Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: It's not funny because it's…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Seemed like a sensible approach to the last 20 metres that suited the local environment there.
Oh, undoubtedly. However, people look at things like that and then try to extrapolate its success into using the same model to support FTTN with a WiFi distribution network to the premises rather than full FTTP. I'm just trying to explain to our non-tech members why that doesn't work so well.
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Hard News: It's not funny because it's…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Who owns them in NZ? the city, anyone know? a lines company?
Pretty sure it’s the lines companies who own power poles. They’re certainly the ones who come out and fix them if they get collected by errant automobiles; spent many hours at crash scenes waiting for Vector to show up to remove and replace broken power poles.
I think that light poles are owned by the road corridor owner, since street lights are primarily about safety of the road corridor, but in most of NZ there’s no distinction between a light pole and a power pole except on motorways.
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Hard News: It's not funny because it's…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Why provide internet to each apartment when you could provide it to the whole block with the same amount of hardware?
Because it's not the same amount of hardware if you're selling even 100Mbps into the home, never mind gig. Wireless is shared bandwidth, meaning that if you and I are both sharing a 100Mbps connection neither of us can get 100Mbps if we're both using it at the same time. It's fine if you're only talking about ADSL2+ speeds but UFB is supposed to be much faster and have a lot of scalability. WiFi doesn't scale well without lots more hardware, to the point where you're talking about some very expensive kit at each end just to deliver what UFB can handle today.
Plus, as I observed above, the higher your WiFi speeds get the worse is its capability to penetrate through buildings. A lot of the terraced housing developments that have a central courtyard that links together all the garages would need multiple APs installed into the centre of that courtyard in order to provide full coverage. Likewise situations such as my extremely common split property where the house at the back of the section can only get line-of-sight to an AP sited on the road if the AP is at the top of a power pole.
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Hard News: It's not funny because it's…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
If there were some wonderful technology in the network layer that only X had, then there could be real competition, but they’re all running the same imported hardware and software, just at different settings.
Better caching, better international bandwidth, service levels, quality support, additional services... There are many things that different ISPs can do with "the same imported hardware and software", including how much of that hardware they use in different places and what software they use.
That you see no benefit in a competitive delivery model above the physical layer doesn't mean nobody else sees a benefit.
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Hard News: It's not funny because it's…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
But utterly opposed to the ideology of neo-liberalism and pseudo-markets for natural monopoly services.
The physical layer is a natural monopoly. The services atop that layer are absolutely candidates for competition.
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Hard News: It's not funny because it's…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
The local council installed to the telephone pole outside the apartment, and then did partnerships with an ISP to provide wireless from the pole. She got good connection all around her apartment, and just had to pay for an account with the ISP.
Had the massive advantage that she got a wifi connection all around the neighbourhood for several miles – basically removed the need for mobile data.
Relies on an exclusive partnership arrangement between the provider of the physical layer and the provider of the services layers. Which is completely the opposite of the intent of UFB.
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Hard News: It's not funny because it's…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
The fibre to the post and Gigabit wi-fi to the home seems ideal to me
Sure. And then you have to have one WiFi link per home in order to ensure that the full Gbps per premises can be delivered. Not only are you dealing with the shared bandwidth design of WiFi, you're also having to ensure that individual ISPs can deliver services to a specific customer with absolute certainty that it's their customer who's getting those services.
Additionally, we're still talking about WiFi. Not cellular data, which is inherently difficult to leech, but WiFi. How many possible ways could delivering from the kerb over an ethereal link go wrong? And what do you do about multi-dwelling lots? I live in the front house and can see the street, but the house behind me cannot see anything of the poles unless their AP was put right at the top of the power pole - at which point it becomes all kinds of vulnerable to power line interference and other issues. Remember that these high-bandwidth RF techniques have awful solid-object penetration properties because they rely on very, very high frequencies (or, in the NTT DoCoMo test, on much lower frequencies that are very strictly regulated). You can't rely on a bunch of street-located APs beaming their connections through intervening properties, because the attenuation of the signal will very certainly drop the speed to below what's required. I have 300Mbps 802.11n at home, and depending where I am in the house I can be sync'ing at speeds more akin to 802.11b even though it's passing through only a handful of walls. Imagine what would happen if I were trying to pass the signal through a whole house!
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Legal Beagle: On the possibilities of a…, in reply to Richard Aston,
it just seems odd to me that a Coroner's inquest can produce conclusions that challenge those found in a trial but after the fact
Remember that the trial didn't find Kahui innocent. It only found that the Crown hadn't proved to the satisfaction of the jury that, beyond reasonable doubt, he was guilty. It's a significant distinction, and means that there was no "conclusion" to be challenged by the result of the inquest. If he'd been found guilty and the inquest then announced that it was someone else, that would have been a challenge to a conclusion that came out of the trial.
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Hard News: It's not funny because it's…, in reply to merc,
except here in NZ, where that sort of thing is OK, because our sharemarket is not well legislated.
The situation in 2002 was rather different WRT insider trading than it is now. Labour tightened up the rules somewhat. The bigger challenge is the resourcing of the watchdog, which National are, naturally, not keen on maintaining - as is the case with every other watchdog.
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Hard News: Judge Harvey: My part in his downfall, in reply to Robert Fear,
Russell said "he is us". Judge Harvey said "he is [the] US".