour government's acceptance of an "undertaking" from Telecom's new management that it would "ensure that interconnection would be provided to competitors on a fair basis, and the relationships between Telecom companies would not disadvantage competitors." On this vague assurance, any mention of interconnection was left out of the Telecommunications Act.

It is difficult now to credit the stupidity of those who devised the policy. After Telecom was sold to Ameritech and Bell Atlantic (themselves, ironically the product of the greatest regulatory intervention in telecommunications history - the forcible break-up of AT&T in 1982) for $4.25 billion (the money was prudently used to retire external debt) in 1990, there was no way that its private owners would - or even should - have made any agreement not to their advantage.

It wasn't all bad: Clear Communications entered the market, negotiated an interconnection agreement for distance calling and set toll rates on a steep slide. But it was different when Clear tried to get into the local calling market: that precipitated a legal battle over the cost of connecting to Telecom's network that churned on for nearly a decade. All the while, National's Communications minister, Maurice Williamson, defended the New Zealand way: "How you do better than the best, I do not know," he said in 1993.

Ironically, it was business customers that suffered the most: the Kiwi Share's requirement for free local calling, with increases no greater than the rate of inflation, offered some protection to residential users. But, while the American shareholders drew extraordinary dividends, Telecom's capital investment fell below the rate of depreciation in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, other nations began to embark on a different path. When they broke up their public monopolies, they either completely separated the wholesale and retail elements of those networks, or foreshadowed local loop unbundling, under which incumbents would be required to allow new entrants access to the "last mile" to residential homes, on decreed terms.

We didn't. And the theory of why we didn't is plain enough. The market would sort things out. If prospective competitors were given a break to allow them to piggyback on Telecom's network, that would be a disincentive for them to invest in their own networks. And anyway, those old copper lines were on the way out. Fibre was the future.

That theory began to unravel in the mid-90s, when DSL arrived. This new technology would allow data to be delivered at pretty decent rates over the existing copper. Telecom, understandably, slammed on the brakes on what had been envisaged as an epochal fibre installation strategy. The various permutations of Saturn, Clear and Telstra installed cable in parts of Wellington and Christchurch but ran out of money. CityLink wired the hell out of the Wellington CBD, and, more recently, several companies laid fibre in the Auckland CBD, but it was clear enough that fibre to our homes would be a long time coming, if ever. It wasn't that the state stood in the way - pretty much anyone can be a network operator under the Telecommunications Act - it just wasn't competitive.

Meanwhile, everyone else unbundled. According to McLeod's column, it hasn't gone too well:

Overseas, unbundling has been fraught with difficulties. In Britain, where local loop unbundling has been in place for over five years, fewer than 300,000 lines have been unbundled. In New Zealand terms that amounts to around 20,000 lines, about the number of broadband connections Telecom sells every six weeks. In Australia the number of unbundled loops is also low and the industry is embroiled in major legal and policy debates on the issue.

This is accurate, but misleading. Bulk migration of lines only began last year in Britain. But last month, the British regulator trebled its previous forecast for the number of lines to be unbundled in 2006 - to three million. Its previous forecast was made in November, the month when the per capita penetration of broadband in Britain exceeded that of the US. From The Times:

Tim Johnson, of Point Topic, said the US broadband market was now less competitive than Britain's. "Although the US telecoms players face strong competition from cable companies, they do not face the same fierce level of competition from resellers and local loop unbundling that there is in the UK," he said.

The BBC had a story yesterday on the new British broadband boom. It quoted a consumer analyst:

"The influx of broadband providers last year caused huge competitive waves, and has resulted in a greater number of cheap and accessible broadband packages being available on the market.

"We fully expect a further price war before the summer as a result of mergers, acquisitions and local loop unbundling which could result in broadband connections being widely available for less than £10 a month," he said.

The reality is, to put it mildly, rather different from the picture painted by McLeod.

So you're thinking: what does unbundling mean again? Basically, it means that competitors can purchase and place their own equipment in the exchanges of the incumbent telco, and use that equipment to deliver service over the "last mile" of copper, at a price related to the cost on the incumbent. It's not cost-free, and in New Zealand, perhaps only Ihug, TelstraClear and Orcon would do so in the short term (Ihug has already announced its spending plans from the day of unbundling). In Britain, hundreds of millions of pounds are being invested in delivering services over the unbundled network.

