I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
RichardH sent me a great article on the need for dramatically more network capacity with a quote (the essence of) that I’m heard a lot in the last few months …
“They [Telco executives] want to manage the Internet as a scarce resource,” … “Internet executives want to manage it as an abundant resource. It’s a basic philosophical difference.”
New Zealand is creative and imaginative. We have an Internet bottleneck that stops us from playing to our strengths. It is difficult for us to unlock our many 1000’s of creative types onto the world stage when our access to the world is over a very thin, very expensive toll road (with poor on-ramps). Digital strategies, the knowledge economy, exporting bits, are just fantasy without resolving this issue. This article points out that it’s going to get worse as our crumbling network performance is choked with video.
I’m as ‘to the right’ as the come, but it seems clear that the market has failed. It seems logically flawed that we would contract out the provision of the base level infrastructure we need to connect our businesses to the world to companies that are scored on their ability to deliver returns to shareholders.
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never mind the bottleneck to the world.. i just want a fat pipe across town without a trip routed via california.
I was “to the right”, but the problem with markets is that… they efficiently reflect the state of human thinking. Which is often not the “best”, particularly with regards to infrastructure, or other areas with high barriers to entry. and almost certainly is not the ‘big picture’.
we like to bash telecom, but… telecom is doing what they (more or less) should be doing for their shareholders (with the exception of the abysmal ferrit!). So it cant really be their fault. What we are asking for are better roads, and lower costs, so there is not much incentive for them.
so therefore it must be a government issue.
we have all the intellect and imagination required here. how do we get a government to support us, so we can actually get on the knowledge wave, without the wave being a little ripple in a smaller pond?
Hopefully with David Cunliffe convinced of the benefits of peering, such pipes will be easier to provide. Wellington should be stacked with options in that area. We do them in Dunedin for around $50/Mbit monthly on wireless and we’re out there looking for modest amounts of investment to crack that down towards the $20/Mbit/month.
Problem is the long-term solution to national transit is pretty stuffed. For redundancy, you’d need to take a neutral fat pipe (undersea fibre) out of the South Island and even then a major quake in Wellington will break 90% of the NZ Internet.
NZ is paying the TEL tax so they can continue their ill-fated ventures into the unknown (Ferrit, which is ironically known to the rest of us for all the wrong reasons, and Adventures in Australiaâ„¢).
To highlight this problem - Hell Pizza got Dugg last night in a big way, 900+ Diggs.
http://www.digg.com/business_finance/Welcome_to_Hell_Best_Pizza_Delivery_Website_Ever
Well, aside from all the positive comments and mass interest from overseas, their server couldn’t handle the load and the site went down.
A pizza site with online ordering, crashing on a Sunday night. Sounds like real Hell to me.
“Now that the site’s been dugg into oblivion, the Kiwi’s won’t be able to order their Pizza.”
There’s the Catch-22.
If there was scope for creativity in this market, some whizz-kid with a load balancer and a plan to prioritise national traffic over international would be knocking on their door this morning saying “I can prevent your site from being swamped in future (overseas hits are nice to have for interest sake, but you don’t ship a hell of a lot of pizzas).
But for the $300 or so they pay digiweb monthly, there’s not a hell of a lot of room for a service provider to do interesting things in terms of service provision…we saw what happened in the hardware market when PC hardware went to commodity and 7% or thinner margins. In this case, the emphasis has to go on service, but the point is that you still have to be willing to pay a premium for good service. Same goes for networking. You can have junk ADSL for $50/month and get what you deserve, or pay a telco $000s monthly for fibre and get something usable. But there’s a huge space in between those end-points for creativity and finding that price/service balance. Fortunately, the number of people willing to pay that modest amount for great service is surprisingly large.
The question is, does that Flash app with the animated devils sell more pizza than a simple and fast Google-style interface would?
The latter, of course, wouldn’t need much bandwidth.
Oh yeah..and also…
http://digg.com/tech_news/Dreamhost_Power_Outage_Shuts_Down_popular_web_host_for_5_Hours
My traceroute [v0.67]
bashful (0.0.0.0)(tos=0×0 psize=64 bitpattern=0×00) Mon Feb 26 12:27:20 2007
Keys: Help Display mode Restart statistics Order of fields quit
Packets Pings
Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
…
7. po2-0.gw1.lax1.asianetcom.net 0.0% 3 225.0 195.3 153.2 225.0 37.5
8. cr1-eqix-peer.lax009.internap.ne 0.0% 3 221.7 197.8 153.8 221.7 38.2
9. core1.lax.inappnet-12.cr1.lax009 0.0% 3 239.7 200.9 154.4 239.7 43.1
10. border1.po2-bbnet2.ext1a.lax.pna 0.0% 3 207.1 189.4 154.1 207.2 30.6
11. newdream-1.border1.ext1a.lax.pna 0.0% 3 258.6 209.8 156.1 258.6 51.4
12. apache2-emu.blowpop.dreamhost.co 0.0% 3 168.6 184.2 154.8 229.4 39.7
Come on Rod! Host locally!
Just a question why is local hosting important for innovation, it would be a lot smarter to develop and test here and host close to the market.
Surely Hell Pizza should have realised that a UK marketing campaign is probably better supported by a UK based website???
Does the Welly web community have any good and close working relation/partnerships to offshore hosting companies.
Would it not be smarter to invest money in establishing an offshore network of hosting companies and establishing an easy way for NZ based entrepreneurs to utilize this network when going global.
Come on guys, I just can’t accept these same tired old arguments.
1: Surely no one in their right mind still believes this “leave it to the market” nonsense. If I were a natural scientist who came up with a theory that has had as many holes shot in it as Friedman’s tosh, I’d be an intellectual laughing stock. I had the misfortune of working in the Government a few years ago and witnessed first hand the farce that is the actual implementation of free market theory, and the knots economists would tie themselves in to try and quantify the definitions of sections 27 and 36.
2: Telecom is not reflecting the best interests of its shareholders by reaping monopoly rents. Any shareholder with two brain cells to rub together should not be investing in the short term pillage of a national infrastructure asset. This calamitous coterie of pseudo-execs (Gattung, Deane, Parkes, Moutter et al)have lost the company $1.5bn of its market value by adopting just such a ludicruous short term view. They were mesmerised by the vast pot of cash that was calling revenues, and no great marketing idea got past Moutter, Parkes or Gattung while they invented new ways to obfuscate that fact. The fact that every business they try and start which is not a monopoly (ferritt, AAPT, esolutions)is such an unmitigated disaster speaks volumes for their actual business acumen. Even Matthew Ridge can do better than that…
Now Telecom is in the state it is in, and the country’s broadband future with it. You think Go Large was bad. You wait until you see what happens when they try and roll out ADSL 2 on their creaking network. And this at a time when they are trying to re-calculate all the economics around the NGN - which they have no idea as to how to implement - within a completely uncertain regulatory environment. How Gattung, Parkes and Goulter lasted so long I have no idea.