Tag: Australia

Article

NBN Co, strata tie-up to ease fibre into unit blocks – Telco/ISP – Technology – News – iTnews.com.au

From the horse’s mouth

Strata Community Australia

Registration Page (work in progress, check back regularly)

My Comments

A typical strata-titled apartment block

There is action taking place to make it easier for strata-based multi-dwelling buildings to connect to the National Broadband Network. Primarily this is where each unit (flat, home unit, office suite, shop, etc) is owned by an individual who either occupies it or leases it out, but the building is ran by a “body corporate” or “owners’ committee”.

At the moment, where there is National Broadband Network constactivity in your area, someone representing the “body corporate” has to register the multi-unit development with the NBN in order to have it prepared for this technology.

There isn’t the opportunity for a “body corporate” to register their development ahead of time in order to have the arrangement in place. If this existed, it could allow the “body corporate” to plan well ahead for equipping their building with NBN fibre-optic cabling.

Why show interest in setting up that building for NBN?

Whether you are a resident of an apartment in one of these buildings or are a member of a body corporate / owners’ committee for that strata-title development, you may have doubts about the relevance of the National Broadband Network to your building.

The National Broadband Network is relevant to the online lives of those of us who live or work in these buildings. This fibre-optic next-generation network provides a data bandwidth that is higher than what we normally have for an ADSL-based or cable-modem-based broadband service.

This can underscore the ability for most of us to work from home or have a real business-grade broadband service which can do more at our office suite or shop. As well, the broadband Internet service is becoming the sole path for communications and entertainment data with such things as VoIP (including Skype), IPTV (including video-on-demand / catch-up TV) and Internet radio / music-streaming services.

What happens after you register the building?

When the NBN start working in your building’s area

The legal owner or strata manager for the building will receive contact from NBN to verify the registration for this work.

After this is done, the residents or occupants will receive a mail drop in their letterboxes regarding the NBN work.

One strata manager, the Strata Management Group recommend that a body-corporate should convene a special meeting about the NBN when they receive this initial contact. This can make the whole of the body corporate aware of what is going on and how it concerns the building. This can include issues like awareness of ducting and conduits that are already used to channel telephone and other low-voltage cabling, wiring closets or equipment rooms where the NBN equipment can exist and where the service demarcation points for the apartments should be. This is also the time to identify the body-corporate representative who will liaise with the NBN through the installation phase.

As well, I would suggest that you look through articles and videos published on the Internet from Europe and other countries where fibre-optic broadband deployments have taken place to see how apartment blocks and similar buildings have been wired up for this new technology.

Installation Phase

There will be further contact with the body-corporate representative with a letter that outlines the inspection and installation activities

These will encompass the drafting of the layout for the fibre-optic wiring with an initial survey of the building. Here, they should look for any plenums or ducts that are being used to run telephony, TV-aerial, cable-TV or similar wiring and, if possible make use of these spaces.

Then the NBN crew will pull the fibre from the street to a connection box outside each unit / apartment. Here, you may have to have the occupants aware of the technicians working through the building especially in relation to safety. This is more so with elderly people or parents with young children. As well, it is also worth identifying whether the technicians need to be in any apartments while pulling through common fibre-optic cabling. This issue may be of concern with access to the apartment as well as assuring the occupants of their privacy.

Connection phase

In this phase, the NBN service will be switched on from the street in to the common wiring infrastructure. The residents or occupants will receive in their letterboxes a mail drop about the availability of National Broadband Network service in their building, with advice to contact their preferred service provider to sign up for service.

When the resident orders the next-generation broadband service, NBN will send technicians to wire up service within the apartment / unit and install the ONT (fibre-optic modem).

At this time, I would recommend that the “body corporate” supplies further information to the residents or occupants about what the NBN next-generation broadband is about as part of the regular newsletter or magazine.

This includes awareness that the ADSL modem-router or cable-modem-router won’t be of use anymore unless it has Ethernet broadband connectivity. Here, the residents or occupants connect to Internet using a broadband router that has Ethernet WAN/Internet connection with this connection plugged in to the optical network terminal provided as part of the NBN install.

Conclusion

This article will make you, whether as an occupant of a flat or a member of a body-corporate, aware about having that multi-unit development set up for the next-generation broadband Internet service that is the NBN.

