Like every other Australian, I’ve been subjected to this whole “election” and “hung parliament” rubbish that’s been littering our news for the past few weeks. Secretly, I’m hoping for the Coalition to take it out (who at the time of writing this, have something like a 4000 vote lead for the entire two party preferred vote). Although it seems unlikely, there’s still a little hope.
As an IT professional, I’ve been asked numerous times, why don’t I support Labour, given their ambitious 43 billion dollar National Broadband Network?
Well, there’s a number of possible reasons. Let’s see…
So this morning, I sparked off this post after reading Mitchell Bingemann’s article title (the) Shape of regional internet hangs on battle to form government. To quote, “areas such as Cloncurry in the Kennedy electorate and Kempsey in Lyne will be served with broadband speeds of up to a gigabit per second” under Labour’s proposed NBN network.
Okay… Now let’s just take a step back… When is this so called NBN due to be rolled out? When will the service be switched on for regional areas? Rolling out a fibre network (fibre to the node, for that matter), isn’t just an overnight process.. I’m skeptical of the validity of this plan in general.
The Coalition’s plan, however, is to boost “minimum peak” speeds to 12mbps. This is faster then my current ADSL2+ connection, which syncs at 4mbps, in the Brisbane Metro area! I have to argue – who really needs a 100mbps connection? 4mbps does the job just fine for me, I get my emails done, do my banking, update my blog, Facebook (alot) and do a bit of online gaming and general downloading, and I certainly am not complaining about my connection speed – even if I can theoretically have a faster connection if I lived closer to the Exchange…
“Moving forward”, to quote our current “prime minister” Julia Gillard, I think the Coalition’s plans are more strategic. Yes, you need to lay fiber to get these regional areas faster speeds, that’s a con for both parties. What happens next is the massive difference in strategy. Labour calls for a much longer term implementation, by deploying fibre to the node, whereas the Coalition calls for an upgrade using existing technologies.
Here’s a quick table of pros and cons, from my perspective:
Labour
Coalition
Pros
Cons
Pros
Cons
100mbps/1gbps fiber connection
Regional fibre to the node
$43bn cost to tax payers
Time to implement – 2020?
Current infrastructure does not allow sustained 100mbps/1gbps speeds on a national level
Labour still has the Internet filtering policy hanging over their heads.
Reduced cost ($6bn?)
Time to implement – 2012?
Current infrastructure will support the national approach
Laying fiber to regional areas and improving current service allows for later implementation of higher bandwidth NBN – “proof of concept?”
Improved regional coverage
“minimum peak” speeds of 12mbps in regional areas
I received a forwarded email from a previous colleague last week, with the subject “NBN – by someone who knows, so therefore not a labour politician” – this alone made me chuckle. It goes something like this:
I am a network architect for one of Australia’s largest Telco’s – so I speak with some authority on this issue.
Here are the technical reasons this will fail :
1) fibre optic cable has a maximum theoretical lifespan of 25 years when installed in conduit. Over time, the glass actually degrades (long story), and eventually it cant do it`s bouncing of light thing any more. But when you install fibre outside on overhead wiring (as will be done for much of Australia’s houses, except newer suburbs with underground wiring), then the fibre degrades much quicker due to wind, temperature variation and solar/cosmic radiation. The glass in this case will last no more than 15 years. So after 15 years, you will have to replace it. Whereas the copper network will last for many decades to come. Fibre is not the best technology for the last mile. That’s why no other country has done this.
2) You can not give every house 100Mbps. If you give several million households 100Mbps bandwidth, then you have exceeded the entire bandwidth of the whole internet. In reality, there is a thing called contention. Today, every ADSL service with 20Mbps has a contention ratio of around 20:1 (or more for some carriers). That means, you share that 20Mbps with 20 other people. It`s a long story why, but there will NEVER be the case of people getting 100Mbps of actual bandwidth. Not for several decades at current carrier equipment rates of evolution. The “Core” can not and will not be able to handle that sort of bandwidth. The 100Mbps or 1Gbps is only the speed from your house to the exchange. From there to the Internet, you will get the same speeds you get now. The “Core” of Australia’s network is already fibre (many times over). And even so, we still have high contention ratios. Providing fibre to the home just means those contention ratios go up. You will not get better download speeds.
