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I’m currently in Auckland attending KANZ (the Korea Australia New Zealand Technology Summit) and Nethui 2014.

Two quite different approaches to the same issue, which is how do we engage with digital networks and technologies to advance as societies, economies and nations.

So I’ll be posting shorter regular updates while I’m here and over the next few days as I reflect on both events.

So stay tuned, I’ll also be tweeting as well at @kiwiradarman

 

more to follow – over….

 

Digital Exclusion

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I’m getting ready to help facilitate at session at next weeks Nethui on ‘Digital Inclusion & UFB Uptake’, which has got me thinking.

What is it that currently excludes people from being able to participate in the digital world ?

it occurs to me that there are really only three reasons:

   1.   Choice – they actively choose not to participate for many reasons, some could be cultural or religious, some could be attitudinal and for some it could simply be the desire for a simpler life.

   2.   Access – they may live in physical locations where access simply isn’t possible or the access they can get is inadequate for full participation. This is the case for our rural, remote and under served communities.

   3.   Cost – we have a large number of households (estimates range between 23 & 27% roughly 1:5)

So it is a major issue, what can we do about it?

Feel free to engage in the comments box, is this a personal choice issue, is there a role for government ( both central & local)? Is there something completely out of the box, like pre-pay UFB

How important is inclusion? Will it be a bigger deal as the world becomes more data rich and hyper connected?

Here’s to you FX Networks…

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I’ve got mixed emotions about the news that FX have done a deal with Vocus, I’ll miss FX they’ve made a huge contribution to the NZ telco scene and they’ve achieved more in a short period of time than virtually any other player I can think of.

FX is proof that dreams can come true, I remember Roger de Salis sitting at a desk in CityLink in 2002 formulating this crazy idea that he could build a network based on the railways fibre.

Roger then quite literally talked and pitched his way into being a player, with serious backing from Colin Hill he set about turning his dream into reality, he attracted  talent, clients and capital and built an awesome business.

I have so many fond memories of going to ‘Thursday Night Curry’ in Manners Mall and getting caught up in the energy of so many of our brightest and proudest geeks, people like Jonny Martin, Jamie Baddeley and Neil Fenemor.

They set out to build a proper network and they succeeded, FX reaches nearly every City in NZ and now runs at a blistering 100gb/s, they provide the physical network for KAREN, the backbone for one.govt and are trusted by many major organisations like the NZ Police & Transpower to provide their national communications backbone.

FX has also supported many of our innovative ISP’s and have even been used to show how we really can have ‘fibre to the farm’. People like James Watts at inspire.net in Palmerston North and Chris Roberts at Amuri Net in Culverden (in North Canterbury) spring to mind.

People like Murray Jurgeleit and Dave Heald have taken FX to the position it is in today.

Vocus actually feel like they are the right kind of buyer and I’m really hoping they focus on delivering the services that will make the UFB come alive.

FX I’ll miss you but Vocus – the future is yours

The ‘gigabit’ debate

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Who needs a gigabit speed connection?

That was one of the most common responses to yesterday’s discussions on the impact of Ultrafast Fibre’s ‘giganet’ announcement. And it’s a perfectly rational argument but one that is ultimately flawed and definitely one that will delay both UFB uptake and the digital transformation of the New Zealand economy.

its probably 2 decades since the idea of a 1 gigabit per second network entered my consciousness, my agency was working with the team at the recently launched Xtra and one of their esteemed geeks breathlessly told me that gigabit Ethernet switches were coming and they were going to revolutionize dial-up internet!

I went back to thinking about selling residential dial up.

Fast forward a decade to 2004 and I was sitting in the advanced networking stream at TUANZ’s 2nd National Broadband Conference in Hastings (I was there on a guerrilla marketing mission for CityLink using Tee-shirts as a weapon!). I was in the room with Simon Riley and many of the fathers of the Internet in NZ (Messr’s Houlker, March, James, Hine etc) listening to the father of ‘Canarie’ (Canada’s advanced research network) Bill St Arnaud share his wisdom.

