Tag: New Zealand

Article – From the horse’s mouth 

Chorus Broadband NZ

Blog Post

My Comments

Chorus, New Zealand’s broadband infrastructure provider, highlighted why their fibre-to-the-premises broadband setup has been designed to be future-proof.

Here, they highlighted the time when New Zealand acquired colour television and households were getting their claws on to one of the new colour TV sets that were being released. This was concurrent with the 1974 Commonwealth Games being hosted in Christchurch, New Zealand and the Kiwis were wanting to watch this event in living colour. Then they highlighted the up-and-coming 2020 Olympics in Tokyo with the possibility of it being delivered using 8K UHDTV technology thanks to NHK in Japan being able to deliver 8K UHDTV broadcast feeds to broadcasters who have local rights to the event.

But they were mentioning about the feasibility of upgrading their infrastructure from 1Gbps to 10Gbps. They are prototyping such a setup in their Auckland-based Chorus Fibre Experience Lab but came across with the fact that it would only require replacement of the electronics at each end of the connection.

This would be the optical-network terminal in their exchange or street cabinet and the optical-network terminal in your home that connects between the optical fibre and your router’s WAN (Internet) socket. At the time that 10Gbps fibre-optic connectivity is needed, newer and better routers would be offered with a 10Gbps Ethernet connection of some sort on the WAN side, in addition to LAN-side wired and wireless connectivity that suits these expectations. If the exchange-side setup is totally modular, it could allow for a gradual service upgrade initially to those who are after that bandwidth like business users or “tech-head” early adopters.

Some other areas like Hong Kong, Norway, Qatar, and South Korea are dabbling with the 10Gbps fibre-optic idea and offering it as a service. Mostly this is offered by the local ISPs as a premium or business-class service.

But Chorus and other FTTP providers can see other upgrade paths for their fibre-optic services without the need to replace the optical fibre. Here, they could convert from passive-optical-network architecture to active-optical-network architecture to provide full bandwidth to each premises. It also allows the infrastructure to support full quality-of-service for real-time applications like online gaming, IP telephony or video streaming as well as a highly-flexible service for households and businesses.

Chorus are also underscoring the reality that there will be more Internet traffic over their infrastructure especially with the smart home and the Internet Of Things. This is more so if these devices become dependent on cloud services and provide frequently-updated data.

Here, what is being highlighted is the use of futureproof technologies that can allow for long-term investment in the same infrastructure and an upgrade path that costs relatively little to implement.

Article – From the horse’s mouth

Chorus 

Blog Post

My Comments

Previously, I wrote an article about New Zealand having its Internet infrastructure being built around competitive operations and next-generation forward-looking approaches rather than pushing out older copper infrastructure as the backbone.

Chorus are providing fibre-to-the-premises broadband in most of New Zealand’s major urban areas. This is in conjunction with the NZ Government pushing this technology across these areas in conjunction with this wholesale telecoms provider and the local electric utilities, along with the “fibre-to-the-node” fibre-copper deployments in these areas being converted towards FTTP, rather than the traditional wisdom pushed in the UK and Australia of “sweating out” copper infrastructure.

But Chorus were offering Gigabit service as a service option for FTTP customers based in Dunedin. This was initially to prove that Dunedin could be turned in to a “Gigatown” with Gigabit-level Internet service available everywhere. Now they are offering this same level of throughput as a service option for all of their customers who are connected to FTTP services in New Zealand. Here, they are underscoring the desire for New Zealanders to have the whole country become a “Gignation” or “Giganation” where everyone has access to Gigabit broadband speeds.

Here, in the blog article they published, they mentioned the need to offer Gigabit broadband as a service option. This is with the benefit of high throughput with the ability to, for example, upload 25 high-resolution images to Facebook or Dropbox in a second or concurrently stream 40 different ultra-high-resolution videos. For people who work from home, this technology would benefit them especially if they are using cloud-based “…as-a-service” computing approaches or desiring high-reliability IP-based voice and video telecommunications.

At the moment, they offer a headline speed of 1Gbps download and 500Mbps upload but could work better by offering a symmetrical 1Gbps speed as a service option. This kind of service offering is being made available by some service providers such as Gigaclear in the UK and could heavily please small-business owners.

They also raised the issue of popular Web services being oversubscribed which could impair the perceived performance along with your home network being equipped with older or less-reliable hardware. They also highlighted the fact that speedtests may not hit the headline speed exactly and reckon that you should be able to have close to that for the download speed at least.

Here, New Zealand is proving that home and small-business networks can be connected to Gigabit-level fibre-optic Internet service that is forward-thinking.

