Is Douglas Webb's replacement a poacher turned gamekeeper?

It took the government a long time to find a replacement for outgoing Telecommunications Commissioner Douglas Webb, perhaps because it's not the sort of job anyone would take on lightly. Webb's tenure is best described as a drawn-out fiasco - he is after all the flip-flopping Commissioner who could've unbundled Telecom's network in 2003, but didn't. That decision was his most important one, and has been widely criticised as the reason New Zealand is so behind in telecommunications.

Will Patterson be able to clear up the mess left by Webb? We'll see; he's not a known name in telco land, but a competition lawyer who appears to have advised clients on how to deal with the ACCC in Australia and the Commerce Commission in New Zealand.

Here's the official release on Patterson's appointment:

Hon David Cunliffe
Minister of Communications

Dr Ross Patterson has been appointed the Telecommunications Commissioner and a member of the Commerce Commission for a period of five years starting 12 July 2007, says Communications Minister David Cunliffe.

He will take over the role from the current commissioner Douglas Webb, who steps down on 11 July.

"This is a key appointment and it was vital that we took appropriate steps to find the best candidate for the job," Mr Cunliffe said. "The commissioner will play a pivotal role in implementing the new telecommunications regime introduced following the May 2006 Stocktake and December's Telecommunications Amendment Act.

"Dr Patterson will have lead responsibility in monitoring the telecommunications market and ensuring, in a robust and impartial manner, that the enhanced regime promotes an effective and competitive telecommunications environment which delivers long term benefits for end users."
Dr Patterson is a New Zealand lawyer currently working in Sydney, Australia as a partner of Minter Ellison Lawyers, where he heads their competition and regulatory practice. His principal areas of expertise include all aspects of competition law, telecommunications law, payment systems regulation and competition policy initiatives. He has a PhD in commercial law, and regularly provides commentary and articles for publications and journals in Australia, New Zealand and overseas.

He is president of the Australia New Zealand Business Council, and a member of the Australian New Zealand Leadership Forum combined working group on competition law and consumer protection, the Competition Law and Policy Institute of New Zealand and the Trade Practices Committee of the Law Council of Australia.

"Dr Patterson will bring with him extensive experience and knowledge in competition and regulatory issues in New Zealand and Australia. He has significant experience in dealing with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the New Zealand Commerce Commission and the Australian Competition Tribunal," Mr Cunliffe said.

The minister thanked Mr Webb, who in March agreed to stay in the role at this important time until his replacement was appointed.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 1:16 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Parallel problems plague programmers.

One curious feature in Intel's new Santa Rosa platform is the Dynamic Acceleration of single cores in the mobile CPUs. That is, if you have two cores in a CPU, and one of them gets busy, it automatically "overclocks" for a performance boost.

Likewise, if the other core is just lazing around doing nothing, it can be put into a low-power sleep state. Graham Tucker at Intel Australia says the transitions are very fast, and measured in micro-seconds after a certain utilisation threshold has been reached - BIOS support is required of course.

I've been thinking about this feature, which will make it into desktop and server processors as well soon. First, it'd be interesting to test it and trigger it via software somehow. Maybe it's possible to turbo up both cores in the processor at the same time even?

The other question that occurred to me was... "why is Intel doing this?" Intel has always been big on parallelism and multi-processing, but just because you can implement that in hardware doesn't mean things will go faster.

Writing multi-threaded applications is notoriously difficult, and I suspect that the dynamic acceleration of cores is something of a fix for that. Speeding up single-threaded apps probably gives a more readily apparent improvement in user experience than Intel would like to admit.

More on this once I get to the bottom of the issue.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 3 )

They won't make you green around the Gills either, I promise.

One of my favourite Welshmen, Chris Bell, who pops up in various editorial capacities at Fairfax regularly, is a hugely good and famous writer of fiction as well.

Chris has been published a number of times, but recently decided to give away much of his work on his new website. Why? Go to the site and read; Chris will tell you better than I could, but it's about the readers really.

He's put a few girly poems in there too, like The Smell of Granny's Toast and Tenancy Agreement, but that's OK. They won't steal your piece of beef or marrow bone or make you throw a poker at his head.

I really like that one.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

RADIATION ALERT! ! !

I'm telling you, this is the end of all the Vodafones, Telecoms, Wooshes and whathaveyou-wireless companies in the world. For they are irradiating our children! Wifi-ing them till they're all wrinkly and desiccated, just as if they'd been put into a microwave.

Even if a "mobile phone mast" radiation measures a mere one per cent of the limit, wifi in classrooms at three times as much is clearly unacceptable. Three per cent of a low limit is bad, mmkay? Doesn't matter that Wifi and and cellular radios run in very different frequency ranges either, because that'd just confuse people wouldn't it?

I saw this coming many years ago, and wrote about it then. It was inspired by NIMBYs in Devonport objecting to Vodafone erecting a cellular access point on Mt Victoria, because there's a primary school nearby. Somehow I don't think said parents remember to turn off their mobile phones when picking up the kids in their fine particulate-spewing diesel 4WDs, or giving their little ones tinfoil hats with the shiny side out to bounce off radiation or think about the sun much, but that's besides the point. Radiation is a big bad word and henceforth, Wifi and mobile phones are pure evil, and any purveyors of such hideousness will surely go under soon.

