I will be working through some of the feature articles and buyers’ guides on this site and refreshing the content in them.

Why I need to do this with these articles is primarily to bring the content up to date with the way consumer and small-business information technology is progressing. It has become such a situation that the technology that was referred to in an article may have been improved upon by newer and better technology.

Previously, I just revised the laptop computer buyer’s guide because of the new classes of laptop and notebook computers that had evolved over the past two years such as the Ultrabooks.  I will be releasing a revised version of the article about extending your wireless network due to the new capabilities that access points and wireless routers have such as dual-band 802.11n operation and WPS easy-setup functionality.

This is not an intention to regurgitate stale content but to bring advisory articles up to date with newer technology as is required of a technology-focused Website.

Introduction

I am reviewing the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook which is Dell’s main foray in to the  Ultrabook thin-and-lignt market. The model I am covering is the more expensive unit which has a 256Gb solid-state drive

There are economy model of this computer, one with Intel i5 processor and 128Gb solid-state drive as the cheapest option and another mid-range model with an i5 processor and a 256Gb solid-state drive.

The computer itself

Aesthetics and Build Quality

Like other Ultrabooks,, this Dell XPS 13 is very light and doesn’t take up much room in your shoulder bag. The unit is wrapped in an aluminium finish with the keyboard surrounded in a rubber-feel panel which doesn’t feel as sweaty to use.

At times the computer does feel warm underneath after a long session of use. This is more noticeable around the back edge and is more so if you are engaging in video-heavy or CPU-heavy tasks.

User Interface

The Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook is equipped with an illuminated keyboard. But this keyboard does feel hard and has that cheap calculator-keyboard feel.  At least you can still touch-type on the keyboard easily. It als misses distinct keys for page-up / page-down functions which can be confusing when you are browsing a Web page.

The XPS’s trackpad doesn’t have distinctly marked-out buttons for selecting or confirming the options. This is similar to what is accepted on the MacBook computers and  it can be hard to locate the correct buttons by touch when you need to click or right-click that option.

The trackpad doesn’t respond to the double-tap = select gesture which is a common gesture for nearly all laptop trackpads.

Audio and Video

Right hand side connections – USB 2.0 port and DisplayPort

The Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook performed properly, responsively and smoothly with video content. This included action content that I viewed as part of a video-on-demand show. It may not be all that suitable for some activities like intense gaming.

I used this Ultrabook with the previously-reviewed Turtle Beach headset and found that you need to enable the Realtek Waves MAXXAudio all the time to keep “punch”in the sound even for the TV show. Of course, I would not expect much for the integrated speakers especially if you want to play music or desire movies and games with the effects being there.

Connectivity, Storage and Expansion

Left-hand side connections – power, USB 2.0, 3.5mm audio input-output jack

The Dell XPS 13 is equipped with two USB 2.0 connectors, a 3.5mm audio input-output jack and a DisplayPort port for monitors and video adaptors. These are its only connectors, in order to achieve a very slim notebook.

This Ultrabook has a 256Gb solid-state drive as its secondary storage and, unlike mist laptop computers that I have used or reviewed, doesn’t come with a memory-card slot. This would be considered an omission for those of us who take the memory card out of our digital cameras as part of transferring our images to a computer.

Battery life

The battery does live up to the expectations for an Ultrabook’s battery with it being half-empty aftar a good afternoon’s worth of hotspot surfing.

Even viewing 1.5 hour’s worth of on-demand video had the battery meter registering 45%. Like the Acer Aspire S3 Ultrabook, the Dell XPS 13 doesn’t support a hibernate mode for whenever you are not using the machine. Instead, the computer will stay in a “sleep mode” for a few hours then enter a “deep sleep”mode until you power it on.

Limitations and Points Of Improvement

The Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook could benefit from a pair of USB 3.0 sockets rather than USB 2.0 sockets so as to take advantage of external USB hard disks. As well, it could be equipped with an HDMI socket or be supplied with an HDMI adaptor so that it can connect to just about every flatscreen TV in circulation.

As I have said before, it definitely misses the SD card slot which would be important with digital-camera users who prefer to “remove the film” from the digital camera and this could be installed in the lid if you needed to balance out the space for the various hardware parts..

Conclusion

I would recommend that people purchase the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook as a secondary notebook computer to use while travelling or using your favourite cafe, bar or hotel lounge as your second office. This assumes that you have a larger laptop or desktop as your main computer where you do most of your work on. It could be sold for a bit cheaper based on the options that it has even though the solid-state drive is sold at a premium.