3) new DSL technologies will emerge. 15 years ago we had 56k dial-up. Then 12 years ago we got 256k ADSL, then 8 years ago 1.5Mbps ADSL2, then 5 years ago 20Mbps ADSL2+. There are already new DSL technologies being experimented on that will deliver over 50Mbps on the same copper we have now. $zero cost to the tax payer
4) 4G wireless is being standardised now. The current 3G wireless was developed for voice and not for data, and even so it can deliver up to 21Mbps in Australia. There are problems with it, but remember that it was developed for voice. The 4G standard is specifically being developed for data, and will deliver 100Mbps bandwidth with much higher reliability (yes, the same contention issues apply mentioned earlier). $zero cost to the tax payer
5) The “NBN” will be one of the largest single networks ever built on earth. There are only a few companies who could do it – Japan’s Nippon NTT, BT, AT&T;, Deutsche Telekom etc. Even Telstra would struggle to built something on this scale. Yet we are led to believe that the same people who cant build school halls or install insulation without being ripped off are going to to do it ??? Here at Telstra, we are laughing our heads off !! Because when it all comes crumbling down, after they have spent $60+billion and the network is no more than 1/2 complete, it will be up to Telstra to pick up the pieces ! (shhhh don’t tell anyone, it`s our secret)
<name suppressed>
This bright so and so confirmed a number of my suspicions. Lets revise my pros and cons:
Labour
Coalition
Pros
Cons
Pros
Cons
100mbps/1gbps fiber connection
Regional fibre to the node
Telstra not necessarily the “owner” of the infrastructure
$43bn cost to tax payers $60bn cost to tax payers
Time to implement – 2020?
Current infrastructure does not allow sustained 100mbps/1gbps speeds on a national level
Labour still has the Internet filtering policy hanging over their heads.
Fiber has a life span of around 25 years
Telstra possibly left to pick up the pieces
Reduced cost ($6bn?)
Time to implement – 2012?
Current infrastructure will support the national approach
Laying fiber to regional areas and improving current service allows for later implementation of higher bandwidth NBN – “proof of concept?”
Improved regional coverage
Private service providers pushing technology forward already – no cost to taxpayers
4G becoming standard, and faster ADSL over existing copper infrastructure constantly being improved, may soon reach 50mbps
“minimum peak” speeds of 12mbps in regional areas
Private enterprise to fund infrastructure
Telstra still “owns” the copper network
Biased? Maybe… But as our nation lies in limbo, trying to decide on who should be running our country, we have a number of key power holders who are highly affected by Labour and the Coalitions plans. It’s up to them to side with the party that will deliver them what they want, but in choosing, they hold a greater power over the governing of Australia’s internet plans… In simple terms, my only question for the Independents is will they benefit more from 100mbps service in 10 years time, or 12mbps “now”?
Whirlpool has alot of reading material indexed over at whirlpool.net.au/wiki/NBN – I suggest anyone who has taken the time to read this far takes a look at the wider community’s input, as there’s alot of valid points, for and against.
I briefly posted about the UVB-76 radio station a while ago, as it’s transmissions stopped. Was a bit of a “oh noes” moment for all the radio enthusiasts around the world, as the station is often referenced as being a part of the “dead hand” nuclear doomsday system which the Russians are said to have built.
A few weeks ago, the following recording was, ugh, recorded…
Probably means nothing at all… Wikipedia has it written as saying the following:
At 1335 UTC on August 23, 2010: “UVB-76, UVB-76, 93, 882, NAIMINA, 74, 14, 35, 74, 9, 3, 8, 8, 2, Nikolai, Anna, Ivan, Mikhail, Ivan, Nikolai, Anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4″ (Recording of August 23rd transmission) [11]
Whatever that means…
Since my last post, however, there’s been a few updates from ol’ Russia… What, with those pesky spies infiltrating America and living there for years without being pulled up… God only knows whether the UVB-76 transmissions are actually “covert” communications…
Let’s hope we don’t have to find out.
EDIT: just got sent this by a mate, recording of the UVB-76 station going down…
Okay. So I had this song stuck in my head while I was on the bus this morning, and it totally got to me…
Me being the MacFag that I am, with my iPhone 4 and all, jumped on iTunes and downloaded the album, a minute later I had it all right there, playing through my little Sennheiser’s.
I’m embarrassed to admit it, this is the third legitimate music purchase through iTunes… Why? Because they make it so easy!
Curse Apple for putting a music shop in my pocket!
I recently helped out a friend of a friend and took on the hosting for a site called Nakama Works. As a JDM car owner, it’s something that I love and can really be appreciative of, as well as partially owning other communities and websites. So to help these little guys out, here’s a little bit about them.
We are a South East Queensland based car club with members from Brisbane, Toowoomba, Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast. The members drive vehicles ranging from Nissan Skyline’s, 180sx and Silvia’s to a variety of Toyota’s and the odd Honda…. We pride ourselves on modifying our cars in a tasteful way with more focus on performance and handling than purely for looks.
Our members enjoy and compete casually in motorsports such as Drift racing, Drag racing and Circuit/Hill Climb events.
My other business, AusPerformance, has had a Facebook page for a while now, but I’ve recently been updating it a fair bit, spamming all my friendly “likers”.