Article

NBN wireless, satellite speeds to double

From the horse’s mouth

NBN Corporation

Press Release

My Comments

Rural Internet in Australia is to get a shot in the arm with the National Broadband Network to double the bandwidth available for the fixed-wireless and satellite rural services. This is through a technical improvement that is being made available for the satellite

The quoted improvements are from an initial 12 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload to 25 Mbps download 5 Mbps upload. The NBN spokesman was even saying that the speeds would be better than the current ADSL2 copper deployments in urban areas. I would see this as yielding some real bandwidth for today’s requirements, especially catering for teleworking, small business and farming requirements as well as families separated by distance due to people heading for the country.

An issue to raise is how much of this bandwidth would be shared amongst the rural households and this could become an issue when neighbourhoods become more dense which can affect the the rural areas as people move to these areas. Personally, I would like to see some of the denser areas like small towns be able to consider the fibre-optic technology. On the other hand, the NBN fixed-wireless technology could support a “master-antenna” setup for those dense neighbourhoods that are at risk of experiencing reception difficulties due to topographical constraints.

At least this is the right step towards real Internet for people who live in the rural and remote areas in Australia.

Article

NBN Co – National Broadband Network – Australia | I’m connected to NBN Fixed Wireless: what it’s like

Also originally published on SRW.ID.AU

My Comments

I have become interested in the account of an NBN fixed-wireless installation in a country property south of Ballarat as an example of what has been done to bring real broadband to the bush.

Previously the owner had to put up with a poor-quality and expensive 3G broadband service as his Internet solution. But this brought the same kind of ADSL quality commonly expected in metropolitan areas to his country property.

NBN installed the service on an inclusive contract which covered 2 hours of labour and the hardware and equipment needed to receive the service. This was part of a beta-test for a new ISP service to cover this country area.

The aerial (antenna) with transceiver was mounted on his TV-aerial mast and connected to the consumer-premises equipment that was installed in the house. This box has 4 Ethernet connections for four different services with connected to the Wi-Fi router that serves his home network.

The particulars with this installation was that he could see the NBN communications tower from his house with a although 2 trees were in the way. This could reduce the signal strength to 2/3 (according to the LED signal-strength meter on the above-mentioned CPE box) for momentary periods on a wet and windy day.

As mentioned before, there was the nominal ADSL2 bandwidth but could improve on upload bandwidth. He raised this as he is a content creator, but this issue would be of concern to rural users who “Skype” a lot for example. The throughput could be improved as the fixed-wireless broadband service is improved over the coming years.

Personally, I would see the fixed-wireless deployment as being worth it for rural users because they can get the real broadband service that would suit most home applications at a price commonly associated with an ADSL or cable broadband service. On the other hand, I wouldn’t recommend this for rural areas that start to become dense like small towns. Here, this could be a chance to look towards implementing the fibre-optic setup for these areas.

Similarly, properties like caravan parks, motels, business or industrial campuses could be allowed to opt for an FTTP setup rather than fixed-wireless as a “business option” so they have stronger throughput for their needs.

Article

‘Wi-Fi Ready’ ruse snuffed out by ACCC | The Age

My Comments

I have given a fair bit of space in HomeNetworking01.info to the issue of “Wi-Fi Ready”, including writing an article dedicated to this issue. This is where consumer electronics that are marked as “Wi-Fi Ready” can work directly with a Wi-Fi segment only if they are equipped with a dongle or module that the manufacturer sells at an exorbitant price.

In some cases, these dongles or modules don’t perform as they should and is something I had observed with a TiVo that being demonstrated at a consumer-electronics show a few years ago. Here, the PVR was being connected to a 3G Wi-Fi router via the official USB dongle that was to be used with this device but the unit, which was in a metal AV rack as part of a large-screen demonstration, threw up “out-of-range” error messages even though the router was in the stand opposite the demonstration space.

I even though of the issue where a manufacturer could have equipment not able to connect to a home network via Ethernet or Wi-Fi unless the customer purchases extra accessories through them. This is although most of these “Wi-Fi ready” TVs, Blu-Ray players and other consumer-electronics equipment, like the Sony BDP-S380 that I previously reviewed, have an Ethernet socket so you can connect them to an Ethernet (or HomePlug AV powerline) segment.

Other situations that could come of this include customers having to order the modules through the manufacturer or distributor rather than picking them up from their favourite retail outlet. Or a requirement that a technician has to fit the module to the TV or other device, requiring either a service call or the equipment sent to a workshop for this to happen, which also entails extra cost to the consumer.

