Optus has lost ground in the ADSL market over the past few years. It seems this has actually been a deliberate move as 4 years ago Optus decided to discontinue its offering of Telstra resold ADSL connections in favour of promoting its own ADSL & Wireless Broadband networks. John Linton of Exetel is also known for his continual complaints of how there is no money to be made in reselling Telstra services – so this is likely why Optus decided to exit this market.

iiNet (who I like to call iiBorg) last week purchased TransACT for $60 million. The Financial Review blew the whistle on this acquisition before the deal was finalized causing iiBorg to suspend share trading. Naturally, the new iiBorg marketing focuses on “the leading challenger” and “number 2” which strangely always makes me relate iiBorg to faeces (number 1 for urine, number 2 for faeces, number 3 is 2 + 1). This is especially because iiBorg are making a huge deal about gaining position ahead of a carrier who had no interest in remaining at that position anyway. The marketing focus of iiBorg since this news is complete and utter shit.

iiBorg probably bought up TransACT for two reasons. The primary reason would be the ADSL customer base. The secondary reason would be TransACT’s fibre optic network across Canberra and TransACT’s datacentres and fibre optic backhaul in Canberra and Victoria. $60 million to put iiBorg ahead of Optus in ADSL subscribers, and to buy up datacentres and other infrastructure, seems like a deal too good to be true.

But now its no longer Telstra followed by Optus across the Australian telecoms market. Its now only true for the fixed line & mobile telecom markets because of this recent lost ground for Optus. I may even have to rethink my use of “The Big 3” to describe the major 3 carriers Telstra, Optus & Vodafone.

Its also now probably more true than ever that iiBorg is too big of a company to consider using, as a big telecoms company tends to have uncompetitive offerings because their products need to suit everybody in order to remain so big, and big companies can often leave the consumer feeling like “just another number”.

It was also recently revealed that TPG have 4.4% of iiBorg shares, and TPG have stated they have no other interest in iiBorg than their “strategic purchase of shares”. You wonder what their strategy is about and if that involves the acquisition of, or merger with iiBorg, as many have speculated.

John was talking about how the cost of delivering data to ADSL customers has changed partly due the continual fall of the cost of IP data and because of the increases in the amount of content delivered from the Akamai and Google cache’s in Sydney.

I found this interesting cause some time during the past year or two I noticed that Google traffic was progressively “switched on” to be served over Pipe Networks who have incredibly low cost peering solutions for Internet Service Providers, typically at a much lower cost than any other transit provider. At first only Google Search seemed to be served from Pipe, and later other sites like YouTube were added.

I remember a time in the distant past where over 90% of all Internet data in Australia had a source or destination that was offshore. In the days of dialup Internet I worked for a small rural ISP who decided that as the majority of their traffic was to/from the United States they would bypass the high costs of Telstra and other Australian carriers and get a satellite link from an American firm directly to Los Angeles.

In the past 10 years there have been improvements in the fibre optic links between the US and Australia and there are now numerous non-Telstra suppliers of international transit. Pipe Networks was the most recent entry to international transit with their fibre link to the US via Guam. These improvements are what John was talking about with the fall in cost for IP data.

How times have changed. Now in the days of broadband and heavy focuses on latency, using satellite or directly linking to America would be an absurd decision to make.

I believe that eventually, every large Internet firm will be placing servers close to the end user, so that international data is only a fraction of data used by end users. This would mean that international transit will become a realm for web sites and hosting firms, and will no longer be a primary focus for ISPs even in the Australian market which is very geographically isolated.

• Facebook – www.v6.facebook.com
• Google – ipv6.google.com
• mirror.aarnet.edu.au
• xs4all Usenet Server – newszilla6.xs4all.nl (although I pay for an Astraweb account so I don’t actually use this)

I noticed that Facebook is slightly faster over IPv6 because AARNet’s links to California has latency around 30ms less than Exetel’s own links via Verizon.

I do a bit of web hosting myself. I’m advised by two of my major hosting providers, iWeb & Jumba, that native IPv6 will be coming very soon.

I operate a VPN network for my business – so that I can remotely access client networks as if I’m directly connected to it. I’ve begun using AARNet to setup IPv6 as a secondary VPN network. So that hosts on these networks aren’t exploited I’ve also implemented software firewalls at all these sites so that only my own IPv6 subnets can access most services. This seems to be a mistake most people make when connecting to IPv6, something I will have to blog about later.

