During the recent Australian election, Labour leader Kevin Rudd promised major government money to boost broadband by laying more fibre-optic cable around cities and suburbs (some $A5 billion worth). The encumbent John Howard promised a relatively more modest $A2 billion path to faster internet, based around tweaking major cities' existing DSL networks.

John Key's announcement today that a National-led government would spend "up to" $1.5 billion on fibre optic cable to the home, in an as yet undefined public-private partnership, reminds me strongly of Rudd's broadband play. Key says the total project, including around $3 billion in private funding, would take six to 10 years.

Encumbent IT Minister David Cunliffe has done a lot, from the historic unbundling of the local loop to pending operational separation of Telecom to recently nudging the state-owned Kordia to build a second fibre optic cable to Australia in partnership with Pipe (lousy internal broadband aside, the Telecom-owned Southern Cross Cable - our only major link to the outside world - is NZ's major fast-internet choke-point). Broadband has got cheaper, but for many homes the benefits of unbundling and other policies won't trickle down until after the election. Key is correct to identify slow internet as a major BBQ conversation topic and election issue.

Cunliffe's office was quick to snap out a response. Working on the assumption that only Telecom would be large enough to be the private partner in such a public-private partnership, Cunliffe's release says Key would be spending tax-payers money to help Telecom restore the billing and infrastructure monopoloy it enjoyed during the 90s (albeit this time with true broadband rather than narrow band).

Cunliffe doesn't say so in his press release, but I would have pointed out that the government spending money on WiMax (via Kordia) sets up a strong wireless competitor to Telecom's landline copper + fibre business.

Incidentally, Cunliffe has also challenged Key to a broadband debate. Maybe Second Life could be the venue ...

Posted by Chris Keall at 4:19 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

I installed a Freeview HD decoder set-top box over the weekend, allowing my TV to receive Freeview's recently-introduced high-definition broadcasts.

Hit me one time
My first thought was with a hypothetical Freeview fan - let's call him Chris - who bought a set-top box when Freeview's standard digital (SD), satellite based service launched last year.

That service required a satellite dish (if you already had a Sky dish, that was fine, as Sky TV and Freeview use the same satellite, the Auckland-friendly Optus B1), plus the one-off cost of buying a $200 Freeview decoder to receive the SD signal.

And a second
Now comes Freeview HD (high definition), broadcast from towers. This new land-lubbing service, available in 75% of the country (see coverage map here) offers a dramatically better picture than the satellite-based SD version of Freeview - see the official Freeview propaganda pic at the head of this post - but requires the installation (as I did Sunday) of a Freeview HD box, priced from $399. You don't need a dish, only a standard UHF aerial, already present on many homes from its days as the Sky TV mainstay aerial before the dish-based Sky Digital was introduced. (If you want, you can run a Sky Digital TV decoder and a Freeview HD decoder into the same TV to watch both services. For lower North Islanders, TelstraClear's cable TV can coexist with Freeview too.)

And a third
Now fast forward to the end of the year, when Freeview fulfils its already-stated commitment to delivering a Freeview HD decoder with a built-in hard disk drive. That is, a box that will work with an onscreen programming guide to provide you with a MySky-style option to record any programme with a click of your remote. Bang, Chris will have to buy his third Freeview set-top box, likely priced around $600. If I were Chris, I'd be a little shirty at that point.

Sky TV and Freeview are poles apart in their decoder strategies. The former has a fixed, relatively low-spec PVR - MySky - which customers don't own, but have to pay nosebleed monthly fees. Freeview is more driven by customer choice. Freeview General Steven Browning tells me his organisation is still setting the baseline spec. Just with the way technology keeps moving, it's likely this will include a hard disk drive bigger than MySky, and will match MySky's twin tuners for recording two channels at once. "If any manufacturers want to build a Rolls Royce model beyond the basic spec that's up to them," Browning told me Monday.

