I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Posted by Rod in Communications at 9:28 pm on Tuesday, 21 August 2007
The problems with the Xtra email migration are well reported. At least well done Kevin Kenrick fronting up on Campbell Live tonight. That must have been a nightmare and he handled it well.
But what staggers me now is all Xtra mail is now to be hosted out of Australia. What?!?
Does that mean that all Xtra mail, say from Gore to Dunedin, travels via Australia? Say it ain’t so.
- So what does that do to our scarce international bandwidth? We can’t do reliable VOIP or video conferencing and we’re adding internal NZ email and attachments down the pipe?
- Are Xtra customers charged for International Traffic now for all email, or do the rest of the New Zealand internet community subsidize that?
- Does Xtra enjoy the same international pricing that drives Radio New Zealand to host their content in the US?
- So if the link between NZ and Oz is down, internal NZ email goes down?
- Are NZ business emails under Australian jurisdiction now?
- What governments now monitor our internal mail? What if we want to invade Australia (directly rather than our current method) one day?
I just don’t get it.
Sad to see Marko go though. He is smart. Wonder where he’ll turn up next?
blog
It just goes to show that Xtra (i.e. Telecom) does not want to provide its customers with a service but merely wants to send them bits of paper demanding money (i.e. bills).
I switched to Orcon a few months back after experiencing the staggering ineptitude of their all-you-can-eat service not working. Orcon has been a very pleasant experience.
But I still don’t use the e-mail box Orcon provided to me.
I switched to GMAIL as soon as I got an invite back in 2004 and I have never looked back. I want to use my ISP as a way of connecting to the Internet. If they can do that for me in a reliable way, I am happy. If they can’t I’ll move on.
This is the advantage of using your ISP as a conduit to the Internet.
It might be tempting to put all your eggs in one basket, with your ISP, but it far more prudent to get your e-mail, web and blog space from those that concentrate on those service areas.
Of course, Xtra is a very special case. Of all New Zealand’s ISP it should be the best. After all, it has a very rich sugar daddy. So why is it so awful?
This pushing of their e-mail service onto one of their suppliers is what I expect from the telco mentality. No doubt they haggled for months on the ‘deal’ to move the e-mail service to YahooXtraBubble. No doubt they got a good price. Its just a pity they skimped on the engineering needed to make it all work. And, let us not forget the people who afford them the daily opportunity to drive hard deals and fancy sports cars … their customers!
Telecom (and Xtra) are holding this country back. The service they provide to the greater public is awful. They squat on top of us and expect us to be grateful for what little they offer us.
I’m not expecting fibre to the door anytime soon but ADSL2+ would be nice.
Are all of Xtra’s webmail boxes going to be resident in Oz? Why? Don’t they understand how to build a scalable service?
Oh, wait a sec, didn’t I hear something about confusion as a marketing tool some time back?
Telecom (and therefore, Xtra) have thrown away their engineering heritage and replaced it with contractor management. This is not the way to create a great product. It is, however, a great way to earn that bonus before you up sticks and bugger off.
I don’t know all the technical issues behind Xtra but I would say that the email is in Australia because it is outsourced to Yahoo who will have infrastructure in Australia to handle it. Gordon you mention about Telecoms engineering heritage being thrown away; I cannot remember any world class engineering heritage ever coming out of Telecom. 12 or 13 years none of us had the Internet, just standard 100 year old phone lines and maybe cell phones.
The have it inhouse or contract it out is not the issue; the issue is no one tests anything, no one works out the metrics and risk and works out a simple way around it. Same thing happened to Skype and now I hear they are blaming MS. What a lame excuse. Maybe hurricane Dean is MS fault as well. No one wants to stand up and say we screwed up.
As for invading Australia Rod, tell me how thats going to work? We cannot fly our troops to Oz because, well they are all broken. Air NZ cannot carry them there because, well because Helen doesn’t want them to.
As it happens, I covered this in March this year:
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/fry/5BE60A689020C74DCC25729200115447
and in news stories. Was wondering if anyone would pay attention :)
Dermott, I am a (somewhat) recent immigrant and I was being kind to Telecom. It comes as little surprise to me that they do not have a strong engineering heritage.
As for in-house, or out, I think there is a difference and that difference matters. If you run a service yourself you have your own reputation on the line. When you outsource it you rely on sonmeone else to make you look good.
My experience with the use of contractors is not good and has hugely coloured my view of contractors and out-sourcing. In general, I would only contract out those services I considered commodities and non-core activities of may organisation.
Telecom seems to outsource everything. Does it consider itself as having any core activities anymore?