Also, I would recommend that people who have digital cameras purchase an SD card reader if you you need to remove the card from the camera to download pictures. As well,you would need to know where the computer is at all times because the machine isn’t equipped with a lockdown slot.

Introduction

I am reviewing the Brother HL-6180DW monochrome laser printer which is Brother’s latest entry in to the “office workhorse” laser-printer market.

The printer that I am reviewing here is the top-of-the-line model which has a page throughput of 48 pages per minute, a high-capacity paper tray and wireless networking. There are cheaper variants that have a lesser-capacity paper tray and work more slowly, with the models in this group having different connectivity options having wireless networking, Ethernet networking only or USB direct-connect only. All of them are driven by the same heavy-duty monochrome laser print engine and can print on both sides of the page.

Prices

Printer

Recommended Retail Price: AUD$549

Optional Extras:

Optional high-capacity paper tray: AUD$180

Inks and Toners

Servicing and Other Parts (Laser Printers)

The printer itself

The Brother HL-6180DW is able to connect to a wired Ethernet or 802.11g/n Wi-Fi wireless network. For that matter, it can support Wi-Fi Direct where it effectively becomes its own access point as well as AirPrint driver-free printing for the iOS platform. It still works with Brother’s iPrint&Scan Android app, being able to print Web pages, PDFs and photos from Android or iOS devices. It is also future-proof by being equipped for IPv6 in a dual-stack manner.

As a monochrome laser printer, this printer and the rest of the series are pitched as a “heavy-duty” take of the HL-2240D and similar units that I previously reviewed. These used a separately-replaceable toner and drum setup with the toner cartridge being “nested” in the drum unit that is loaded in to the front of the printer. This still has the advantage of the drum unit being separately replaceable which is more relevant to equipment that is expected to do a lot of work.

But the difference between these units and the other compact units is that the print engines on these models are optimised for heavy-duty printing. Here, you notice the difference with behaviour like the printer sounding like it is doing a normal print run even when working on both sides of the paper.

Printer setup experience

Hardware setup

Control panel

Something that can confuse some users is the front-door latch being confusingly part of the output retainer tab. This may be of concern when you are setting up the printer and removing all the packaging material or if you have to ask someone who isn’t familiar with the machine to change the toner or rectify a paper jam.

But once I opened the machine’s front service door, it didn’t take long to get the printer up and ready for use. The drum unit, with the toner cartridge. dropped in to the slot without any risk of user confusion, The paper was also easy to load up with a drawer that didn’t feel tacky.

Software setup

As is my practice when reviewing printers, I install the latest driver set from the manufacturer’s Web site rather than working from the CD that came with the equipment. This is to be sure I am not running a driver set that has bugs or isn’t tuned for best performance with current needs because of the desire amongst manufacturers to get the product to market very quickly.

During the installation phase, the driver software discovered the printer very quickly and was able to have the printer ready to go within a few minutes. Like other driver programs used with Brother printers, it still has the same easy-to-use user interface where there is a list of selected options for the print job.

Printer useability and page quality

The Brother HL-6180DW laser printer doesn’t take long to start turning out the print jobs. Here, it took only a second from when I clicked the “Print” button on the computer for it to come to life and have the first page of the document coming out of the output bay. There wasn’t any unnecessary curling or buckling with the paper after a print run because the printer’s fuser unit was effectively at temperature when the job came in. Even the auto-duplex cycle was very quick with it taking around three seconds to print both sides of the page.

There is a confidential-print mode where you can set up a passcode that you enter in to the printer to claim the print job. But, like the other single-function printers with this feature, it requires the user to enter the passcode using the “pick’n’choose” method with the arrow keys and this can cause users to be impatient with this printer.

Separately-replaceable toner cartridge and drum unit that nest in to each other

Like all of the Brother laser printers, the HL-6180DW uses a separately-replaceable toner cartridge and drum unit which slot in to the front of the unit. Here, like the compact HL-2240D and others in that series, this unit requires the drum unit to be removed from the printer before you can replace the toner cartridge. But it is still easy to detach and attach the toner cartridge and drum unit by you pressing a distinct green tab to separate these pieces.

The auto-duplex function was exact with the registration when printing A4. This would be important for desktop publishing, especially if you want to turn out tent cards, door hangers and the like.

