I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Following up on the Wellington 2.0 concept it was exciting to read in the paper this morning that Wellington Mayor Kerry Prendergast is making broadband a local body election issue.
There have been a lot of passionate people, over many years, lobbying council (and Kerry) to understand that broadband is a competitive advantage to a city.
Myself and Sam Morgan spent time with Mayor Kerry and CEO Garry Poole last week and were impressed that the council team do get why broadband is so important for us to attract new business into Wellington - as well as continue to enhance the vibrancy of Wellington and the opportunities around social responsibility issues. They also understand the need to Wellingtonians to be able to communicate with the rest of the world leveraging new technologies such as VOIP.
I was impressed by the quality of council staff that are looking at this issue. They are passionate and capable people.
The fact is ICT strategies at the local body level are complex. There are many with a vested interest and the technology changes frequently. Myself and number of industry people have offered to assist the council with a pragmatic strategy and as a strategic sounding board moving forward.
Normally dealing with councils can be soul destroying but I was optimistic that the timing is right and top level support is there - making this an initiative worth putting time into.
So, so far, good one Wellington City Council and Kerry. Lets make 2007 a year when things happen.
Roll on Wellington 2.0.
blog
Hi Rod; I’m planning on working with a UK start-up company called Epitiro Technologies, to provide robust and detailed data and analysis in real time on the performance of IP-based services (data, VOIP, video). I hope to launch the service here; both to ISPS and to large organisations wanting to monitor these services so as to ensure their SLAs are being met.
The service is unique in NZ in that it replicates the customer experience, rather than monitoring the network from within. The company in the UK has most of the major UK ISPs as its clients.
Do you see a need for a service such as this in NZ, given all the imminent changes in the NZ telco environment, including developments such as Wellington 2.0?
Regards
Mike Cranna
http://www.epitiro.com
What kind of broadband? Are you concentrating on the CBD only or the city as a whole? There are numerous pockets of rental offices outside the CBD not covered by Citylink with Telstra’s dodgy cable connection being the fastest option. And there is also Lower and and Upper Hutt. They are too small to do it in isolation. Smartlynx proved this.
Cheers,
Max
The vision is that the City works out a way to cost effectively get big pipes throughout the suburbs. By having big pipes anywhere we should foster innovation based on what you can do with lots of bandwidth. This is for business, education and social responsibilities. Everyone wins.
The challenge is being pragmatic to evolve and prod to get to the Vision.
With the support of Citylink and WCC, the ICT Capital cluster is about to launch an initiative, called Innovation Launchpad, championing digital content and applications for next generation broadband.
We too want to keep the broadband conversation to the fore in 2007 and also intend use the project as a platform for established technology enterprises, tertiary organisations and startups to get creative about technology collaboration.
It’s a small step, but if we are to properly leverage and extend the infrastructure we need some more cool apps and content to hang off it that showcases Wellington in a global sense and delivers an economic return as well.
Right now we are looking for industry mentors/partners to participate in the initiative in the form of local players from the software or digital content arena.
Post onto this thread if you need more info or phone me on (027) 4737 314
Google Brighton in the UK (town on English Channel in Sussex for those geographically challenged). The council there together with Sussex University have set up a Wi-Max town wide network (toen as in 250,000, you cannot be a city in England without having a cathedral and in Sussex that is Chichester, much smaller).
Here is a link to what they have - http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,,1506911,00.html
Now WiMax does not fit all situations and cannot really be used indoors without extra antenna’s but its interesting to see an English city council this progressive (I lived there for 10 years).
This network covers 90% of Brighton and Hove and is run on a 24 Mbit/s line of uncontended symmetric bandwidth.
There are other cities in the UK that have gone down the same path as well.
Plus commuters on the Brighton to London train can use free broadband.
We are behind here in NZ!
We are indeed behind on (real) broadband and yes there are issues with WiMax.
