Telstra are at it again!

Telstra have let their PR bull terrier out of his cage again, and he’s certainly got his hackles up.

Telstra’s Communications Chief Phil Burgess explained why high-speed broadband is crucial to Australia’s future. But what’s more, Telstra have upped the price of high speed wireless broadband by $5 accross the range of their broadband products, and extended the length of their contracts from 2 to three years! (I wonder if the are still the only company to meter uploaded data ??) Now who in their right mind would lock themselves into a three year contract in the ever changing telecommunications industry.

Consumers beware! The price should be falling and the speed increasing – like it is everywhere else in the world!

Telstra spokesman Craig Middleton says, “This pricing reflects the fact that it’s the best product on the market for wireless broadband. If you want to travel first class – you’ll be prepared to pay more. If you want to travel on the bus with our competitors…” He denied that the price rises were related to capacity limitations on the network stating “Absolutely not, this is a premium product.”

There are several hundred service providers in the market of which very few have their own technology or hardware in exchanges – they simply resell the Telstra product – this equates to over 90% of the market.

See the webcast if you dare!

Show 8 of 2007

2007 is an election year here in Australia with a federal poll scheduled towards late October or early November. Both major parties seem to have a difference of opinion when it comes to telecommunications and connectivity in Australia.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, we currently have 20,757,869 people living in this country of which 6.65 Million are connected to the internet in one form or another. That’s just 32.1% of the total population. In a report release on Friday February 16 by the ABS, Wireless broadband technology seemed to be the big winner with 400% growth in just 18 months. So how does broadband and wireless compare? And what of the new wireless fad? Is Telstra’s next G and companies like unwired set to reap the spoils of their labor?

Also This Week:

Telstra’s 14.4Mb upgrade to Next G and what does it mean to users,
False advertising is rife in the broadband marketplace,
A leading Australian retailer refuses to stock HD-DVD
The ACCC steps in to mediate between Telstra and Optus
Australia’s obsession with mobile technology
Apple’s new $200m development for Melbourne

More info and downloads

Telstra Announces Next G Boost … *sigh*

For 20 million Australians, the 6^th October 2006 was an important day. The way we live, work and play began to change forever.ⁱ

How, I hear you ask? An act of terrorism? A natural disaster of unprecedented proportions? Or maybe a scientific breakthrough to revolutionise our busy lifestyles?

Well, no. Sorry to disappoint. It was just Telstra announcing an increase in the data rate of its mobile phone network, that’s all. The bit about “Australians’ lives changing forever” was a part of CEO Sol Trujillo’s speech at the launch of “Next G”, Telstra’s new wideband CDMA telephone network.

Similarly bold claims were again made yesterday by the incumbent telco, in a Media Release entitled “Telstra super-charges Next G network”ⁱⁱ. Yesterday Telstra apparently “super-charged” the speed of its Next G network from 3.6Mbps to 14.4Mbps, and boosted the cell range up to 200km for more than 40 rural and coastal sites.

Sigh. I took a deep breath and decided to “clarify” some issues on behalf of Telstra. For those of you confused about this monumental announcement worthy of a Telstra media release, here are some home truths about their Next G network.

Telstra is desparate to match its existing CDMA coverage, servicing regional and rural Australia, before turning off this legacy network next January.ⁱⁱⁱ The smoke-and-mirrors announcements (the likes of which we saw yesterday) are designed to distract customers from the millions of dollars they were forced to invest in a CDMA network, after the AMPS system was switched off about 10 years ago.

Additionally, Telstra’s laboratory tests have little bearing on reality. Telstra’s media release says that speeds on Next G network have been “super-charged” from 3.6Mbps to 14.4Mbps and cell range has been boosted up to 200km for more than 40 rural and coastal sites. So for those sites, I can be sitting 200km from the cell and get speeds of up to 14.4 Mbps on the data card in my laptop? Sorry to break the bad news, but no. This is misleading for a number of reasons.

One, these data speeds to the base stations accommodate all voice and data traffic for that base station. 14Mbps is a maximum data rate and only achievable sporadically, not continuously, under extraordinarily good radio conditions. Additionally, the base station is a shared resource. Multiple simultaneous users each take a share of that 14Mbps. Put simply, the fastest data speed is only achievable when there are no other subscribers using the base station and you have a “perfect” radio path with no signal degradation or interference.

By its own admission, Telstra have said data rates of 2.3Mbps had been recorded during testing at distances of 200km.^iv 2.3Mbps is a far cry from 14Mbps.

