IPTV in 2009

Wed, 1 Apr 2009 20:27:08 +1030

I delivered this presentation the CommsDay Summit 2009 in Sydney on April 1st 2009.

This was the day after Senator Conroy had promised to announce the ‘Winner’ of the NBN ‘process’ at the very same event.

He didn’t. Maybe next week.

Meantime, I talked about life beyond the NBN - trying to move back to productive new services delivery instead of hand-wringing about a broken network policy.

The video recording of the presentation will be posted on YouTube by CommsDay soon as well.

When reading the Whirlpool front page image contained in this talk, do remember the date when the presentation was made... :)

http://www.simonhackett.com/submissions/commsday-apr2009-hackett.pdf

Correcting The Record

Wed, 4 Mar 2009 09:21:39 +1030

Late in 2008, a ZDNet journalist, David Braue, sent me some questions via email, at a very busy time for me. I have exchanged email with him in the past, and he’s written articles quoting those comments. And I interact fruitfully with several other journalists in ZDNet about all sorts of things over time.

But this specific time, I didn’t ever manage to get him a reply to those questions. He did try multiple times to get me to reply - no dispute - but doing so just never quite made it to the top of my things to do list. Mea Culpa. It happens, and it wasn’t personal.
 Alas, Mr Braue did take it quite personally. He decided that I was hiding things from him - that I wasn’t just busy and had better things to do - and hence that my failure to reply to his email was somehow evidence that I was hiding some dark desperate secret(s) from him.

He then proceeded to write an article that attacked the strategy of both Internode in general and me in particular, making up a variety of false conspiracy theories and creating various other statements of alleged fact that were (and are) false.

Here is the article he wrote:

http://www.zdnet.com.au/blogs/fullduplex/soa/Et-tu-Internode-/0,139033349,339294629,00.htm

It’s not the most edifying example of investigative journalism, in my view. And it’s clear that it was written as some form of ‘payback’ for the terrible crime of placing my day job and its needs ahead of his drive for answers to the long running NBN saga.

But - what to do about it? I was faced with a choice: Dignify it with a response and potentially get into a slanging match, or just leave it alone, and hope that the author realised at some point that other people continue to get commentary from me all the time - including other ZDNet people - so perhaps it was (a) nothing personal and (b) not actually justifying the conspiracy he chose to invent in response.

I left it alone. My hope being that by not inflaming the situation, he might reconsider the merits of returning to evidence based journalism rather than, frankly, just making stuff up.

Unfortunately, he didn’t.

This week, Braue published another piece that included (in part) a response to an Internode announcement about launching a new Greenfields FTTH initiative:

http://www.zdnet.com.au/blogs/fullduplex/soa/From-show-pony-to-dead-horse/0,139033349,339295218,00.htm

This piece took the long bow drawn in the first article and stretched it still further.

Reading that article, it becomes clear that I still have a target on my forehead in his view, for not answering an email about my position on the NBN - a position that is hardly a secret - take a look at the other articles in this very collection of blog postings, right here on this site.

Equally clearly, I’m going to keep being the subject of such attacks until I respond to that first article.

So, with reluctance, I will do that now, in an effort to encourage Mr Braue to give the conspiracy theories a rest and return to the normal practice of sending me email with questions in them, and giving me another chance to answer them, but without flying off of the handle if I don’t.

There are so many potshots he has taken, that it’ll take a while to respond to them - this is a long response as a result. I don’t resile from that - I want to say this in detail once and be done with it.

I’ll form my response by quoting passages in his articles and responding to them:

But not even the most die-hard optimist can argue that coincidence had any part to play in the curious timing of Internode's announcement, on 26 November. That was the same day that it and its buddies in Terria — the one-time potential telco that is now just another anti-Telstra lobbying group — decided not to submit the bid, letting Optus go it alone while they wave flags from the sidelines.
Sorry Mr Braue, but this really was a co-incidence.

There are a finite number of days in each year, and (amazing, but true), sometimes two announcements are released on a given day that have nothing to do with each other.

I had in fact signed the contract two weeks earlier, but it took that long for someone from Telstra to get around to countersigning it! When someone sufficiently senior from Telstra could be spared from their important work in the mothership to actually countersign it, that was the day we released the press announcement.

It was that simple.

There is no correlation between that announcement and anything to do with Terria, Optus, the NBN, the weather, or the colour of Mr Braue’s socks.

(ok, I admit it - maybe his socks had something to do with it - especially those purple ones with the strange motif on them)
 Myth Busted.

Another consistent theme both of the ZDNet pieces is that Internode offering our customers something they’ve been asking us for for months was somehow ‘selling out’ - specifically that the contract was signed at the price of us no longer deploying our own DSLAM ports.

