The clouds have opened, and the moustouches are being shaved off. Yet all-in-all it's been a motastic month, with more than $1 million raised for prostate cancer awareness. We're just getting back on an even keel today after our office Movember party which included guests from Ingram Micro, Logitech Microsoft, Samsung and others sprouting foculating for the cause.

Naturally - the do being hosted by PC World's publisher - there had to be a rating element. IBM's Michael Friedberg (pictured above left) picked up the coveted Best Porn Star Mo category, but it was our in-house mo-man, PC World Account Manager Phillip Albrey (left), who scooped the popular vote to win the Supreme Mo award. Phillip dressed as a building site worker, I'm assuming to express his interest in the construction industry.

Anyhow, it's now just hours until the mo's get shaved off. As fate would have it, a TVNZ crew came in this morning to interview PC World Staff Writer Jan Birkeland about the Kiwi botmaster arrest, so the full Lemmy-out-of-Motorhead glory of his handlebar 'tache got featured on One News at Midday.

Speaking of Jan, after barely a week he's cracked into iYomu.com's Top 10 leaderboard (and is number 9 as I type), so he's now seriously in the running to win the Kiwi-founded social networking sites' $US1 million challenge.

Myself and Jan may or may not have lunch with the iYomu crew next Wednesday, when its PR company hosts its Xmas bash, so I'll let you know how that goes. I suggested the most expensive restaurant I could think of (Clooney), figuring that by now they're either rolling in it, or taking such a 7-figure bath that a big Clooney tab wouldn't get noticed.

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

A couple of juicy bits of news from day two of the Digital Future Summit. Firstly, Trevor Mallard announced a definitive time-frame for analog TV to be switched off: 2012, or on an accelerated schedule if digital TV penetration reaches 75% of households ahead of that date.

Between Sky Digital customers and Freeview's 62,000 households, Mallard said during his midday speech that we're 45% there already (60,000 is a big jump on the 20,000 set-top boxes Freeview had been targetting before the end of the year, incidentally - and that's an awful lot of households in for a big surprise when they discover they'll need to buy a whole new set-top box to get Freeview's high definition, terrestrial broadcasts coming early next years. The current boxes for receiving Freeview's satellite-based standard definition digital service will not be able to get HD).

It's good to have a set date - and it'll be nice when all that analog spectrum is freed for WiMax use - but as Juha notes across the way, the UK is well ahead of us, with a switch off due next year (it's also interesting to note that in the UK the BBC's iteration of Freeview now has more viewers than Murdoch's BSkyB).

Fibre to the home
Elsewhere, Telecom's Matt Crockett, newly promoted to the position of Wholesale CEO, announced his company would eschew the traditional copper for five new sub-divisions. Instead, a pilot scheme will see 1000 homes in Wanaka, Queenstown, Papakura, Cromwell and Orewa get fibre optic cable connected directly to their front door from February. Not an exchange kilometres away, or a politically wiley roadside cabinet, but, yes, the Holy Grail of actual bona fide fibre to the home.

I'm not sure what the "pilot" aspect of the scheme is, since we already know fibre is blistering fast, and copper slow. I guess it's what payback Telecom, and its chosen partner WorldxChange will get from the roll-out (not pricing has been released yet).

WorldxChange, which will provide a VoIP service for the lucky 1000 homes, might not seem the most obvious partner, but with ihug now owned by Vodafone, Orcon by rival infrastructure maker Kordia, and Slingshot/Callplus stuck in divorce court Crazyville, I guess options were narrowed. Regardless, Crockett says Telecom is committed to opening its so-called NGN (next generation network) to all providers over time.

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:57 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

The only real news from day one of Digital Future Summit 2.0 was David Cunliffe identifying (yet another) key problem with our broadband: our connection to the outside world. There's no shortage bandwidth (if fact I'm often told much of it is "dark fibre", biz-speak for unused). But it's subject to monopoly charges.

