Posts by Knoydart 188 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Nov 2009
Here in NZ (and most other "western" nations, the telcos have sold off their terrestrial tower networks to a third party. There might a perverse incentive not to expand terrestrial coverage any further as it might cost them more than expanding their networks by more cell towers in space. Interesting times ahead.
Another thing to consider is the number of players in the market currently, and how much of a consolidation we are going to see? European regulators have tired to maintain a minimum of three MNOs in their markets, as two heads towards a duopoly situation. Will we see the same for the space based services, IF they can find some means of making it pay in the first place. I would guess that with the costs of getting into space in the first place, we are not going to see more than one or two players remain viable. Just about every NGSO satellite network to date (baring SpaceX) has gone bust, and some have even been resurrected as there are valuable defence contracts still to be serviced, or hardware flung up to the heavens.
Likely spectrum will be “shared” by the local mobile operator- for the US it be T mobile, who will carve out a block of their spectrum holdings and switch off the range of frequencies from their terrestrial network. Then SpaceX switch on the matching frequencies on their spaces based transmitters.
SpaceX (along with Lynk and AST) will likely be using software defined radios so they can reconfigure their satellites to match the spectrum bands of countries they are passing over at the time. This will be tricky in places like Switzerland, as cross border issues will arise as the beams from space are very wide and hard to control. Australia and NZ will likely be fine, the secret sauce will have to be added for places like Switzerland to minimise these issues and interfering with neighbouring countries terrestrial cellular networks.
Sorry but burner devices at Defcon is prob year 2000 advice. Juice jacking is not a thing despite various (US) government advice, and if your device is fully patched, its not likely someone is going to drop a zero day on you unless you are really really important (and go you for reading El Reg). Having been a couple times pre Rona, it was worth it as I was somewhere in the vicinity, esp the villages where you get to meet like mindeds. Linecon for some of the bigger rooms is very much a thing and if you are an introvert, be warned!
Some of the equipment vendors offer simultaneous 2G and 4G services in one block of spectrum. The reality is that for M2M connections, only a small number of 2G carries are required, as your smart meter or other connected systems only have to phone home once or twice a day. Here in NZ, there is only one operator left running a commercial 2G and I think that will run until around 2025 when their existing M2M contracts expire. My guess is that they will shut down public facing 2G connections however few years before, as the number of non 4G phones dwindles to a tiny amount, and they (somewhat cynically) just have to mop up the handful of users who rely on it by throwing a bit of cash or hard luck at the 2G punters.
Here in NZ, the competition regulator (after a number of public complaints of mis-selling) has opened a case against the local organ of Vodafone. Basically they went down the line of their HFC product being rebranded "fibreX" to compete against FTTP (UFB is the local product name). So maybe the UK courts should have a look at the land of long white cloud instead?
We currently have an update of laws around protecting information and privacy in general. Some of the smarter people in the NZ security space are advocating for laws to match or at least complement the recently introduced GDPR European rules. Otherwise we run the risk of being a banana republic (monarchy?) in terms of trade and data protection in relation to them.
Comments I saw elsewhere appeared to infer that the connectors used by Telstra previously didn't have a broad enough frequency response to carry the re-jigged nbn co HFC signals. As now the HFC network needs to convey both DVB-C as well as broadband required under the MTM plan.
Good like Australia, here on the east island, we kind of feel your pain, but our 85%+ ftth network is coming on nicely, so we get to read all about the nbn issues before you do.
You can now run a GPRS carrier (2G low speed data) among a 4G carrier with almost no impact on the 4G services. Therefore legacy smart meters and other GPRS connections can keep their low speed, rarely polled devices (eg once or twice a day for an ID, usage breakdown and checksum) going for many years to come.
The "robots" in New Zealand are basically remote controlled shunters with the operator riding on either on the footplate of said shunter, walking alongside the wagons or in visual range of the train. Not that remote when compared to those trains across the ditch. Think of an oversized RC car but on steel wheels and tracks.
My entry level Garmin can choose which constellation (GPS or GLONASS) it uses but doesn’t seem to be able to combine them to increase accuracy.
There is work for aeronautical use on having duplicate constellations being able to be received by receivers to provide diversity of reception from different constellations but I get that GPS at the moment is the only one the American's trust for its civil aviation fleet and so on. ICAO will have a big job on their hands qualifying many of the GNSS constellations for worldwide use.
Coverage in the underground (apart from metal bodied carriages which have large amounts of glass despite the sub surface lines being rather sub surface!) is actually difficult due to size of plant (base stations and antennas) verses tunnel space needed. Some of the higher frequencies will not even go beyond line of sight. Mix that in with 19 century tunnel geometry (sharp curves...) and its very difficult to go far. The attempt at migrating the police and other emergency services to LTE (4g) based communications below ground will be fun to watch.
That may be true (and I have relatives who are Scandinavian based so I know what a proper winter is like). Its a pretty damp country on the edges however - Central Otago is one of the drier areas in the country where as somewhere like Wellington or Dunedin may not get cold (by Scandinavian standards) but the damp defiantly makes for poor health outcomes when the houses are uninsulated and unheated.
