Readers of this blog will remember the so called ‘Copper Tax’ campaign from the end of last year. Things may have seemed a little quiet on that front lately, but behind the scenes there’s quite a bit going on.

The latest skirmish to surface burst onto the scene with a press release from the Commerce Commission, then the story has started to grow, CallPlus have come out and shared their submission and the Telecom view is out there too.

The InternetNZ submission is now online here, the legal opinion by Michael Wigley is worth a read as it takes the issue apart in a clear logical sequence.

Its interesting that the issue is seen as a Telecom complaint to the commission as it is wider than that and pretty much involves everybody except Chorus including InternetNZ, Consumer NZ & TUANZ.

At stake is the integrity of our regulatory system and the future of copper (DSL) based broadband in New Zealand along with quite a few global trends as well.

It’s easy to get bogged down at this point in a veritable alphabet soup of 3 letter acronyms and deep interpretations of the Telco Act, so here’s my ‘idiots guide’:

The current broadband regulations set up a service called ‘UBA’ or ‘Unbundled Bitstream Access’ which specifies the price and performance of the ‘DSL’ services that Chorus are required to provide to retailers (what we used to call Telco’s and ISP’s).

Chorus has had 3 years to get ready for a change from ‘retail minus’ to ‘cost plus’ pricing for this service. The Comcom has set a new price for UBA which will come into effect on 1 December 2014.

This ‘interim’ price is substantially lower than the current price and will punch a big hole in Chorus revenues. Chorus are understandably not happy about this and have been trying a number of strategies to reverse this situation. I won’t go into all this now but its important to keep this in mind whenever you see anything about Chorus in the news.

In an attempt to use what they see as a ‘get out of jail free’ card, Chorus want to use a loophole in the act to launch some new copper services that because of their innovation and the investment involved are outside of the act and can be prices in binding contracts between Chorus and the individual retailers.

It is now well established that real ‘killer app’ for all forms of fast broadband is on-line video, it started with the growing popularity of YouTube and now extends to iTunes, Quickflix, Netflix etc and is the new battleground.

Telecom (soon to be Spark) have announced they are launching a service called ‘Lightbox’, CallPlus are going hard with their geoblock avoiding ‘global mode’ and of course Vodafone already have a strong relationship with SKY.

Google have recently certified a number of RSP’s as being good enough to receive their ‘HD Verified’ status (remember who owns YouTube). Video is seen as driving future broadband demand and traffic growth.

So along come Chorus with a special video optimised service called ‘Boost HD’ which will be specially tailored to deliver ‘HD’ video content. Sounds great doesn’t it ? the hitch comes when the retailers get the details on HD and quickly learn that it will be priced like todays UBA services, that its performance will increase as investments in the core network come on-line (investments also necessary to meet growing UFB traffic) and because Chorus consider this to be a new and innovative service it would no longer fall under the Commerce Commission’s oversight.

But wait there’s more, Chorus are also proposing that their regulated legacy UBA services, the ones that get cheaper at 1 December and may get even cheaper after the current FPP (Final pricing Principle) process (which Chorus asked for) has been concluded, will essentially be frozen in time at current speeds and they won’t enjoy the benefits of future network upgrades only the ‘commercial’ Boost HD services will.

From a Chorus perspective this all looks pretty good, dodge the regulatory bullet, preserve current copper revenues and get to sound like a player in the booming broadband video space.

However, from the retailers perspective it looks a bit different, they feel it is Chorus trying to abuse the act to in effect get them to ‘contract out of the law’, that Boost HD is simply a continuation of network upgrades that were planned back in Telecom days and that have been getting rolled out progressively anyway until now. And finally they see Chorus wanting to effectively degrade the regulated service that has actually worked remarkably well in improving the urban broadband experience for most New Zealanders.

At its root this issue comes down to money, Chorus want to restore their financial position and get back on track with their investors, this weeks CFH deal is part of that strategy as well. The retailers also want the best services at the lowest prices and see the current Comcom IPP & FPP processes delivering that.

The users groups, ourselves, InternetNZ & Consumer NZ want to see the savings passed onto the consumer and we are committed to preserving the integrity of our current regulatory system because it is actually working.

TUANZ has invested a lot of time and effort in getting the NZ telecommunications market to its current structure, we have a robust regulator and strong multi-stakeholder processes. Boost HD could see an end to all that and it would be a return to the dark old days.

This really is the big game in town.

Be afraid, be very afraid…

An active, non-pre paid telephone number, whether real or virtual, fixed or mobile is essentially a form of unlimited, unsecured credit. There really are bad guys out there probing for unsecured lines and this can bizarrely turn our telco’s into unwitting mafia debt collectors.

In the last few weeks, I’ve become aware of an issue that concerns us all but no-one seems to want to talk about in public.

And thats phone fraud, when I did the interview I’d heard about it, but thankfully I’d never been a victim of it, but on further investigation I’ve been talking to a lot of people who have been victims and its not pretty.

The sums involved can be eye watering and its happening all the time (but especially on weekends). Often the victim is completely unaware until the next bill arrives and then all hell breaks loose.

