I spend quite a bit of time watching various technology stories emerge and I’ve learnt that you need to develop a couple of skills if you are going to maintain both your focus and sanity.

It is very easy to believe everything that you read and soon you come to realise that:

a.   A lot of the breathlessly announced new technologies never see the light of day

b.   A lot of progress is incremental and each subsequent release brings an increasing sense of disappointment as products and services approach the boring nirvana of some kind of long term ‘steady state’ existence

c.   How do you pick the winners?

There are a couple of models that I have found really useful over the years, the first is Geoffrey Moore’s ‘Crossing the Chasm’ model which helps to explain why so many products never make it beyond the early adopters and then I came across the Gartner Hype Cycle which I came across through my long term addiction to Wired magazine.

So I’m very curious to what the 2014 edition of the hype cycle contains:

The 2014 Gartner emerging technology Hype Cycle graph

Gartner have actually analysed over 2000 emerging technologies and placed them on this curve and they’ve been doing it for over 20 years so they have pretty unique depth in this space.

I love this model for several reasons, one is that it makes sorting the wheat from the chaff a lot easier, the second is that I now cynically wonder what the real purpose of a lot of announcements truly is. You know that they are usually about money, When concepts are at the ‘innovative trigger’ stage it can be about research grants, then attracting angel investors and venture capital, once the delightfully named ‘peak of inflated expectations’ is reached its often about attracting investors to an IPO or increasingly now part of a ‘crowdsourcing’ push this is followed by the aptly named ‘trough of disillusionment’ where it maybe about keeping grumpy investors or bankers on side long enough to reach the golden shores of the ‘slope of enlightenment’ which lead to the ‘plateau of productivity’ and its then our money that they’re after as consumers.

So what do you think of their picks?

Well I’ve had a night to sleep on yesterday’s announcement and I’m still pretty excited, its a clever piece of policy work, by extending the TDL (Telecommunications Development Levy – successor to the much derided TSO) the Government has given itself an extra $150 Million to play with that is fiscally neutral (I think they’ll be hoping that the Telco’s paying the TDL won’t notice that they’re going to keep paying a wee bit longer.

Politically its very smart as it does 3 things, firstly it gazzumps Labour’s $9.6 million contestable fund for very similar rural initiatives, secondly it deals with genuine heartland concern about broadband and mobile coverage and finally it is actually quite ambitious for rural New Zealand.

To be really successful it needs a target and I think it needs to be an ambitious target – funding projects that will have the capability within 10 years to deliver 1 gigabit/second to rural New Zealand.

Thats not a pipe dream. it can be done today with 2 technologies fibre and point to point wireless and by 2024 5G should be gigabit capable as well. 

As a former rural New Zealander (I’m just currently an economic exile in #gigatownporirua) one thing that really pisses me off is hearing that old technology is good enough for country folk. Its up there with the now 30 year old refrain about farming being a sunset industry, I’m glad its such a long sunset as without the ‘white gold’ boom we would be in a far worse position.

Farming is developing into a very sophisticated data intensive business, it is the starting point for the worlds food based supply chain and consumers increasing demand for more detail about their food & where it comes from. But not only that, rural New Zealanders are entitled to all the good stuff that comes with ultra fast internet, tomorrow see’s the launch of Spark’s ‘Lightbox’ service and I’m sure plenty of rural Kiwi’s are up for a bit of ‘Global mode’ too.

The devil as they say is in the detail and it will be the same with yesterdays announcement, there are many questions to be asked and a lot of capacity to be rebuilt. In its first broadband schemes the Government favoured large monolithic structures run by contract, in fact it believed that contracts would work better than regulation.

Councils and small regional operators were sidelined by both the UFB and the RBI and massive waste and overbuild has occurred, the situation in Palmerston North is a prime example where pioneering work was done by James Watts and his team at inspire.net and he had an effective partnership going with the Palmerston North City Council, James was even running fibre to the farm 7 years ago.

Now the Government recognises that local is often best and will need to re-engage players who still have much to offer. This will require both sides to re-establish dormant relationships and a number of plans can be dusted off and updated.

Who will run the new scheme? is it best suited to MBIE or could it function out of CFH with an expanded mandate? Nearly all of the old team at MED who used to run these projects have moved on or retired.

I think it could well take several years to get back in shape for this challenge, the current RBI advisory structure needs to be revisited and updated to provide genuine governance and oversight.

We also need to make sure that it remains consistent with our market structure, that is that new access networks are structurally separated and open access and the the correct regulatory settings are applied.

I’ll leave with the insights I’ve just gained from the engineer behind the very successful Northpower fibre rollout. 

A few different experiences lately have got me thinking about digital leadership and just whose job should it be?

A recent discussion on twitter also canvased the issue as well, I think the whole ‘gigatown’ campaign highlights the difficulties around trying to stimulate UFB uptake and awareness when Chorus itself comes from the culture that up until recently when suddenly there was Government money involved, actively denied the need for anything better than ‘everyday broadband’ which was seen as being around 256kb/s.

The UFB is a bold initiative that is already driving NZ up the global broadband rankings, the US is still getting excited that fibre might be coming to Cupertino – the home of Apple. Within a decade it will be the norm in every New Zealand town.

In 2008 TUANZ called for the creation of a Government entity dedicated to providing digital leadership similar to role played by the IDA (the Infocomm Development Authority) in Singapore.

Xero founder and all-round digital good guy Rod Drury has been vocal in his call for NZ to have a CTO (Chief Technology Officer) something that is get picked up as an idea by a number of political parties but sadly not yet by the Government.