The Poms and Yanks have the advantage of living in essentially flat geographic landscapes which are conducive to distribution of broadband via RF. Unfortunately in Wellington the cityscape is punctuated by inconvenient and rather large chunks of greywacke.
I’ve been looking at what cities in the U.S. are doing. It seems places like Philadelphia are looking at deploying municipal owned wireless mesh networks that use a combination of WiMax and WiFi. Of course this raises the ire of many critics (including network incumbents) who question whether city authorities should be taking on that risk. I think it’s interesting that we are seeing this discussion re-emerge regarding the public ownership of utlities.
Another approach is to lower the barriers to entry for new network providers. Like her counterparts offshore I note that Mayor Prendergast is also now talking about making other civic property, such as drainage pipes,available for fibre access. That would save a lot of expensive digging and make fibre more attractive.
Regarding the Brighton-Hove “MetroNet”. There’s good news and bad. It’s a smart JV between the local council and an existing wireless provider. But they are charging commercial users 275 pounds a month for a measly 2Mb linkup!
Paul, not all cities that use WiMax are flat. I believe San Francisco has looked at a WiMax/WiFi combination and may have already done it and Brighton is far from flat.
And 275 pounds is not expensive by UK standards. Also remember it is 2mb in both directions not an ADSL connection.
Plus you have the government in Wellington so they will subsidize it!
Broadband via WiMax/WiFi in a city could be done area by area by different ISP’s. After all its all about providing broadband services to the masses and not relying on the Telecom local loop. Commercial companies should not get some cheap deal as there are already options available in most business areas of NZ cities for business.
forget WiMax.
I used to run two wireless links to Johnsonville to shift Radiology images 27MB each. One repeater was on Newlands hill, the other on the highest house in Broadmeadows. We used two for reliability.
I used to use a pole harness to strap myself to the pole to work on things. The weather isn’t the only issue. Theres power, mist/fog/cloud as well.
We got around 5 to 10 Mbps of symmetrical bandwidth. And it wasn’t enough.
In my home I produce comercial video. I have done over 100 hours per year for the past 6 years. I have DSL, I have two satellite uplinks. None of them are what I call broadband. Last year I fed content to TVNZ, TV3, BBC2 and the Canadian Govt. Theres 5TB of disk in my home for processing. I encode at 13GBytes per hour……
A 100Mbps link into town would be nice. To get the stuff to BBC and Canada I drove a disk into town. I backed it up with Fedex.
Decent Residential broadband would be nice. I live in Tawa. My day job is with CityLink, the video is what I do in my spare time.
Please forget wireless as real broadband. It isn’t fast enough or reliable enough.
Rich - now you’re talking! I’m aware of other small, creative businesses outside the CBD who are also trying to compete by using Fedex. It sucks!
Dermott - I know that San Fancisco was looking at WiMax and that Google was proposing to underwrite carpeting the city with WiFi, but I can find scant reference to any recent developments. It seems like they are still talking about it. That’s a shame because it would make an interesting case study. They have deployed a point to point RF solution for certain specific applications such as remotely managing city water pumping facilities however.
One thing is apparent from reading all of these cases. The drive for more bandwidth is becoming highly politicised everywhere you look. I think that is something we all need to be cautious about.
The whole idea of providing broadband for a city is for different reasons to the commercial needs that you mention. If you want commercial high speed broadband then -
1. You have to pay for it.
2. There will be a price and it won’t be the discount prices you see for ADSL or wireless.
3. But the performance is really good.
The only option that I think works is fibre eithernet connections. This what we have at work, a fibre ethernet line, running at 10 megabits (we can upgrade to faster speeds by calling the ISP, and virtually zero latency.
It costs money but gives us a great service and that’s what I am after. Anything else is a compromise and this is reflected in the price.
BTW, free internet in Wellington airport will be a good start.
There is
http://www.drury.net.nz/2006/12/04/thanks-sam/