5G or what to expect in 2022

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Every time a new G hits the cellular world, we get driven into yet another frenzy of cyclic upgrades, there’s new spectrum to be auctioned off, towers to upgrade and new devices to buy. 

So I was intrigued to read that the Chinese Government has already set out its 5G agenda and that China Mobile is already 2 years into its 5G development program.

So I headed off to Wikipedia and discovered that we’ve been getting a new G about once every decade and the next one is due somewhere around 2022 – 2023. Great so I now know that my future iPhone 12 will be pretty fast and I can start saving for it now.

How fast well its hard to say but 1gb/s looks likely, and hopefully battery life will have improved by then.

What this really illustrates is that we need to look critically at all the announcements and have some context to fit them into:

1.   Mobile is really important in China, their Government understands the need to have a 5G agenda and their carriers are already planning how to respond

2.  Mobile speeds are going to continue to blur the lines in our post-pc world, we really are heading into the ‘hypernet’

3.  Mobile networks are going to continue to be capital intensive and we may need to seriously rethink how a small country like NZ continues to enjoy world-class services (can we really support 3 competing 5G networks?)

If you want a fore taste of 5G you’ll probably get one in around 2016 or so when 1gb/s WiFi will start to become widespread, just in time go inside our UFB connected ‘GigaHomes’ but thats ok because Southern Cross, Hawaiki and the Trans Tasman cables will be running at up to 1tb/s (actually I just made that bit up).

The thing is though, there is a hierarchy of technologies that support all these networks and it starts with the fibre, then it goes to the ethernet switches, it moves onto WiFi and then gets rolled out in the cellular world.

And the speeds at the edge are the ones that really count, and that edge is now in our hands, our cars, our homes and on or in our bodies.

 

Cellular Biology

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I want to return to a theme that emerged in my first week on the job here at TUANZ, and that is how utterly and completely handheld devices have changed the face of telecommunications, and that isn’t going to abate anytime soon. In fact we are just at the beginning of a revolution that will reshape how we live, work and play.

A cool thing about living in my temporary TUANZ cave in Porirua, is that a lot of information flows through everyday and a lot of it comes in the form of press releases or articles in the media announcing the latest developments, service upgrades, new products and cool emerging technologies and I’ve got to read them so you don’t have to.

Two that caught my attention were Vodafone’s trialling of ‘Smell Cell’ technology and 2Degrees launching free WiFi in Wellington using a wholesale WiFi offering from Wellington’s fibre and WiFi pioneers CityLink (disclosure: I helped CityLink launch CafeNet in 2002). 

This morning i was reading ‘Communications Day’ (an Australasian industry newsletter) with some fascinating comments by the chief scientist of China Mobile (the worlds largest cellco with over 800 million customers). She was recommending caution on proceeding too fast to 5G networks! (and I’m still getting to grips with the promise of 4G in my 3G world), the challenge she faces along with every other cellular operator worldwide is:

She also said that China Mobile was acutely aware of the need to reduce energy consumption and other costs to cope with an expected 1000x traffic load increase by year 2020. “One-quarter of our total cost of ownership is power consumption, so that’s how important being green is,” she noted. As well as research into lower energy consumption, she said China Mobile was looking into software defined network technologies with the aim of a software-based net- work from the core right through to the access network. 

And to put that scale into perspective:

China Mobile’s own growth is equally impressive, with its subscriber base now approaching 800 million. To cater to that number of customers, the company has around 1.5 million base stations and another 4.2 million Wi-Fi access points. 

Thats like having a mobile base station for every house in NZ and a WiFi AP each.

So every cellular operator in the world is facing the same challenges, coverage and capacity, expanding coverage usually means more towers and expanding capacity involves getting the most out of scarce spectrum and backhaul resources.

And thats where ‘Small Cells’ and carrier WiFi fits in, Small Cells are an elegant ‘in-fill’ solution for a cellular operator that doesn’t require new towers or consents, the 10kg box is part of the Vodafone network and can be installed in as little as a day. Small Cells will be used to fill-in gaps or boost coverage in all those annoying blackspots and ‘grey’ patchy coverage spots in places like office buildings and shopping malls.

Carrier WiFi recognises that sometimes the best network for heavy lifting on mobile devices is someone else’s, often this means our home or work WiFi networks, 2Degrees is using the CityLink WiFi network in Wellington to do the same, save your precious 3G network for the genuinely mobile and voice traffic and let the big stuff go over WiFi and straight to the fibre backhaul networks.