Almost all our international internet data (apart from a tad by satellite) is piped through the Southern Cross Cable Network, two loops of fibre optic cable (two in case one breaks) that connect New Zealand with Australia, and both countries to the US, hub of most of the world's internet traffic. The Network is owned by the Southern Cross Cable Company, incorporated in Burmuda and half-owned by Telecom. Currently, it's the only game in town, and its monopoly position allows it to hold international data traffic charges high. And, IT&C Minister Cunliffe says, Southern Cross charges add $9 to every household's broadband bill each month.

Cunliffe hinted that the government might help fund a second sub-sea (or "submarine, in industry-speak) cable to Australia. The idea is that while the Southern Cross Cable company is also screwing the Aussies, our friends across the Tasman are about to get an alternative connection, and it would be great to be able to tap into that second choice. Specifically, Telstra plans to build its own cable to Hawaii, from where there are a bunch of different options for connecting to the mainland US. The Telstra cable should be finished by mid next year. Incidentally, at 1.28 terabits per second, the Telstra cable will boast more than double the Southern Cross Cable's bandwidth.

Great idea, but so far Cunliffe has not gone beyond the hint stage, beyond talking about his willingness to explore "non-traditional" funding.
Certainly, for such a crucial economic asset, the numbers involved are not huge (and certainly less than other, much more debated public infrastructure spending, such as the appalling case of middle class welfare that is the Eden Park upgrade project). Over at Stuff, Tom Pullar-Strecker quotes industry experts saying the cost of laying a second cable from NZ to Aus could be as low as $100 million. Even doubling that, to allow for the initial low-balling that has bedevilled every infrastructure and IT project ever, it's still a bargain investment.

1984
On an interesting sidenote, both Computerworld Editor Rob O'Neill and Russell Brown picked up on Cunliffe's adoption of David Lange-like flourishes in his keynote address. Is it, indeed, a sign of unbounded ambition? I hope so. Big infrastructure projects don't get pushed through by small personalities.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

On Friday I had lunch with AVG's global security strategist, Larry Bridwell, who as well as working on his own company's antivirus software, consults to Homeland Security. That is, he's a very senior and well-connected guy on the security scene.

I had to query Larry about a rumour you hear whispered from time-to-time: that, behind the scenes, all the security software companies share information about the latest virus or malware outbreak. None of them want to look stupid by missing a major attack, so they deem it safer to share antidotes within four hours (or 24, depending on which version you've heard).

Larry replied that it is true that fixes are shared, within hours, but there's no formal agreement between the security software companies. Rather, he says, it's the case that there's a network of senior researchers who work for rival AV companies, but who have all worked together in the past and keep in close contact. It's these researchers who see themselves on a purist mission to defeat malware; a mission that transcends the commercial rivalry between the different businesses they happen to work for.

Faster, faster
Symantec's ex country manager once mused about how some hardcore online gamers like to surf naked. That is, they turn of all antivirus and firewall software (which always slows your system to some degree). They assume they'll get infected, and deal with that eventuality by blow-torching their system, then restoring from back-up.

Certainly, that's a risky way to live. Yet it's also true that even if you're careful, no security software will protect you all the time. Particularly at a time, as AVG's Bridwell noted, when virus writers have moved from being show-offs, who wanted fame from sparking a major outbreak, to sneaky bank account detail stealers who don't want to corrupt any of your files, or otherwise alert you that they've been messing with your PC.

So it's no surprise that in some countries with proper broadband (i.e., not here) Symantec has, like Microsoft and others, added online back-up to its security solution.
I asked Bridwell if his company was considering online backup. He said yes, maybe sometime, but that you also have to consider the trade-off between features and speed.

And certainly his company's product has always done well on that score, thanks to AVG's small footprint on your hard drive and, much more importantly, small footprint in your system's memory. In PC World testing, AVG has always rated strongly in the System Slowdown section of our benchmarks. Last time round it slowed our test system by just 2%, while rival brands slowed it by up to 10% or more.