The discussion was around Bill’s insistence that advanced networks needed to start at 1 gb/s, one of the workshop participants said ‘gigabit, meh! our network hardly ever runs at more than 10mb/s,’

Bill smiled and gave a one word answer ‘Overhead’

I was already struggling to keep up, so I played dumb (I had the lowest IQ in the room) and got him to explain what he meant, so he patiently explained that files (data sets in e-science speak) were getting bigger and bigger and were mostly moved on external media (disks, tapes, CD’s, DVD’s and even whole hard drives) but with gigabit you could save money and time moving these over the network and still keep all your other users happy.

The penny dropped for me, my agency had also seen this happen, in the late 90’s we’d been spending literally tens of thousands of dollars a month on cycle couriers, digital printing, external hard drives (remember Jaz drives and Zip disks?) this was normal and we recovered the costs in our charges.

But in 1999 we moved to an office that had CityLink running past the window, we were installed on the weekend we moved in, and an edict was issued that our first method of moving files was to be digital transfer.

in these days of the cloud, Dropbox, Xero and Saas you’re probably yawning into your decaf latte and thinking what’s the point.

Well the overhead in our digital homes is rapidly increasing, we all generate and share digital media and support increasingly busy home networks, all media is heading on-line and so are big chunks of healthcare and education.

One case in point, Ultra High Definition TV’s are coming, if you look at one in Harvey Norman’s or Dick Smith’s this weekend, take a look around the back – there’s a pretty grunty dedicated PC pumping out a Weta grade video stream. Guess what – you can’t broadcast UHD! 

So in the not to distant future if you want the best seat at an All Blacks game it’ll will be coming to you in UHD over your 1gb/s UFB connection (and they do like their rugby in the gigatron).

Just like every other step we’ve taken in home connectivity, we’ll use all the capacity and we’ll be looking for more.

 

 

 

Confessions of a Tee-shirt evangelist

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Since its a friday I thought I’d go off on a slightly different tangent, the recent moves in our extremely nascent, emerging residential Gigabit market got me thinking about the power of evangelism (in the marketing rather than the spiritual sense) as a marketing tool.

If you’ve ever found yourself up against rivals or competitors who can outspend you 1000:1 or even 1,000,000:1 you need to find ways to punch far above you weight (a bit like TUANZ does) and one of the best ways of doing this is to turn your customers and supporters into real life walking evangelists.

And one of the best things to give your evangelists is a tee-shirt with a snappy slogan on it.

I learnt about this technique from Guy Kawasaki who was Apple’s chief evangelist, who wrote the original Macintosh marketing plan. Guy realised that his launch budget was less than IBM’s annual styro foam coffee cup budget so they got creative.

The original TV commercial is widely regarded as the best TVC of all time, even though it was designed to only play once (during the 1984 Superbowl) and a lot of effort when into cool tee shirts for developers.

Fast forward to the early 2000’s and it was great pleasure to be working with the team at CityLink, we launched CafeNET (early public WiFi) in 2002 with street theatre in Civic Square (plus David Isenberg) and a bright yellow tee shirt saying ‘love is in the air’.

In 2004 CityLink couldn’t afford to mount a stand at the 2nd National TUANZ Broadband Conference in Hastings but we wanted to make a point about getting ‘real’ broadband not just the rationed version that Telecom were promoting.

So we got a Tee Shirt printed that said “You need at least 10mb/s to be broadminded” on the front and “CityLink – we’re broadminded” on the back. I hitched a ride to Hastings and took 3 cartons of tee shirts (I kept 3 for myself), with about 5 confederates we started circulating in our cool tee shirts and we got our first requests.

We then started our guerrilla phase and gave anybody that made a statement we liked a tee shirt, often by yelling “that deserves a tee shirt” this went on all day.

Breakfast the second day saw about 100 tee shirts in the room with more people trying to get them. I knew we’d won when on the last day, the keynote speaker from Ericsson in Sweden took the stage in one of our shirts and started by saying ‘the guys in the tee shirts are right!”

The tee shirt got a gigabit upgrade when it was taken to NZNOG (the NZ Network Operators Group) where it became a collectors item.