CityLink’s MD Nick Wills was recently at a ‘Small Cell and Carrier WiFi’ conference in Singapore and he observed that ‘most carriers build up to 1GB of data into their monthly 3G/4G plans, but with carrier WiFi and cellular handover they can offer an additional daily allowance of 1GB per day’.

CityLink’s carrier grade WiFi access points can handle up to 32 simultaneous SSID’s (unique network identifiers) and offer many other advantages for managing WiFi spectrum.

CommsDay had another article showing the growth in WiFi use in Australia:

Roy Morgan: free Wi-Fi turns Perth into

smartphone hotspot capital

The launch of free Wi-Fi across Perth’s CBD last November has catapulted the city into first place for smartphone Wi-Fi access, according to Roy Morgan Research.

The firm found that in the six months to September last year just 19% of smartphone users in Perth had accessed the internet via a wireless hotspot within an average three month period – com- pared to 28% in Brisbane, 24% in Sydney and Melbourne and 20% in Adelaide. But six months lat- er, it found that 29% of Perth’s smartphone users were now connecting at hotspots. Sydney, despite having the highest proportion of residents with a smartphone, now has the lowest rate of smartphone usage at just 23% of owners; the popularity of hotspots grew to 27% and 25% respectively in Mel- bourne and Adelaide.

“The iiNet Group, which includes iiNet and Internode, has partnered with city councils and state governments to develop and offer free Wi-Fi to residents, city workers and visitors, with ‘Perth Wi-Fi’ launching late last year and ‘AdelaideFree’ coming online very soon,” commented Roy Morgan media GM Tim Martin.

“Other cities are catching on, with Melbourne broadening its trial, Brisbane adding new hotspot locations and iiNet continuing its roll-out with the development of free Wi-Fi in Canberra.

“Telstra recently announced plans to offer a unique Wi-Fi hotpot service that is free to its subscribing customers who are willing to share their home Wi-Fi, and available for a fee to other 

Telecom are well advanced with their hotspot strategy here and we’ll see a lot more developments in this space, would you share your home WiFi willingly with others? And how does this blur the line between RSP’s (ie fixed line telco’s & ISP’s) and the cellco’s?

What all this means is that our mobile devices are going to be even more useful in even more places, we will be seeing a lot more of both these technologies as our reliance on mobile goes to the level of dependence beyond addiction.

And as China Mobile are observing the next big challenge is the ‘ABC’ of mobile – Always Be Charging.

 

Here’s how TUANZ makes a difference

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I’m meeting with quite a few people at the moment and the topic of TUANZ’s raison’d’etre often comes up. There is a view that we’ve fought the fights that needed to be fought, but now the market will take care of things and we should just retire gracefully basking in the glow of a job well done.

The thing is that our voice is needed now more than ever, and our user perspective is very different from the carrier view or that of the officials and regulators. Our strength comes from our voice being listened to.

So I’m pretty pleased to learn from NBR (sadly behind the paywall) that my late night musings on things gigabit has helped to produce a result:

Chorus: gigabit soon across our entire network
NBR put the Dunedin South MP’s criticism to Chorus.

Spokesman Ian Bonnar replied,  “We already offer Gigabit business products, and we have long had residential Gigabit services on our product roadmap.

“Since last year we have been working with our retail service provider (RSP) customers to understand how and when we can best launch residential Gigabit products and we expect to do so soon, across our entire fibre network.”

Hmn.

So if gigabit fibre is coming to all Chorus’ UFB areas (essentially, the whole country besides UFF’s eight towns, and Whangarei and Christchurch), and its own fibre elsewhere, why should we care who wins Gigatown?

Thats awesome, I’m glad that gigabit is on the Chorus roadmap and its safe to assume market pressures will keep the wholesale pricing sharp.

The challenge now is to the RSP’s, we need you guys to figure out how to create gigabit services (I’ve been talking to some folk with a few ideas in this space). We’re not expecting to buy gigabit products in July but now we can put them on our roadmaps.

Next week I’ll be looking at ‘the state of the stack’ and what we can expect from UFB products, if you read the comments in the NBR article you’ll also see several commenters who are stuck in the blind spot between the UFB and the RBI (the 3 speed internet we were concerned about as the UFB was being negotiated).

