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Interesting article on the logistics required to roll out Australia shiny new NBN (National Broadband Network)
It’s a pretty big job – no wonder it cost $43 billion!

FROM snowy mountains and sun-baked deserts to the steamy tropical north, Australia has begun wiring its vast expanse with a high-tech broadband network in a giant project being closely followed abroad.

Workmen are already digging trenches in Tasmania, the first step in a $43 billion scheme which Prime Minister Kevin Rudd calls the nation’s biggest ever infrastructure venture.

The ambitious plan aims to connect 90 per cent of homes, including remote outback settlements and sprawling coastal cities, with fibre-optic cable by 2017, accelerating lagging network speeds and boosting the economy.

The sheer scale of the project has drawn interest from foreign governments including the US, where President Barack Obama has outlined similar plans.

Engineers will lay cable across 7.7 million sq km of often challenging terrain which covers an area equivalent to two European Unions.

"There’s no kidding about it, it’s a massive job," telecommunications analyst Paul Budde said.

"You have to physically go to 10 million premises and bring a cable there, either (by) digging it or via (power) poles and then obviously it’s not just having the cable, you have to have the installation in the house."

Specialised French digging machines have been shipped to Tasmania to lay the first of millions of kilometres of fibre-optic cable. By next June, three pilot towns are expected to be enjoying connection speeds of 100 megabits per second.

Just 0.1 per cent of Australians are currently linked to fibre-optic cable, with most accessing the internet over the 100-year-old copper telephone network, prompting Mr Rudd to call the country a "broadband backwater".

Mr Rudd says Australia has some of the developed world’s slowest internet speeds and lowest access rates. Some outback communities rely on dial-up connections and others have no internet access at all.

"It is good for business, good for productivity, good for the delivery of e-health, good for e-education and good for Australia," Mr Rudd said this month.

Industry expert Reg Coutts, who advised the Government on the network, said the venture had attracted top-level attention in the US and elsewhere.

"There’s really an absolute interest, particularly in America, but also in Europe," he said.

"People are asking, ‘What the hell are you doing and how are you doing it?’ People of course are sceptical," he said.

Laying the network was only the first step, he added, with the real challenge being the transition of 10 million customers from old TV, telephone and internet networks to the new system.

"That alone, we have never seen on that magnitude anywhere in the world," Mr Budde said.

Once laid, there was "really no limit" to what the fibre network could do, said Ravi Bhatia, CEO of Primus Telecom and spokesman for industry consortium Terria.

He said technological advances in areas such as satellite mapping would make the roll-out easier than it would have been even three years ago, allowing for "smart" deployment of resources and machines to dig and pull cable.

"By using the latest technology building this network we create another set of skills which we can then export to other countries and build their networks," said Mr Bhatia.

Mr Coutts said every developed country was grappling with the same question – how to replace ageing once-public infrastructure that now belonged to private companies.

Teams of lawyers and economists were racing to untangle complex commercial questions of how to use existing exchanges, underground ducts and power lines to minimise building work, said Mr Budde.

Australia moved to deal with the problem by serving telco giant Telstra, the former state-owned monopoly, with an ultimatum to split its network and retail businesses or face being barred from further wireless spectrum and slapped with tough new operating rules.

Mr Coutts said there was "a lot" of existing infrastructure that could potentially be utilised in the national broadband network but estimated it was only about 10 per cent of what was needed.

"Most of what’s going to go on is purely civil works, actually pulling in and splicing optical fibre to replace the copper," he said.

Below is the text of a very interesting article at LifeHacker about the changes that have been made by the Federal Government to Telstra’s monopoly control of Australian telecommunication

Credit were credit is due – I called Senator Conroy an idiot once and he probably still is but I think he got this one right

 

Broken hearted about the Telstra split?

I don’t think so

 

Yesterday’s announcement that Telstra will be forced to split its existing infrastructure business from the rest of the companyis going to be fodder for news journalists and communications junkies for months to come. But what difference will it make to the average Internet user?

The really simple answer is: no-one knows for sure, and nothing will happen for a while, but it should ultimately result in cheaper prices and more competition for Internet services, most particularly the ADSL services used by the majority of Australians.

The reason for that is pretty straightforward. I summarised the situation back when the National Broadband Network was first announced as a government-backed project in April, and that still covers most of the key points:

Most of the problems with Australia’s current broadband infrastructure stem squarely from the decision of the Howard government to privatise Telstra without making it give up control of the existing telephone infrastructure. That effectively gave Telstra control of the ADSL market for a time, a position it repeatedly abused through such consumer-unfriendly strategies as making it difficult for rivals to add their own equipment to exchanges, or only offering ADSL2 to customers in exchanges where rivals had already set up.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 57% of Australians use some form of ADSL. The vast majority of those utilise Telstra’s network, either directly or as a service which Telstra has resold to other ISPs. Telstra controls access to exchanges, so even if ISPs want to put in their own equipment to offer advanced services, they often face a difficult time. Telstra has also been the subject of frequent criticism for the wholesale prices it charges other ISPs, which in some instances have been higher than what Telstra itself charges consumers.