Amid all this, reports Public Address reader Andrew Kivell, the British broadband market has swung back to competition on line rate: "8Mb is the new 2Mb, and 20+Mb is available. My 'slow' 2Mb costs a flat rate £15/mth (5 beers in Universal Currency) with no download cap, no fixed contract term, and an upgrade to 8Mb as soon as the exchange is enabled." Our geographical isolation from the core Internet will always have a bearing on price and service here, but I think this reiterates that it's in the higher-end broadband products that we're most poorly served.

The British regulator's report had another line of considerable interest: "There are no Disputes in progress at the present time." In a market where there is "a dispute in progress" most of the time that sounds pretty damn good.

But here's the thing: almost all the growth in broadband connections worldwide is in DSL Even in the US, where broadband Internet has been dominated by cable TV providers who worked out how to repurpose their coaxial networks for Internet access, more than half of the new connections are DSL. Those unglamorous copper wires are much more important than anyone thought they would be 10 or 15 years ago.

Unlike Canada, New Zealand did not have the advantage of dot-com era telcos coming in and laying fibre like crazy, then going belly-up, leaving thousands of kilometres of cable in the ground as a sunk cost. The reality is that there will never be a big-bang installation of residential cable in New Zealand. At best, fibre to the home will grow incrementally, but the degree of investment implied by a pervasive new residential network is currently a fantasy. Most of that new fibre will be installed by Telecom, not any new entrant. But the kind of investment implied in unbundling - from tens to hundreds of millions - that's possible. Britain has shown that.

At this point, the promise of wireless data services is usually invoked. I have one of those myself: Wired Country via Ihug. I cling to it, even though Wired Country is a bit of a shambles, and Ihug would like to move me to cheaper DSL, because as a 2Mbit/s synchronous connection, it kicks Telecom DSL into next week. Woosh Wireless may have sorted out its technical issues by now, but its residential service offerings are abysmal. BCL shows no sign of moving into the residential market and, even with WiMax looming, I'm still waiting for someone to show me that wireless will be anything more than a niche.

So what's the problem? As McLeod points out, nearly all New Zealand homes now have the choice to pony up for broadband. A lack of market dynamism is the problem: a lack of competition on price and service. Telecom's miserable contention rates are a symptom of that problem. The contention rate is the ratio between the bandwidth flowing out from an exchange to individual users, and the bandwidth provided to that exchange. It would be silly and uneconomic to offer a contention ration of 1: that is, if you had 1000 people on 2Mbit/s DSL connections to an exchange, you'd provide 2 gigabits into it from the network - effectively assuming that everyone will be using their full 2Mbit/s all the time. It would be like designing a roading system that didn't slow down at rush hour, but looked kind of empty every other time.

Elsewhere (the UK, for example), a minimum contention rate for residential use is about 50 (it is often a good deal lower). For business customers, it's more like 20, and in competitive markets, business customers can affordably demand contention rates of 1. Telecom's contention rate is around 80, and - amazingly - the rate for its new 3.5Mbit/s service (so warmly hailed by McLeod) is said to be 148. That's a joke. But why should Telecom do any different? Because almost all broadband in New Zealand is a Telecom service resold on Telecom's terms, it is hardly at any competitive risk. In the 1990s, the Commerce Commission declared Telecom "the de facto regulator" in its own market. We have a regulator now, but things aren't so different.

Telecom dictates the speed, terms and price of any DSL service offered in New Zealand. The revised Telecommunications Act holds out the possibility of a major competitor being able to offer the service of its choice, subject to Telecom's technical support (ie: about 8Mbit/s, although DSL now potentially runs up to 24Mbit/s for users close to an exchange), but not without spending a long, long time in court, and out of the market. Telecom simply has no incentive to permit a service enhancement it doesn't feel like offering itself. No prizes for guessing why the market is a bit dead.

Yes, the number of New Zealand broadband connections grew nearly 70% between Q3 2004 and Q4 2005, but that's still less than Thailand, India, China, Pakistan and Australia, in the Asia-Pacific region alone. And were it not for a modest extension of regulation and accompanying government pressure, it's hard to believe we'd have done that well.

So, anyway, I've been leery for a long time about local loop unbundling, for reasons related to those cited by McLeod - it's a difficult step this far down the line. But the reality of the world economy in telecommunications is such that I'm over the leeriness. If it's not full LLU, then the government will need to impose some complex regulatory requirements on Telecom. LLU has the advantage of relative simplicity.