Its hard to put an immediate value on our advocacy but if you are a member thank you your continuing support lets us function, if your not a member but think this is a useful role the membership details are on this site.

Gigatown turns into a Giga challenge for Chorus

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One more post before bedtime, now that I’m back in the temporary VDSL equipped TUANZ cave in #gigatownporirua.

I’ve had a flight back from Auckland, (cut off from my feed to the internets) to think about what Ultra Fast Fibre’s declaration of their central North Island patch as the ‘Giganet’ means for Chorus.

And what it means for us as users and how I think its the most exciting thing to happen in the UFB world since Northpower finished their build.

In military terms this has been a brilliant piece of asymmetric warfare, a judo throw that Vladimir Putin would be proud to call his own.

Chorus will now be compelled to re-evaluate the entire gigatown proposition because its just had a whole lot of the gloss removed:

1.   The winning gigatown no longer enjoys the advantage of the ‘Southern Hemispheres’ fastest internet.

2.   The 3 year stint as the gigatown is also meaningless as UFF have declared that its package will run until 2020 – which is the big bang year anyway in terms of UFB evolution

3.   The winning gigatown will have the cheapest wholesale, residential gigabit service but that may not translate into much of an advantage in what will be a much broader residential gigabit market.

4.   The winning gigatown will still enjoy the Alcatel Lucent innovation fund, but the economic development benefit is seriously diluted.

I think there will be quite a lot of angst out there in the gigatowns tomorrow (disclaimer I am part of the #gigatownporirua team) because the competition has required a lot of energy and commitment from largely volunteer teams (think Top Town meets social media). The competition and rivalry is fierce and intense, the creativity that has been unleashed is inspirational and overall it has got us all thinking about what the UFB can mean for our communities.

So what can Chorus do?

The options as I see them are:

1.   Box on like nothing’s happened

2.  Use the ‘Team Oracle USA’ like clauses in the gigatown T&C’s to pause and look for a reset

3.  Match UFF and declare everybody a ‘GIGATOWN’ (my preferred option)

I think Chorus owe it to all the towns who have played the game by their rules and who have sunk what I think must be millions of dollars worth of community time and energy into gigatown to show that they are serious about our giganation.

So whats in it for us as users, this is the stuff that rocks

1.   RSP’s now have the incentive to get really creative with UFB products, speed is no longer a limitation!

2.   The developer community can now start to build ‘gigabit grade’ products and services with a good sized local sandpit (even bigger if Chorus come to the party)

3.   UFB consumers will get world class connectivity

4.   The rest of the stack (backhaul and international) will get an increased incentive to open the pipes so we really will get genuine gigabit grade experiences

5.   There are going to be huge possibilities in education and health

6.   This will speed up the copper transition and force all the RSP’s to get serious about UFB

7.   The market for fast WiFi is going to go nuts!

8.   Aussies are going to be sooo jealous 

9.   The Government might feel so good about the giganet they’ll get behind other good ideas like Northpower’s rural fibre plans

10.  The belt of towns from New Plymouth to Tauranga is hugely important to all our current export industries and it is home to our mighty ‘Agritech’ sector (think Gallaghers etc)  – which I believe is our best shot for a global ICT niche we can own. So the Giganet is really, really important to our collective future.

I’ve been involved in the fibre dream in NZ since 1999, when I first got a CityLink connection in downtown Wellington, I helped get regional fibre extended across Nelson, Marlborough, Tasman with NMi and the Broadband Challenge.

But this development today has got me more excited as it moves us from a rationed future (just one gigatown) to one that is brim full of possibilities (a whole giganation?) because the UFB is now really going to be Ultra Fast.

I think I need a lie down now, I hope I don’t wake up tomorrow and find it was all a dream.

 

Time for Giga thinking

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Today’s ‘Giganet’ announcement by UFF promises to revolutionize the entire UFB program for some really exciting reasons:

 

1.   It gives the RSP’s a reason to get serious about creating compelling gigabit products

2.  It brings gigabit to a powerhouse of the NZ economy

3.  It clearly separates UFB from legacy copper based broadband 

and it deserves a marketing award as a cheeky and brilliant use of a competitors marketing program and promotional budget.

All we need now are the clever uses, I can think of a few…

 

Good times!

And the winning Giga Towns are…Hamilton, Tauranga, Te Awamutu, Cambridge, Tokoroa, New Plymouth, Wanganui and Hawera.

