I'm similarly impressed with the thoroughness of operational separation, the whistleblower provisions, etc. But Chorus does share various systems with the rest of the business — I gather that it cost BT quite a lot to duplicate those systems when it was structurally separated.

The precise example being Yellow Pages…

It would seem that given the degree of separation that has taken place that a purchase of Chorus would be a perfectly straightforward exercise.

I'm similarly impressed with the thoroughness of operational separation, the whistleblower provisions, etc. But Chorus does share various systems with the rest of the business --…

and that the government doesn't subsidise a competitor

I specifically posited it being spun off and run as an SOE. Why would the Government subsidise a competitor to itself?

Assuming that it gets enhanced with FTTC or whatever else works commercially, and that the government doesn't subsidise a competitor, then low-medium risk.

So why do you say that creating an open-access fibre network that Telecom can access but not control is high risk? I don't understand that logic, I…

Rich, the Government wouldn't pay all that much for the copper though. It's demonstrably run-down, hasn't been cared for, and was flogged off at a seriously discounted rate. Why reward a company that hasn't maintained the asset?

if you took it to a scrap metal place you could get a…

Doesn't…

under the gum tree

You have gum trees in Dundee?

Would you consider Telecom's existing network to be low-risk if it was entirely expropriated and turned into an SOE?

Depends. Assuming that it gets enhanced with FTTC or whatever else works commercially, and that the government doesn't subsidise a competitor,…

I know that wireless sucks the life out of Mtu's but some bright spark will come up with somthing like header comperssion with dynamic error correction and the whole need for cable and fibre will be history.

It's not just MTUs, though that's part of it. It's also latency, and…

My point is really that any new technology deployment has a lot of risk.

Fibre's not a new technology, though. Not even vaguely close. People have been putting bits and bytes over skinny lengths of glass for longer than I've been alive. It's not a dying standard, unlike CDMA, and…

I think the problem with Iridium in the early 90's, when the decison was made to build it, wasn't the technical problems that Russell rightly highlights. It was more that…

Neither Iridium nor Telecoms CDMA could really be called networks. Rather protocols and associated hardware.

That's a good point. It's like saying that ethernet is a network. I hadn't thought of it like that, but you're right.

it's much cheaper to host your New Zealand website outside New Zealand.

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHG!!!!
Even teh internets are leaving New Zealand
But I still won't vote for Shon Key ;-)

Matthew: If networks are always low risk, what about Iridium, or Telecom's CDMA white elephant. Both of those work fine, but failed to meet business expectations.

Iridium has so much wrong with it, including horrifying compression, 10 kilobit data transmission rates, call rates of up to $US14 a minute and,…

I also wonder why it appears that PA is hosted in San Francisco, is it?

It is, along with a number of other sites built and hosted by CactusLab.

There's a simple reason for it: it's much cheaper (and simpler) to host your New Zealand website outside New Zealand.

I'd be happy to pay up to $100/month which is about what I pay now for phone line and internet, as long as the connection could take care of my phone as well.

That's the kind of responses I'm getting too but we're going to need bigger international pipes to…

So my next question is: what price would you pay for 50/20Mbit/s service? With, say 100GB of data.

As someone else has noted, that data cap would start to become a problem. Currently I have a 20 GB data cap for low quality video. Once the speed goes up to…

It's probably not the last mile or the pacific wholesale that's stuffing up your video, but the contention within the NZ backbone

More likely it's the fact that my flat is on Go Large, and we're thus competing with the remaining people on the plan for what is, I'm sure,…

Network infrastructure isn't something that should generate spectacular returns. It's meant to be a safe investment, not an especially profitable one.

That implies low risk. Installing a fibre network when you have no idea on takeup and acceptable pricing isn't low risk, in my book.

Rather, how about setting requirements for a 5 year and 10 year schedule, e.g:

5yr: 75% with 20Mbit, 95% with 2M, everyone (including rural) with 512k
10yr: 75% with 100M, 95% with 20M, everyone with 2M

Been done. I haven't got time to go looking now, but from memory, it's…

Rather, how about setting requirements for a 5 year and 10 year schedule, e.g:

5yr: 75% with 20Mbit, 95% with 2M, everyone (including rural) with 512k
10yr: 75% with 100M, 95% with 20M,…

I'd love for Wimax to come along and solve all our problems but is that still going to happen?

I've just checked my facts regarding WiMax and Woosh's roll out date. I now have it on good authority that the roll out is set for late 2009. As far as…

On the existing "ducts" thing, anyone know…

– Amsterdam has a wonderful ducting system in place: they're called canals :)

– Careful with the "Mbps" (millions of bits) "MB" (millions of bytes – a factor of 8 larger...) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbit/s#megabit_per_second

– Streaming HDTV needs 28 Mbps to eliminate all artifacts BUT (as Motorola discovered when…

Ben: wireless will never beat cable, unless someone finds a way to make it a non-shared medium and deals with several other fundamental issues. Check out the actual throughput figures for wireless vs…

I understand Vodafone's annoyance at the sudden movement of the goalposts that is the cabinetisation project.