I will hopefully use it a bit more over the next year, I aim to have atleast 500 “likers” before March 2011. And with that, I hope to run some competitions and what not to get people involved… Here’s hoping!
I loved electronics when I was young, and was lucky enough to have a Dick Smith Fun Way electronics kit. Sure, I had no idea what I was doing, but playing with all the little transistors and capacitors and what not, was cool…
Now I’m a little more grown up, I’ve come back to this passion… As an motorsport enthusiast and participant, I’ve found a number of automotive applications which could be improved upon or created, and so I have been researching little DIY electronics kits and what not.
A few months ago I purchased a JayCar (Silicon Chip) Air Fuel Ratio display, and put it together. It got me thinking, and after chatting with some mates who have also been playing around with PLC’s and other electronics, I decided to have a look at a piece of software called LabVIEW.
Admittedly, I haven’t gotten very far, but hopefully, I pick it up soon. I have some (what I think are) great ideas, so would love to work it all out.
With that, my usual self reference material follows!
iPhone needs to be jailbroken to do this (tested on my iPhone 4, with iOS 4.0.1 using the www.jailbreakme.com jailbreaker). You don’t need OpenSSH installed, but I prefer it. If you install OpenSSH, connect using root@iphoneipaddress, password ‘alpine’ – I suggest changing this using the `passwd` command while you’re at it. MobileTerminal currently doesn’t work on iOS 4.0.1, atleast on the iPhone 4.
Pull image off iPhone using the following commands.
The first command uses `nc`, aka netcat, and opens a port up and listens using the -l switch. You run this on your destination computer, and pipe the output to the disk image file, i.e. iphone.img (filename unimportant).
On the iPhone itself, you point `nc` to the destination computer after it has been setup to listen. Pipe the output of `dd` reading the iPhone disk to the `nc` command and it will transfer. Note: I found the iPhone would not read the disk without the bs=1M switch.
The process can take a while. It’s taken about 20 minutes for 2.5gb to transfer over the wireless link I’ve setup between my laptop and my iPhone… For a 32gb iPhone, this will obviously take a while!!!
Once complete, analyse iphone.img with Scalpel or whichever forensics software you prefer.
It really annoys me when people say, “oh, why don’t you just re-install Windows” or “do a repair install”. Over the past few years I had numerous machines come in that plain wouldn’t boot in to Windows, and even other technical colleagues would comment that it needed Windows reinstalled or repaired.
To me this is just a complete waste of time. Consider this. Reinstalling or repairing Windows (XP or Vista in the majority of cases), takes an hour or so. If you are reinstalling from a factory disk, the process of getting everything up and running is alot less tedious, and thus alot quicker. However, if you do a clean install from legitimate Windows media, you generally have to go and dig out drivers for everything possible. This is more time you don’t want to be spending whilst working on a machine.
Sure, the client might be paying by the hour, but what if you could reduce all this time to say, a 15 minute fix, and still charge for an hour? I’d call that efficiency.
And so there is my case.
For me, the most common non-boot problems can be quickly and easily solved by using bootable CD’s to manipulate the Windows registry and drivers.
For instance, any non-boot error message pertaining to the registry, including the common “\windows\system32\config\system” file being corrupt or missing, can be fixed using the “Registry Restore Wizard” tool from my favorite boot CD, the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. Simply restoring to the last known good date can fix this issue immediately. Of course, there may be an underlying hardware or virus issue in addition, so you’d want to check that as well, but hey, you just saved yourself 2 hours of stuffing around reinstalling/repairing Windows.
Another good one is “stop” errors when booting, that is, the infamous “blue screen of death”. When booting the machine, by default, the blue screen will leave you in a reboot loop, unless you disable the auto-reboot by pushing F8 right after the BIOS screen disappears. Once this has been disabled, you can get an understanding of what is causing the stop to occur. In most cases, this is a file system or device driver error. Again, this can be fixed using a boot CD or even loading into Safe Mode (sometimes even using the Last Known Good Configuration boot option will work, but keep in mind this must be the first option as logging in under Safe Mode will discredit this option).
Without going into too much detail, just keep these in mind next time someone comes to you with a Windows problem. Increasing your own productivity by knowing which tools to use and when should be a given, yet most people still live by the reinstall mindset. It certainly has to be quashed if you have customers lining up machines to be fixed right before their eyes (as is the expectations of people).
My web stats for one of my larger websites is full of referrers which look to be spam… Today’s brief stats below shows the highest referral counts coming from a page titled “how to open an offshore company”… Cause I need to know how to do that…
Totally on my to-do list now, to implement mod_access_rbl for my Apache install. Idea is to point it some of the general spam related blacklists, as in theory, these would be perfect examples of IP’s purporting to create this nuisance traffic.