And when you get down to it digital leadership does seem to come back to the government for many reasons:

1.0  They are the collective voice for NZ inc

2.0  They are the biggest beneficiary of NZ being a keen adopter of ICT through everything from increased productivity generally down to lowering the cost of delivering government services

3.0  They are the biggest aggregated purchaser of ICT services in the country, who else has the money to do INCIS, Novopay etc

4.0  They are now once more a significant investor in ICT and hold stakes in a variety of ICT related entities (for example CFH, Chorus, Kordia, REANNZ & N4L)

5.0  Their policies direct how the NZ digital landscape develops at both an infrastructure and commercial level

6.0  They set and operate the regulatory regime, the spectrum regime, the resource management regime, the educational curriculum and broad economic policy

7.0  They are our interface to wider international agreements and environments for issues like copyright, trade, RS&T and international standards

8.0  Various arms of government also contain more people who are paid to look at the future than you find in the ‘real’ economy where we are focused on surviving today and coming back for more tomorrow

Steven Joyce is a man I like and respect but he is wrong when he says that having a GCIO (Government Chief Information Officer) is as good as having a NZ inc CTO reporting directly to the PM. We do need a GCIO mainly to manage number 3 on the list, the CTO needs to have an overview of everything.

And the CTO needs to be able to look at the big picture stuff like the ‘Internet of Cows’, ‘3D printing’, ‘Digital Inclusion’ or ‘delivering Rural Gigabit’.

What do you think?

My trip to Taranaki last week gave me a chance to put faces to the gigabit speed test results I’ve been posting. I took the time to visit Primowireless and see what these guys are up to, what I found is a seven year old business that is thriving by filling the niches that others find hard to fill.

At the moment those niches are rural wireless, business fibre, residential broadband and hybrid solutions that are a digital version of the ‘Taranaki Gate’. Kind of sounds like the ideal future oriented RSP for regional NZ, actually I think they are.

Primo is located a couple of hundred metres up a side street in Inglewood, from the outside there’s two double cab utes and an office located in an ordinary house. Inside is busy chaos, there’s account being done, an antenna being assembled for an install and all sorts of gear lying around.

Talking to founder Matthew Harrison, I hear a typical story, he and is mates were LAN gamers who started building ad-hoc LAN’s for gaming parties at each other’s houses. This is a common starting point for entrepreneurs in this space. He started out improving rural connectivity for people who wanted what the rest of us take for granted.

They now have over 50 sites all round Taranaki and provide an impressive service which has seen customers leave to try RBI services and then come back because the ‘official’ solution doesn’t work as well as what they already got from Primo.

They are also keen to mix and match technologies and are free of the ‘rulebook’ constraints found in our larger operators. I was impressed with plans to bring historic Parihaka into the digital age.

But what I really wanted to learn was what are they doing with UFF’s gigabit residential service and what might a final service look like?

I was wondering how they were doing this when there is no UFB in Inglewood itself. The answer is simple, one of there tech’s Hanan already had 100mb/s UFB to his home, so Primo upgraded this to UFF’s 1000/20 ‘GigaNet’ service.

Then the testing began by testing the ‘SpeedTest’ results from hitting servers all over NZ, the results have showed a few interesting things, obviously local is fastest, the next is that interestingly ‘Spark’ servers produced the best results at other NZ locations, this I think is indicative of the fact that Spark (not Chorus) have provisioned the network that you would expect is required to service 50% of the broadband subscribers in NZ.

Primo themselves have access to multiple backhaul providers and are confident that Taranaki customers really do have access to the best broadband in NZ.

I was interested in Matthews thoughts on provisioning and pricing a residential gigabit service, something I hear from the big guys is really, really difficult. So it was refreshing to hear Matthews thoughts and how his innate knowledge of the industry gives him the ability to create a product model in his head in about 20 minutes.

I need to stress that this is a ball park, blue skies conversation and in no way reflects what Primo may finally decide to launch.

First of all Matthew understands the cost of his inputs, installation, UFB service, handover and backhaul plus provisioning of data.and having good enough user level equipment to actually be able to use a gigabit.connection.

First of all Matt recognises that his handovers will need to be upgraded to 10gb/s, remember this is a shared handover at the point of presence. He will then monitor the need to provision more backhaul as required which I think is sensible. 

What I found really interesting was Hanan’s observation that other than the SpeedTest results you can’t really tell the difference between 100mb/s and 1gb/s, the other issue is that most people then use WiFi that probably tops out at 50mb/s at best. So the case for 1gb/s is mainly ‘overhead’ and that is what you’d get with a house full of device equipped teenagers or you’ve got Hanan and his mates having a LAN party.

I also found Matt’s view on data interesting he’d like to separate plans into the connection and the data, rather than offering ‘unlimited’ plans as at 1gb/s it is possible to go through a staggering amount of data. So options could include daily data plans or buying into quantities in the ‘terabytes’ rather than ‘gigabytes’.

I found it fascinating that each speed test consumes about a gigabyte of data, this is due to how Ookla have designed their speed test, I’ve heard similar tales with people showing off their 4G cell phones and blowing their monthly data cap while trying to get bragging rights at the pub.

The other observation is about customer expectations as to what a ‘gigabit’ really means in that the fastest test to date is actually 975mb/s and you will not ever actually achieve the magical gigabit. So is it better to call this a 500+ or 750+ service, the same observation is true for 30, 50, 100 & 200mb/s service.

I’ll blog separately on Matt’s views on rural broadband.