You've not met too many New Zealanders then. They love their uninsulated, unheated houses and this is in a country where you are in the roaring 40's and the odd storm arrives live and direct from Antarctica.
Well a few facts (and I'm not spark fanboi)... Spark still have something like 43% of the broadband market in NZ and thats the largest RSP (retailer) of fixed line broadband in the country.
Chorus (as one of the 4 fibre companies) are still installing their part of UFB and are on track to finish their part of the network and make streets "fibre ready". This should be by 2019 but the other fibre companies have completed their (very much smaller) builds already. So when an order comes in from a customer, there is still a bit more work to blow the fibre through the ducts and do the build on each property (be that residential or business). What Spark and UFF are doing is trying to do the final "customer build" part en mass for a street as UFF have completed their slice of the underlying UFB network around the Hamilton / Taraunga area.
Chorus have 70% of the UFB build and a lot more complicated install issues like multi dwelling units and power pole sharing problems. UFF and Northpower (two of the 3 other fibre companies) are power companies so have used their own poles to help build UFB nice and quickly for their regions of NZ.
The irony about this push from Spark is they want to migrate customers off copper (one Chorus asset that is being sweated rather nicely for the share holders) and either onto the UFB product (hello more Chorus / other fibre company income) or away from the rented infrastructure and onto their own 4G network and (I'm guessing here) even more revenue per user as no line charges for retailing the fibre product are incurred.
I think its a good thing the en mass street install. If UFF were savy and Spark agreed, they would get all the other RSPs to do the same street, so the likes of Vodafone, 2degrees and Vocus would rock up as well with their customers and migrate the whole street in one go.
Maybe the various government agencies actually now want some 700 MHz for their own network(s), so like various bits of the Australian and South Korean administrations, they want to not sell it lock stock and barrel commercially, but carve some blocks for themselves out of the band that is proposed to be auctioned.
Must have been an awkward meeting or three to make that call (of pulling the auction), so close to start date. Popcorn sales at Ikea must be sky rocketing by now.
Another point that I hadn't picked up on until the IBM submission was that they had a 40 hour outage at the request of the ABS. Admittedly they had 4 odd hours of downtime but the next 40 was not of their doing. Guessing that the ABS were too nervous to fire the IBM system back up again and went back to paper based system (and the $30M bill).
Minor correction on those Kiwi UFB numbers. UFB 1 - due by 2020 aims to reach 75% and UFB 2 is looking to push that to at least 80%. The contractors can't keep up with demand right now but we should have a glut of fibre jointers available in around 2022 just when the west island suddenly works out the correct technology mix.
Furthermore the RBI project (they have split the urban / rural broadband rollouts here) has rolled out FTTN to a significant number of rural cabinets and built some open access cell phone towers. RBI 2 is aiming to get to 97ish % of the country in the next. In theory, the kiwi rural speeds should be around the same at the nbn MTM solution for the urban areas in the lucky country.
So guessing these lab trials have brand new copper between two nodes and with no cross talk, dodgy crimps and so on?
I would love to see what speeds you get when deployed in the real world. I guess those on the west island will find out in about 5 years when it might get deployed.
One would think that with that massive bill to remeditate the local copper loop, you should just put in some fiber instead?
So the info that allegedly came out of nbn co that at the time was all lies and made up, is now confirmed to be true now?
How much FTTP would have $800M got is the question someone should be asking? Optus (like Telstra) must be loving having their cash windfall. I wonder if the accountants can depreciated the assets as well?
So much for Mr Turnbull's much vaulted mixed technology approached. That 2014 renegotiation is not looking very flash now.
I think I'm still a fiber fetish which is a good thing, as (the non CVC) UFB has recently been installed in my building.
Its more like the 2.4 GHz ISM (industrial, scientific and medical) band that 2.6 GHz. 2.6 GHz is typically being rolled out for small cells in urban areas for capacity.
2.4 GHz is one of the bands your microwave in the kitchen can use to nuke your Marks and Spencer ready meal and is typically on a shared basis. So any user (RPAS included) has to accept interference and deal with it. What the RPAS does with the loss of command and control likely varies between manufacture.
A spot of GPS spoofing (at a technical level) would offer another level of interruption to RPAS in flight. Maybe spoofing the white house geo-fence for starters would be a plan?
You check against the publicly available hardware (schematics, parts etc) and software to ensure the right bits are in the right place.
If you wear a multiple layered tin foil hat, you then head off to the silicon foundry and rustle up the devices yourself to populate the board.
Never in my limited time on this planet have I had the displeasure of dealing with such a slow and painful organisation as the UK SLC. I wish I'd cleared my loan a lot quicker than I did so that I didn't have to deal with the mess that passes for the peak finance body for the students of the UK for as long as I did.
Sadly they have 2p of my money in their bank account. One day I will get it back but I suspect it will be a cold cold day in hell and prob by cheque, so my bank wont know what on earth it is and they get to keep it.
Maybe, just maybe they are not (yet) like the big boys and investing $ in the business and not just directing all income to the directors and shareholders.
Would be an interesting case study if the founders can shape company culture to be different from other ISPs in the US. Can they mandate / curate a positive company culture towards the customer and then keep it going if they achieve it in the first place?
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