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No I’m not talking about Chorus’s ongoing #gigatown competition, I’m referring to all the towns in the central north island that are lucky enough to have Ultra Fast Fibre as their LFC.

Because they will all have access to residential gigabit UFB services from July this year, these services will be available to RSP’s for $65 per month until 2020!

UFF have decided to rename their region the ‘Giganet!’

So it’s now over to the RSP’s, TUANZ congratulates UFF and will update this story tomorrow .

More to follow,,,,

 

Whats next in “Fibre-Rei”?

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Last Wednesday night, Graham and Darren from Northpower shared the Northpower Fibre story at a TUANZ After 5 in Auckland.

It was a great night and I’m trying to convince them to come and share the story in Wellington soon (keep an eye on the after 5’s section of our website).

I’ve been following Northpower with interest for a number of years and it was great to see them pass such a major milestone – just in case you missed it 

Northpower have completed their UFB build!!!

Thats right, ahead of schedule and apparently under budget!!

Compared with what we usually hear about the UFB as a troubled project, this is quite simply amazing news and a fascinating story.

Personally I’m not surprised because Northpower is pretty special, not just because in many ways they are still a pretty traditional, community-owned electricity lines company but also because they have one of the most cohesive corporate cultures I have ever encountered.

When I first visited them with Ernie Newman 5 or 6 years ago, I was struck by how it didn’t matter whether you were talking to the Chairman of the board or one of their linesman you heard a completely consistent view of why they were building a local fibre network and who they were doing it for – the people of Whangarei in particular and the well being of Northland in general.

This attitude has already attracted investment and focus to Northland (examples being the early partnership with TelstrClear  and the extension of competitive fibre backhaul via FX Networks and the Tai Tokerau Network) and which may be strengthened soon by a Northland based landing for a competitive international fibre with the proposed Hawaiiki trans-pacific cable (watch that space for pending developments).

What they’ve achieved is remarkable on many fronts, when fibre became a political issue in the 2008 election, I don’t think too many of us would’ve picked the ‘Rei’ as NZ’s first fibre city! But when you hear Graham tell the story its easy to understand how they got there.

It was a ‘communications project’ planned by ‘power engineers’ using ‘IT project management tools!’ and a never say die attitude.

They had a genuine process of plan, build, refine, learn and modify, they developed unique hardware for their overhead build and even stuck the fibre jointers up the poles in cherry picker buckets all to speed up the deployment time and lower the cost per premises passed.

And they refined this process at least 4 or 5 times, I think their tight structure and locally focussed team were also huge assets in their success to date.

They’ve done a remarkably good job of taking key stakeholders and the community with them, from working with the council on consenting, developing and supporting local IT companies as retail partners and working with local businesses, schools and communities to ensure that Whangarei was truly fibre ready.

The proof is in the pudding so what are the results?, well they’re pretty impressive too, they currently have the highest UFB uptake rate of any LFC, approaching 70% in the earliest streets they connected, but the figure that blew me away was that since announcing the completion of the build and its subsequent publicity – the enquiry rate has increased by 400% !!!

Rohan McMahon from CFH summed this up by saying “you’ve turned the waiters into wanters!” and in the process I think they’ve shown the way forward for the UFB overall, people will watch the build with interest but it is only when they can assume UFB is available that they’ll seriously consider making a commitment.

But it gets even better, Northpower aren’t resting on their laurels just yet! ultimately they’d like to be able to offer fibre to all their electricity subscribers! (including Rural dwellers!) there’s a few wee challenges but if anyone is up for it – its these guys.

So if you want an awesome lifestyle plus NZ’s best broadband Whangarei is the place to be!

iHomes, iHealth and I’m new at this…

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Gidday – for those who don’t know me I’m Chris O’Connell and I’ll be the voice of TUANZ for the next 4 months until Craig Young begins the role. (It says I’m Paul because I’m coming to grips with our CMS!)

I’ve been around TUANZ for quite a while, I started out judging the TUANZ interactive awards and ended up on the board mainly looking after our policy work, but I’ve also had a stint as the chair.

So TUANZ is now coming to you over Snap VDSL from Whitby in #gigatownporirua!