Since Telstra was privatised, there have been 150 formal complaints to the ACCC regarding access to the network. As Senator Stephen Conroy pointed out in the announcement of the regulatory plans, this is far higher than the level of complaints in any other regulated industry. Forcing Telstra to structurally separate, making its copper access business entirely distinct from its retail operations, should reduce those complaints and make it easier for rivals to offer competitive services.

The biggest unknown is the impact that the National Broadband Network will have. The first backhaul projects are also designed to loosen Telstra’s control of the national network.

But predicting the future in telecommunications is notoriously difficult. Back in when Telstra was first privatised, the services which received the most attention were conventional voice telephone lines. These days, with mobile phones at more than saturation level, that seems less of an issue, while Internet access is seen as vital. At the same time, the popularity of 3G broadband suggests that ADSL Internet access may also eventually go the way of the dinosaur. For all those reasons, it’s hard to predict exactly what impact the change will have, but it’s hard to make a case for it having a negative impact in terms of consumer services.

The Telstra Split 101 | Lifehacker Australia

About a month ago Four Corners aired an episode talking about the dangers to be found on the internet and the prevalence of cyber crime.

For those (like me) that missed it you can go to the Four Corners website and view the video, read the transcript of the show and read some other details and interviews.

The ABC do a really good job of putting their content online following in the footsteps of the British BBC who have the best media website and content I have seen.

Check out the Four Corners report Fear in the Fast Lane

Please find some brief information on a few topics, most of which were discussed at the Mullies last week

How The Internet Works – I.P. Addresses

We discussed what an I.P or Internet Protocol address is and why some ISP (Internet Service Providers) might provide a static address for your connection.

I found the following article today which explains how the Internet works far better than I can/did.

Technology Explained: How The Internet Works – MakeUseOf.com

LiberKey Portable Apps

A portable application or program is one that can run without being ‘installed’ in the traditional manner on your computer. As the program runs without prior installation it can be carried on a portable storage device like a USB stick or portable hard drive and run on any computer. This makes the program portable and useable anywhere and also easy to back up and share. There are a good number of portable applications available as well as a number of suites and packages which gather together a number of apps.

I have been trialling the LiberKey portable apps suite and demonstrated it the other day. I quite like it as a front end to a number of small applications. The Liberkey software itself provides a sort of start menu along with an update function and the ability to switch your PC’s file associations over ( and later back) to the portable applications.

You can download any of the 3 suites but I suggest you start with the smallest ‘Basic’ suite. You can then visit their ‘All Softwares’ page to automatically add additional programs to your suite with just a click. For example portable Open Office is not included in any suite but is well worth a try and you can automatically add it to your LiberKey Suite here.

Check out the list of available programs – it is huge!

Of course all programs are free and many are in fact open source. Apart from a good Antivirus Program (see below) any Windows PC probably only needs this suite of applications provided with it to make a very useful and productive machine. Note to use the update functions you need to register at the website first – I did and have not received any spam or so on.

Antivirus – Eset Nod32

Since I have been using Windows 7 lately (the beta and now the release candidate) I have been trialling a few different Antivirus programs. Our old favourite at Mullies – AVG Free – does work with Win7 and is as good as usual – but how good is that.

Well I also tried Avira free and really liked it too. In fact I think it was better than AVG whilst being equally as low on the resource usage. If you are looking for a free Antivirus program then I think Avira is good.

However I have since trialled a paid program in Eset NOD32 Antivirus and have found it to be the best Antivirus and Antispyware program I have used. Again it is very light on system resources and does an excellent job. If you are prepared to spend just a few dollars then please don’t buy the bloated Norton or McAfee offerings – you will be happy with NOD32

I read an interesting article at Windows Secrets today about Internet Service Providers doing more and more to inspect and filter the web traffic of their users. The idea is that the ISP is helping to protect copyright by not allowing users to access copyright material to download. So that song or movie you want to get on Bit Torrent or Limewire will be blocked and or your internet access will be banned.

OK – so breach of copyright is illegal. Fair enough.

The problem is that in some cases for the ISP to know what you are doing they need to look at all your data. We may all be doing perfectly legal and acceptable things on the internet that we don’t want people looking at. No I don’t mean porn! What about confidential business emails or personal voice chats? You wouldn’t want someone to tap your phone and listen to every call you make and this is the same sort of invasion of privacy.