Full LLU would also, of course, immediately introduce something that the nearly 20 years since corporatisation has conspicuously failed to deliver: nationwide competition on residential voice calling services. (My Wired Country connection includes an IP-based phone service from Ihug: it's louder, clearer and has many more features than our Telecom phone. Imagine if you could have your pick of such services via your existing phone line. Would you like that?)

McLeod's column hails the progress of Vodafone in our "competitive" mobile calling sector, without acknowledging that the benefits of that competition have failed to flow through to the consumer: our mobile termination rates (especially when calling from fixed lines) are the highest in the OECD. Theories must be subject to evidence, and the evidence of two decades of "light-handed" regulation is not impressive.

Frankly, I think Telecom can rise to the challenge. It has shown excellence in the past, most notably in the work of the team (of which Theresa Gattung was part) which responded to the sudden challenge to the telephone network when the Internet went mainstream in the mid-1990s, and people suddenly started spending hours, rather than minutes, "on the phone". Will there be perverse effects? Probably. Every bit of regulation from the Kiwi Share on has had its perverse effects. There will probably be compensation involved - money out of your pocket and mine. But I simply do not believe those effects will outweigh the benefits of unbundling in the interests of genuinely competitive exploitation of the only pervasive network we're likely to have for a long, long time.

Digg this Scoopit!

Philosophical | Feb 19, 2006 11:55

I had a dream in which somebody committed suicide last week. The room was a classic interior of the unconscious: the foyer of some grand theatre, primarily consisting of smooth, mottled, curving marble. We were looking down, a long way down, over a balcony. And then, suddenly, he dived over.

He was someone I know, or used to, but I think he was there for symbolic, rather than literal, value. I remember the sudden horror - it's fascinating the way our dreams can anticipate the feeling of a thing we haven't experienced - and then the clear, sharp, sickening smack of the body hitting a distant floor. That sound was truly awful.

The dream was mixed up in a week of doomy portent; in which the worst things did not happen but hovered on the edges. On Friday afternoon, I took some of the weight off my back, literally, by finally getting some treatment for a minor back injury I hadn't been able to shake off. Turns out it's the kind of injury that precludes, for the moment, two forms of exercise I enjoy: cycling, and shooting hoops in the driveway. The hoops, in particular, have been doing more harm than good.

There needed to be more. So I called Paul, who came around to watch the Blues-Highlanders game, with a mutual friend who works in the Internet industry. All this stuff about connection speeds was missing the point, said our mutual friend. What people needed to start asking questions about was contention ratios - that is, the number of broadband users served by each individual ATM circuit to a Telecom exchange.

Telecom won't reveal its typical contention ratio, although providers overseas tend to advertise theirs as a selling point. Word is, it can be in excess of 80. The standard in competitive markets is more like 50, and can be considerably better. The upshot is that if you buy JetStream via an exchange serving an area yet to awake to the broadband revolution, your results might be excellent. But if all your neighbours are getting broadband - look at Mt Eden, my friend suggested - then you're drawing water from the same, small pool. At peak times, your 2Mbit/s connection will actually be nothing of the kind, and your 3.5Mbit/s isn't actually going to improve anything.

I told our friend that if he thought members of Parliament were going to get their heads around that problem, let alone a solution, he was dreaming. But you can only try.

We watched the game. Can anybody tell me what the Blues' game plan was? Because we looked 80 minutes for a pattern, even a glimpse of a winning pattern, and we could not discover one. Basic errors at set piece, repetitive, lateral backline movements, frantic offloading, sure. But sense of purpose, there was none. And with Luke McAllister cracking his jaw, the unfortunate placement of Lavea at first-five is set in. We discussed how long this might go on before Nuciforia panicked and started Nacewa at first-five (which, apart from anything else, would add a goalkicking option by bringing Ward in at fullback). The Blues aren't going to win the bugger this year.

After calling a dial-a-driver for our friend, Paul and I headed into town, for the last couple of hours of the city council's Dancing in the Streets event, between the library and the St James in Lorne St. I love these events; they're mad and energetic, and Lorne St was packed with kids when we arrived. Paul and I found ourselves a spot on the balcony by the library, and soaked it all up.

Chris Chetland's Baiter Cell began life as a pretty stern business: hard, alternative beats. It is now a party experience, with MCs and vocalists and unabashed crowd favourites (there's never a wrong time to drop 'Blue Monday') spliced in among Baiter Cell's various student radio hits. It was good fun.