For the last few years I’ve been in the habit of getting up early on or around this date to watch the keynote address at Apple’s annual developer conference the WWDC, normally I’ve been doing this for 2 reason’s the first is that I am an unreconstructed fanboy (I’m so old I date back to using original Mac’s in the Otago University economics department in the early 80’s!) and the second reason is that Apple has always helped my digital trendspotting by being an awesome bellwether on the things that real do make a difference.

This year I have the added incentive of seeing how this all translates into the telecommunications space here in NZ.

And I see Apple endorsing 3 bigs trend in the years ahead:

The first is with their announcement of more features for their ‘message’ and ‘iMessage’ the commodification of voice telephony and text messaging continues with calling and texting via iPhones now integrated into the Mac OS, so it won’t be long before we see the same from Google (probably via the Chrome browser) and Microsoft (Skype everywhere?).

The next big announcement gives the ‘internet of things’ a boost with the release of ‘Homekit’ a series of tools for ‘Smarthome’ developers and applications to integrate on iOS devices and offer us the possibility of Jetson’s style living in the 21st century.

And finally the release of the much rumoured ‘Healthbook’ app and accompanying ‘Healthkit’ development environment. A few years ago Wired magazine coined the term ‘self quantifiers’ to describe those who capture data about themselves, analyse it and use it as the basis for many forms of self improvement. 

This has already gone from wacky, to leading edge and is heading for mainstream. And for me personally recent events have got me on board! I’ve recently become an Insulin Dependent Diabetic! this means I now test my blood sugar frequently, manage insulin injections and have embarked on a new fitness and nutrition regime. So I started looking for apps to help and there are plenty (I use Glooko for blood glucose tracking, Map my fitness for training and some specialised apps to help me with my 2015 half marathon goal) and the truth is that the data does become a little addictive!

Where today’s announcements fit in is that these apps will acquire the ability to talk to each other and the new ‘Healthbook’ will become my personal dashboard – its all a bit scary and yes I can see a dark side (several in fact, privacy, security and data integrity spring to mind) but there is a huge upside for people wanting to lead long healthy lives.

I can give my clinicians and trainers access to relevant data and can tune my programs as my needs change.

This brings up one final current interest of mine and that is the emerging world of low power sensors and programmable switches, servo’s and actuators that will bring all my 60’s era childhood fantasies of the future into affordable reality!

I’m looking forward to telling Siri to turn the lights on (or off!) mow the lawn and vacuum the house!

The other big number to reflect on is that there are now over 800 million iOS devices in pockets, bags and drawers all over the world!

And we can be certain that Google and Microsoft will follow suit with similar announcements.

Isn’t the best time ever to be using all this stuff?

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Cellphones will not give you cancer

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Originally published in the New Zealand Herald

 

Cellphones do not give you cancer.

There, I said it.

No equivocation, no weasel words, no pussyfooting around the subject.

There is no link between using cellphones or living near cellphone towers and cancers of any kind.

The World Health Organisation has recently concluded the biggest study of its kind ever undertaken – the INTERPHONE Study – which looked at research from dozens of smaller studies around the world. Thousands of cellphone users took part and the upshot is: we cannot find any trace of a link between cellphone use and cancers, but we’ll keep looking.

The UK government has been studying the same question for the past 11 years. Its Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research (MTHR) study concluded there was no connection at all between cellphones and cancer, and has closed down the research unit.

As MTHR’s chairman said: “This independent programme is complete, and despite exhaustive research, we have found no evidence of risks to health from the radio waves produced by mobile phones or their base stations.

Thanks to the research conducted within the programme, we can now be much more confident about the safety of modern telecommunications systems.”

Which should reassure those of us who use cellphones regularly or whose children will grow up in a world where cellular communication is the norm.

So why were we so concerned in the first place? I think it’s the term “radiation” and those connotations of death rays, microwaves, x-rays and the like. The word conjures up images of creeping death, of nuclear devastation, of The Hulk rampaging across a benign world. It’s scary and, in this case, quite misleading.

A better word for how cellphones operate is “radio”. That’s all it is. It’s a radio, much like a walkie-talkie or the alarm clock radio beside your bed or the one in your car. It sends and receives radio waves and that’s something we’ve been studying for nearly 100 years, since the radio was first invented.

In that time, the incidence of brain tumours and cancers has remained flat. Surely we would have seen some kind of increase, some kind of relationship between the two if radios caused cancer?

During that 100 years, we’ve also seen television burst on to the scene. Television also uses radio waves to transmit the signal, yet even with both radio and television in our homes the incidence of brain cancers and tumours remains flat.