When you print colour photos using this printer, the 1200dpi image was brighter than the 600dpi image, thus was also close to what a colour image would look like on those old black-and-white TVs. The printer also turned out some very sharp text from material printed out from the computer.

The Brother HL-6180 laser printer was very reliable with turning out a large auto-duplex print job, thus not being prone to jam up. In fact if it runs out of paper, you don’t need to do anything further to get the job going beyond just putting the paper in the drawer.

Limitations and Points Of Improvement

The Brother HL-6180DW and others in this series could benefit from a few useability improvements here. For example, a distinctly-coloured latch release for the front service door could be beneficial here because this is hard to find amongst the document retainer flap on the top of the printer. Here, the confusion can occur if a user had to open up the printer to replace the toner or rectify a paper jam.

As well, there is the absence of a “fuel-gauge” on the display to show how much toner is available. Here, this can be useful if you were to determine whether to always run high-capacity cartridges or know if you were to order extra toner after a large print job.

Similarly the printer could benefit from a USB port to permit walk-up printing of PDF files or use of a USB keypad to improve the useability of the printer’s “secure print” function. This could be delivered as a product differentiator for the high-end models. As well, the HL-5470DW could be able to work with the extra-high-capacity toner cartridge, which could be handy if you were to avoid having to spend heaps of money on toner.

As well, the end-of-job cool-down noise could be reduced by, perhaps, gradually slowing down the fan’s speed through the cooling cycle or running the fan very fast for a few minutes just at the end of a print job.

Conclusion and Placement Notes

The Brother HL-6180DW laser printer is one I would recommend for use as an office’s main laser printer. This would be very important in paper-intense environments like schools or medical and legal practices or for those of us who are doing plenty of monochrome desktop publishing. If you could afford to, you may be at a point where you can use the high-capacity or extra-high-capacity toner cartridges for most of the machine’s working life and use the standard-capacity toner cartridge as a short-term measure if the organisation was short on cash.

If you want to save money but want a heavy-duty laser printer, I would recommend that you could go for the Brother HL-5470DW if you value Wi-Fi connectivity or the HL-5450DN if you are just connecting to an Ethernet or HomePlug network segment. Here, you don’t have the ability to load up a large quantity of paper or use the extra-capacity toner cartridge. But, as I have said before, I would recommend using the high-capacity toner cartridges due to the low cost-per-page and the long time between replacing them.

Technology

Mobile Computing platforms

Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet – fit for business

The Android mobile computing platform has, over the past year, become an increasingly-credible platform that overtakes the Apple iOS mobile computing platform. This has been exemplified through the Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy Note phone-tablet bridge device and the Google Nexus 7 tablet. This has even had apple take Samsung to court concerning “trade dress” and similar patents that Samsung copied in their earlier Galaxy S and SII products.

Regular computing platforms

Another set of major technology changes over the past year had come about in the form of new versions of the Windows and MacOS X regular-computer operating systems. These versions, known as Windows 8 and MacOS X Mountain Lion respectively, have introduced various mobile-computing concepts such as touch-driven operation and the app store to the regular computer.

The long-lasting battery can allow the Fujitsu to work well for a long day of hotspot surfing at inner-city cafes and bars

As for the hardware, Intel had launched the third-generation “Ivy Bridge” classic-instruction-set processors with improved integrated graphics. This has raised the stakes for regular-computer graphics especially in the portable-use arena.

Bluetooth Smart Ready

The Bluetooth standard now embraces the 4.0 “low-power” variant which supports sensor and control devices that can work on 2 AA batteries or a watch battery for something like six months. This requires that the sensor devices work with a host device that implements Bluetooth 4.0; and this feature is slowly creeping in to all of the credible smartphones and tablets as well as some regular computers like Apple’s latest MacBook lineup and some of the Windows-based computers.

Awareness of malware targeted at the Macintosh platform

It is also the era that the Apple Macintosh platform is gain a similar user base to the Windows platform as far as regular computing is concerned. It doesn’t matter whether the core task for that computer is to be office work or creative work like media editing or playback, with some Windows computers being used for the latter purpose.

This has drawn malware creators to the idea of using the Macintosh platform as an attack vector, mainly through the use of cross-platform runtime environments like Java or Adobe Flash. This is due to the ability to quickly write and deploy the same version of software to run on both Windows and MacOS, with the runtime module liaising with the file system and other operating-system services/ Lately this vector has been taken further with zero-day attacks because the Java runtime isn’t updated as quickly and as regularly as the native-code software for the main regular-computing platforms.