It's not even very sudden. At the time that TCNZ announced it and everyone started whinging about how it was "shifting the goalposts", commentators such as Juha were pointing out that cabinetisation…

Here in the UK the deal is UNLIMITED broadband

i think peter is thinking the old ihug model.

and i say, why not?

Telstra are very powerful player here. If the election had gone the other way I have no doubt they would…

If it turns out to be a bunch of crap, then fuck 'em

The peering announcement makes it appear that they're at least trying. But it's still stupidly difficult for my inner cynic not to look at the "we expect roughly equal bi-directional traffic flows, but we're only going to…

As for the timeframes, they are in part dictated…

Think Telecom is bad, they are still in nappies compared to the badness of Telstra.

I think we have to get used to assuming, at least by default, that Telecom is not bad. Because the whole purpose of the separation undertakings is that Telecom won't be bad any more. There…

Two points.

1. This is happening in Australia, and it going to happen fast

2. There is a huge issue between…

We paid to bury our powerlines and we can pay to bury these too.

Powerpoles are like so last century.

Sounds like the odds of ever getting decent fibre up there is somewhere between zero and none. Sad really. But on the upside, as I said earlier, roll out the fibre to…

I'd say bring on the poles.

A pole with a couple of wires on it would not be especially important overall surely?…

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/53/193930371_6e215b8c14.jpg?v=0

There's about 400 subway stations plus there's the tunnels running between them, not to mention the hundreds and hundreds of underpasses, underground arcades, building basements etc.

In terms of terrain, it is surrounded by rocky mountains but the built environment is reasonably flat, sitting…

Not implying you're young. Why just this week I've been called middle aged. Harumph. Just that I too remember the Dark Days.

But don't lose hope – the head of Chorus doesn't have the final say on the matter. That's why it's important we don't undo all the LLU…

Heh, you're a spring chicken.

Not in the least. I've been around for the majority of the time the internet has been commercially available in this country. I was just illustrating how recently it was that we were getting shafted on even basic speeds, never mind real broadband.

The OECD…

The idea behind the Institute FibreCo model, and the National Party's fibre build, is that there will be a greater return on investment (As I understand it – someone tell me if I'm wrong) than is currently the case. I just don't see that happening.

Network infrastructure isn't…

One month I foolishly downloaded a Windows update for both PC AND work laptop. Boy, the editor was ropable…

so I reckon it's going to be at least 60ms

60ms to US servers would be absolutely bloody fantastic. Anything has to be better than what we get now, even on cable, I get anywhere between 160 and 300ms. 60 is what you get to NZ servers a lot of…

The assumption seems to be that customers who receive a faster connection speed will pay more for it. That's not true in my experience, instead they (we) say things like…

Where there's a will there's a way and all that. I dunno what it…

what price would you pay for...

About $50, same as now. I don't plan to budget any more for internettery.

But it's not what *I* would pay for the service. It's what an average household would pay – or, more specifically, the price/adoption curve.

Taking a small group of early…

I do hear what you're saying – with a family each member downloading movies, TV, surfing, working…

I'd love 100MB up/down. That way I might finally get a deceny ping to US game servers....

What's the minimal latency from here to the US West Coast? Speed of light is about 3000000km/s, distance point to point is about 11000km, so I reckon it's going to be at least…

Several years ago now I met a nice…

Then Auckland will risk missing out.

Wishful thinking on your part. The figures, from NZI's estimates at least, appear to be based on ducting not overhead.
The big advantage of ducted is that errant car drivers, of which NZ has more than a few, don't knock out large swathes of…

Ain't going to fly in Auckland. A significant part of the reason that Auckland doesn't have TCL cable is that the Auckland City Council said nay to overhead lines. District plan forbids new ones unless it's absolutely imperative.

Then Auckland will risk missing out. I'd be quite happy if they…

I would have thought that stringing fibre from phone poles (of which there are an awful lot around the country) would significantly reduce the cost of rolling out fibre. Telstra clear has cables festooned all over the place in various Wellington burbs, and Citylink in wellington has their little blue…

I'd love 100MB up/down. That way I might finally get a deceny ping to US game servers....

I'm on telstra cable now, and frankly, even their cable offerings aren't good enough to game and have one of the other machines on the network surf at the same time.…

If this network is used to provide HDTV it would be the most expensive way possible to do it and I struggle to see an advantage with broadcast satellite and terrestrial digital TV (freeview) available.