The past 10 years have seen the use of cellphones skyrocket. No longer a yuppie toy, now it seems everyone has one. The incidence of brain cancers and tumours must surely have moved, given how close to our heads we hold these things? But no, there is no variation – brain cancers and tumour rates remain flat, unaffected by the increase in usage.

Today, roughly five billion people around the world use cellphones. Surely, if there were any link at all between cellphones and cancer, we would have seen a rise in the incidence of such things, but we haven’t.

For a long time I was happy to say research should continue because we just don’t know enough, but now I think we do. We know that despite thousands of studies, millions of hours of use and billions of users all holding these radios up to the sides of their heads, the incidence of brain tumours has not risen.

It’s time to put these worries aside. There are plenty of things that are out there to occupy our researchers and I’d rather they were studying those than trying to find a link that isn’t there.

If you want to know more about how cellphones work, I recommend the www.emfexplained.info website.

Vox Pop

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I was involved in a highly enjoyable discussion on Twitter yesterday after someone asked what the ideal population for New Zealand would be.

This has been a bugbear of mine for several years now, so quick as a flash I came back with “Twenty million”.

I think New Zealand faces something of a dilemma. We have one city, a handful of towns and villages and lots of open space. This makes us the ideal place to film the next outdoor/wilderness epic but a poor place to meet people. Building those networks that build the future economic power houses is going to be difficult if we’re scattered around the place, as countless studies of incubators, hubs and entrepreneurialism have shown.

In addition, the cost of providing infrastructure is high because we have so few people to pay for it. I’m constantly amazed that we have two national networks covering 97% of the population with 3G service. That we’re on our way to having three is astonishing because the money sunk into providing service to four million people would equally provide service (and revenue commensurate with that service) to ten million in central London or Hong Kong or just about anywhere else.

Infrastructure costs a lot of money and for that you need a government willing to support it and a large enough tax base to provide cash to build it. We simply struggle on that score because of our population size.

Great Britain is about the same size as New Zealand geographically, yet has 60 million people. Japan, not too dissimilar in terms of useable landmass and there the population exceeds 120 million. Four million Kiwis simply doesn’t give us the country we want.

After the shock/horror of having MORE PEOPLE died down, someone quickly pointed out the inevitable problem: they’ll all move to Auckland.

He’s quite right. If we simply carry on doing what we are today, Auckland will continue to grow like topsy, creating a two-tier country of Us versus Them in everything from government spend, house prices and business location. Today you move to Auckland because you have to be in Auckland.

I’m suggesting tomorrow might be quite different.

I moved up from Hamilton nearly 20 years ago and I moved for work. I had to be in Auckland to sit at a computer and type words onto a screen. Today, that job could be done from anywhere in New Zealand or indeed the world (hello, outsourcing) but it’s still done in an expensive office block in the central city.

Twenty years from now when my children are well engaged with the workforce, I would hope they’d be able to conduct a similar role from wherever they chose to be. Hamilton, Wellington, Dunedin even. What about Clevedon? What about Warkworth or Cambridge or Coromandel?

The fundamental reason for moving to the city – to get that job and be at your desk – is gone. In fact, the pressure is building to go the other way. Why open an office in central Auckland with expensive rent, competition for staff driving up wages, mortgage rates that are insane and drive up wages even more and all the hassles of traffic and lousy public transport, when you can open the same office in Whangarei or Napier or Nelson and have a good quality of life, with good access to the world via broadband.

You’ll remember we brought Dr Tim Williams to New Zealand a couple of years ago. His white paper, Connecting Communities, remains my touchstone for such regional and rural regeneration programmes. In Tim’s world, broadband enables companies to work smarter and make the most of our greatest asset – the people of New Zealand. I think it’s high time we saw regional development given this kind of priority because we need more people, we need more infrastructure and we need those people to live throughout the country, not clustered in one city that gobbles up the resources while everyone else gets leftovers.

Twenty million might be a bit steep, but imagine a New Zealand with 10 million. Wellington, Hamilton and Dunedin each with a  population over the million mark, but carefully managed. New towns and cities springing up to serve the main centres, built on quality infrastructure lines. Intercity trains, broadband for all.

It could be your worst nightmare, but if we do it well, do it with a will to succeed, it could be the making of our future here in New Zealand.