On top of this, voice traffic is always prioritised above data. So the more people that are using the base station for voice calls, the less likely you are to maintain high data speeds on your laptop or mobile device.

There are other technical limitations too. Radio power is shared amongst all subscribers, so that “cell-edge users” needing, for example, a 20-watt signal from the base station might be consuming half of that base station’s possible power ouput. Upstream network traffic is also a consideration, which is a measure of how many calls or data connections the base station can support back to the network. A base station might only be provisioned for 8Mbps, for example. Remember that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and Next G is no exception.

Bear in mind that products supporting these speeds aren’t even available to the Australian market. We won’t be seeing 14Mbps cards for at least another 6 months.

What we’d like to see from Telstra’s media machine is an announcemnt about high-speed broadband being available over the fixed line network. Australians are screaming for fast, reliable internet connectivity to their homes, not “super-charged” bandwidth to their mobile telephones. Telstra needs to break the bizarre love triangle with the ACCC and the Federal Government, not only in the interests of its shareholders but, just as importantly, in the interests of its customers, and start investing in landline infrastructure to support true broadband to Australian homes and businesses. This, however, is a rant for another occasion.

 

Dr Ron

i Company announcement from Telstra to Australian Stock Exchange, 10/11/2006, re the launch of Telstra’s “Next G” 3^rd-generation WCDMA telephone network on 06/10/2006.

ii Telstra Media Release “Telstra super-charges Next G™ network” by Peter Taylor, 15/02/2007. http://www.telstra.com.au/abouttelstra/media/release.cfm?ObjectID=39138

iii From “CDMA switch-off in 12 months” by Michael Sainsbury and Richard Kerbaj, Australian IT News, 06/02/2007. http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,21179897%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html

iv From “Next G claims range record” by Staff Writers, Australian IT News, 13/02/2007. http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,21219295%5E26559%5E%5Enbv%5E15306%2D15320,00.html

Show 7 of 2007

Listen to it here

Digital rights management is back in the news again this week stirred up by Apple Boss Steve Jobs. In a speech to industry on February 6 he said some have called for Apple to “open” the digital rights management system that Apple uses to protect its music against theft, so that music purchased from iTunes can be played on digital devices purchased from other companies, and protected music purchased from other online music stores can play on iPod’s. For listeners unsure what Digital Rights Management is, simply it’s an electronic system designed to stop people sharing files – in this case music – files between computers, iPod’s and the like. In what seems to be an unrelated announcement MUSIC label EMI said last Friday that it is planning to release a large portion of its music catalogue for sale by download, without technological protection against piracy. Coincidental? I’m sure the conspiracy theorists amongst you are slightly suspect of all this, so we thought it time to revisit one of our pet hates – Digital Rights Management.

We also talk to Lidija Davis, our Silicon Valley connection about the RSA 2007 conference in San Francisco last week, and if you’ve ever bitched about your anti virus software, wait till you hear this! Lid’s recommendation – Kaspersky

Justin Dunlop joins the panel to tell us all about the new technological lineup from Apple. Vista spores yet another clone, this time we see the release of a Vista for mobile devices. Apple boss Steve Jobs urges the top 4 record companies to un protect their music. What’s in a password? Well plenty as we find out in a new study about weak passwords and Vista security found somewhat wanting… For more information visit www.techtalkradio.com.au

Make Firefox FASTER

I’ve been hunting for this for sometime and finally managed to track it down so I thought I’d post it here for everyone. Thanks to the guys at forever geek, I found this little gem burried in their site.

Here’s something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return.

Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30.
This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0”. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages MUCH faster now!

Punctuation Substitution

Ze Frank moderated the 2007 RSA Conference; I could not resist including this little sketch of his. 

Enjoy!

Coolest Google Rumour

Late January, Michael Eisenberg, partner at Benchmark Capital – (and he should know, Benchmark Capital are one of the investors in Second Life) mentioned this on his blog:

 “Google is working on turning Google Earth into a virtual world a la SecondLife”

Google Earth ( a 3d mockup of the planet generated from satellite photo’s) is terrific, but Google want you to do more than just zoom through it, it wants you to add to it too.

Google recently released version 6 of its popular 3d modeling program (free) sketchup. 

Late January 2007 Google put out a competition for college students to model their campuses in sketchup.

They even provide the 3D warehouse – a website where you can demonstrate what you’ve build in sketchup

The Metaverse entrance? 

Jerry Paffendorf, research director of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a futurist organization says “I would expect to see someone using Google Earth as a virtual social space by the end of the year.  He is working on the “Metaverse Roadmap Summit” – a gathering of programmers of virtual worlds

How to Link Bait

The idea of generating traffic to your website seems daunting for many; people often use not too clever ideas, sometimes learning about the Google death penalty as a result.