Google, Microsoft, lions, bears, nuclear war
Try as I might, I failed to goad Bridwell into criticising Microsoft's entry into the security software market, Windows Live OneCare. He noted that the Microsofties have head-hunted a crack team of developers, raiding Symantec, McAfee, CA ("a whole team from Melbourne") and others for talent. He said the net result, so far, was "not a bad product, but not a great product either." Like others, he sees OneCare's threat being at the consumer and small business end of things, with most larger companies wanting a "layered" security approach involving more than one company.

Bridwell did volunteer, unsolicited, that his greatest fear is Google entering the security software market. The search giant has hired a number of security gurus, and done a lot of development in this area. However, for now, Bridwell thinks the effort is entirely aimed at keeping Google's own house secure.

Fewer clicks, more sales
AVG does have something in common with Google: its core product is free (and appears on NZ PC World's cover DVD most months, along with other free security tools from a variety of vendors). Worldwide, Bridwell says that 1.7% of users of free-version users upgrade to the commercial version.

The conversion rate used to be under 1%. Like all software companies, AVG thinks its product is getting better and better. However, in this particular instance, the recent boost was due to better web design. "It used to take six clicks to buy it," said Bridwell. "Now it takes three."

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Got a live demo this morning of Vodafone's coming 3G Broadband (HDSPA) upgrade. From April next year, busy cell sites in main centres will get a speed boost from 3.6Mbit/s to 7.6Mbit/s for downloads, and from 384Mbit/s to 2Mbit/s for uploads - a considerable speed jump on Telecom.

You'll only need a firmware upgrade of a Vodem or HSDPA PC Card modem to take advantage of the new download speed, but you'll need a chipset upgrade - in practical terms, a whole new modem - to take advantage of the increased download speed.

In demo at Vodafone's HQ on the Viaduct, speed was blistering, as you'd expect in a closed system trial. The new HSDPA network will have a theoretical maximum speed of 7.2Mbit/s. At the demo this morning it hit up to 5.9Mbit/s.

Out in the real world, Vodafone's Kursten Shalfoon says that, as ever, the speed you'll see will be dependent on three factors: how many people are using the nearest cellsite; how close you are to said cellsite; and general internet congestion at whatever destination site you're trying to reach.

The net effect is that people with compatible mobiles will see a peak download speed of around 5Mbit/s, and average download speed of between 2Mbit/s and 5Mbit/s today, says Shalfoon (compared to around 1.5Mbit/s for today's HSDPA 3.2 network).

Certainly, in a controlled environment, it looked impressive. A Casino Royale trailer was uploaded to a mobile (a Nokia N95, appropriately enough, as Nokia - in its Big Infrastructure Stuff incarnation, is also carrying out Vodafone's HSDPA 7.2 upgrade), streaming with nary a jitter - apparently the new upload technology has much lower latency, as well as its substantial outright increase in bandwidth. Then three movie trailers at once - and at one point, five -- were downloaded to a PC, again entirely smoothly in different windows on the desktop.

All very jaw-droppingly good, but of course being able to suck down data at DSL-like speed when you're on a mobile-priced data rate can be something of a wallet-buster. Hopefully Vodafone will continue to tweak its mobile data plans (an extra 3GB for $10 deal was recently announced) to keep pace as bandwidth expands. Shalfoon did also show a slide of an "in building" device that consists of a box that sits on the end of a DSL connection. It can serve both as a traditional DSL/wi-fi modem/router, or as a "home zone" device to route cellular voice or data calls over a landline backhaul network. Shalfoon says this function is the main reason Vodafone bought ihug. Local release of such a device is at least a year away, however.

Posted by Chris Keall at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

The Sounds NZ closure reflects how tougher life has got for music retailers in the face of iTunes (although as Stuff notes, the rise of the Warehouse hasn't helped either. I'd also add that discerning punters now often chose to buy their discs over the net rather than wait for them to arrive as pricey 'imports').

