Sure Telstra own 98% of all copper lines in Australia… however few are aware the ACCC effectively controls Telstra retail & wholesale pricing so that Telstra resellers are able to compete with Telstra retail. In simple terms, the competitive offers are not with Telstra and any competitive offer from Telstra will likely see it withdrawn very quickly after a flood of lawsuits. So it can’t be price as Telstra is typically double the price of any other carrier.

“But Telstra have the best service!”. I’m not sure how anybody could say this either. NextG is the only word that needs to be said.

When NextG first kicked off, Bigpond started offering Wireless Broadband to everyone claiming coverage is available in their area. During this time I made a decent salary with on-site calls to confirm there is no coverage, and that the modem has to be returned to Telstra. At the time Telstra claimed that a result of no coverage with Wireless meant the customer could only exchange the wireless modem for an Bigpond ADSL service that was double the original cost. No refund was possible. The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman found this quite interesting and helped several of my customers receive a complete refund and expenses to cover my invoices.

Recently I’m seeing another problem with NextG – shit hardware. Sierra Wireless 880U & Maxon BP-USB devices often fail to work on brand new computers. Why? Bigpond seem to encourage the customer frequently reconnect the modem device… and do not ship the modem with a $1 USB extension lead. Therefore, the USB connectors wear out very quickly.

The latest trend for Bigpond Technical Support (13 3933 – tell them I sent you!) is to forward you to Gizmo. Bigpond does this when they decide they’re incapable of helping you. Gizmo charges $99 per hour for telephone support – often due to simple problems that Bigpond staff should be aware of, or faulty hardware which Bigpond staff should be familiar with identifying. $99 an hour for telephone support is quite laughable since my firm charges half this. Maybe I should bump up the rates.

Yet my firm offers technical support for the significantly cheaper phone and Internet products resold by Telstra… locally and free of charge. There are no Telstra stores in my area. My firm doesn’t just support the hardware we sell – but endeavour to support any hardware the customer may be using. Being familiar with our area, we don’t attempt to sell products that a customer cannot obtain anyway – we research our claims before we make them. Similar stories are true of many other Telstra resellers. My firm only resells Telstra services because its conveinent for support reasons – yet very few can understand this reasoning and still believe Telstra will offer a better grade of support (even though they call us to do it, and get billed for it).

There is also Bigpond E-mail. Bigpond have quite a reputation of being the biggest contributor to spam in Australia. In fact the “dynamic addressing” of their network makes it harder to identify spammers on the Bigpond network. They have had several national outages that have lasted from minutes to days. Bigpond does not offer virus or spam filtering without an extra cost. And, by using Bigpond mail it makes it much harder to change Internet companies. You can in effect get a better service from Google or Hotmail for free that is not tied to your broadband invoice. But still, somehow Bigpond E-mail is better than Australia Post.

A copper telephone is still required in order to have an ADSL connection due to Telstra policies. However VoIP is actually booming right now as its only a fraction of the cost to make calls, and results in significant savings, even when a VoIP account is added to the monthly invoices. Some people when they hear the word “VoIP” immediately put you in the same basket as Indian telemarketers. Have these people never made international calls and realized there is a latency? It is not the technology that creates the latency, but its the distance. VoIP is likely to be the only form of a conventional telephone service available, in the not to distant future. Telstra will likely fight VoIP feircely as their copper network is designed entirely around carrying voice signals. VoIP and the National Broadband Network will pose a serious threat to Telstra revenues if the NBN is ever built.

Excess charges is a huge reason to not go with Telstra. Bigpond Internet have a standard charge of around 14c per megabyte for excess downloads, which equates to $140 per gigabyte. Yet Telstra resellers can do it for a couple dollars. Its completely unreasonable to charge these kinds of prices and is a marketting trap in my opinion.

So back to my original complaint about Telstra. Why is there no other option other than Telstra? From my point of view, Telstra is not an option. I ask you – how do I signup to the Post Master General? The service you describe is nothing like my description of Telstra. My description of Telstra is: unethical, overpriced & poor service. I wonder which carrier Telstra staff choose…

Thank god for that – because the tool provided by Microsoft didn’t support many UPS’s anyway, which meant you had to use 3rd party software. In other words, the inclusion was pointless.