We are being encouraged not to implement these runtime platforms unless necessary and I have raised the idea of compiling Java-written code to platform-native logic when writing for a regular-computing platform rather than creating intermediate code that requires the runtime component. This is so one doesn’t have to run a Java runtime component which can be used as an attack vector or allow a slow operating environment. Similarly, there will be a requirement by Symantec and others to write “security runtimes” that check for malware in Adobe Flash or Java intermediate code.

Network technology

802.11ac wireless networking

As for the small network, there have been a few trends concerning it. For example, a pre-release version of 802.11ac Gigabit wireless networking has been released but this is intended to work on the 5GHz radio spectrum.

Wi-Fi Direct wireless-network setup

Similarly, we have become more aware of the Wi-Fi Direct wireless-network setup concept. This is more about creating a Wi-Fi “personal-area network” either as an alternative to Bluetooth for wirelessly connecting peripherals to a host computer or setting up a temporary “on-the-road” network for mobile devices, laptops and network-connected peripheral devices.

I had reviewed a device which was an example of this concept in the form of the Kingston Wi-Drive, one of the “wireless portable storage servers” that are being promoted for use with smartphones and tablets. Another class of device that is exemplifying this concept is some of the recent crop of network speaker systems that can play music from a computer device via a Wi-Fi network that it is part of or can create itself. They use either Apple AirPlay or the open-frame DLNA standards to transfer the audio content from the computing device to the speakers.

HomePlug AV 500

Another trend for “no-new-wires” networking is the use of HomePlug AV 500 which is a high-throughput variant of the HomePlug AV powerline network. This will have the same situations as the HomePlug 1.0 Turbo network where all the endpoint devices that exist on that segment have to he the high-speed variant for the segment to work at the high bandwidth.

WPS in a multi-access-point wireless network

A question I have answered myself in the course of troubleshooting and optimising a home network was how the WPS easy-setup solution would cope with a multi-access-point wireless network. These kind of network setups are often required where there are building setups that could impede radio-wave transmission, such as interior walls made of double-brick, stone, reinforced concrete or the existence of metal walls.

The above-mentioned networks would have two or more access points which are linked to each other via an Ethernet or HomePlug AV wired backbone. All the access points operating on the same band are set to the same SSID and security parameters but are set to different radio channels so that the wireless client devices can roam between the access points seamlessly.

Here, I found that as long as the access points that have this feature are set up to persist their current setting when you engage the WPS push-button setup function, this function won’t affect the proper operation of this extended service set. What’s more, you can use this quick-setup routine at the access point closest to where you are intending to use the new device you are setting up.

Milestones

Two milestones have happened over the past year. One was the death of Steve Jobs who. along with Steve Wozniak, founded Apple in the mid 1970s. This led to the arrival of one of the first credible personal computers in the form of the Apple II, the commercialisation of the graphic user interface with the Macintosh and eventually a credible mobile computing platform with the iPhone and iPad. When I heard that Steve Jobs was falling ill with the cancer, I saw it in a similar light to Bill Gates leaving Microsoft – the foundation stones of personal computing coming away.

Another milestone that was celebrated this year during the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics was Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Her was the founder of the World Wide Web and, effectively, the Internet as we know it today.

This site

I have increased the quantity of Ultrabooks and similar computers reviewed on this site, focusing on them being secondary travel computers rather than main or sole computers. I have also revised the laptop buyers’ guide to encompass this class of computer.

Similarly I am increasing the amount of coverage dedicated to the online lifestyle. With this, I have given special coverage to the sports scoreboard apps that you can download to your smartphone or tablet so these devices can become sports scoreboards. I have tied it in with some of the main sporting events.

As well, part of giving some more time to travel and lifestyle is to establish a “travel and lifestyle” page which will have useful information for travellers and for people who integrate their IT in to their lifestyle.

My post on the Australian Audio & AV Show 2011 has allowed me to sum up the trend towards network-driven audio and video, especially as it is being considered of respect at the top end of the market. This has intensified my interest in the DLNA-compliant home media network because of it being respected by hi-fi manufacturers of respect.

I have spent some time writing some advisory  articles on common computer-usage topics. One of these was a two-part “Email Essentials” series (1, 2) where I explained about basic email-usage concepts, something I have often had to help people who aren’t competent with computers on. I augmented this with another article about using email for sending messages to be “taken further”, which was targeted at people who regularly use Facebook, Skype, iMessage, SMS and other messaging systems.