Now the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission have taken steps in tackling this issue. Here, they have required the main consumer-electronics brands to qualify this statement in their promotional material that they provide to consumers and retailers about these products. This means they have to mention in the brochures that the customer has to buy the module to enable this feature.

Previously, whenever the European TV manufacturers provided the ability for customers to have add-on modules installed in to their TVs to enable functions like teletext, stereo audio reception or picture-in-picture, they would emphasise in the promotional material that these were options for the sets concerned. This put in to the customers’ minds that you didn’t necessarily get the feature with the set.

The European Union could tackle this issue using a directive; and other consumer-protection agencies could make sure that this issue is raised concerning “Wi-Fi ready” consumer electronics.

But what was never looked at was the continued availability of the extra-cost accessories that enable these functions. This can definitely affect TV sets that typically serve more than 10 years with older units being “pushed down” to secondary areas like bedrooms.

What can typically happen is that, as part of superseding a model, a manufacturer could cease to supply the accessories available for that model and design similar-function accessories for the newer model so they don’t work with the product in question. When the consumer-protection departments look in to this issue, they should raise the issue of having customers able to use newer accessories to enable prior models using the lessons learnt from computer design.

Similarly newer standards concerning the network interface will arrive and customers could be limited in to using accessories that only support the older standards. This can happen as the Wi-Fi wireless-network standard evolves to faster technologies or is able to use newer frequencies.

These issues such as disclosing whether extra-cost accessories are needed or whether such accessories are available beyond the equipment’s lifecycle need to be looked at to encourage a consumer-friendly experience when buying network-capable consumer electronics.

Article

Telstra lodges its plan to split | The Australian

Previous Coverage

Telstra split ‘wont fix monopoly’ according to rivals

My Comments

As I have previously mentioned in this site, there needs to be further action taken concerning providing a wireline telecommunications service that is really competitive. The idea of Telstra splitting its telecommunications business between wholesale and retail is still about moving the wireline infrastructure to another entity with monopoly powers. This is compared to France where fibre-optic Internet can be provisioned by competing interests who have their own fibre-optic infrastructure but have access to the same ducts, poles, wiring closets and other physical infrastructure.

Other issues that weren’t raised included the definition and provision of the basic telecommunications service. This includes whether universal-service funds should be set up to competitively provide this service, how the national emergency-contact service is to be provided and how disaster-relief and social-telecommunications needs are to be provided in a competitive world. As I have said before, it would be best to look at what the UK and France are doing as they have moved from a government-run “PTT-style” telecommunications monopoly to a lively competitive telecommunications environment.

Article

Indigenous plea for NBN in remote areas | The Australian

My Comments

I have previously stood for rural access to broadband Internet as an enabler for the rural communities when it comes to commercial or government services. But this latest article underscores my standpoint for rural broadband from the arts and culture perspective and enabling indigenous communities located in rural and remote areas.

This was highlighted by the National Congress Of Australia’s First Peoples who wanted to see increased effort in providing the National Broadband Network to the Indigenous Communities around remote Australia. This is in the form of access to arts and culture for these communities, including integration of urban and rural communities.

The same argument could be iterated in other countries that maintain scattered indigenous-people communities like New Zealand with their Maori people or North American with their Red-Indian communities. Here, they would have their unique cultures enhanced by the technology such as through “large-area” ceremonies or similar activities. Similarly, this argument could be raised for the Gypsy and Traveller communities in Europe when it comes to their access to broadband technologies.

In Australia, the remote communities that are outside the reach of the fibre backhaul would be covered by fixed-wireless or satellite links. But I would also like to see the feasibility of fibre links for community clusters with closely-located households, so as to provide higher-quality service in these communities.

Article

Internode adds Darwin POP • The Register

My Comments

In Australia, Darwin has benefited from the expansion of competing backhaul networks through the country. Previously, this city only had access to a single Internet backhaul line provided through Telstra, which led to higher prices and poor service quality due to an oversubscribed data pipeline. This didn’t provide for a competitive environment where the end-users could benefit through lower service prices and higher Internet throughput.

Here, the second backhaul that is passing Darwin allows competing operators to use an independent data path and wholesale service. This has lead to Internode being able to establish a point-of-presence in this town, thus offering an unbundled local loop Internet service to customers in that area; which would be feasible by early 2012 when this backhaul between Adelaide and Brisbane is enabled.

What I would see out of this is that Darwin is able to benefit economically whether through one or more larger employers setting up shop there or the development of research facilities in that town.