Guy Kewney's Newswireless has a good long post on the topic, with some hilarious stuff like the former PM of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, being "electro-sensitive" to mobile phones.

'My favourite clash with mast debaters on this was outside the local fire station last summer. There, a group of people stood, grim-faced and determined, in the sunshine, adamant that their children, who were within half a mile of a proposed 3G phone mast, should be spared this danger. And I can assure you that even with Factor 50 sun cream, they will have been exposed to more radiation in the hour or so they spent on the street, than they will ever "suffer" from having a WiFi access point in their classroom.'

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 9 )

In three to five days you could be the coolest Mac Marine on the block!

And, you can get up to 500 of them as well - excellent! Other Apple fanbois will mug you the instant you put that lovely, gooey, yummy black thing into your ear so you need spares. A lot of spares.

They're probably fakes but so what? We're talking iPhones here! You hear me? IPHONES!

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 4 )

Deloitte-audited or not, people say it ain't showing the right figures - and Ihug agrees.

Good: Ihug responded fast to customer concerns over the usage meter apparently going haywire.

Bad: the usage meter is still displaying random values according to feedback I've received after blog posts here.

EC for instance wrote in to say that in just two weeks, his usage was adjusted upwards by... wait for it... 4.3GB. Yes, four point three gigabytes. Ihug's helpdesk has admitted to EC that there is a problem with counting usage, and the provider is trying to resolve it.

Others report that they see different usage figures depending on the meter view they pick.

This really isn't good enough, Ihug.

Update Looks like the usage meter has been mended. Ihug told me so earlier this afternoon, a few people have contacted me to say things are copacetic on the usage meter front for them.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 4 )

The official reply from Ihug is posted.

We'd like to assure all ihug customers, and everyone that has commented on this issue, that ihug's data measurement methods are extremely accurate, as proven by a recent external audit conducted by Deloitte's.

We agree that it's vital that internet users are able to trust their internet providers when it's come to counting their data allowance - especially when the plan they've paid for is based on how much data they get, as opposed to speed, which is why ihug uses an external agency to
audit this process.

We recently upgraded our data counting system and as some customers experienced over and under-counting of data during the upgrade (mentioned in the comments earlier in this blog e.g. from ihug's newsgroup etc), we didn't rate limit these customers during that time i.e. we didn't slow their speeds down if they'd hit their data allowance. For customers on plans where they get charged for excess data, we waited until their data had been accurately processed before we billed them.

We would like to sincerely apologise for any confusion over this issue but please be assured that ihug is counting and billing for data correctly. The disclaimer on our online tracker within my account is simply to let customers know that there is a delay from when data is used to when it reaches our database and is then shown on the tracker. Due to the upgrade some data is taking longer than normal to be being processed at the moment, with some data from a few days ago still being processed - which is why the screenshots of data usage in this blog
changed slightly each time the data tracker was checked (and also the reason for some of the other issues talked about on
PressF1. We hope to have data processing as close to real time as possible again in the next few days - we'll keep you posted.

The main point is, we certainly haven't been saving money or defrauding unsuspecting users!

Cheers,
The team at ihug

P.S. Some people were talking about using their own data measurement program - ihug counts all traffic that is sent to and from a customer's connection so any conflicting counts you get may be due to the fact that the program used to monitor the traffic uses different measurement
criteria. We still recommend that you use our online data tracker (with your ihug bill as the final data record).

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 6 )

Are you getting what you're paying for?

I'm not so sure, not when it comes to NZ's Internet-on-the-meter with small data caps. You pay for 1, 3, 5 and 10GB of traffic, maybe more, and if you go over it, you're either throttled down to dial-up speed or have to pay more. If we're going to have that, ISPs should have to make some effort to ensure that their usage meters are accurate.

However, how do we know that data usage is being accurately recorded? The TelstraClear example recently is perhaps an extreme one, but it's not the first or last I've heard about.

Now Ihug customers are up in arms over what they say is a meter recording random usage. One Ihug customer sent me three screen grabs from May 11, 12, and 13:

The person says he hasn't used as much data as the meter says, and runs an app to keep count of the bytes traversing his end of the Internet. Ihug tries to wash it hands of having to provide an accurate usage meter by saying the data tracker only "gives an idea" of how much has been used and that there's no guarantee the information is 100% current at any given time.

It's difficult to say who is right or wrong here, but I am struck by the fact that Ihug's usage meter displays different amounts of data for the same days, within that three-day interval. How is that possible?

Some more voices from the ihug.general newsgroup:

After emailing IHUG (3 days into the month my useage was not only extraordiarily high, but the data useage page shows double the data on the monthly detail page) they suggested I use Net Limiter to monitor useage.
Too early to tell exactly, because I started monitoring after downloading email etc, but now my useage shows:
IHUG: 101MB
NetLim: 18.7MB
I certainly did not use 80MB before installing

Just to add to the tales of woe.....

