Fibre plan huge opportunity for New Zealand
InternetNZ congratulates the Minister of Communications Stephen Joyce and the Government for solidly following through with their pre-election commitment to a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network for New Zealand.
InternetNZ Executive Director Keith Davidson says the proposal announced today is very much aligned to InternetNZ’s thinking and the conclusions of the Network Strategies report commissioned by InternetNZ last year.
At the outset, the inclusive regional open access approach being adopted looks very promising, says Davidson. “InternetNZ is in agreement with the high-level principles articulated in the proposal and with the overarching requirements for open access, equivalence and interconnection standards. Read more
Internet users rights at risk, says InternetNZ
InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) welcomes the release for public
consultation of the Telecommunications Carriers’ Forum Draft ISP
Copyright Code.
InternetNZ Executive Director Keith Davidson says the rights of Internet
users are at risk.
“I urge everyone who is interested in the rights of Internet users to
read the draft Code and provide input to the TCF’s consultation. Users
should not be disconnected based on untested allegations.” Read more
Digital Strategy 2.0 welcomed
InternetNZ broadly supports the Government’s Digital Strategy 2.0 which was released today. InternetNZ asserts the plan provides a robust framework for New Zealand’s future in the digital world, but notes ongoing concern that the included broadband targets remain too slow.
“The Strategy builds on the strong framework developed in the first Digital Strategy, and adds a useful broader dimension focusing on the outcomes that digital technology can have on people’s lives and impact on the broader economy. This is an improvement, and as a whole the Strategy remains a world-leading approach,” says Keith Davidson, InternetNZ Executive Director. Read more
2006 Cyberlaw Research Published
The working paper from 2006 Cyberlaw Fellow Judit Bayer has recently been published by Victoria University’s Faculty of Law, and will be distributed to InternetNZ members.
Her paper – titled “Liability of Internet Service Providers for Third Party Content” – considers ISP liability within a variety of different fields of New Zealand law.
The following is an extract from the paper’s Foreward, written by Victoria University Law Professor Susy Frankel. Read more
Nii Quaynor Receives Jon Postel Service Award
The international Internet Society has awarded pioneering Internet engineer Nii Quaynor the prestigious Jonathan B. Postel Service Award for 2007 for his leadership in advancing
Internet technology in Africa and galvanizing technologists to improve Internet access and capabilities throughout the continent.
The Internet Society presented the award, including a USD$20,000 honorarium, during the 70th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Read more
TelstraClear Best Performing DSL Provider – Epitiro
TelstraClear has come out tops in an analysis of New Zealand DSL providers conducted by Internet research firm Epitiro.
Epitiro measured packet loss, ping times, traffic flow, connection, and the server response times and speeds of New Zealand’s five largest ISPs (Xtra, TelstraClear, ihug, Orcon and Slingshot).
Tests were conducted in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch from 20 July to 10 September 2007, measuring DSL performance every fifteen minutes.
Slingshot ranked second and Orcon third.
Surf globally, connect locally!
A bit cheesy, perhaps, but it conveys the essence of connecting the Internet: you join to the nearest node and it lets you have access to the global network. That’s how the Internet works and how it has always worked. After all, if no-one swapped traffic there wouldn’t be an Internet - just a collection of smaller, far less useful networks. Remember Compuserve and Prodigy? The way we exchange traffic is by interconnecting, or peering as the techies call it.
The way it works in New Zealand is that the ISPs all haul their trafffic to neutral points called peering exchanges. The original ones are in Wellington and Auckland, now there are exchanges in Palmerston North, Christchurch and Dunedin as well. At the exchanges ISPs just hand over traffic that is intended for each others’ networks. Simple, obvious and fast, not to mention cheap. This is the way the Internet works.
In 2004, the two telcos stopped peering with other ISPs in New Zealand. TelstraClear led the charge on this, and Telecom followed suit. They forced the third party ISPs either to pay them to accept traffic for Paradise or Xtra customers, or to haul their traffic to Los Angeles where Telstra or Telecom pick it up for free. (Paradise and Xtra customers between them make up the majority of consumer Internet connections.) And guess who the ISPs have to pay to move their traffic that far - yes, the telcos. A side-effect of that was that hosting big websites onshore in New Zealand became more expensive than hosting in California. Big New Zealand sites were under pressure to shift offshore, with consequent loss of jobs and revenue in New Zealand.
If you use streaming content like the RadioNZ website you pick it up locally (and quickly) from your nearest New Zealand peering exchange - unless of course you are a Paradise or Xtra customer in which case you have to get it slowly and expensively from the States, because the telcos won’t peer at the exchnages. It’s hard to see this as anything other than a deliberate attempt to push up the competition’s costs while slowing down most people’s Internet. New Zealand’s Internet users and businesses become collateral damage in a piece of aggressive corporate behaviour.