And a fourth
But wait, there's more: all the main TV makers - Philips, Sony, Samsung et al - have pledged to release flat screen TVs with Freeview decoders built-in. Sources say to expect at least one brand to release a Freeview-packing LCD before the Olympics in August.

For many people this will prove the most practical Freeview HD solution. Especially early-adopting types who already have a standalone hard disk drive recorder, or who are hanging out for Sony's Play TV unit, which turns a PlayStation3 into a recording device for Freeview TV (there's no NZ launch date yet for Play TV, but Sony Computer Entertainment was able to show me a working demo unit at its Auckland office last week).

Light on: that means Freeview's off
Anyhow, back to today. With a UHF aerial already on the roof, set-up of my Zinwell ZMT-620HD receiver ($399) took literally two minutes. The 620HD is tiny - the size of a large paperback.

I was able to almost immediately watch TVNZ's Freeview only TV6 and TV7, which are both very welcome (offering commercial-free kids TV and news beyond 6pm respectively) plus a channel that provides rolling animals-and-scenary demo of HD footage. For while HD does look stunning, there is little in thethe way of HD broadcasts yet, even in the home of HD, the US, for a programme needs to be filmed in HD, edited and processed in HD, then broadcast in HD. TV3 and TV4 are already offering a limited selection of HD fare via Freeview - around 12 hours' worth a week. TVNZ will start its Freeview HD broadcasts with its Olympics coverage).

My only gotcha was that next time I turned on my TV, I couldn't get any Freeview signal. After an hour of furious tears and plugging and unplugging cables, I finally hit Freeview's website (which has an excellent series of explainers) and discovered that the Zinwell's light is on when the unit is off. When the unit's on, receiving a Freeview signal, there is no light. It looks dead.

Anyhow, the parade of receiver options aside, I don't want to sound like I'm bagging Freeview. Browning and his team have taken a very go-ahead, aggressive approach, in stark contrast to Sky TV's meandering, much-delayed introduction of HDTV content (now scheduled for a limited launch on July 1; a handful of details are on Sky's website here). It's no wonder Freeview has blown away its targets. A buyer at Dick Smith told me he was just gobsmacked at how many Freeview boxes his company was moving. All up, it's astounding. Earlier this month Freeview announced more than 100,000 receivers had been sold, putting the service in 100,000 homes, give or take. Come the Olympics, it's going to be a lot more.

More reasons to try Freeview: TV Works (owner of TV3 and TV4) has pledged to provide two more Freeview channels within the next 12 months. And by 2011, when the government switches off analog broadcasts, everyone will have to be on Freeview or SkyTV (or both; catch the handy diagram here).

Posted by Chris Keall at 8:39 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 6 )

I was in a bathroom today where, as a marketing bod put it, you need to do a "Queen Mother wave" as you walk in to activate the lights, which automatically extinguish themselves 15 seconds after you leave.

Technically, I don't think the Queen Mother does much waving these days, but you get the point. Motion-activated lighting is pretty green.

The planet-friendly facililities in question were at IBM's Auckland offices, where the company today unveiled the results of an Environment, Business & Technology survey it commissioned from the New Zealand Business Council for Sustainable Development (NZBCSD ... and you thought the IT industry had a license on initials out of control).

The online survey canvassed the opinions of 2302 New Zealanders, weighted to match the latest census profiles, but with a special subsection of 200 IT managers.

Some of the results that caught my eye:

IT folk are less green-minded than the average citizen: Specifically, only 55% of people working in IT believe business must become more environmentally-sustainable, compared to 65% of all correspondents.

Dubious: 28% of IT managers did not think it was possible to reduce IT emissions without compromising performance.

IT's a guy thing: Incidentally, NZBCSD CEO Peter Neilsen said this shouldn't be taken to mean computer industry people are more earth-hostile per se; it's more a function of the fact that in the overall survey men were less green, and more men than women work in IT.