I then went to the TUANZ Digital Summit in 2006 (I think?) with some tee shirts that said “I want FTMH NOW!” on the front and on the back it said “Fibre To My House” It worked pretty well as well, we got the then Minister David Cunliffe into one.

So I think it worked because here I am a decade later eagerly awaiting gigabit fibre at my house.

Next week I’ll tell you what I plan on doing with it.

3D future…Is it Green?

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Last week the Green Party released its high tech manufacturing policy at the Wellington Maker Space, they got my attention because this is an area close to my heart (both my sons are aspiring ‘Makers’ and the eldest had his 11th birthday party at the Maker Space) and I know they are onto something championing this whole area.

I do wonder how Gareth Hughes is going to align the bio-tech and nano-tech capabilities of this technology with some of his supporters but good on him for getting this into the public debate.

We really are heading into the post-industrial world and the idea of 3D printing can be traced back to a few sources, for me the ultimate 3D printer is the ‘Star Trek’ replicator and the concept of ‘seeds and feeds’ was developed for me in Neal Stephenson awesome book ‘The Diamond Age’.

Industrial CNC technology has been heading in this direction for a while, when we were working on the business case for the ‘NMi – Nelson Marlborough inforegion’ project  (a Broadband Challenge funded extension of Network Tasman’s fibre optic network into Marlborough) I came across Air New Zealand engineering subsidiary Safe Air who wanted fibre at Woodbourne.

The reason they wanted it was because they were FAA certified to make parts for aircraft provided their raw materials were of the required and their machinery was capable of machining the part to the required standard. Fibre to Safe Air would eliminate the need for the CNC files to be shipped on disk. This is a form of 3D printing, what Gareth has picked up is the rapid consumerisation of 3D printing.

The hobbyist is now being spoiled for choice as cheap 3D printers are now heading below $1000, and the results are getting better and better (although for some reason everyone seems to want to print rabbits???), I’ve been looking at this area for about 3 years now and while I can see huge potential, its still a long way from being ready for prime time.

There is a whole 3D eco-system that needs to be assembled and the printers are just one part of it, a far bigger piece of the puzzle is opening up the world of 3D design.

Original creative designs is one thing (Kiwi start-up Ponoko was a pioneer in this space) and represents a huge potential market for talented designers and crafts people. The Green policy recognises the importance of getting 3D design into our schools and there is a great future for talented 3D designers.

I can see the Green appeal in having the world serviced by ‘distributed factories’ (the vision of Ponoko founder Dave ten Have) where transport is reduced to the distance between the consumer and the nearest ‘Fab’ (fabrication point), a lot of packaging waste can be eliminated and consumers will get unheard of options for customisation.

it also marks the return in a very high tech sense of the artisan craftsman, the world will again see beautiful yet functional devices, tools, trinkets and toys.

But like all technologies there is a dark flip side, several in fact, the first is IP theft and counterfeiting – it will be possible to scan a product and recreate a perfect facsimile. Another threat is the use of substandard material and the subsequent risks of failure (thats why the FAA certifies people like Safe Air) and who and what do consumers trust?

Overall I’d have to give the Greens a B+ on this one, we look forward to seeing what other parties are considering in this area. 

I’m feeling left out…

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You know that feeling you got as a teenager, when the cool kids were having a party that you weren’t invited to ? But you found out about it and you really, really wanted to go ?

Well I’m starting to feel that way about 5G, I know the party doesn’t start until 2022 but it’s going to be soooo cool, those Chinese kids are already picking out their party gear and I just heard from my mate in Aussie (well today’s Comms Day) that those Euros with the cool glasses (& a Digital Agenda for Europe) and those techno South Koreans are working together on their party pieces and everything ! (South Korea already has a 5G forum).

That Aussie kid hasn’t been invited yet but he’s a jock so they’ll invite him to pull the chicks, maybe we can get in with him ?

Hmmmmm

Meanwhile in other news, the worlds fastest mobile broadband (according to Ookla – providers of the Speedtest  app) is right here in New Zealand – Yay (only if you’re a Vodafone customer though!)

And the fastest place – Kelburn

Well done those guys, maybe we can go to the 5G party cos we’re really really cool dancers ?

 

 

 

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.