I found a really good utility that works in 2000, XP, 2003, Vista & 7 called UPS Assistant. Best part is UPS Assistant is free.

It auto detected my cheap no-brand UPS and only required slight tuning to the min & max voltage parameters so it matched the meter on the UPS. This particular UPS was not supported by Windows XP, but does work on Linux.

UPS Assistant can send out e-mail notifications on power failures or run a command.

As the V8s race around the mountain this weekend for the Bathurst 1000 I’m once again frustrated with Telstra Bigpond. I’m surprised that its gone on for so many years.

Bathurst 1000 supposedly attracts international interest. Certainly I can imagine Australians overseas wanting to keep in touch with Australian events. Its amusing how there is little mention of which channels air Bathurst 1000 overseas – probably because they’re all PayTV channels.

So if you live overseas and want to watch Bathurst, you have to be a PayTV subscriber. This requires you to have a physical coax line installed in your home from the street, or requires you to install a satellite dish. Not exactly a temporarily rig. But Bathurst is only a yearly event. Surely there is a market for online streaming.

And there is. Telstra Bigpond signed an exclusive coverage contract for the online arena. However Telstra Bigpond do not offer video streaming as a product of its own, but require you to have a Telstra Bigpond Broadband Internet connection. So in other words, if you live overseas, don’t wish to subscribe to PayTV for those other 11 months of the year, and want to watch Bathurst… stiff shit.

I was quite surprised by a customer, with no real technical capabilities, had specifically requested Linux. We ended up using Debian, NIS & NFS for ‘account roaming’ across multiple machines, and the Gnome Desktop.

The Internet stream initially seemed simple to solve but proved to be quite a challenge. Reliability was the major issue. I setup an Icecast stream and found due to my DSL connection dropping out, the stream would drop out some 6-12 times per day. Once every 2 hours did not seem acceptable.

The solution to that problem now encompasses two physically separated sites with their own independent Internet connections uploading the stream to two public Icecast servers. In order to allow for redundancy, the stream uploaders run Icecast servers and the public servers are configured to relay streams from these machines. With stream fallbacks, one of the stream uploaders can go offline, or one of the public servers can go offline, and the stream will remain in a working state. Even still, its important enough to warrant SMS notifications in the event any equipment in this pool goes offline – so we monitor it around the clock.

The only form of Internet available to us is ADSL from Telstra and their resellers. There simply are no other affordable options in our area since the OPEL project was canned by Krudd. This limits us to 384kB/sec at each stream uploader site. We can only afford one line at each uploader site, and there are other uses of the Internet connection, so the realistic available bandwidth is even less.

The bandwidth limitations meant we could only upload one high quality stream. However, we required several in different formats and bitrates to suit listeners requirements. Stream transcoding at the server end seemed the only possible solution – and it seems the Icecast developers aren’t interested in stream transcoding at all due to ‘quality loss’. There are very few applications available to handle this task. I ended up making numerous watchdogs for the buggy streamtranscoder package from oddsock. This enabled us to transcode the stream into another 3 formats.

Playback in web browsers seemed to be another drawback for Icecast/Shoutcast. Two methods are possible – use HTML <embed> tags to request a plugin the user may or may not have installed, or use Adobe Flash. Adobe Flash seems sensible, but its lack of handling for live streams makes it the worst choice – playback is distorted, or non-existant, in many mainstream browsers. I’m still to develop a reliable method to play the stream in a browser that “works everywhere”.

Another problem the station faced was broadcast recordings. By law, ACMA requires the broadcast is recorded and copies are retained for 6 weeks. The old solution was huge piles of VCR machines which would fall over frequently for many different reasons including tapes only lasting 6 months with the duty cycle the station imposed on them.

A couple shell based tools made recording possible with just a shell script executed from cron. But like always, it took some time to perfect. We had also added a terabyte of RAID5 so there was plenty of storage for 2 months of recordings at a high bitrate which seemed an easier number to archive. The implementation of this quite simplistic shell script has been a huge success – with many presenters pulling their own shows, for their own archiving purposes, from the recording system I setup. It is the primary method for recording radio shows today.