That’s the context for today’s announcements of an earnings drop by TelstraClear. Business users are staying away from TelstraClear in droves. One reason for that has got to be the lack of peering. By refusing to accept traffic locally TelstraClear is slowing down business connections, pushing up their costs through unnecessary international traffic, and forcing hosting services offshore. With that kind of attitude to their customers and the rest of the Internet, is it any surprise that customers are voting with their feet and their wallets?
It’s long been clear that the technicians at the telcos have been appalled at their managements’ decisions to damage the Internet and New Zealand businesses by refusing to peer. They haven’t been listened to. But seeing business customers deserting the companies may concentrate the minds of those who tell the techs what to do. Let’s hope so.
Breaking up is hard to do
Apparently, anyway. What other reason can there be for Telecom promoting its model of operational separation as ‘the BT model’ when it is nothing of the sort?
The key to the separation which BT has done is hiving off the network into a separate division, called Openreach, with a separate accountability from the rest of the business. Openreach can - and does - actively seek business from non-BT suppliers. Remember, the UK is the country where mobile phone companies give out free wired broadband if you spend more than $90 per month on your mobile.
Telecom, instead of making the network a separate business, wants to specify the network services that other companies get access to on a fair basis - and it only wants to do that for three services. Which we all have to agree on now. In a fast-changing environment like the Internet. Hmm.
Telecom has called for regulatory certainty so it can get on with the job. InternetNZ wants that, too - but let’s do it properly. We all seem to agree that the BT model is the one to implement. We need to be clear what that means, and it’s more than Telecom is proposing.
In the meantime, Telecom is still discriminating against the other ISPs by not letting them connect to the network by ethernet, which is cheap and modern, but insisting they connect through ATM, which is expensive and obsolete. Guess what Xtra gets to use? Yes, ethernet. And Telecom can provide a new DSL line for an Xtra boradband customer in a day, compared with up to two weeks for customers of the other ISPs.
And an update on last week’s post about Bronwyn Howell’s submission: not only have two respectable economists rubbished her paper, the company whose work she was criticising, MED advisor Network Strategies, is incensed. Here are their concluding paragraphs:
Network Strategies believes that the current Select Committee process considering amendments to the Telecommunications Act is key to delivering New Zealand’s future competitive telecommunications environment. Given the importance of this Select Committee process, it has become necessary for us to address publicly a submission to the Select Committee which includes misinterpretation and serious misrepresentation of some of our earlier advice to the Ministry of Economic Development on New Zealand’s broadband gap.
In summary, we believe that the misunderstanding, misrepresentation and misquotation of Network Strategies’ work found throughout the Howell submission is of an extremely serious nature as these errors are used to form the bases of arguments and conclusions which seek to persuade the Select Committee to follow a particular regulatory course.
Quite.
Telecom sets a new direction
This is the title of a press release from Telecom today.
Last week, a new regulatory regime was announced that fundamentally changes the telecommunications market in New Zealand.
Telecom understands that the public supports these changes.
That’s a big step forward. Until now Telecom has ploughed on regardless of public opinion. Its CE’s comments to sharemarket analysts a few weeks ago indicate, to put it charitably, a blatant disregard for the views of its customers.
Interestingly, the release quotes Telecom’s chairman, who had thus far remained aloof by refusing comment on the matter.
We have Telecom’s attention now. The question is: is Telecom serious about changing, or is this more of the same? We’ll find out over the next few months.
We’ll know if Telecom is serious by whether it goes with what the government has set out for it, and even goes further. InternetNZ thinks Telecom should:
- - Look at voluntary structural separation (as BT did in the UK, the company benefited from this move both in revenue and profit)
- - Talk to the companies who buy its UBS services. Call them now. Find out what they want and try to deliver. Don’t just run ‘roadshows’ to tell them how you are going to screw them.
- - Make an immediate improvement in broadband packages especially guaranteeing that Telecom is not sabotaging Skype connections
- - Resume peering at the exchanges, just like all well-behaved ISPs do (all of them except the two telcos, that is). Peering is how the Internet works. [Memo to telcos: the Internet is not a product. It’s a co-op. If you want play, you have to co-operate.]
- - Respect the end-to-end principle. If you are supplying Internet access you are shifting bits. You are not shaping traffic, prioritising service or any of the other euphemisms for charging twice for the same service. Without the end-to-end principle, no further innovation is possible without telcos clipping the ticket. Its the end of improvements on the Internet.
- - Treat the other ISPs the same as Xtra. We undertand why Xtra can connect customers to broadband faster than the other ISPs. That doesn’t make it right.
- - Get rid of the ‘churn fee’. If you can’t keep your customers on service and price, you don’t deserve them.
Alternatively, Telecom can continue to stonewall all reforms. I’m sure the government will be watching, as will InternetNZ.