Well Juha, I read a fair bit of what you write but I clearly missed this little beauty. It might be a chaper service. It might be a more synergystic service but … it still sounds like a crap service.
Gordon, the issue with to out source or not is not the question, the answer or the issue. The real issue is do the customers get what could be called a fair, reasonable service. As the owner of a software company we get outsourced work because of some companies having the old fashioned “computer department” we don’t do that here mentality. So service is the key, always has been in business its just that this view gets lost along the way at times.
This is one of the reasons I think why in IT SaaS will over business (both large and small) a much better service. When businesses a paying a monthly subscription, the vendor is only one month away from being dumped by the customer if the service is below acceptance levels. This is as opposed to one version away with the traditional software delivery model.
This keeps the vendors on their toes.
As for Telecoms engineering heritage, I guess what I was trying to say was that traditional Telco networks where not leading edge. We have in the last 12 months had several ADSL outages caused by things like, software updates did not work so they had to roll back, but obviously no one tested that it worked after the update. This is a IT 101 issue, lots of young people in IT think they are bullet proof, and they are not. I always ask the question “why do you think pilots have checklists?”.
For a great example of this check this link -
http://www2.taic.org.nz/InvDetail/03-003.aspx
In IT when this happens people just lose there ADSL connections for a while, in the airline industry people can die, lots of them.
Regarding your first point, you might want to run some tracert checks on some common IPs that you know are local.
I know on Friday when I checked that the traffic for our company site, which is hosted on Thorndon Quay, was taking a round trip via Sydney to get to Kelburn. With all the de-peering from things like the Wix there is an insane amount of traffic going overseas for no good reason at all (I’m with Telstra but I’m guessing most of the ISPs do similar routing?).
I remember when, for whatever reason, a lot of my traffic for local web sites were going via somewhere in Japan.
I don’t keep up with the play on things like peering but as I understood it, without it we have very poor routing for local traffic anyway.
Very sad state of affairs,
- JD
@John-Daniel:
That is why a lot of content providers like RNZ have content servers in NZ AND in the USA. ISPs who peer get the content for the cost of a hop over the exchange. Those who don’t (no names) have to get the traffic via expensive international links at whatever they pay for wholesale traffic.
People from Citylink have shown graphs at various conferences giving rates of more than 100 Mb/s traffic comming back to NZ from their US content server all day every day.
Kind of like getting all you groceries from the US when you have a supermarket on your doorstep.
Strange things happen when X meets Y.
After the weekend collapse of my conduit to the world (email), where I missed an important email from a supplier in Mumbai - which cost me time and cred with a client, I feel gun-shy. Am I missing things?
Maybe it’s time to move to a service that is reliable. But who? Is it simply something we can expect from technology.
Is there a psychological condition that describes tech-anxiety?
I was able to see the light sight of the screw-up on the weekend. After waiting for over an hour for a service rep to take my call (and hearing almost every song in the kiwi klassics repertoire while on hold), said rep acted as though it was business as usual. He sounded surprised that I was unable to send or receive mail. Then he became defensive (passive-aggressive?) - ‘we sent you an email…’
So, not only is the product faulty but the service is also rubbish.
How much profit did Telecom make last year?
Rod… Isn’t it Xero’s goal to service the UK market from NZ?
Is so, how is this any different from what Xtra are doing?
I don’t get your point Jason.
If you wanted to point out my hypocrisy I go for my personal email is on GMail. Much easier shot.
But I don’t that is the point of what I wrote either.
My point is that in asking people to host their accounting information overseas, in foreign jurisidiction, you will be asking your customers to make the same decision that Yahoo has just convinced Xtra to make.
If your reaction is an indication of how people will respond to overseas hosting (and with email!), how do you expect people to react to your asking them to host their accounting information here in NZ (an overseas jurisdiction!)?
I’m not pointing out any hypocrisy, just asking. I’m assuming that you’ve already provided answers to those complaints. If so, you’ve probably already got the answer that Xtra has come up with.
Jason, I think possibly one of the points Rod was making is that the amount of traffic that goes through Xtra’s email servers a day is massive. And by not hosting locally regardless of the cost to Xtra, it increases international traffic between NZ and Oz for for no reason, and slows other traffic that does have a valid reason to travel between the two countries.
I would assume that Xero will host locally in the UK but not because of traffic size (because Xtra’s traffic will always be much greater than Xeros), but for another issue related to hosting services. Begins with the letter L. Lets see if you can guess what it is.
Dermott, I was merely expressing my distaste for an organisation to outsource a core service that it provides. I am prepared to believe that an ISP does not have to provide its customers with its own webmail service. It may choose to buy in a service from elsewhere. However, it should ensure that it doesn’t look like an idiot when it does so.
