Broadband bungle writer same as ever

May 12, 2012 Chilling_Silence Personal Rantings

I’m not usually one to visit the NZHerald.

In fact, I actively avoid it at almost all costs. I’ve not been there in months now to be honest.

A long time ago I was put off NZHerald by the stupid ramblings they call journalism by a writer named Chris Barton. It’s a shame really because there’s another writer there Hamish Fletcher who I’ve found to be actually quite good, well educated, well rounded, and to be frank he’s not just bitching and moaning in every single post or suffering from ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’ like Chris does.

So it was a quiet night a couple of nights back and I had a few moments spare. Google+ had been read and I didn’t feel like Exploring. I’d read all of the Stuff website so I figured I’d take my chances at the NZHerald site.

What a mistake that was, I immediately came across this article, and remembered why I never go back there: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10802539

What’s so wrong with it? You mean aside from the fact that the article is a gigantic whining session?

Maybe it’s just me, call me crazy, but if I’m writing something I’d actually like it to be semi-useful, or semi-constructive. So I thought I’d take the chance to pick through some of the bile that’s been written.

Don’t get me wrong, everybody is entitled to an opinion, but some times you really have to wonder. So without further delay, lets get into it!

So what he writes, I’m going to quote like this:

“I know what you’re thinking. Who cares about copper when the future is fibre and ultra fast broadband (UFB)?”

Then, I’ll rebut like this:

Actually, a lot of people care about Copper. Considering the speeds VDSL2 is able to attain, at the price, and given that an “entry level” Fibre connection is only 30mbps down and 10mbps up, why even bother with Fibre at that speed when you can deliver VDSL2 for cheaper, no additional cables to be laid?

So, lets continue then.

“But the truth is most of us are going to be on copper – for the so called “last mile” to our homes for years to come.”

Most probably, considering it’s a 10-yr plan with several of those still left to go. It’s also significantly easier to cabinetize than it is to re-run the last mile. Suck it up and get used to the fact that you’re not going to get on to UFB right away. I can get Fibre at my place already, I believe through FX. I enquired about it several years ago now so I’m a little hazy but it was around late 2009. Anyways, I could get it. It was a $2,000-odd installation fee and then a further $1K a month, but I could still get it if I wanted it. If Chris really needs Fibre so badly, he can still get it in Devonport. If he wants it cheap, he’s just going to have to wait patiently (Or impatiently, bitching and moaning all the way, as he does).

“To get any real advantage on fibre I’d have to opt for a 100Mbps down/50Mbps up service which is going to cost around $124 a month with 60GB cap.”

Yeah funny that. New technology costing more than old technology, who’d have thought? Clearly he’s not an iPhone / Apple user or he’d basically say “Shuddup and take my monies”. When has any new technology come out and cost less? Basically Chorus and the Govt have invested a truckload of money, they need to recoup that. So you either pay for it like this, or you pay for it with your taxes to the Govt indirectly. One way or another, you’re going to be paying for the rollout and then for some of the costs to be recouped.

“Then there are the extra setup costs – a new router, possibly new wiring in the house and maybe an uninterruptible power supply to ensure you still have a phone line when the power goes out.”

What, you want them to just do it for free, because they love you, because you write just so many nice things about them? Pffft… Get real son, you’ve got a lot of learning to do! That’s not how the world works, and certainly not to people who are right pricks, bashing the company every step of the way. Do you really expect that if I were to write bad things about McDonalds on a weekly basis that when they open a new branch in my neighbourhood they’d say “Oh yes, come here, have a free meal on us, come and bash us some more”. Think about it.

“horror stories like this report from Palmerston North about the parking mayhem and disruption that can happen in your street when the Chorus contractors arrive.”

How else are they supposed to dig up the roadside? Again, more bitching … It’s like you’d prefer not to have to deal with the inconvenience and instead just live with Copper for the next million years!? I dunno Chris, you’re confusing me. First you want Fibre before 2014, now you don’t want the possible hassles of getting it like wiring your house, or the disruptions to your street. Which is it?!

“providing a low cost infrastructure for businesses to engage in creating big data services, products, content and collaborations that can be exported anywhere in the world in a blink of an eye.”

Yeah of course! However, the rollout isn’t happening purely so that businesses can get cheap fibre. Businesses can already get Fibre, and for those who actually need it, the cost isn’t too bad, and they’ll work it in to their business plan. Same for if you want VDSL2, I know that Hosting Direct do some quite competitively priced plans vs ADSL2+, and they’re rumoured to drop in price even further!