Better software for broadcasting from the PC is in the works at last. It seemed the station was initially interested, but then failed to locate a presenter who was willing to use such a system. We now have one – and hopefully can use this presenter to turn more. Its still unclear how we can wire it to the FM broadcasting equipment while retaining reliability.

Given the special requirements for a radio station, and the costs of licensing software to handle it – seems you’d be crazy to not take the Linux route. But it isn’t an easy route – but that seems true for any PC solution for public radio broadcasting.

It does seem Microsoft have improved the kernel since Vista, so there are some performance benefits. Additionally the visual effects have been “toned down” so they don’t hammer graphics and CPU as much.

And probably the most significant change – User Access Control is nothing like it is in Vista and prompts far less.

I myself did end up skipping Windows Vista. However selling it as an OEM I never had much complaints and in fact told my customers I believed the bad rumours about Vista do not come from knowledgeable sources, neither are the rumours accurate. I actually built quite a success list of machines upgraded to Vista etc., where Vista was actually faster! Although I do disable UAC on Vista completely.

Trying out the Windows Live Writer too, since its compatible with Wordpress. I just might blog more often if I can easily post articles.

Senator Conroy, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, appears to be out of touch with the Internet industry. The only ISP to accept the ‘live-trial’ of a censorship system was iiNet, who claimed they’re participating to point out how errorant the governments proposal is. Not even Telstra accepted.

The ‘live-trial’ was quite interesting indeed. The government proposes we filter child pornography, and other ‘illegal content’ not yet defined. They’re proposing a filter with an absolute maximum of 10,000 entries. I fail to see how this will be useful in blocking any content. Additionally, the ‘live-trial’ will not be conducted on real-world ISP networks – infact, a much smaller network which completely nulls out any scalability testing. South Cross Cables claims to hold 480Gbps to the USA and new International carriers are soon to enter the market – any realistic ‘live-trial’ would be of a larger list, for significantly larger quantities of bandwidth.

The mention of Southern Cross Cables brings up another issue… if content within Australia can be successfully ‘taken down’ by law enforcement, why is the proposed censorship at the ISP level? Clearly the issue is with International bandwidth which places any censorship with International carriers like Southern Cross Cables, and not ISPs which are often small businesses who will likely find it difficult to finance any censorship systems.

The Unitied Kingdom is the Governments number 1 case example of Internet Censorship that works… its now hitting the headlines that the UK is filtering certain Wikipedia pages. I’m really surprised they don’t mention China as another location where Internet Censorship has worked.

I’m not the only one who holds the views that censorship isn’t the answer, and know a number of persons in the Internet industry who carry similar views to my own.

Instead of censorship – IP addressing should be ’static’ by law. This will mean unique users can easily be identified on the Internet, and provided they don’t divulge the information, their address and name will remain private – obtainable only by a court order. Static addressing for all will also mean voluntary blocklists like anti-spam DNSBLs will be more effective, it should be much harder for a spammer to obtain a new address (relocation of ISP perhaps?). Telstra happens to be the largest offender of dynamic addressing in Australia. But don’t be fooled, it isn’t a national problem – its a global problem.

Greater regulation also needs to be created to deal with questionable online activities, ISPs divluging information to courts, and what justifies as undeniable evidence in the computer world.

Clearly Internet censorship is nothing to worry about. It may pass into law, but it’ll come and go. Just a few more billion dollars wasted by Krudd

Getting back into repairs has gotten me back in the loop. I intend on blogging more about my daily life with all of the above… revisiting once per week.

I’ve also wiped my blog for a ‘fresh start’

Yesterday, there were protests across the country against the governments proposal to censor the Internet. As you can see from the above photo, it was a huge success in Sydney

UPDATE: APC Mag did a nice writeup on how much these protests sucked. Except they thought the opposite. Hundreds? What, across the whole country? These are the only people with Internet?

Its been a problem for the past month, if you ask me.

Next scheduled update: Jan 9, 2009

Merry christmas from Microsoft!