These two articles are based on work that I have done whenever people ask me for assistance with their computers. I have also written up an article about dealing with that “hair-trigger” mouse which can happen with different mice and as they get used more.

As well, I have written an article on how to keep your computing skills alive and relevant when you retire from active work life. This encompasses what computer system to use as your main computer setup, including the idea of buying out your laptop or desktop that you have used at your work; as well as keeping the skills alive.

Because I have reviewed some business-grade laptop computers and other computer targeted at the business user, I have written an article about this class of equipment becoming relevant to the small-business and SOHO user. Typically, the distributors tend to pitch this class of equipment at the “big end of town” i.e. the larger corporations who have a large fleet of these computers, and these products are not made easily available to the smaller operator even though they can do the job as well for them.

I had written up an article about setting up for Internet when you move to a location in France. This is due to the highly-competitive Internet and triple-play market that exists in that country and I have encompassed some coverage about the Freebox Révolution Internet gateway and set-top box as being an example of what is being offered as carrier-provided equipment in France.

I have given a fair bit of coverage to the cloud-computing trend especially as this is frequently referenced in the computing press and bandied about by people selling IT solutions to small business. This was instigated by an interview that I did with — regarding secure computing in the cloud-computing age and had written an article about what small business needs to look for when they sign on to this kind of service.

I have given some coverage to the issue of device firmware updates and field-delivered software to computing devices. This is in response to legal action that was taking place in the US concerning the device firmware updates that were being applied to HP printers. This legal action was raising the possibility of loading modified firmware in to a device that could facilitate espionage or other undesirable activities. Here, I was describing the trends that occurred with the firmware-update practice over the years and raised security and updating issues concerning this practice, and the fact that the firmware-update ecosystem must deliver a secure update for the device and when we deliver the first update for a device, we deliver one that brings it to expected functionality once and for all.

Conclusion

Expect a very interesting next year for regular and mobile computing life as Windows 8 and MacOS X Mountain Lion merge the context of mobile and regular computing with different devices suiting different needs occupying particular spaces in the home and small business network.

Introduction

I haven’t reviewed any headphones or headsets for this site in a long time but had bought the Voyetra Turtle Beach M3 gaming headset as a “ring-in” when I left my headphones behind before heading out. Here, I thought that it would be an opportunity to review this headset and assess its prowess as a computer accessory for gaming, laptop and mobile use.

This is a headset that has an in-line microphone for use with smartphones and tablets using a four-conductor 3.5mm plug; or can be connected to a computer or other device using a break-out cable that plugs in to the headphones and microphone jack on the device.

Price

I had purchased this headset from EB Games for AUD$48.

Type

The headset itself

Connectivity

As far as connectivity goes, the Turtle Beach M3 headset doesn’t work well as a headset with my Samsung Galaxy S Android phone and I had to use the jack adaptor to run the headset as headphones. It may work well with iPhones and does work well with laptops that have 3.5mm audio I/O jack like the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook that I am reviewing.

In-line microphone rather than a boom microphone

The headset uses a single-sided cable that has an advantage of being less likely to have the sound cut off to one earpiece due to a cord being pulled out. It also has the advantage of having the cord easier to manage as you use or store the headphones.

Comfort

The Turtle Beach headset’s vinyl earcups do feel sweaty after a significant amount of time wearing them and the headset does feel tight and less likely to slip off your head.

Earpieces with vinyl earcups as if supra-aural, closed-back design

The earcups appear to be supra-aural due to a speaker grille flat across the front but work like the circum-aural design. They also sit effectively on the ear rather than wrap around the ear

Sound

One key factor I have noticed with the Turtle Beach M3 headset is that they shine on bass response. This does come through with some recently-recorded funk and soul music where the bass line comes out clear.

As for games and movies with the sound effects, the headset does perform with them. The Turtle Beach headset has shone with the effects at the start of “Kurt Wallander: The Sniper” which I was watching as on-demand video using a review-sample laptop. This is where there was some gunfire from the sniper’s weapon followed by the snarl of a “scrambler” motorcycle’s engine as the sniper escaped. The gunfire had the full “punch” and you could hear the bike’s engine’s distinctive noise was as if you were near one of those trail-bikes.