True but as a method of delivering video on demand whether it be movies, lectures…

Anyway while selling the phone company might have been a stupid thing to do it certainly wasn't a golden age of telecommunication

Nowhere near as stupid as keeping the privatised telco vertically integrated, thereby turning it into the Ma Bell of the South Pacific. At least Ma Bell had the…

But ... once you've acquired Chorus, even at a regulated price, you've spent all the money you were going to spend on fibre, haven't you? I can see any way it adds up, except for Telecom/Chorus to be the dominant shareholder in FibreCo. That'd be a fun negotiation.

To be…

I do remember when we owned the phone company – it sucked badly – really badly – it was run by people from…

And this is nowhere nere as bad as what I saw on my last trip to Asia...

I know of certain parts of Wellington which don't look that much different (Mt Victoria for instance). Though Wellingtonians are fortunate to have the Telstra Clear cable network, combine it with overhead power…

1 (preferred):FibreCo pays fair price for the existing fibre and copper access networks to FibreCo
FibreCo takes over management of copper and optimises maintenance and…

Although the TCNZ board may have been eyeing up the well-above-book Toll deal and counting their chickens already.

But ... once you've acquired Chorus, even at a regulated price, you've spent all the money you were going to spend on fibre, haven't you? I can see any way it adds…

That would be like selling the roads

The man who looks likely to be the IT Minister in a year's time wanted to do exactly that! His road-to-Damascus conversion, as quoted in the same Herald article that talks of Ratcliffe's short-sighted notions, is rather hard to swallow when one considers…

How about this?

heh heh – that's exactly what I was thinking of!

TCNZ is a privately-owned company ... – that makes it difficult to have them easily (and cheapily) give up assets simply because the NZ public would like them in their hands, thankyou very much.

I had to laugh the…

I'm unconvinced on the upgradability of passive networks. If it gets built out with 100G bandwidth say, wouldn't all the users need to upgrade equipment at once for 1G bandwidth?

Sounds right, yes. But when you're starting from a position of nothing, and the marginal cost to go…

And this is nowhere nere as bad as what I saw on my last trip to Asia...

How about this?

It could be done, but I've had some insight lately into the work that's gone into Telecom's undertakings for operation separation. It's eye-watering.

Well there's certainly benefit in having gone through all that before you get to structural separation – at least the businesses should be more easily detached from…

The problem with 1 is surely that TCNZ would price it through the roof given they have a locked-in, deep-pocket buyer? Unless it is "light-regulation" whereby everyone agrees to sell at an independently-judged fair value.

It could be done, but I've had some insight lately into the work that's gone…

Doing it with Telecom as a willing partner would take 12-18 months and cost a lot. If it ain't willing ...

So the NZInstitute paper on this had three options:
1 (preferred):
FibreCo pays fair price for the existing fibre and copper networks
Telecom (and others) agree to sell its…

But most importantly completely separate Chorus from Telecom and "nationalise" it (through public-private investment) into this FibreCo vehicle – that's a big play for a National Govt.

Yes. I didn't have time to cover that angle this morning, but it would be something akin to a hostile takeover by the…

I'm unconvinced on the upgradability of passive networks. If it gets built out with 100G bandwidth say, wouldn't all the users need to upgrade equipment at once for 1G bandwidth?

That's my understanding, yes. It seems to be one of the big drawbacks of passive networks.

We have Telstra fibre at both Auckland and Wellington (fringe CBD) offices. With 1MBit of bandwidth, coz it's uneconomical to go over that. I'd assume they'd connect any kind of premise if one was willing to pay the price, no?

I'm unconvinced on the upgradability…

I don't want a telephone line, a fibre optic cable and a dish on the side of my house.

I should be able to get all those things through one 'thing', I don't particularly mind which.

The…

sorry. It's not like there's anything to watch at the moment (Battlestar Galactica season four? Anybody?)

We would love to get high quality tv/movies, does that require 10Mb/sec?

At the moment, National don't care whether…

I would suggest that any government look at overhead cables where possible

And this is nowhere nere as bad as what I saw on my last trip to Asia...

I too want HDTV streaming to my home – I don't care if that's delivered over satellite TV, terrestrial, wifi, LTE, WiMax, copper, fibre or cable. It can be bean cans on string and I wouldn't care – I just want the service.

And the point being that you can…

rb, sounds like all this digging will be taking place in the suburbs.

any word on whether they'll also be stringing residental apartments?

I think there's an obvious case for connecting hi-density urban residential areas first: you get more residents for your dollar.

We're just going to have to live…

I think that the killer app here ought to be TV – a competing service to Sky…

I…

any word on whether they'll also be stringing residental apartments?

lots of people with disposable income there, and the big players won't give us fibre...