Posts by Matthew Poole
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Paul, the problem with that is that such configurations would be an absolute nightmare to establish and maintain. Sure we use PPPoA for DSL now (as against PPPoE like most other countries), but it's a single stream provider, there's no need to configure mux/demux in the router, and there's really no need to provide smarts in the router. Once the router's having to handle multiple streams from multiple providers, probably with MPLS or some other LSP tossed in for good measure, it's becoming the job of a networking professional just to get your home internet connection established. I wouldn't be comfortable with trying to manage that sort of configuration, and I know vastly more about this kind of networking that Jo(e) User.
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Re Woosh: http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/2300968/Losses-now-Wooshs-biggest-asset
Interesting. He's right that there's unlimited carry-forward on the losses provided that there's a 49% continuity of shareholding between the year the losses were incurred and the year the losses are utilised (and it's oldest losses first, obviously), but there really does come a point where investors have to sit back and ask "When the hell will we ever see our money?" The loss can't be distributed back to the shareholders, so unless Woosh can, somehow, go cash positive and stay that way for however long it takes to recoup the best part of nine figures of losses, it's got to be very, very close to being a "cut stakes and run" proposition.
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That isn't going to be dollar-and-a-dream stuff - I suspect there won't be many choices of full service ISPs (as opposed to thin-layer resellers).
Making things different to the current situation how, exactly? True end-to-end ISPs aren't all that common in the current environment either.
Also, your list of things an ISP must have is pretty excessive. So long as they have the capability to terminate their own customers' connections, they can contract with others to provide the higher-layer services. Companies like Akamai, for example, or with the TV companies themselves. Better still, get into a collective contract between a bunch of ISPs and someone like Akamai to support the placement of content servers into an IXP, with all parties to the agreement getting unlimited access to the content. You don't need to have the servers at every IXP in the country, just two or three well-placed ones will be quite adequate.
You're quite determined to find things wrong with this proposal, aren't you? I don't think I've ever actually seen a single post from you that's said "This looks like it'll be good for New Zealand."
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How does giving town dwellers fibre help in getting broadband (of some sort) to Eketahuna?
You have to start somewhere. Even getting the inter-city links established improves the chances of cockies getting faster tubes. Plus, I didn't say that there was any benefit to rural dwellers from the current plan. I was answering someone else's question as to what benefit faster broadband offers to the primary sector.
I don't see how it enables me to decide that right now, at 1333, I want to watch Goodbye Pork Pie in Wellington when nobody else does. Doing that efficiently requires big caches of content fairly close to the end users, and that isn't cheap.
Akamai is a beautiful thing, and it's got those big caches of content fairly close to the end users. In NZ. Now.
Also, IPTV doesn't pretend to offer you every movie ever made. You choose from what's available, not from anything, ever, in the history of movies. So it doesn't have to let you watch Goodbye Pork Pie now, or even tomorrow, because there's probably insufficient demand. It might, however, let you watch last week's Coronation Street , or some of the movies that were showing at the cinema in January. -
though I doubt that that was actually the intent
The PAS readership: being reluctant to give credit to Tories since 2006.
In this case, to politicians in general. Cunliffe is the only one who I'd give the credit of actually being able to discern the subtleties of language around "peering", and even he probably wouldn't come up with something quite so, err, useful.
But you're right, when it comes to matters commercial I'm unwilling to give National any credit whatsoever about considering reining in the baser urges of large corporates. Their history is not replete with examples that give me comfort.
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I think Key's meaning was perfectly correct, although not so sure about the sentence structure.
Indeed. His meaning was obvious, but his grammatical construction was appalling. Maybe he started off wanting to say "a quantum leap faster"?
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Final point Russell, whilst you are right that "peering" is not mentioned, I assume that this is what the paper means when it talks of "interconnection at neutral points of presence".
That's how I read it also. Removes the temptation for lawyers to be, well, lawyers, and try to argue the toss over what "peering" means. After all, we'll be dealing with Telecom and TCL and their entrenched (particularly in TCL's case) anti-peering attitude. Removing interpretive wiggle room is a very smart move, though I doubt that that was actually the intent.
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OK, there're a bunch of different questions in here and I CBF going through and explicitly answering them with quotes. So this is a bulk answer to various people.