I've been online for 1.5hrs today. And all I've done is download a few emails and look at a few web pages. No attachments. NetLimiter tells me I've used 500KB. IHUG's usage meter reckons 50MB.

I've only been on broadband for 3 days and the previous days look outrageously high as well - but I've only just got NetLimiter 2 Monitor to get a better feel as to what is going on.

I have watched my allowance rise today - and kept a few periodic printouts which make interesting reading. The traffic is growing for *previous* days - between 3pm and 5pm my traffic for 10th May went from 513MB to 1074MB, and the traffic for 11th May grew from 4693MB to 4721MB. To my recollection I haven't travelled any time machines today. Bear in mind this was over a 2 hour period - different days have been growing prior to this. Currently my 10th May is up to 1343MB and 11th May is up to 5325MB. It's fair evidence that the usage meter is broken.

Just called IHUG and spoke with someone there.... they are aware of the issue (duh) and are awaiting some hardware changes before the issue will be resolved. I was asked to call back during business hours to speak to a manager who will be able to remove the rate limiting/extra data.

Dear Customer,

It has come to our attention that some customers may have had their data usage calculated incorrectly. With that, the rate limit has not been inforced your account. This will have no affect on your internet browsing and a fault has been lodged to have this issue corrected.

Thank you for your continued support of ihug products and services.

The person who contacted me is taking the matter to the Commerce Commission, and I can't blame him. After all, even the lowliest market trader has to have accurate scales at pain of huge fines if they're not.

So why then do ISPs who sell metered quantities of data get away with usage meters showing random data?

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 14 )

Well, across the pond they get them. I know, not directly tech related but...

... it sure as hell matters when it comes to keeping techies and related business here. More details here on SMH.

At a first glance, it seems the Aussies are spending billions on infrastructure too. I was looking for the bits in the budget mentioning the fibre network build haven't found them yet.

This will put pressure on the NZ government.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

And... the UPRotW Award goes to Orcon!

For immediate release

There's a constipated joke in there somewhere...

Orcon’s Broadband speeds beat out rivals

Does it really? That's not bad, considering all Orcon's doing is reselling the same "broadband" as its outbeaten rivals.

As a part of their on-going commitment to providing New Zealand's best broadband, Auckland based telecommunications provider Orcon has announced that it has increased its international and domestic network capacity.

Ooh, excellent. Good one, Orcon! So, how much more capacity then? Hmm? You're not going to tell me?

”Orcon is making certain that our broadband product is light years ahead of everyone else! We are providing one of, if not the best bandwidth ratios per user in the industry, meaning that our customers are receiving the best broadband experience possible" says Orcon’s General Manager, Scott Bartlett.

Goodness! Light years ahead now with first-generation DSL. Impressive. I guess we won't be told what the "best bandwidth ratio per user in the industry" is though. I'm not receiving a good media release experience here, Orcon!

Orcon's network engineers conduct rigorous planning and forecasting to ensure that additional bandwidth is bought onto the network in plenty of time to satisfy demand. Because of this continuous upgrade process there will not be a noticeable difference in connection speed for most users.

But... hang on a sec: Orcon, you just said the speeds beat out your rivals. What do you mean, "no noticeable difference in connection speed"?

"Users are placing increased demands on the network every day as they begin to use more sophisticated multimedia applications. This, coupled with the volume of users that we are bringing onto the service, means we have to be planning well ahead to keep up with demand. We are truly proud of the speeds our network delivers, with global internet speed test site speedtest.net ranking Orcon’s UBS network the fastest DSL broadband in New Zealand among the larger providers" concluded Bartlett.

Is that what Speedtest says?

Not quite, I conclude.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 3 )

Sometimes things don't go according to the best laid plans of geek-men and computer mice. That's OK, it happens all the time, especially with computers.

I had a bad case of the above last week, with an ASUS Santa Rosa, or Centrino Duo as the official name is. The notebook itself seems pretty good: nicely built, runs quiet and cool, good specs (2GHz Core Duo plus 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 and 160GB SATA HD) but when I fired it up, I was dumped at the Vista product activation screen.

Hmm. As I couldn't reconfigure the network settings to make it activate over the Internet, I did the phone song and dance routine with Microsoft's robo voice machine. Put briefly, it's involves keying in lots of digits - nine groups of six - over the phone. If all goes well, the robo voice reads out another 72 digits for you to key in to activate Vista.

Except this time, it accepted the digits I keyed in, but told me I have an invalid copy. It was after office hours so I decided against speaking to a live helldesker, and thought... "maybe the recovery DVD will sort me out?" I mean, that's what it's there for, right?

So, pop it into the DVD drive, boot the lappy, click click click, yes I'm sure I want to restore the machine. Then, bang:

No go. I tried several times, but the recover disc would not go past that stage. Oh well, I popped out the disc and thought I should try the phone thing again, just in case. The recovery disc had however accomplished something: it had repartitioned the hard drive, so there was now no bootable OS on it.

Whoopsies. Not a biggie, I suppose, but I can see how it might irritate some computer buyers.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 3 )