That assertion is just as false as the previous one.

In the spirit of debunking that theory with hard evidence, lets look at the facts:

The first Braue article noted that we had 110 active exchanges. As I write this, a few months later, the number of active exchanges is 115. That’s more than 110.

Only this week we put a further 6 exchanges into build, while in another 13, we are not-so-patiently waiting our turn for Telstra to permit access to build. That is another 19 more exchanges on the way.

We will add a still more exchanges to the build list in the the next few months. That’s in addition to, and not in conflict with, our access to the national footprints of Optus and Telstra.
 Hence, regarding the myth that Internode has agreed to stop building DSLAM’s at the behest of Telstra?

Also busted.
 Next conspiracy? Here goes:

The quick philosophical turnaround of Internode was followed in close succession by its sudden launch of ADSL2+ services in 46 Tasmanian exchanges and around 1,400 other Telstra exchange areas nationwide.
This isn’t a different announcement, its the same one, at greater detail (correcting the Telstra ADSL2+ exchange count upward to 1400 from 900, and explicitly reassuring our Tasmanian customers, subject of bandwidth limitations in the past, that they would not be left out of having access to ADSL2+ either).

And as for this alleged ‘Philosophical Turnaround’ - I’m sorry, but thats just (more) rubbish.

We’ve been, as I’ve said, negotiating for access to Telstra Wholesale ADSL2+ for months - this isn’t a ‘turnaround’, its been completely public that we’ve been working on this for most of 2008.

Here is an evidence point for that: http://www.whirlpool.net.au/news/?id=1779 (February 2008)

So if Mr Braue considers our obtaining wholesale ADSL2+ access from Telstra to be a ‘philosphical turnaround’ he is either mistaken (to be kind), has failed to do any research (possible), or is deliberately avoiding the evidence to the contrary (as noted just above) to support his apparent decision to attack my integrity.

Can it be a coincidence that the most visible spokespeople of both Internode and iiNet came out slamming the NBN in public, after months in which they had openly supported it and Terria's effort?
This is a disingenuous statement at best. Rubbish at worst.

The position of iiNet and Internode about the NBN and FTTN is neither a secret nor has it actually changed in the way that Braue asserts here.

For an example that demonstrates the long held position of Internode and iiNet very clearly - look up the blog article “The Myth of FTTN” right here on this blog area. It dates back to August 2006. It asserts that the government FTTN policy is building something that isn’t necessary.

Shock, Horror. Another myth busted.

And in terms of reconciling our position about FTTN with our involvement with Terria, and our ongoing support of it, the fact that both stances can exist at once (our criticism of the government policy and process around the NBN, concurrently with our support for Terria) is a stretch that Mr Braue clearly can’t make.

The truth is that those stances can, and do, coexist without conflict.

To understand how they can do so, in detail, take a look at the downloadable copy of a public presentation I made, that you can find under the post ‘NBN: Decision Time’ here on this web site.

It was published in December 2008 (exactly when Mr Braue claims I was avoiding comment on the NBN) and it includes a video of the speech I delivered with those slides.

In that presentation, I contended that the best public outcomes regarding the NBN process were the following things, in this order of preference:

1) Build an FTTH network, not an FTTN network. Not possible under the current RFP policy because the government are not providing sufficient financial or legal support to make a national FTTH network possible. The government allows FTTH but offers only enough financial support to make FTTN economically possible.
2) Abandon the whole, deeply flawed, process, and review what the community really needs (rather than what Sol Trujillo asked John Howard for in 2005) - and remembering to factor in the importance of not destroying broadband competition in the process of ‘upgrading’ broadband in Australia
3) Award the network build to Terria/Optus. If FTTN is really the answer (and the government have never properly defined the question), then the best FTTN network approach, without a shadow of a doubt, is the Terria/Optus path. Hence, I absolutely support Terria/Optus, as being the best FTTN if FTTN is the answer. Note that not even Sol Trujillo believes that it is, any more - and it was his idea in the first place!
4) The absolute worst case for consumer pricing, innovation and choice would be to let Telstra build FTTN

(note that when I made this presentation, Telstra had not yet clearly removed itself from the RFP process)
 If you study those preferences, you’ll see that these are not, in fact, inconsistent - and they’re long held views - evidence for this, again, being right here on this blog site.

Take a look at ‘An Inconvenient Truth About FTTN’ - right here - and presented when the RFP was first released.

I’ve always advocated FTTH as being the real future - and hence the recent announcement from Internode of the deployment of cost effective Greenfields FTTH services (with other competitors welcome) marks Internode being an exemplar of doing what it talks about.