You don’t want that.  If people can’t find your site, they won’t come to your site; if they don’t come to your site – no surprise – your product or service can not sell.

Q: So how do you generate traffic to your site?

A: You encourage new links!  Think Link Bait!

Eric Ward sums it up neatly and accurately:

“Link Bait has been around longer than I have.  It’s what we used to call ‘content’.”

Google’s Matt Cutts describes it as “Anything interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”

Although it has an unfortunate name, the ideas are tried and true; just ask any journalist, PR or marketing person – you need to ‘hook’ the reader.  Read more about what is linkbait at blogwell.

4 Cool Free Tools for Webmasters

domaintools.com

whois record, domain name, registrar and contact, indexed data, Wikipedia info, SEO

Validator.w3.org

Browsers accept Web pages and try to display them even if they’re not legal HTML. Usually this means that the browser will try to make educated guesses about what you probably meant. The problem is that different browsers (or even different versions of the same browser) will make different guesses about the same illegal construct; worse, if your HTML is really pathological, the browser could get hopelessly confused and produce a mangled mess, or even crash.

This free validation service is available at world wide web consortium (W3C) that checks web documents in formats like html and xhtml for conformance to W3c recommendations and other standards.  It also tells you how to fix it. 

They also include a validator for css.
websiteoptimization.com

This is a web page analyzer – you enter your URL to calculate page size, composition, and download time.

The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component.

Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time. The script incorporates best practices from HCI research and web site optimization techniques into its recommendations.

www.siteadvisor.com

mcafee siteadvisor – go to bottom of the page and enter your url for a safety test links – see whether anyone has reported you as spam out there.
 

The Art of the Blog

A recent study by MRI research and CBS chief research officer David Poltrack, only 8% of Americans read blogs.  This figure is based on a survey of 20,000 people.

Yet here I am telling you to blog.  Huh?

Eight percent of people read blogs on a regular basis. 

Search Engines READ blogs; better, search engines LOVE blogs.

Blogs update a lot; they are remarkably free of stupid, confusing code.

If your customers are looking for products that you make, or services that you provide, you want to be the first thing to show up in the search results.  If you want search engines to consider your site to be the most relevant result to your industry – blogging is the way to go.

WHY?: Technorati currently tracks 66 million blogs…

In January 2006, over 70,000 blogs were added every day, now over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) make a debut every day – think about the numbers.

At the beginning of last year, research showed that only about 5% of FORTUNE 500 companies had blogs. A new survey that began in October 2006 has to date looked at 64 Fortune 500 companies and found 43 with at least one public-facing corporate blog.  The Fortune 500 Blog Project is an independent volunteer effort to study public-facing corporate blogs by Fortune 500 companies.  They are reviewing on average about 10 companies a month.  You can help by registering as a researcher; choosing a fortune 500 company and helping them complete their list.

I had a chat with Adam Lasnik (Google Search Evangalist) in December, who said:

“We DO love blogs – because they have frequently updated material and many links – I don’t see us looking down at blogs anytime soon” And that’s the clue:  Frequent updates and many links.

Anthony Hicks began a database of Australian blogs in 2000, but stopped in 2005.  He says the site began with only a couple of hundred bloggers, but ended at 8,500 in 2005. 

An Age article says that as of June 2006, there were 750,000 Aussie blogs

It is an exercise in frustration if you try to get numbers for blogs; so much so that comScore last week announced they are going to join forces with Federated Media and start taking a closer look at the blogosphere.  All everyone knows is that the blogosphere is growing, and growing fast.

What to blog about?

Decide what you want to blog about.  Generally you either write in a news format, reporting what is happening in the world in a particular field, or you write a personal piece, something for friends and family to stay connected with what you are doing, or your opinion on a topic.

So where do you start?

First you need someone to host your blog.  This is easy, and inexpensive.  For the most part, many sites that are dedicated to blogging offer their basic package for free as long as you are happy to have a site name like www.techtalkradio.wordpress.com.

When you sign up, you will have to fill in basic fields like the name of your blog, a brief description.  Then it’s off to determine the basic layout of the page, usually called a template, skin or theme.

That’s pretty much it.  Now you need to add content by adding a posting.  The html is done for you; usually you just click on a button that lets you ‘post’.  Once done, save it and put it out there for the world to see.

Seoblackhat has a great tip:  “In blogging, the tightest grasp is with an open fist”