"We're so lucky to have this," mused Paul. "This is the best country in the world."

He got in a conversation with the young bloke next to him, which somehow got onto Paul being gay. The young bloke asked Paul what it was like being gay. Not too foul at the moment, Paul may have said.

Around us, kids hopped up on BZP hopped around and texted their friends. Then Concord Dawn came on and they hopped 30% faster. Drum and bass isn't my favourite kind of music, but I do love the energy of drum and bass crowds, and it's not hard to see why Concord Dawn are regarded as one of the top D&B acts in the world. Here and there, a pair of cops wove through the throng, seeming almost stationary against the hubbub and clatter around them.

Apart from a brief scuffle near the front, there seemed to be nothing to trouble the plod. But as we left afterwards, someone working on the production said there had been several people staggering away from the mosh pit (this is the kind of dance music that has the equivalent of a mosh pit) dazed and bleeding, on account of several other people - on the P, no doubt - going way too far. There had been perhaps half a dozen arrests.

In which case, allow me to salute some intelligent, organised policing. There was a time when New Zealand police would have piled in on something like this; aggravated people, created a disturbance, stopped the music. But not this Friday night in town. They appear to have dealt with genuine problems so swiftly and efficiently - whipping miscreants to vans round the corner - that we, and a couple of thousand other partygoers, had no idea anything was amiss.

Paul and I walked up to K Road for a drink at the Wine Cellar. I love this place. It's like going to someone's flat for a drink - because it actually is someone's flat. The concise, reliable wine list doesn't trouble you with labels - just a Marlborough pinot gris, thanks - and the servings are of a size you'd pour in your own house. Paul and I yarned for nearly an hour over one drink. On the way in we met some of the bFM party crew, who were amiably trollied, and as we left we bumped into Julian Hansen and the man formerly known as Otis Mace, who were arriving in their course of their own auld buggers' night out. We exchanged greetings and knowing grins.

We thought we'd have a drink at Family, the great gay bar on K Road that, if it gets any more popular, risks being a victim of its own success. It's a thronging, colourful, diverse place that attracts, it seems, quite a few hets - for the very good reason, probably, that it's not full of uptight wankers like most other city bars are.

It was home from there for me, although Paul decided he'd stay and chat to some nice boys. Saturday was quiet and stationary, largely on account of the back treatment catching up on me (I had to bail on a friend's stag do that evening - I just wouldn't have been up to scratch). I sat on the deck and read the new Bulletin, which has Murdoch on the cover and a fine essay on liberalism, democracy and the Islamic world by Fareed Zakaraia, reprinted from Newsweek. The cricket was good, because we won and because Jhetan Patel bowled Chanderpaul between his legs, hilariously exposing the batsman's innovative front-on stance. We watched some new television off the Internetweb until midnight.

We're off to lunch in a half an hour, with friends, old friends we haven't seen for years and some interesting people we haven't yet met. The cicadas are sounding, the sun is shining and there not much to do but lazy lunching. We've run out of time for a swim around at Pt Chev, but that's okay - Pt Chev beach has been very good to us already this summer.

Paul's right. It's not too foul around here.

---

Update: Turns out Computerworld has more on the way Telecom is running its wholesale services. Juha Saarinen looks at the new deals offered to wholesale customers, which come replete with such "fish hooks" as a cut in the monthly data allowance for each retail customer, from 10GB monthly to 4GB. Full-rate DSL (previously 7.6Mbit/s and eye-wateringly expensive) has also been scrapped, in favour of the new 3.5Mbit/s offering. There's also an updated story on the dreadful contention rates, including a claim that Telecom's network will not support streaming media during peak times. Editor Paul Brislen says it's time to get tough, really tough, with Telecom.

And after a second week, one or two high-fliers (that means you, James Griffin) have come crashing to earth on the Public Address Virtual Super 14 leader board. Our leader is Nic Jones, with a blistering 90 points from two rounds, heading off Michael Parry, Kathryn Dick and Francis Wevers. Special mention for Holly Walker as a well-performed newbie. I managed not to completely embarrass myself.

PS: Juha has just been in touch with a little more on contention rates. He says:

"It's actually worse than 80:1. Telecom provisions a mere 24kbit/s per user for its "broadband".

"This means that for the 3.5Mbit/s connections, the contention rate is an astounding... 148:1

"The 2Mbit/s connections are shared by up to 84 users.

"Needless to say, you can forget about streaming video and other media during peak times."

Digg this Scoopit!