Clearly the Xtra/Yahoo screw-up is everything I have come to expect from a service migration, i.e. it received insufficient testing beforehand.
I agree that testing is very important. However, this just shows us what Telecom/Xtra has become. It’s all about the brand and the deal, not the service. They are continually taking their eyes off the ball and annoying the hell out of the customers they retain. This is not a recipe for success. They are so big that it does not matter. They can do whatever they want to their customers with impunity.
I used to be an Xtra customer and it took three successive broadband screw-ups before I finally walked. Most customers, I suspect, will just continue to accept what they get since their expectations are so low to begin with.
Gordon, I agree totally.
I’ve had some txt messages from Australians asking if my mail is down and I’m not even an Xtra customer.
I suspect that the extra traffic is slowing other email from Australia as well.Doesn’t seem like a bright idea.
Dermott - I expect that TNZ, being a primary shareholder in the Southern Cross Cable is motivated by the fact that Telstra has previously announced that they are building their own cable, and won’t be using the Southern Cross once it goes live.
As for Xero, yes, they’ll be helped on the latency side by hosting locally (for their support organisation - not their foreign customers). Doesn’t avoid the rest of Rod’s points about the legal ramifications of hosting data overseas.
Personally, when I see latency for support organisations brought up, I ask, “How often do you really need console access to the system? Does your need outweight the extra time and frustration your customers will experience?” I usually tell our engineers to suck it up and put their terminal into line mode.
And before everyone gets too confused. From a customer service/brand POV, Xtra has really, really messed this up. TNZ needed some good press, they haven’t had any in a long long time. I wouldn’t want to be on Xtra’s management team this week.
Perhaps I need to store this problem off for the next time a project manager complains about the amount of testing we do. :)
Rather than being an issue with outsourcing, I wonder if it is more the business strategy being followed by TCNZ when compared with Telstra (as an example). Telstra very clearly position themselves (and please suspend reality for a minute) as a media company, and see their growth in value added services such as those from Sensis. Our TCNZ clearly doesn’t see itself the same way, believing their best return to shareholders is to sell off those media assets to private equity.
Could be that running email servers, anti-virus etc doesn’t fit with their strategy of being a focused telco - or is this just indicative of a lack of realistic strategy?
If I understand correctly, the issue is about our international bandwidth. I saw some number that said 90% of all email is now spam. Almost 100% of this is sent from offshore. I know that the vast majority of spam to ISP consumers is stopped by spam filters employed by ISP’s (some obviously gets through, of course). These spam filters now sit in Australia meaning much less email should be on our international links. Or is my logic flawed ?
Hmmm, that’s interesting. Telecom Marketing should hire you :)
I raised all these issues, before Campbell Live, and this blog, and everyone thought I was Nuts on GeekZone.
I have a real concern about New Zealander’s ability to communicate, or do commerce when we are now reliant on another countries infrastructure to do this.
Look what happened when we had 4 days of downtime, what happens when the fires start in summer in Sydney, or the cable had problems with this extreme weather.
Not to mention our data now being under the rule of US and Australian law.
All without being asked.
Oh, and yes, that does mean that e-mail from Hamilton to Huntly would completly stop if the A)Cable Breaks B)Sydney Power Fails C)American/Australian Government decides to flick the switch
I still think the major issue here is you host locally. Lets look at what has happened. We use Exchange server for email. If we followed Telecom’s logic with Xtra email, we would locate our physical server in Dunedin so every time I send an email to my secretary it travels from Auckland to Dunedin and back again. The international pipes are clogged enough without simple infrastructure decisions not being followed. And so the pipes become more clogged.
The simple rule of thumb is you host as locally as you can to your customers and they get a better service. Its just another decision by Telecom that makes no sense at all.
I thought I heard Kevin Kenrick mention on Campbell Live that the Yahoo service allowed people to upload their documents, photos etc. Now who in their right mind would do this and solely rely on this as their only backup.
As for spam, I still get a lot of spam from Xtra at home which gets dumped into my Outlook spam folder.
I think all we can say is that the whole Yahoo thing is a mystery.
I wouldn’t bother mucking around with xtra. It’s a waste of time, especially as their servers are now based with Yahioo in Australia. Gmail all the way. It’s the only way to reliably send and recieve email. I’ve never had any problems with gmail. I download it into Portable Thunderbird on a USB stick and it’s great. Ian
I have had a problem with gmail receiving forwarded email from my domain name based account, so I wouldn’t consider it reliable.