Anyhow, this just in from Red Herring, gelling nicely with today's topic:

The barrage of digital music and the ascendancy of Apple's iPod have record companies singing the blues, a new study says. The report from Jupiter Research finds that while spending on digital music will grow from about $1 billion in 2006 to $3.4 billion by 2012, it will not compensate for shrivelling CD sales, which still reached almost $10 billion in 2006.

"It's tough making money, except if you're making iPods," said David Card, vice president and research director at Jupiter Research. "Then you're making a lot of money."

The report cites record-industry statistics showing that U.S. CD sales were down 13 percent in 2006 and a further 19 percent in the first six months of 2007.

Related reading: Radiohead fans choose their price

Posted by Chris Keall at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

For those following Jan's bid to win iYomu.com's $US1 million challenge, our unshaven staff writer is now number 26 on the site's leaderboard, and rising fast.

Jan's created a website where you can keep tabs on his progress here.
Thanks to all the readers who've taken part in our PC World crusade so far. For helping us out - and helping iYomu gain more members - you are all winners. Although in another, more real way, Jan will be the ultimate winner when he pockets the cash. [UPDATE - Dateline Thursday: Jan is now in 20th place.]

Vodafone at home - now only sort of unlimited
Over at Stuff, Tom Pullar-Strecker reports on an angry "customer" (I put "customer" in inverted commas since the guy's actually an ex Telecom exec) who's discovered some "fair use" fine print for Vodafone's new 'at home' gadget for re-routing your home phone calls over the company's cellular network. Last time such a brouhaha broke - as I'm sure the complainant was aware - it was over Telecom's Go Large plan (RIP ... or is it about to come back from the dead?).
Some interesting comments are building after my original post on the subject, incidentally. Check them out here.

Annette & Malcolm reunited - at least by the Herald's art dept
More fine print: There's a great pic in today's NZ Herald Business section (print edition only) showing a laughing Annette Presley side-by-side with her ex-Malcolm Dick.
Could it be that they've put their vicious legal spat over CallPlus and 2Talk behind them? Nope. A micro caption beneath the picture says "Digitally altered image". Should have known it was Photoshop'd, since Presley's not wearing her red clown suit.

Local loop unbundling unravelled?
Orcon's new owner, Kordia, fired off a press release yesterday saying Doc Reynolds' proposed $1.4 billion upgrade of Telecom's networking could unravel local loop unbundling.
The logic is that Orcon, ihug and co. have finally been able to shift gear into Telecom's exchanges (well, as Consumer's new edition notes, five of them so far ... and with 650 exchanges in the country and a Commerce Commission roll-out rate of 15 exchanges per quarter, some of us could be waiting 10 years). But if Telecom's four-year, next-generation network upgrade does indeed involve running fibre to roadside cabinets, the gear that Orcon, ihug and co. have installed to juice copper lines running from exchanges becomes redundant.
The Independent Financial Review's Jenny Keown has a wrap up of the spat here, and the Herald's Helen Twose here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:51 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Your Monday morning mission, should you choose to accept it: sign-on to help our staff writer, Jan Birkeland, win $US1 million.

It works like this: home-grown social networking site iYomu.com wants to attract millions of users worldwide. Its weapon of choice in the publicity war is a $US1 million prize to be paid out in the new year. To be in the running, you have to sign up to iYomu.com, and solve 10 onscreen puzzles, getting more points for each puzzle you solve. Beyond that - which Jan and others have already achieved, levelling the playing field - you get points for referring other users. Everyone who's on the site's top 10 leader board on Dec 31 will then be in to win the $US1 million, to be decided by a popular vote by iYomu members.