IT has a killer carbon footprint: IBM NZ Systems & Technology Group Manager Andrew Fox quoted a Gartner study says information technology was responsable for 2% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions last year - equivalent to all the planet's airline's combined.

IT's getting worse: Technologies like virtualisation are helping us do more with a lot less (IBM's flagship virtualisation project, at the University of Auckland, saw around 200 physical servers reduced to 15 physical servers, which today host around 400 virtual servers. Yet demand is insatiable. By one count, over the next three years the planet will need three times as many servers, and 60 times as much storage capacity.
Accordingly, Gartner reckons IT-related emissions will double over the next four years.

The big stuff is the bad stuff: At a personal computing level, it's good to switch from a desktop to a laptop, or from a CRT monitor to a much less power-intensive LCD, and to always look for new gear that complies to the latest, strictest Energy Star rating (Energy Star 4). But the average laptop is a pretty green beast. It's data centres, and those suburb-size server farms in the US and elsewhere that chug above their weight: Gartner says they produce 30% to 40% of IT emissions. Less than half of that is related to power generated to run the servers themselves. The real killer is airconditioing - $US29 billion worth, last year.

Idle IT: Despite strides in virtualisation, Fox says a recent study finding your average server is idle 80% of the time, and your average processor 70%, is "optimistic".

People won't pay more for green, but will look elsewhere if you ain't got it: A third of respondents said they are more likely to buy a green product. However, only around 3% said they were willing to pay more. The rest offer companies a negative incentive: if you're product isn't environmenally-friendly, they'll skip it for one that is. Neilsen says this offers a "first move advantage" for companies that have made their products greener.

The building I work in is medieval: And so is yours, in terms of environmental-friendliness, at least compared to Meridian Energy's new Wellington HQ (above, centre), which opened last October. For starters, there's no air conditioning, and that means no noise (I hate our noisy air-con!). Rather, everything's done by ventilation, controlled by smart sensors. If things get too hot, cold water is piped through to chill the building's beams. If it gets too cold, heat pumps push through hot water. All drainage water is drawn from a rain-collection tank on the roof (you can take a virtual tour here).

Green IT in action: Meridian CIO Rob Bolton said the new building's green IT enhancements include wireless networking everywhere, and every employee being issued with a laptop and mobile phone as their virtual office. Why is that green? to take one of Bolton's many examples, everyone can walk into a meeting with their laptops, and wirelessly pull the same PowerPoint file off a server. No need for print outs.

Follow-me printing: Bolton has identical Fuji-Xerox multifunction printers installed around the building. Where-ever you are, totting your laptop, you can wirelessly send a file to a single virtual print queue, which automatically prints your document to the nearest Fuji-Xerox. The green angle? Bolton says people used to print screeds of stuff then forget which printer it had gone to; just forget it full-stop; or be unable to find it in an overflow of print-outs once they finally made their way to a printer (guilty! guilty!). As a side benefit, it also stops sensitive documents hanging around random print trays - a problem in every company.

The best server room? None: When I asked Bolton how he managed to chill Meridian's server's sans air-con, he replied the building had no servers. Wellington's CityLink fibre-optic loop meant inhouse servers biffed in favour of hosting with a third-party data-centre (which of course has to power and cool its server farm, but it's a more efficient set-up).

Cold? Feel the data: IBM's Fox pointed out most company's thinking is 40 years in the past. When they get the chance to set up a server room, they think of how many square metres they'll need, not about air flow or ventilation. And similarly, air con tends to be uniform - he compares it to cooling your entire kitchen rather than putting stuff that need to be chilled in the fridge - rather than targetted where needed (IBM has a whole suite of products for monitoring server rooms). Yet a data centre is always going to generate a decent whack of heat.

Fox says IBM is using heat exchange technology to work with several companies in Europe to experiment with using excess server room heat to warm their buildings during winter.