And I don’t blame the ISP’s really. They are smaller businesses who are being confronted by the Big Brothers in the Movie & Music industries.

As per usual though these sort of rules only catch the innocent or naive. There are ways around it and we will discuss some this week at the Mullies meeting this week.

ISPs assist in cutting off file-sharing users – Windows Secrets

Not many things in the technology world make me angry but man I am PO’d about this Internet Censorship debacle.

A recent article at the SMH highlights how ridiculous the  soon to be trialled internet filtering system will be. Labour MP Stephen Conroy is nothing more than a Orwellian censor who is making a mess of something he clearly does not understand. Take the following details for example:

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has repeatedly claimed his proposed mandatory filters would target only "illegal" content – predominantly child pornography.

Already, a significant portion of the 1370-site Australian blacklist – 506 sites – would be classified R18+ and X18+, which are legal to view but would be blocked for everyone under the proposal. The Government has said it was considering expanding the blacklist to 10,000 sites and beyond.

OK so which is it? Deplorable stuff like child exploitation or just a list of stuff that Mr Conroy and his cronies take a dislike to. Half of this stuff is legal – not everyone’s taste but then what is? Some of it of course may not be ‘adult’ in nature at all – it could be political in nature or whatever. So if I say Mr Conroy is an idiot (oops too late) am I on the list? Where does this end and who decides.

Last time I checked Australia was a democracy mate. As long as we are acting fairly and reasonably and within the laws of our great nation you cannot tell us what to do or what to think. As an elected representative of the people I would have thought you wouldn’t need reminding of this

The article highlights how linking to the banned material can cost Australian websites $11,000 per day – yet the list of banned material is secret. So how the heck can anyone comply? I guess the list has to be secret because otherwise we run the risk of 1) just advertising some material that should not be promoted and 2) exposing most of it as just an uneducated whim of a stupid politician or his henchman.

Almost all of the major Internet providers including Telstra and Optus have declined to be a part of the trial. They still own half of Telstra and they can’t even get them to give it a go – speaks for itself doesn’t it?

Oh and don’t mistake filtering for doing something about the deplorable acts like child sex exploitation. This will not save one innocent child or do any other good. It’s like closing your eyes and sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending it isn’t happening. Any low-life who wants to see this sort of thing will find a way. By the time skilled law enforcement let alone some dull-witted public servant catch up with them the websites and users will have moved on long ago.

Come on Conroy – you came up with a bad idea and you aren’t man enough to say so. You don’t have the numbers to pass the legislation anyway – only your own party lemmings will vote for it. Even the Family First and other conservative senators can see this has no real positives and HUGE potential negatives. You keep saying yourself how far behind internet access is in Australia yet your first big move after being elected is to introduce a scheme that will clog up and slow down our access? Sheesh.

Kill this farce and get back to doing some good – like getting Telstra to toe the line on rural and regional hardware sharing, etc

Please do a bit of research on the topic on the internet (gee who would of thought huh – guess it’s not all porn hey Stephen?)

You might like to start at No Clean Feed

If you feel this is a bad idea like I do then you can write to Senator Conroy

Senator Stephen Conroy
Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Level 4, 4 Treasury Place
Melbourne Vic 3002

Or write to your local member

Find below the details of the latest Whirlpool Broadband survey.

You would be familiar with the Whirlpool Broadband Choice info site. We Mullies are always recommending using it to research Internet providers (ISPs) to check availability and prices in your area before signing up.
Whirlpool Broadband Choice 

The survey compiles the opinions of Whirlpool forum users on their ISP. The typical WP user is probably more proficient than your average user elsewhere so the survey can be a good gauge on the performance of ISPs around Australia. There is also a section on hardware – check it out.

Australian Broadband Survey 2008 Report

I found this YouTube video very interesting. It’s a brief (8 minute) history of the internet.

Check it out.

I like Twitter and I follow quite a few people on it. I was explaining quickly to Janelle how it works and here’s what I wrote

Twitter is like Facebook status messages and Instant Messaging rolled into one
You can post what you are doing and see what others are doing

If you want to send a message particularly to someone’s attention you type their name in preceded by the @
So to send to me or notify me particularly you type @noblejoker in your message
You can do that with anyone – you don’t have to be ‘following’ them to send the tweet message.
I see though that you are following me and I am following you so whatever you write to anyone (@someone) or to no one I should see

You will also see people retweet
That is usually done as rt @name where the rt stands for retweet.
So lets say I write "something cool" and you want everyone following you to see it you then retweet my tweet like this:
”rt @noblejoker something cool”

Do you Twitter?if so send me a message and feel free to follow me

Matt aka Noblejoker on Twitter