Article

Someone could be setting the cat amongst the pigeons in the Australian market

Singaporean Internet startup MyRepublic to launch in Australia | Mashable

How Telstra threat MyRepublic plans to win the NBN race in Australia | Fairfax (Sydney Morning Herald)

My Comments

What needs to happen with the status quo when it comes to Internet service quality and pricing is that a new competitor who offers better value for money shows up in the marketplace.

This has happened in France with Free.fr when they offered some really low prices for their telephony and Internet service and has whipped up a highly-competitive Internet service market where Internet and triple-play services are so keenly priced. In the USA, Google rolled out their Google Fiber service to cities like Kansas City, Provo and Austin with rock-bottom prices for Gigabit Internet service. This has stirred up established Baby Bells and cable companies in the area to lift their game when it came to Internet service quality and prices. In the UK, Gigaclear have cut in to BT’s established practices by offering to rural communities FTTH broadband services which have the same upload and download speeds at prices most home and small-business users can afford.

Now a new Singapore telco has come on the scene in the Asia-Pacific region to do expressly that. MyRepublic is intending to join the Australian Internet-service market by offering an all-you-can-eat 100Mbps service for AUD$80-90 per month in the main capital cities. They intend to link in to the NBN infrastructure to provide this service but are critical of the way NBN was changed towards a fibre-copper technology mix.

MyRepublic had reached other markets like New Zealand where they offered an all-you-can-eat 100Mbps service for NZ$79.99 over a 24-month contract and were focusing on offering a pure-play service that is independent of traditional telcos and cable-TV companies who are dependent on their other services.

Existing telcos, especially Telstra, are crying foul because they think that MyRepublic doesn’t have the infrastructure ready to provide Internet service of the same standard that they want to provide. What I see of this is that it shows that established providers will try to discredit competitive influence in order to make sure that the competitors can’t survive.

A question that may be worth raising is whether MyRepublic would have to capitulate towards offering multiple-play services with VoIP telephony and IP-based pay-TV especially in markets where multiple-play is the order of the day. It will also include whether these services will be keenly priced and offer increased value such as included calls or TV channels.

Most computer and video games are written in USA or Japan, mainly through larger studios like EA, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and others.

This is typically because of the common platforms such as the main console platforms where the barriers of entry to the platform are very significant. The regular-computer (PC / Mac) and mobile platforms aren’t as exacting as the main console platforms and are in a better position to nurture more games developers. This is although Microsoft was running the XNA game-development program for their XBox 360 console which opened up game development for this platform.

The regular-computer and mobile platforms are opening up the “indie” game-development community which is independent of the main US and Japanese studios. A key example of this is Rovio, a Dutch games studio who built up the successful “Angry Birds” game franchise for the mobile platforms.

Europe has had a chance at the development of computer games through the 1980s while computing platforms like the Commodore Amiga which had an open-access software development environment existed. Similarly, when the Philips CD-I format gained a bit of a foothold in the European market in the mid 1990s, a few European games studios developed games like Burn Cycle for that format. But these were systems that had some level of popularity primarily in Europe.

Typically most of these efforts see their results achieve some sort of “domestic” popularity where the game is popular in its home market. But Rovio, a Finnish independent games studio, had cut through this barrier by releasing the popular “Angry Birds” game franchise, initially to the iOS and Android mobile platforms. But this was so popular worldwide that they ported it out to other non-mobile platforms like the PlayStation Portable and the two main regular-computing platforms, Windows and MacOS X.

The Android-driven OUYA games console is in a position to allow the independent games studios to write for the large-screen console market because it has access to the Google Play app store and the Android knowhow. This could open up paths for games studios in the under-represented areas like Europe and Oceania to cut in to the gaming mainstream. Similarly, there were a few other games consoles such as the “Steam Box” being premiered at the Consumer Electronics Show early this year. These console platforms, along with the Android and iOS mobile platforms, could light up the independent gaming scene and encourage the development of games titles in these areas.

As well, governments and local industry associations could establish incubation programs for the computer and video games industry in these areas. This could come in the form of, per se, a culture ministry treating gaming / interactive-entertainment development in a similar manner to other arts and culture endowment programs. On the other hand, an entertainment-content district like India’s “Bollywood” extending their brand and concept to interactive entertainment like what has happened with Hollywood.

Once you have other countries and areas having interactive-entertainment studios and engaged in computer and video games, it can allow a lot more to occur. For example, games can be reflective of different cultures rather than a Hollywood-led “aggressive” culture. Similarly, a game that is set in the modern era like some adventure and strategy games can be set up to reflect a locale other than the suburbia of USA.