In one case, in Switzerland, IBM has rigged a Zurich company's data centre so it's heat is transferred to warm a next-door swimming pool (see the report in our sister publication TechWorld here).

Learning from the boy racers: Water cooling has long been a fad with case-moders, who bring boy racer frills to desktop PCs. It actually used to be the fashion in corporate IT circles too. And now, with electricty prices sprialling every-upward, it's making a come-back. Fox says water-cooled server racks are 4000 times more efficient

Posted by Chris Keall at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

First we turn NZ PC World contributors on the world, then they take over the world.

Erstwhile NZ PC World open source columnist Vik Olliver is part of an international team working on a printer that can "print" 3D objects by laying down layer after layer of plastic to create, say, a plastic bowl or an iPod case.

While others have developed 3D printers, West Aucklander Vik's project has two unique elements.

1). It's technology is shared with all-comers in open source fashion, as the team want 3D printers to become cheap and available for developing countries.

2). A key goal is to create a 3D printer that can replicate itself. Of course, there's a fine line between 3D printers for all, and self-replicating printers taking over the planet, which is probably why Computerworld's story on Vik's efforts has proved a huge hit, namechecked everywhere from Slashdot to CNet. Yes, sorry, it's proved so popular that it's slowed down all our sites. Read it here.

Dancing With the Stars
Meanwhile, just when you thought nothing could top David Pomeroy's Trinny and Susannah makeover in the glamour stakes, ex-PC World staff writer Malcolm Burgess turns up as a budding ballroom impresario.

Malcolm, now books editor at Wellington's DomionPost, was roped in to partner Julie Jacobson for an article that saw the pair drilled by Dancing With the Stars judges Paul Mercurio and Brendan Cole. Here's the pair's "journey", as they say on reality TV, in photos (one question: why does Paul Mercurio look in worse shape than me???):

Read Julie's full story on Stuff here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

I was at a CIO event Monday night, and got talking to a guy from Vector. He told me his company plans to put all overhead power lines in Auckland and Wellington below ground within 8 years. Within my own suburb - First World, here we come! - the timetable is within 2 years. While it's digging trenches in established suburbs, Vector could also lay some fibre optic cable, and indeed this is on the agenda, but not with so firm a timetable. With new subdivisions, Vector is among those vying to lay fibre (as is Telecom; here).

I hope fibre optic cable does come to my street.
Nothing beats fibre, whose bandwidth doesn't weaken with distance, as copper does, sharply.

Meanwhile, back in my copper cable reality, this week an ISP made the tantalising offer of providing me with ADSL2+ after, sadly, discovering that, like most, I'm too far from my local phone exchange (i.e. more than 1km away) for VDSL, rolling out from June.
Apparantly the copper cable in my street is just too crummy for ADSL2+ to render more than a "modest a best" speed boost (which I could already guess, given the slug-like performance of my DSL account).

To summarise, fact fans, the official copper foodchain now goes like this:

Dial-up: now with less than 50% market share. You know how slow it is.

DSL: Providing up to 7Mbit/s download and 700Kbit/s up, if you're within 6km of an exchange, the copper in your street is in good knick, not too many people are jamming up the net, and the lunar cycle is right.

ADSL2+: Revving to up to 24Mbit/s download and 1Mbit/s up, with the same provisos as DSL. Increasingly available, from Telecom (check the latest roll-out map here), and from Orcon and Vodafone (now incorporating the company formerly known as ihug) as they install their own gear in unbundled exchanges.

VDSL: Up to 250Mbit/s download if you live on top of an exchange (and up to 24Mbit/s upload); 100Mbit/s at 500m; 50Mbit/s at 1km, then after 1.5km similar to ADS2+. You mush live close enough to one of the Telecom exchanges that Vodafone plans to goose with VDSL during the second half of the year (more on Vodafone's plans here, and Telecom's govt imposed mandate to roll-out VDSL or equivalent-speed tech here).

Posted by Chris Keall at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 5 )