Posts by Matthew Poole
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Bill English wouldn't know freedom if it pissed on him.
Before or after one of Helen's jack-booted thugs sets him on fire? ;)
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My first thought on reading the blog was: is that the Scots "canny" (cagey, shrewd), or the Geordie "canny" (pleasing, fine) that he's using? Quite a different nuance.
At least it wasn't "cannae", which would mean yet another thing, and not a good thing.
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That is completely unacceptable. The policy that they seem to happily state is the core of the election and ongoing policy platform and they won't reveal it until then? Absurd, absurd, absurd.
Don't say that too loudly around Craig. He calls it "prudent" for National not to release policy yet. I think he believes that Labour cannot come up with any policy of its own unless National comes up with it first. In fact, that's the only explanation I can think of, because there's no other rational justification for excusing the other half of the big two from having stated almost no substantive policies when the election is, at most, six months away (22 November's the latest date innit?).
It's excusing a campaign that's run as a popularity contest, not a campaign run on debating policies, because you can't debate something that doesn't exist.Interestingly, my younger brother's PolSci class at VUW had Pita Sharples in talking to them yesterday. He said that since National started polling high, he hasn't heard from John at all. Says it all, really, about National's arrogance surrounding working within MMP.
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Oh, and PS:
and that the government doesn't subsidise a competitor
I specifically posited it being spun off and run as an SOE. Why would the Government subsidise a competitor to itself?
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Assuming that it gets enhanced with FTTC or whatever else works commercially, and that the government doesn't subsidise a competitor, then low-medium risk.
So why do you say that creating an open-access fibre network that Telecom can access but not control is high risk? I don't understand that logic, I really don't.
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Rich, the Government wouldn't pay all that much for the copper though. It's demonstrably run-down, hasn't been cared for, and was flogged off at a seriously discounted rate. Why reward a company that hasn't maintained the asset?
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I know that wireless sucks the life out of Mtu's but some bright spark will come up with somthing like header comperssion with dynamic error correction and the whole need for cable and fibre will be history.
It's not just MTUs, though that's part of it. It's also latency, and the shared medium, and a bunch of other things that are actually really difficult to overcome. A point-to-point fibre link operates at fairly large fractions of the speed of light (I've seen 1/3 and 1/4), and wireless doesn't have a snowball's of ever getting to that kind of latency.
Fibre also scales beautifully, as witnessed by how phat the SCC is now compared to when it was laid and for only the cost of upgrading the end-points and amplifiers - designed for 120Gbs, now at 860Gbs less than a decade later and potentially offering 2.4Tbs (or more) by the end of the 16 years of life it has left. That's an increase of 2000x in 25 years, and it's real increases not theoretical ones. Wireless is showing no signs of coming anywhere near that exponential scalability. -
My point is really that any new technology deployment has a lot of risk.
Fibre's not a new technology, though. Not even vaguely close. People have been putting bits and bytes over skinny lengths of glass for longer than I've been alive. It's not a dying standard, unlike CDMA, and it's not experimental and obscenely expensive to use, unlike Iridium.
Here's a question: Would you consider Telecom's existing network to be low-risk if it was entirely expropriated and turned into an SOE? Ignoring any question of longevity and historic underinvestment, would you say that a primarily copper phone/data network run by a company that does nothing else is a risky investment?
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Neither Iridium nor Telecoms CDMA could really be called networks. Rather protocols and associated hardware.
That's a good point. It's like saying that ethernet is a network. I hadn't thought of it like that, but you're right.
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Rich, they're hardly comparable. Iridium's network wasn't exactly something that could be rolled out in usable sections, was it? As for CDMA, Telecom made a stupid decision to go with a technology that was known to be on the way out. The decision had to have been made at least in part because it meant customers faced that much more difficulty and expense in shifting to BellSouth/Vodafone, because there's no sound technical explanation.
Steve, my take is that it's yet another wireless spec that failed to live up to the promises. So far none of the wireless protocols has delivered the headline speeds claimed when rolled into the real world, and that includes WiMax. They all fall short, often dramatically short, which is a real problem when trying to use them as fixed-line replacements. Right now 40Mbps is good enough, but it's not going to be good enough for long and the lead time on developing and deploying new protocols is often the better part of a decade. The 802.16m working group has also said that they're going to look to deploy into the military space first, and get that stable and functional before they try for consumers. That means at least another three years, probably more like five, before consumer equipment is available, and that's from when the spec is finalised which isn't expected to be until late next year.