And remarkably, the second Braue article takes Internode to task for starting to offer FTTH services. Indeed he says, in response to that initiative, “don’t look to Internode for leadership”.

Que??

...the timing of all this suggests that Internode's souring on Terria may have come about as a direct result of interference from Telstra.
As explained above, this statement is false in multiple ways. We haven’t soured on Terria, and we haven’t had ‘inteference’ in our ability to deploy DSLAM’s by Telstra (well, not more than the entire industry routinely suffers - which is essentially unchanged).

Stating these things as if they’re facts in this manner presumes ‘guilt’, in the same sense as an assertion such as “When did Mr Braue stop beating his wife?”.

Or, more to the point, that Telstra withheld negotiations on ADSL2+ wholesale until it extracted a pledge that Internode would help poison the well and break up Terria's already-flagging momentum.
Again, this is a made up, false, and derogatory statement constructed with no evidence to back it up. There is no evidence to back it up because the statement is false.

So why did we sign up for Telstra ADSL2+?

a) Our customers demanded it - despite the price - so we have given them that option - we have increased their avenues of choice, and
b) In doing so, we are actively improving our business case for then building more of our own ADSL2+ infrastructure, to then offer those Telstra based ADSL2+ customers a better option in the future (on our own hardware).

To take one last quotation to task (in reference to FTTH):

Internode isn't taking this approach national, or even regionally; heck, it couldn't even cost-justify continuing to roll out its own DSLAMs
This is also false. The Opticomm/Internode effort is expected to extend to at least a dozen new housing developments nationally over the next year.

Our regional efforts in South Australia using WiMAX remain a proof point - working, today - that NBN speed outcomes can be achieved with licensed wireless equipment in regional areas.

And, yet again, Braue repeats the falsehood that Internode has stopped rolling out its own DSLAM’s. So again, I point out that we are indeed doing so.

Sure, we’re not rolling out as many as some other larger companies - thats because those other companies are larger, Mr Braue. Gee whiz, what a shocking revelation. We do what we can prudently do, in difficult economic times, and we haven’t stopped doing it.

Specifically, we haven’t stopped building DSLAM deployments, and we also won’t stop innovating in Greenfields areas and regional areas as well.

---

In conclusion:

I suppose I should be flattered at one level - its clear that Mr Braue feels that I’m an important member of the industry - or he wouldn’t have bothered to write such rubbish about me in an apparent effort to promote himself - and not once, but twice.

It is regrettable that he feels so motivated to attack both Internode and me personally, and that he feels it is acceptable to make up and repeat damaging and false statements in the process, all for the (apparently) heinous crime of my not replying to an email.

NBN : Decision Time

Mon, 8 Dec 2008 09:23:25 +1030

On 8th December, I delivered an address at the ATNAC 2008 conference, put my perspective on the current state of NBN policy and the possible future paths that the industry, and all Australians, face in broadband terms at this point.

You can download a video recording of my presentation (plus the slide set) here:

http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/videos/atnac08/ (running time about 20 mins)

The bottom line here is that it is ‘Decision Time’, but before deciding which bidder should get to build an FTTN network to replace all existing ADSL2+ competition and pricing, the deeper question is one of whether an FTTN network is actually the right policy.

There are other alternatives to building FTTN that address the stated government aims - that do so in more creative ways - and that don’t lock in speeds in the 50-80 megabit range by 2020 - just in time to be rendered irrelevant compared to countries who are deploying 100 to 1000 Megabit Fibre to the Home systems instead.

Blogs for Spectators

Sun, 7 Dec 2008 14:38:45 +1030

I’ve just started writing some blogs for Business Spectator (you can find them here).

If you’re interested in some other perspectives on IT related things... as well as those that turn up here... some more of my thoughts are going to turn up there over time too :)

NB: The Business Spectator site requires (free) registration to view it. It doesn’t take long to do that.

IPv6: The retail ISP perspective in 2008

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:32:42 +1030

I delivered a presentation at the IPv6 2008 summit in Canberra.

A copy of that presentation can be downloaded here (6 Mb).

In essence, IPv6 deployment is finally happening at the retail ISP level - Internode is doing it (via tunneling now, via native layer 2 IPV6 access in 2009).

Time to get on board - and whether its the panacea for the future or not - the technical barriers to getting on with it are now largely resolved (after only a decade or so!).

Hence, we, at least, are just getting on with our part of it.

My Technology Blog

IPTV in 2009

Correcting The Record

NBN : Decision Time

Blogs for Spectators

IPv6: The retail ISP perspective in 2008