Not wishing to come over all I-told-you-so, but pre-unbundling, I warned not to expect miracles with the opening of Telecom's local exchanges. Forcing Telecom to raise the broadband speed limited from 3.5Mbit/s to 8Mbit/s has already created ferocious arguments about wholesale pricing and alleged lack of space inside exchanges for competitors' gear.

But it's the practical problem that's worse. Raising the DSL upper speed limit to 8Mbit/s is tantamount to the government trying to solve Auckland's motorway woes by raising the rush hour speed limit to 150km/hour. Doesn't quite gel with reality, baby.

Now a report from one of Telecom's main infrastructure providers, Alcatel, confirms that even with the current 3.5Mbit/s top-out, one quarter of DSL customers aren't getting the speed they pay for -- and that to get to 8Mbit/s under the promised 'unconstrained bitstream', or 24Mbit/s under the coming ADSL2, you'll have to live within 1km of your local phone exchange. Read Juha Saarinen's full report in our sister publication Computerworld here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 5 )

The recently-revived Red Herring names the top 10 open source downloads of all time in its 17/07/06 issue. Piracy - sorry, sharing - is still the killer app. Choose your poison from the list below. Just don't call us after you've been arrested. (Pictured: BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen.)

Project (what it does): no. of downloads
1. Emule (file sharing client): 206.6 million
2. Azureus (cross-platform BitTorrent client): 120.1m
3. BitTorrent (tool for distributed downloading): 51.9m
4. DC++ (file sharing client): 36.5m
5. Ares Galaxy (chat, file sharing P2P client): 32.1m
6. CDex: (extracting digital audio data from an audio CD): 28.7m
7. Virtual Dub (desktop video processing + capture app): 26.2m
8. Shareaza (multi-network P2P filesharing client): 23.8m
9. Emule Plus (improved vers. of Emule): 14.6m
10. Gtk+/Gimp (installers for Windows): 13.5m

Source: Sourceforge, late June.

Posted by Chris Keall at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Woosh has announced it's buying land-lubbing ISP Quicksilver, and will start offering DSL accounts. Like, why? I'm tempted to make like Zidane and headbutt this maddening company. In fact I will. Stand back:

Woosh faces some terminal challenges. That triple threat in full:

1. The apparant loss of Woosh's WiMax spectrum, which offered an escape route from its current slow, proprietary TD-CDMA platform. Many thought today's hush-hush press conference would be to announce Woosh's conversion to the Intel-backed, open and superfast WiMax technology that most see as the future of wireless internet. Alas, the company is rushing in the opposite direction.

2. Coming 3G upgrades from Vodafone and Telecom that will dramatically boost their respective third generation network's speed from as soon as September (read Juha Saarinen's exclusive inside details in August PC World).

3. Local loop unbundling and the government's general jabbing of Telecom, which will stretch DSL's already huge performance lead over Woosh's current service. Especially cutting is the new legislation's 'naked DSL' provision, which will see tons of ISPs offering attractive VoIP options (VoIP being Woosh's supposed killer app).

Buying Quicksilver solves none of these problems. Now Woosh has gained around 10,000 landline customers (to take its total base to around 35,000). But that's not enough to bring any economy of scale to its new DSL-based services. So: why? Maybe Woosh is preparing to leave wireless behind. And with it, its only point of difference. Cancel that IPO. Again.

Posted by Chris Keall at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Put those champagne wishes and caviar dreams on hold. Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have cancelled a contract with aviation designer Leslie Jennings. Miffed, Jennings has blabbed details of 'some strange requests' from his former clients.

The affair began when Sergey & Larry bought a Boeing 767-200 widebody, formerly owned by Qantas, planning to use it as an oversize private jet. The pair acquired the 180-seater through a holding company called Blue City Holdings LLC, with Brin saying he would use it for personal travel, including 'taking large numbers of people to places such as Africa'.

The Wall Street Journal reports trouble began when our heroes brought in Jennings early 2005, whose mission was to pimp the plane, repurposing it as a luxurious 50-person ride.

All details were to remain 'ultra secret', but now Jennings has been fired for allegedly not doing his job properly, the designer has started to spill.

The 767's commercial layout was to be modified to include a lounge near the front for Google CEO Eric Schmidt (often seen as the company's designated adult), while boyish Brin & Page would have adjoining state rooms further down the aircraft - described by Schmidt at one point as a 'party plane'.

Jennings says Larry and Sergey's 'strange requests'; included hammocks hung from the ceilings of the plane. And, reports the Journal, 'At one point he witnessed a dispute between them over whether Mr Brin should have a 'California king size bed. Mr Jennings says Schmidt stepped in to resolve that by saying, "Sergey, you can have whatever bed you want in your room; Larry, you can have whatever kind of bed you want in your bedroom".

The Googlistas are continuing a California Superior Court battle with Jennings.

Meanwhile, in more down-to-earth news, Google has appointed its first New Zealand country manager - 32-year-old Forsyth Thompson, who will train in the US, Australia and elsewhere around the Google empire before opening an Auckland office around September. Thompson was formerly the publisher of the New Zealand edition of MIS magazine.

Posted by Chris Keall at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Firefox is flying. At the US edition of PC World, for example, 23.98% of its website visitors are surfing the Fox. NZ PC World visitors are embracing the rebel browser in even greater numbers. Check out these pcworld.co.nz stats (as independently measured by Nielsen NetRatings) for the first week of July:

pcworld.co.nz
BROWSER - % OF UNIQUE VISITORS
1 Microsoft Internet Explorer - 65.94
2 Mozilla Firefox - 29.05
3 Opera - 2.27
4 Netscape - 0.74

In the totals above, I've added versions together (eg Firefox 1 and Firefox 1.5) but generally speaking, most pcworld.co.nz users of any given browser tend to be on the latest version. And if you're wondering why it doesn't total 100%, there are several browsers in the sub-1% chaff, including Safari, Camino, AOL, Konquerer and, yes, Crazy Browser.

It would suit this snippet nicely if I could make some kind of snazzy year-on-year comparison showing a surge in Firefox's pcworld.co.nz popularity. But in fact you guys were pretty hip to Mozilla this time 12 months ago too.

Our inhouse stats guru Edward Porter saves my editorial bacon, however, by pointing out there has been some movement at our (cough) perhaps more conservative sister publication Computerworld. Of computerworld.co.nz visitors, Ed reports Firefox has increased from 21.17% to 35.61% over the past year, while IIE has crashed from 74.61% to 58.32%.

And even at our stablemate Unlimited (a straight business title aside from its rather excellent 'Technology' column), there's a sniff of insurgency. Ed reports Firefox increased from 9.92% to 12.79% of unlimited.net.nz traffic over the past 12 months, while IE dropped a smidge from 87.23% to 84.60%.

For more on lead Firefox lead developer Ben Goodger, and his recent trip home for Webstock, click here.
To roadtest the Firefox 2 beta, click here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:36 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 7 )