“By anyone’s logic, shorter copper loop lengths should lead to lower loop prices.”

Not specifically. Chorus have just spent a truckload of money over the last few years rolling out 3,600-odd cabinets. That’s a massive multi-billion dollar investment! You don’t spend a whole lot of money, then drop your only source of income.

“But this is New Zealand where we have a Commission that long ago lost sight of what it’s supposed to do”

More bashing / tall poppy syndrome…

“Its cunning plan to prevent competitors taking its lines customers away was to “cabinetise” exchanges – that is move the lines closer to the customer in roadside cabinets.“

Oh great, yeah sure lets just scrap cabinetization altogether. I for one would be going from a 24mbps VDSL2 connection down to a 900kbps (Kilobits, not bytes, that’d be 112KBps) with an even slower upload speed. Thanks Chris, for wanting to send us all back to the stone age, just in the name of “competition”. I’m glad we have you to defend New Zealand from any form of technological progress at all.

You’ve been on the same “Geek Exchange Tour” that I have, and I saw it as one of the greatest things to come to New Zealand infrastructure in a long time. You see it as anti-competitive and a bad thing because now ISPs such as Vodafone and Orcon have 3,600 more places to put their equipment in to.

You know what, you’re right, there’s not much room for competition! That’s because this is New Zealand and with only 4,500,000 people in this country, it’s simply not cost-effective to have 3+ ISPs wholesale-servicing 70-100 homes.

That’s roughly 25 to 30 connections per-ISP. Why would an ISP want to spend thousands putting their own equipment in there, when they’ve gotta get it from the Cabinet back to their main datacenter, and then further out to the internet? Considering an average connection is ~$50 a month, x24 months for a real long contract, x30 customers means that they’ve taken $36K over the space of two years from a single cabinet. It’s just not cost-effective, and that’s why so many ISP’s are simply using Telecom Wholesale. They could put their kit in there, but it’s not worth it even at what you describe as highly over-inflated pricing, let alone what you suggest by cutting the cost of a port in half.

“It’s also a key reason why Chorus should never have been let anywhere near the ultra fast broadband project.”

So we could have somebody else instead run another entirely new backbone? All that most providers would have done is the “last mile”, because there’s already several providers out there with Fibre up and down the country, from TelstraClear to FX Networks and more. All the proposing companies were in a similar boat, it’s just that Chorus had the furthest existing reach and the best current infrastructure at the time that would make the rollout as fast and as effective as possible.

More sour grapes from you, I think. Must be because people gave up listening to your bitching and moaning all those years ago.

“In a perfect competitive world, lower cost copper services would drive down the cost of entry-level fibre services”

No, this is wrong!

Lower cost copper services such as ADSL2+ or VDSL2 would most likely bring on more people from Dial-Up, or increase the ways that people currently use copper. The relationship between copper and fibre pricing is not linked. ADSL2+ is a ‘commodity’ product, similar to dial-up. Anybody can get it. VDSL2 is more of a “premium” product, higher peak speeds means ISPs need to purchase more bandwidth overall to be able to cater for the ‘bursts’ in data during peak hours. So it’s going to cost more in that respect alone.

Then you have Fibre, which not only requires significant wiring from the cabinet, down your street, to your home, but it’s also going to require an ISP further buys more bandwidth to cater for peak hours. Otherwise if they over-subscribe too much, you’ll end up with higher latency, dropped packets, poor throughput, and an overall *worse* product than if you had ADSL2+. Your logic simply doesn’t make sense.

Conclusion

So much moaning Chris, so much complaining Chris, so much suffering from “Tall Poppy Syndrome”.

Have you ever thought about taking a break, perhaps playing devils advocate for a change and *not* bitching about absolutely everything? You’re the sole reason that myself and a number of people I know never go to the NZHerald website. Yup, I’m sticking with Stuff instead. They don’t do quite so many tech articles, but more of them are better written and well researched, factual, rather than the opinion of one bitter old man.

Yeah granted things with the UFB rollout aren’t perfect, they were never going to be purely because of the amount of people this country has, spread over such a massive distance.

If you have something constructive to say Chris, then by all means get in touch, I’d love to hear something positive from you for a change.

ADSL2+, Chorus, Chris Barton, Fibre Rollout, nzherald,