Now, iYomu wants to attract as many as 10 million users by Christmas. However, from what we can gather, things are still a little quiet. So, I figured, to help iYomu gain some more members, and struggling young house owner Jan to win $US1 million, we would start a concerted pcworld.co.nz campaign to get our staff writer onto the site's leader board.

Jan reckons he needs to sign-up about 80 referrals to get to the top. If you want to partake, then send your email address to jan@pcworld.co.nz, and Jan will send you a referal email.

Read more about iYomu's quixotic attempt to dethrone Facebook - bankrolled by a network of investors supplying $20,000 of the prize money each, including PR doyen Michelle Boag - here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

Vodafone has just released a gizmo that re-routes your home phone calls over its cellular network, quite literally pulling the plug on your Telecom landline.

"Vodafone at home" is a $99 box, the size of a beer mat but a couple-three centimetres deep, with two standard jacks to plug in any old home phone. An aerial on the box then beams your home phone calls over Vodafone's cellular network rather than your home's Telecom line.

Thanks to a regulatory change that's been in force since April, you can keep your current phone number if you do choose to switch (to Vodafone at home or, a couple of technology leaps away, a VoIP service run by an ISP. Whichever service provider you switch to can call Telecom on your behalf to arrange things).

Toll-free calls
The monthly service, also called Vodafone at home, cost the same as a standard Telecom home account ($40), but Vodafone includes unlimited calls nationwide. That is, bye bye toll charges. Calls to Vodafone mobiles in New Zealand will cost 39 cents per minute and calls to other mobiles are 55 cents per minute. International calls are based on Vodafone's existing fixed-line offers.

Plug and call
I set up an eval unit this morning (pictured), bracing myself for the niggles that come with any first-generation product. However, set-up was plug and play, and I was able to make my first call within two minutes. Call quality was fine. The only difference was that - as if I was using a cellphone - I had to dial 09 before making a local Auckland call (for the Vodafone at home box has a SIM card inside). I'm going to call my brother in London when the time's a bit more amenable, so check in on tomorrow's update to see how international call quality turned out.

Like a Woosh modem, the Vodafone at home box (officially called an XSJack T2, according to its slim manual) has lights on its exterior. Three green bars - which I got, in central Auckland - means signal strength is optimum. If you have difficulty getting a strong signal (and my colleague Juha Saarinen reports such strife) then there's a - again Woosh-style - extender aerial with a long cable that ends in a sucker you can attach to a window. The T2 does need an AC outlet, too.

Telecom snipes back
Telecom spokeswoman Rebecca Earl was quick to strike back via our sister site Stuff, where she said

the value of home lines went beyond calling and was how broadband and Sky interactive services were accessed and alarms monitored. Mobile was not considered by the telecommunications industry as the preferred platform for the diverse services customers demand.

"This move has been well signalled for some time, and we think relying on mobile technology as a household's only link with the world will suit only a niche group of customers."

When I put Earl's comments to Vodafone spokesman Paul Brislen, he replied: "This is only the first generation device on offer. Future versions will include capability for data, alarm monitoring and so on. The at home device today is really only the tip of the iceberg and there's plenty more to come."

Brislen also expects Telecom's response to go beyond Earl's war of words: "National toll calls are worth $150m a year to Telecom. The fixed line business brings them in $1bn. They're going to have to respond somehow."

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 8 )

Radiohead launched a brave experiment last month: putting its new album, In Rainbows, online and letting fans decide how much - if anything - they paid to download it.

Now, net traffic tracking giant Comscore says 62% of the UK band's fans chose to pay nothing. And of those who did, $US2.26 was the mean (as opposed to median) price.

Radiohead has hit back, rubbishing Comscore's figures, on RollingStone.com and elsewhere, as "wholly inaccurate and in no way reflect definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project" but refusing to provide its own hard numbers - and stating that no third party can know, since the band's site is independently run.