Here, this represented the kind of effects that are often encountered in video games with the gunfire being part of “shooter” and warfare games; and the motorcycle engine noise being part of what would be heard in racing games.

But I have noticed at times that the higher frequencies can sound a bit coloured without any distinct clarity. This can cause some fatiguing after a while of listening.

I have used the Turtle Beach M3 headset with my phone on a bus, mainly to test for its useability on transport environments. The headset had reduced the engine noise significantly in a way that I was able to distinctly hear the music on my phone easily. This would make it work well when travelling on buses and diesel railcars and may be of use when flying. Even telecommunications voices have come through very clearly as I was able to use the headset as headphones using the break-out adaptor and the phone was running Android 2.3 Gingerbriead and allowing me to use its microphone to speak to the caller.

Conclusion

I would recommend that one purchases the Voyetra Turtle Beach M3 gaming headsets primarily for gaming or watching video content in a relatively noisy environment such as while travelling on public transport. For music, you could use this headset when listening to popular music where it is critical to hear that bass-line, again especially in a noisy environment. If you intend to buy them for use as a headset for your smartphone, make sure you can try them out with the phone before you buy them.

Article

Installing Windows 8 on your old PC could turn it into Greased Lightning | ZDNet

My Comments

Some of us might think about upgrading an existing computer system to Windows 8 when this operating system is released rather than staying with Windows 7. Most commonly, there would be a lot of doubt about this process but, in some cases, it could improve the computer’s performance.

A Windows computer that was built up in the last four years i.e. since Windows Vista was launched could easily benefit from an upgrade to Windows 8. This is due to the reworked code that is written to work best with the recent generation of hardware.

The speed increase also comes due to natively-integrated desktop security software as well as Internet Explorer 10 and integrated cloud-computing support.

But I would recommend that the system which is being upgraded has current expectations for RAM and secondary-storage capacity. This would be 4Gb RAM and 128Gb of secondary storage as a bare minimum. If the machine uses a hard disk rather than solid-state storage, I would expect it to have at least 320Gb. As I subsequently mention, the operating system is at a price point that may allow you to budget in a hardware upgrade to these expectations.

Users can upgrade their Windows computers to the new operating system at a cost-effective price due mainly to the “electronic hard-copy” distribution that Microsoft is using i.e. to buy and download the operating system online rather than having to buy a packaged copy with an optical disk. This is in a similar way to how Apple are distributing the MacOS X Lion and Mountain Lion operating-system upgrades. It also comes with some attractive licensing terms including the ability for those of us who are building our own systems to legitimately purchase a “system builder” package.

It would be OK to go ahead with the upgrade if you can handle the changes to how the operating environment works, such as the new touch-focused Start “dashboard” and having to “descend further” to get to the standard operating interface. But I would recommend that those of us who aren’t computer-competent should stay with Windows 7 unless they are buying a new computer that comes with Windows 8.

Article

FTTH the right choice: NZ IT minister | ZDNet

My Comments

Australia, France and a few other countries are implementing fibre-to-the-premises technology as their mainstay next-generation broadband networks. Similarly, some local “real-broadband enablement” deployments in some country towns like Hambleton in the UK have set up for this technology.

Similarly, those countries who have established fibre-copper next-generation broadband services, like the VDSL network in Germany and the fibre-to-the-cabinet deployments in the UK, have shown interest in the FTTP technology in some limited-area or pilot deployments.

Now New Zealand have shown interest in creating a next-generation broadband network. This time, they have headed for the fibre-to-the-premises technology rather than the cheaper fibre-copper technologies. Of course, the rural areas would be serviced with fibre-copper or fixed-wireless setups rather than the all-fibre solution.

The New Zealand Communications Minister, Amy Adams, had gone on record that she stood for the technology. She stood for it because there is better fiscal sense in rolling out this kind of network because of it being future-proof, rather than retrofitting the fibre-copper network to an all-fibre setup at a later stage in the network’s service life. This was raised as part of discussions with the Australian Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy regarding trans-Tasman communications, including capping the cost of mobile-phone roaming between Australia and New Zealand.

The country may also have other requirements that are particular of multi-island nations. Here, it would need to benefit from higher-bandwidth

But, in my honest opinion, that country does need to improve on competitive Internet access. It is because I have heard that the New-Zealand broadband services are more expensive compared to Australia and other main Internet markets. The problem is more so with international access streams ran by other operators so that the retain ISPs there can buy cheaper bandwidth and onsell it to the New-Zealand public.