Posts by Andre Alessi
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As usual, Ezra Klein has |a great, simple post on who will remain uninsured after the reforms are put into practice.
The partisan divide we are currently witnessing is just another manifestation of the cultural conflicts that have been part of America's history since its inception, generally being based on some version of the fundamental North/South divide.
I don't know that seeing this stuff as a continuation of fundamental tribal divisions within America makes much sense anymore. Certainly there's an element of "My side has always hated X so I can never support it!" but what we're seeing is more complicated than that in so many ways. American's electoral system and relatively low poll turnouts make incumbency an impossible hill to climb unless you whip your supporters into such a frenzy that they believe not voting for the new guy is tantamount to selling their children into eternal slavery. That's why everything is a life or death issue, why bipartisan compromise isn't all that common, and why people who don't pay much attention to American politics think that "universal health care"is somehow equivalent to fascism/communism.
The boundaries of the North/South divide haven't been nearly as consistent on the actual issues as recent events would indicate-it wasn't so long ago that the Democratic Party was the dominant force in the South.
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I want my VDSL2. I believe it will start to be offered as a product sometime in the middle of this year.
You might, if you wheedle the right people, get in on one of the pilot projects underway right now. I believe that many of the providers utilising Telecom's network via wholesale agreements are actually moving faster on this than Telecom Retail itself.
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I can Google lamb's brains stir fry on my ultrafast connection for you, if you like.
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Sadly, no.
One of the things that often gets lost in the discussion around rural broadband is that the distances involved are going to lead to overall reductions in the average speeds of New Zealand broadband connections, even with increased cabinetisation. The most up-to-date DSL technology, VDSL2, is only really useful less than 1 km from the exchange, so that'll be another innovation that doesn't filter through to the majority of the population.
Fibre's a possible solution to this, but I just can't see companies investing seriously in laying dark fibre to rural properties over 5+ km distances any time in the near future. Rural broadband is going to have to look for new solutions; the money that has been offered so far just hasn't been enough.
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I'd like to know how you get jobs writing this sort of manual, they seem to pop up all over the show and I'd be excellent at it. I could probably slip in a few pointless, rambling anecdotes from timeto time, too. You know, just in the name of continuing to develop my writing style.
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Democrats: WHERE THE &#%&@ IS MY GODDAM UNICORN?!!
Obama is riding it of course.
(My girlfriend made me buy that t shirt for her during the primaries)
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I put a proposal to Auckland City Council a few years back about running FTTH through the sewers, you can guess the response "Too Hard, too dangerous for teh workers, blahh blahh blahh" I was Not the first to come up with this concept.
Not that it's a completely terrible idea, but I'm not sure you appreciate how preternaturally capable anyone with a backhoe licence is when it comes to finding and destroying underground pipes. I can just hear the conversations now when they have to send people in to fix them, too: "I'm sorry Mrs Bratwurst, I know you really want to Skype with your granddaughter, but the technicians have exceeded their daily poo exposure index. Call back tomorrow."
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It's not a simple issue. Cabinetisation effectively stopped Vodafone, Orcon etc from investing to take advantage of LLU -- but the impact for consumers has been extremely positive, especially where I live.
It's not simple at all, and Vodafone and Orcon both deserve bouquets for the massive amount of early behind the scenes work they did to get LLU rolling at a practical level. That not only increased confidence for other telcos that they could do the same, it also forced Telecom to refine its LLU agreement process to smooth out a lot of the kinks that trip new players up.
I'm thinking more of the smaller telcos that aren't about providing network investment at all-they can get 300 or 1,000 lines and sell them to end customers fractionally cheaper than Telecom Retail (by bundling toll calling or broadband usage, etc.) There's been a proliferation of these companies over the last few years, mainly targeting SMEs in specific areas, and they're the most conservative element of the industry. They're parasitic on the relative product stability of the last few years, and as a result they're making it harder for wholesale arrangements with Telecom to move to new technologies. The big companies that are already set up for LLU can make the jump, but the rest have no reason to.
But I'm damned if I know exactly why my Telecom connection performs so much better than the wholesaled version of the same connection I was getting from Vodafone -- whether it's because Telecom is provisioning accounts better, or because Voda didn't get a level playing field.
One of the eternal mysteries of the wholesale arrangement-I've seen it go the other way too, and there's absolutely no rhyme or reason to it. It's almost certainly the result of back-end configuration randomness (e.g. they move you to a different port when you reassigned that happened to be on a network element with a higher contention ratio, for example, or a mis-configured profile) but because of the way operational separation works at a practical level, the people who could actually figure it out and fix it, Chorus, have no direct relationship with the people you pay your bills to. There's a lot of "double blinds" to the current set up that prevents any one person or company in the process from being able to see the entire picture.
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The tricky thing with that, Rich, is how you define a "decision". Can people vote several times a day? Will they have the interest and the awareness to do so constructively? If not, and you restrict votes to "big picture" questions, you run the risk of the details not matching up with the broad stroke statements when they're interpreted by people on the ground.
A company like Telecom could be well run for the public good, but it really does require specialist management at the operational level to make that happen. The TSO hasn't been a complete failure at providing rural customers services they need, but it could be so much better if it had just been revised yearly to take into account changes in technology instead of just costs.
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One thing Gattung said when she was interviewed on NatRad recently really intrigued me: that most NZers in her view wanted Telecom to be run like a public utility and would be happier if it were an SOE.
New Zealanders do have a really strong sense of ownership of Telecom to an almost irrational degree. I've had conversations with recent American immigrants who have refused to believe that Telecom isn't state owned, just because of the way we talk about it (and probably also driven by its perceived inefficiency and poor service, which can't possibly happen in the private sector.)