Meanwhile, although Gigwise.com gushed that Radiohead sold 1.2 million copies of In Rainbows, Comscore says, sorry, wrong. According to its numbers, a total of 1.2 million people visited Radiohead's website during October and not all of them downloaded the album. Comscore says it knows how many but won't say for "commercial confidentiality" reasons. The band won't comment.

Enter The Wall Street Journal's "The Numbers Guy" blogger, who points out that Comscore could divine the number of people visiting the band's website and downloading the album. The tracker has an uber panel of 2 million volunteers worldwide, and from their surf logs its extrapolates the behaviour of us all (in a notable local example, Yahoo!xtra has chosen to use Comscore as its main traffic metric, abandoning Nielsen//NetRatings).

Big money in small numbers
But, crucially, Comscore's Andrew Lipsman pointed out to The Numbers Guy that Radiohead doesn't need many paying downloads to make a decent slice of dosh. Since they've cut record labels - or even iTunes - out of the picture, with only 5% of visitors stumping up an average $US2.26, the band would have still scored $US360,000 revenue during October. And Lipsman

That is, of course, if we're talking 5% of 1.2 million people. Again, Radiohead's lips are sealed, and Comscore never, for any site, reveals what actual number of its panellists visited - making it impossible to gauge its margin of error.

Free? Steal it anyway
Another interesting factoid from all this: even though In Dreams was right there on Radiohead's site, for free, Forbes.com reports that 500,000 people downloaded pirate copies from unauthorised sites instead. That's bad news for Radiohead, in that people can also order In Rainbows on disc from its website, so it loses the chance to upsell downloaders to the full-resolution audio splendor of the CD version, due for Dec 31 release (along with a $US80 boxed version that includes a bonus disc and - for irony fans - a vinyl version).

Posted by Chris Keall at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

I've been wondering lately: if the SIS was surveiling Tama Iti, then did they capture my one almost passing liaison with him, a little while back? (Not counting a second incident where we stopped and stared at each other at our local petrol station's cafe, where, perching at a table, he gave me a "So I'm eating two mince pies for breakfast, so what?" look.)

At the time, Tama and my wife were both members of the NZ Maori Internet Society, and I was charged with giving him a lift to the society's annual hui. However, either because discussing domain name issues and digital strategy were insufficiently revolutionary, or because it was 7am on a Saturday, the then urban-dwelling Tama never answered the door.

Tama did attend several meetings, and made his obligatory incendiary comments. But, as ever, they were best taken in the entertaining, agitprop spirit they were delivered. He's no more likely to assassinate President Bush than I am.* Meanwhile, the NZ MIS is embarking on the much trickier task of lobbying Google.

*I'm really hoping the SIS interprets that line the right way.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Myself and Reviews Editor Scott are so far nowhere in the Movember stakes (blame it on too much radiation from our Test Centre). But around PC World Towers, moustaches are starting to sprout:

Staff Writer Jan: Despite denials that his gaming team uses performance enhancers, Jan suspiciously grows a full mo within a week.

Deputy Editor Ted: The French lieutenant.

Circulation Manager Lawrie: The John Cleese.

Portfolio Sales Manager Andrew: The David Boon.

Account Manager Phil: The Boonus Maximus.

Marketing Exec Ryan: The 70s porn star.

Learn more about Movember and prostate cancer awareness or sponsor a mo brother here.

Digital photography tips by email
This afternoon - at 3.30pm to be exact - sees the long-awaited return of our Digital Focus email newsletter, courtesy of our latest recruit, Web Producer Michael Foreman, who's going to be helping to create more content and multimedia for pcworld.co.nz and its sister sites. Sign-up, or learn about five others we've got in the pipeline, here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

What will happen if I load the new Facebook for BlackBerry onto my RIM BlackBerry Curve 8310 (which I previewed in New Adventures in GPS)? Will CrackBerry + Facebook = the annihilation of my little remaining productive time?