The most commonly used network software these days is already IPv6 enabled. Remote Desktop & File Sharing (CIFS) work fine over IPv6 on XP, Vista & 7. Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and most other web browsers are IPv6 enabled. Only instant messaging and VNC for Windows seem to be the apps not IPv6 enabled.

Today there are some reasonable uses for IPv6, and this will only increase.

Apparently none of the embedded network devices I commonly use like ADSL routers & VoIP ATA devices are IPv6 enabled as yet. I contacted Netcomm a few weeks ago requesting information on what devices they offer will be IPv6 enabled with firmware upgrades – yet to receive a response.

NBN Co bought radio spectrum licenses from Austar the other day for $120 million to enable NBN Co to provide satellite internet to those who won’t be connected to the NBN or wireless. And then there is the other $43 billion.

Telstra the other day announced its planning to roll out LTE wireless technology soon and has conducted lab and field trials with Huawei. The lab trials achieved real world speeds of 150mbit on 20MHz of bandwidth while the field trials on 10MHz of bandwidth achieved nearly 70mbit. Telstra have also previously confirmed their 3G HSDPA network will be upgraded to 84mbit theoretical speeds this year.

Telstra’s announcement prompted Optus & Vodafone to also confirm they’re conducting trials with Huawei and will likely serve to rush the market into adopting faster 3G and LTE.

I also wonder about the public safety aspect of the NBN. Mobile phones have batteries these days that last days to weeks on standby, or hours when used in calls. The NBN requires battery backup systems to be employed in every home to ensure phone services will operate during a power outage. It will become a huge issue in the future with people unable to call emergency services in a power outage because their battery backup simply didn’t last long enough or the battery has not been replaced and does not hold charge.

So when ADSL2+ can deliver a maximum of 24mbit, and significantly faster wireless is coming in the next 2 years – there seems little point adopting the NBN (at least at 100mbit speeds). Its simply too little too late. I’m predicting that most will migrate to wireless services as their primary connection before the NBN is fully operational as it will simply be better than ADSL.

I operate about 8 wireless hotspots in my town which provides total coverage to the entire central business district of the tourism driven town I live in. Some of these hotspots are at hotels, most of them are in shops. These hotspots are D-Link DIR-300 devices which use Tomizone so the “captive-portal” is handled all in box, payments are processed by Tomizone, technical support is the responsibility of Tomizone however I have no control over pricing. Over the past year there has been a significant drop in usage – about 50%, resulting in less profit.

When I first implemented this WiFi network I would daily see people using the service on their notebooks in cafes. Today I see people in cafes using 3G dongles.

Pricing is perhaps a main driver as Tomizone presently charge $3 per hour or 60MB, $6 per day or 160MB or $30 per week or 1200MB. Given that providers like Exetel sell excess data at $1 per GB I’ve tried my best to strongly suggest to Tomizone they slash their prices significantly and provide more download quota. Whereas, 3G services can be as low as $5 per month and can be used anywhere mobile reception is available.

People who use very little data are also slowly moving to 3G, although this movement is probably a lot slower than WiFi. In some cases 3G is better priced – for example Bigpond charge $29.95 per month for 256/64 ADSL with 2GB quota where Exetel sell a 3GB 7.2mbit 3G service for $30 per month.

3G is also perhaps more flexible for these users as there are no reconnection fees if the person decides to move, and they have the option of taking their broadband with them if they own a notebook computer.

Overall, in a country like Australia where the population is geographically sparse – I won’t be surprised if wireless over the next 10-20 years becomes the primary method of telecommunications. There are already more mobile phones in Australia than fixed line phones.

Whirlpool are currently conducting the yearly Australian Broadband Survey.

As always I’ve completed the survey some ISPs tend to view the survey results and try to better their offerings based on the suggestions.

One question I found interesting this year was “Is there anything you dislike about your ISP’s terms of service?” which I answered “ISP does change conditions frequently”. It seems that John Linton of Exetel likes to change the plans every 3 months, sometimes for better or worse. It’d be nice if pricing were stable.

Also since last year my line sync speed has risen from 7000/384 to 8100/1024 due to upgrading to ADSL2+. Telstra Wholesale decided to improve their offerings for ADSL2+ last year and thus many ISPs signed up to their ADSL2+ products which they did not previously offer.

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

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?