The industry are aware of the issue as it is a major pain and the TCF are working on it, but I think TUANZ has a real role to play because ultimately this is a user issue and we can help protect our members, raise media awareness and help the carriers deal with a huge problem.

If you or your company have been hacked can you let me know, I want to collect enough stories to be able to quantify the issue, find out what worked and how issues were resolved and suggest ways forward to both the TCF and the Government.

So if you want to share your story email me on chris@tuanz.org.nz or call me on 021 488 188

If you Google the ‘Internet of Cows‘ you will see that not only is it a serious topic, its also one that we in New Zealand should take very seriously. If you want to get all agri-techie follow some of the links to get an idea of what is coming for Daisy and Buttercup.

But since we’re all pretty dependent on white gold for a big chunk of our national well being its worth stopping to think about how Daisy and Buttercup are getting on-line. At the moment most of our IoC consists of an RFID eartag called NAIT, this is a scheme that was introduced a couple of years ago to keep track of our cattle and deer herds from birth to ermmm ‘processing’, it was introduced primarily for biosecurity purposes but it is also the beginning of an on farm digital revolution.

Because every cow now has a unique digital identifier there is now a growing range of tools for the digital farmer, and we’ll see new and unimagined applications emerge in the coming years.

Allied to this is a whole movement called precision agriculture which is enormously exciting for a gadget loving farm boy like me. In fact we even have the NZ Centre for Precision Agriculture at Massey University who are figuring out how to best use these techniques in our rather unique pastoral farming environment.

So my question is this, is the RBI really good enough for the Internet of Cows (& Sheep & Trees & Rivers & Tractors & Pumps….) because very soon all of these things are going to be sensor equipped, location aware, remote controlled data generating devices. Upload speeds from the farm, orchard, vineyard and forestry blocks are going to matter.

We’ve yet to see a true Farm Area Network technology emerge, and I’m not sure any of the farmers I know will pay for lots of little data transmissions over 3&4G networks, they will need serious connections into their farm offices and from there to the cloud where all this data is going to be processed.

My picks are some kind of local super WiFi that the farmers own, then either ‘fribre from the farn’ as Northpower want to deliver or some form of affordable 4G fixed wireless that can give good 100Mb/s grade service. I’m pretty certain that current copper, satellite and wireless services aren’t going to be that useful to Daisy and Buttercup.

The battle for your hands (and wallets) has been heating up in recent days with the latest event being both Telecom and Vodafone making announcements about turning their recent 700Mhz spectrum purchases into the latest front in the opening skirmishes of the 4G wars.

Both developments actually fall into the category of ‘positioning’ Vodafone want to preserve their hard won reputation as the ‘first’ with new services and Telecom (soon to be Spark) careful to add to their ‘best’ position. Its all a little academic as there is still a shortage of 4G devices that can access the full range of 4G frequencies.

Underneath all this something more important is happening and that is the maturing of mobile broadband into a fully capable challenger for the fixed line broadband dollar. 

Beyond a desktop PC, what was the last device you plugged into a wired network cable? I bet it was some form of wireless access point.

WiFi has conquered all our devices, laptops, tablets, phones, printers, TV’s, stereos, security cameras – the list can even stretch to fridges, washing machines and light bulbs. 

Over 20 years ago M.I.T Medialab digital guru Nicholas Negroponte famously postulated what has become know as the ‘Negroponte Switch’ which stated that:

Put simply he suggested that due to accidents of engineering history we had ended with static devices – such as televisions receiving their content via signals travelling over the airways while devices which should have been mobile and personal – such as telephones were receiving their content over static cables. It was his idea that a better use of available communication resource would result if the information (such as phone calls) going through the cables was to go through the air and that going through the air (such as TV programmes) was to be delivered via cables.

And thats pretty much what we’ve been living through, the information part is the likes of YouTube and Netflix and all our wireless devices are the other part. And WiFi and cellular are intimately linked, WiFi is always about half a generation faster in its latest formats but cellular is more ubiquitous but its expensive and we are trained into treating as a scarce resource.

I know that I wait to get back to either the office or my home before I do any heavy lifting such as software updates or watching movies not because 3G or 4G isn’t capable of the download but because of the cost in terms of data usage.

There is now no reason other the cost of mobile data stopping 4G being a faster alternative to todays copper based broadband and it will give the lower end fibre services some serious competition as well.

So what does the 700Mhz 4G war mean for us? several big things, more coverage in more places, potentially including rural NZ (who despite the RBI still desparately want both better broadband and reliable cellular coverage), it will hopefully lead to mobile data plans that are realistically priced and with practical monthly capacity allowances.

As more multi-band 4G devices become available these networks will get put to the test but there is now no doubt that those lucky enough to live in 4G coverage zones are going to be spoiled for choice. Early adopters will see these networks at their uncontended, best but there are many promising techniques which promise to deliver reliable 50mb/s+ performance.

And we’ll see more use of carrier WiFi to help with the heavy lifting and ‘small cells’ will fill in the coverage gaps.

I think this will also define the major use of the UFB,  as being the backhaul that we all build our wireless networks on. Just like todays cellular networks, we all want to be just one wireless hop away from fibre.

This is actually going to take the best part of the next decade to roll out, and it should be finished just in time for the 5G wars – whatever they are going to be.