My colleague over at Computerworld, Ulrika, has already taken the plunge, and as a more advanced Facebooker than myself is only so-so impressed. Looking at Facebook on the screen of her BlackBerry, it looks to me like most of the basic functions are in place - including the all-important Status Update and Poke, plus the ability to add friends or upload photos - but not the open platform apps that so many people love.

Facebook: your new HR software
While some employers are busy banning Facebook (now part-owned by Microsoft), it's easy to see why the canny Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, is lending its support.
A mob in Sydney called Serena Software has not only OK'd Facebook, but is positively embracing it with "Facebook Fridays" during which its 800 staff are actively encouraged to network with family, friends and customers via the soc-net site. It's the way to reach "Generation Y", Serena's CEO reckons.

And Fortune's Brent Schlender says "Facebook makes me cringe" before admitting it could be the mother of all HR systems for keeping a company's staff on the same track.

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Aussie analyst Paul Budde, who covers Australia and NZ, fumes at the latest OECD broadband figures, just in. Apparently the OCED's word is gospel about who ranks where overall (even though others reckon some countries are goosing their broadband stats by counting 3G cellular connections), but we must question its download speed assumptions. Anyhow, over to you Paul:

Exhibit 1
New Zealand rankings in global OECD broadband survey for year ending June 2007
Average monthly subscription price: NZ 16th most expensive out of the 30 OECD countries at USD$48.66
Average monthly price per Mb/s: NZ 15th most expensive out of 30 at USD$16.75
Average advertised broadband download speed, by country, Mb/s: NZ ranked 5th fastest out of 30 at 13.6 Mb/s Who is actually getting that speed in NZ?
Broadband penetration NZ: ranked 20th out of 30; (16.5 inhabitants/ per 100) Penetration more than doubled in previous 12 months.
Equates to 683,000 users as at June 07.
DSL coverage: 93%
(Source: BuddeComm based on OECD broadband survey)

Exhibit 2
Australian rankings in global OECD broadband survey for year ending June 2007
Average monthly subscription price: Australia 12th most expensive out of 30 at USD$52.26
Average monthly price per Mb/s: Australia 8th most expensive out of 30 at USD$21.34
Average advertised broadband download speed, by country, Mb/s: Australia (ranked 9th fastest out of 30 at 12.1 Mb/s. Who is actually getting that speed in Australia?
Broadband penetration: Aus ranked 12th out of 30; (22.7 inhabitants/ per 100) Penetration more than doubled in previous 12 months.
Equates to 4.7 million users as at June 07.
DSL coverage: 81%
(Source: BuddeComm based on OECD broadband survey)

"It is amazing what happens with statistics. If they agree with the government's position they are praised and welcomed, but if they are not they are rejected.

The latest set of broadband stats from the OECD is no different from the previous figures - and there are several areas that are very questionable; but this time they work in favour of the government, so they are being applauded.

A year ago we began reporting that, in accordance with our long-term predictions, penetration in New Zealand was beginning to catch up with the rest of the world, and this, of course, was confirmed by the OECD figures. New Zealand ranked 20th out of the 30 nations survey, equating to 683,000 broadband users as at June 30th. Despite some good progress, New Zealand still has some catching up to do to bring penetration on par with Australia, which ranked 12th out of 30 nations.

We also stated that while this was happening the rest of the world was improving network quality, achieving higher speeds which allow for more video-based services including e-health (video nurses for aged people, video monitoring of patients at home), smart grids (energy savings) and entertainment.

This is where New Zealand is still very much lagging - in terms of average download speed and of cost. But this is certainly not accurately reflected in the OECD rankings.

The figures for average advertised download speed are meaningless. New Zealand ranked 5th out of the 30 nations with an average advertised broadband download speed of 13.6Mb/s, but who is actually getting that speed in New Zealand??!! It’s great that such speeds are possible, but they are only available to a very small section of the population. Without widespread ADSL2+ or fibre access true average download speeds are significantly lower than those in Europe, Japan, Korea, North America etc, where those networks are far more widely deployed.