1) What economic benefits accrue?: Well, for one thing, the point about broadband being of minimal value to primary producers isn't entirely accurate. Federated Farmers are distinctly unimpressed with how long it's going to take to get their members attached to something faster than low-grade dialup, and since they're the ones who should understand rural needs I'll accept that they have good grounds. It doesn't take much thought to see why farmers might be keen to have an always-on internet connection that doesn't tie up their phone line, and that's just for starters. Live weather data, real-time reports from various commodity trading floors, mapping and statistical data from the gummint... That's just the stuff I can think of.
Next rebuttal is, if we're ever going to get away from our absolute reliance on farming we need to get into tertiary production. We have a literate, English-speaking population. We do great work on movies, and could probably get a lot more post-prod work if it didn't take days to send a single cut or render output back to clients in other cities/countries. Teleworking, centralised services for healthcare (imagine if all the DHBs outsourced their radiography to a single location, for example, and sent radiographic images over a network) and other industries, remote commercial imaging (think building x-rays, for example), and the rest. Nascent industries that will never get a chance to grow without some significant improvement in our national internet infrastructure.2) Wireless: for all the hype, wireless has big limitations. It's a shared medium, for one thing. You and I in the same room on the same access point instantly shares the available bandwidth to the AP, never mind what's behind the AP. It gets caught by the usual radio wave propagation issues, like hill shadows and building reflections. And as a general rule, practical data rate is at best about half the headline rate. Fibre is expensive to deploy (the fibre itself is much, much cheaper than copper), but it has none of those limitations. In fact, fibre's biggest limitation is that being a physical carrier makes it expensive to roll out. Wireless might be faster, maybe, than ADSL2+, but it's very definitely not faster than fibre. Yes there are wireless technologies in development that can equal the speeds the fastest wired ethernet (ATM continues to piss all over wireless, and will forever courtesy of multiplexing), but that's in development not in production. Given how many years it's taking just for 802.11n to be finalised and released, I have zero confidence in any suggestion that wireless will deliver higher speeds than fibre. After all, in the time that n has been in development we've seen 10GbE proposed, standardised, deployed widely, and 40GbE and 100GbE working their respective ways through the standards process.
3) IPTV: This is what IP multicast is for. You don't replicate the same stream to every user, you just send one stream and people pluck it from the ether as they desire. Don't try and overlay unicast problems onto IPTV, because there are existing, well-considered solutions. Multicast is already in deployment, but there aren't too many apps that take advantage. Ubiquitous, high-speed broadband will change that. Even with our crap domestic internet we've still got the likes of R2 doing multicast streaming of the commercial videos they make, so it's obviously a solution that works and can be utilised in NZ.
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being charged $50 for it. When did this come in? i seem to have missed that one. It highlights a hypocrisy where if I injure myself due to my own carelessness ACC picks up the tab but if I need hospitalisation because I catch a communicable disease through no fault of my own I pay through the nose.
It's been around for a long time. St John have had a fee for non-ACC transports for well over a decade. That's why Wellington Free Ambulance has that middle word in its name. SJA do offer membership, at a cost slightly higher than that of a single ambulance ride, and that then covers "repeat customers". People with medical conditions usually join, just because it's a one-off payment each year and isn't actually that unreasonable.
Also, before you get too outraged, consider that that charge is to cover things such as O2 or other medications, dressings, laundering the linen on the trolley, and any need to wash the bus out if you make a mess. In the US you usually get a three-figure invoice for the most basic of ambulance rides, never mind if you actually require any kind of care prior to being deposited in the care of physicians.Plus, hypocrisy is not the word you're looking for. When did hypocrisy become shorthand for "An inconsistency that looks bad and with which I don't agree"? Not just picking on you, because it's something I've noticed starting to creep into general conversation.
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Ben, we're not suggesting national funding for museums. Or, at least, I wasn't. I was just lamenting the fact that squillions got poured into Te Papa rather than spending somewhat less to turn the existing, and widely-recognised, Auckland Museum into the national museum.
Yes, it's ordinarily a combination of regional and host-city funding. Auckland's a bit unique because of its cluster-fucked local authority structure. Most museums in other places don't have to contend with that kind of fractured, factionalised funding base. I don't think even Wellington has that kind of nonsense going on, though it could just be that Wellington, Hutt, Upper Hutt and Porirua manage to play like adults on such matters.