It is unlikely that Local Loop Unbundling (LLU), which is scheduled to be rolled out in New Zealand from the beginning of 2008, is likely to have any impact at all, any time soon. You only have to take a look at Australia, which has had LLU for several years, but still has only limited availability of faster speed ADSL2+ services. Having said that, the move towards the Operational Separation of New Zealand, as outlined in the latest government reforms, should speed things up to some degree by giving more equitable wholesale access to Telecom's network, however Telecom's Next Generation Network is still scheduled to take another four years to complete, and even if some of Telecom’s competitors like ihug and Orcon begin offering ADSL 2+ via DSLAM rollouts in 2008, this will only be on a limited scale and it likely to take several years before Telecom will be offering ADSL2+ services on a national scale.

A further negative for New Zealand is that it is also one of the few OECD countries in which every broadband operator surveyed by the OECD was found to impose data or bit caps. This severely hampers the uptake of more interesting applications in healthcare, education and entertainment, as these applications are feature rich and do require more data capacity.

Content and service providers are reluctant to build these new innovative applications because if users go beyond their cap, they must pay additional fees or have their services slowed to a snail's pace, which of course would defeat the whole purpose of these new services. So in this way, we do keep our users 'dumb' and we certainly don't allow the country to fully utilise the many social and economic benefits that broadband has to offer."

Posted by Chris Keall at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

TVNZ is adding US shows from Disney-ABC to its video download service. The new series, including episodes of Sisters, The Amazing Race All Stars, Criminal Minds, What About Brian and Daybreak, will be available via tvnz.co.nz just 24 hours after screening on TVNZ's broadcast channels. The new shows will be added from later this month.

Previously, TVNZ ondemand has been restricted to local content.

The move to add US shows is a good, foward-thinking one in itself. But it'll also be interesting to see if it spurs the moribund iTunes NZ into offering any serious, A-List TV content.

Also, watch this space: Is TVNZ about to dump ondemand's cumbersome PlayPoints system (which means you pay about $2 a show) in favour of a more high-trafficked, ad-funded service? Certainly, it would help, since most of us already have to pay for our (CAPPED) broadband.

Posted by Chris Keall at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Epitiro, the ISP monitoring firm that's thrown up some interesting benchmarks in its regular testing, also played a useful role this weekend, outting a Telecom outage:

Says Epitiro MD Mike Cranna in a press release today (Sunday):

"Something happened in Mayoral Drive on Sunday morning, and it took Xtra and ihugs' service down for about four hours between 5:30am and 9:30am.

"The word on the street is they suffered a major power outage to a couple of levels at the Mayoral Drive exchange, and our data shows services were affected for the two ISPs all over the country." Most other large ISPs, with the exception of TelstraClear, were affected while their traffic bottlenecked, but their services stayed up.

"It's surprising that a mission critical component of the network like Mayoral Drive could have a power outage. Normally an important network location like this would have multiple power supply back-ups available. I'm sure ihug will be asking the question."

Posted by Chris Keall at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

It made me wince when I read on CNN that iRobot is seeking to send more of its military robots, designed to seek and destroy roadside bombs, to Iraq.

I reviewed the company's domestic product, the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, for our erstwhile sister publication >>FFWD. It was easy to make fun of the Roomba: it was round, while the corners of our rooms were square, and possesed a Dalek-like inability to negotiate stairs.

Nevertheless, I probably would have kept the Roomba on as a domestic slave, if it had not been for its lousy engineering. The dust bag was tiny, and frequently fell off. And even when there was space, the Roomba often got tangled and confused around our table and chairs. So: good luck, Marines. I hope you're got smooth, clutter-free roads to play on in Iraq.

For some more agreeable Friday reading, check out Fortune's report on Tesla veteran Ian Wright, who has built the fastest electric car on the planet.

Posted by Chris Keall at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )