I am thrilled at the news of Malcolm Turnbull’s appointment as Opposition communications spokesman. I do believe that he is qualified to hold the post and he will do well in his endeavour to keep Stephen Conroy on his toes. I mean, the man has his own iPhone app for crying out loud! In his “acceptance” blog post, he highlighted the $43 billion cost of the ALP’s National Broadband Network, which is a great concern. I do notice that no mention has been made of the Coalition’s broadband model, which has been largely (and rightly) rubbished since it was announced during the election campaign. I can only hope that he goes back to the drawing board, and realises that FTTH is the way to go – but that it must be done with a close eye on the purse strings.
What does worry me (as usual) is the first comment on the blog post:
As an IT professional working from home do I need a 100MB connection? Absolutely not. Does my 76 YO Mum need 100MB? No…
This argument is so short-sighted that poster Craig should be ashamed to call himself an IT professional. If there is any profession that changes on a daily basis, it is the IT profession. The 24 MBit connection serving my office today is just enough for me now, but would it have been too much 10 years ago? Absolutely. Will it be adequate 10 years from now? Absolutely not.
Craig also misses the defining point of the NBN, which is that it is universal. France recently recognised broadband as being a basic human right, and I am certain that in the future it will the the case in every developed nation. To leave it to private enterprise to roll out the last mile is to consign rural Australia to the dark ages of the Internet, making the tipping the balance of rural/urban living again strongly in favour of the urbanite.
I’ll say it again: the NBN is a necessity for Australia. Even if you don’t appreciate a personal benefit from it, there are millions of Australians out there who will.
Paul Broad (CEO of AAPT) was on the news this morning, once again bleating about how the National Broadband Network is wrong and how wireless is the future. I’m usually a very calm person, but I did find myself wanting to throw things at the TV while he was speaking.
It is true that wireless is a complementary technology that will work with fibre to deliver services where hard-wiring would be unfeasible. Inside premises, for example, and the last mile for some geographically difficult areas. But does he really think that wireless – with its profusion of protocols and spectrum issues – will serve the needs of a tech-savvy Australia in the way a FTTH network would? There is a distinct lack of vision here, and also an ignorance of what is going on around the world.
Have a look at this fibre plan from Malaysia. It works out to be about A$60, and you get more than anything you could possibly get in Australia. And this is available right now. It is truly a disgrace that the chief executive of a major telco:
thinks that these services can be delivered over any type of contemporary wireless solution.
believes that the core of internet delivery in the future will be wireless
thinks that the current trend of people moving to wireless will hold
In the first place, the people moving to wireless broadband are moving because the process of taking a fixed-line internet connection when you move premises is slow, painful and expensive. If you could move from one apartment to another and have your internet connection move with you with little to no downtime, then you could be fairly certain that fixed line abandonment rates would be much lower. This can easily be solved by having an open FTTH framework.
Furthermore, you would think twice about wireless broadband if you did anything more than check your email and browse the internet for non-critical things. Even so, right now there are parts of inner-city Melbourne where you can fail to watch a YouTube video on wireless broadband. I would never dream of running my business over a wireless connection, mostly because my phone systems require a low latency that just cannotbe provided by wireless networks. With all the wireless congestion around, I can’t even run a low-payload codec over VoIP using a 54Mbit 802.11g connection. How do you think LTE or 4G would fare? Better? Next to fibre, they would not stand a chance.
Paul, set up a nothing-special wireless connection in your inner-city office, and tell me how reliable it is. Run your business off it and then tell me that you want to have this replicated all over the country.
I will leave a discussion of the importance of the NBN for regional and rural Australia for another day. The argument that “people don’t want this” seems to reign supreme amongst detractors at the moment, but I would again refer these detractors to business owners in Ingham and Clermont and Richmond (QLD, not VIC) who are trying to compete with businesses in Brisbane and Sydney and Melbourne. Without the NBN, they will fail in anything but the most ambitious attempt. But that is a rant for another day.
I could write out a long essay on live streaming video from BP’s ROV’s working in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as whether or not you should always be getting the latest software to hit the shelves. But instead I shall make you listen to me…
ABC 630 North Queensland – Morning Show with Paula Tapiolas 1 June 2010 10:10 AM
Email has come a long way in the last 24 months or so. A big step forward came with Google’s introduction of Google Apps, which allowed you to use your own domain name with a GMail account. This meant that you were no longer stuck giving out an unprofessional sounding [email protected] address at interviews, when you could quite easily give out [email protected]. It all depends on how good you are at getting the domain name of your choice. Google Apps is also free. This is of course a big selling point (ironically) and unlike many of the free-for-personal-use gotchas of the online services world, Google is quite happy for you to use this for business. Quite a few of my clients are set up this way.
However it is easy to get a bit carried away. I had the displeasure of discussing email solutions with an odious little character not so long ago (we’ll call him The Accountant). A client is currently paying a lot of money to host their email on a hosted Microsoft Exchange server, and this character was brought in from the echelons of upper management to scrutinise the use of money in all areas of my client’s organisation. Being an educational institution, cost is of great concern to them. Nevertheless, they appreciate the importance of reliable, fully-featured online services and make good use of the features offered by Exchange. The Accountant decided that it was high time to stop the waste and move all of their email accounts to Google Apps.
This in itself is not a bad idea. Google offers educational institutions a great deal more than they offer the standard Google Apps user (which is already a lot). Again, this is all free. I would be all for the idea, had this client not already been using Exchange for several years. Google has worked hard to eat into the Exchange market and they have succeeded in taking a good chunk out of Microsoft’s dominance, especially in the small-business arena. However to say that Google Apps is for everyone is a bit misguided.
In the first place, Google offers Google Apps Sync, which is designed to connect Outlook to your Google Apps account in the same way that it would connect to an Exchange account; your email, calendar and contact data would all come in as if they were hosted on an Exchange server. This was the argument that The Accountant put forward when I mentioned the heavy usage of Outlook in the client’s office. The simple fact is that Outlook is only half the story. Anyone who has an Exchange 2007 account and has used the Web Access component of it will be able to tell you that it is much easier to use when you have 5 minutes to check your mail, accept or decline meeting requests and look up your organisational contacts etc at an airport kiosk. Microsoft know all about the brainwaves of impatient executives.
In the second place, the cost argument comes into play in a very big way. The Accountant failed to consider the cost of migrating data from and Exchange server to Google Apps. Google makes it quite easy to do this when you’re already set up with Outlook and if you download an application that uploads your existing data to your new Google Apps account. Simple enough for one account, maybe even five (I have done this many times for many clients). The client we are talking about here has 75 mailboxes. Even if each one were 1 MB in size it would be a gutsy person who would have the patience to do all of that, and an even braver one to give a commitment that every single byte of data will be moved across without a hitch.
In the third place, I am not against moving this client off their heavy-billing Exchange system. It’s a lot of money that could be better spent on other things. Again, Microsoft have figured this out, and in their ever-underestimated sneakiness, have come up with an educational deal that rather blows Google’s offering out of the water. It’s called Live@Edu and offers educational institutions free use of what is essentially a hosted Exchange server. Each account has just under 10 GB of storage and they even throw in 25 GB of document storage per user. I have used this myself, and I know that the move from the current hosted Exchange environment to this new one (called Outlook Live) is going to be much less traumatic for any user of the existing system. Even moving data and accounts across is more easily done. It would be completely irresponsible of me to recommend Google Apps over this.
Outlook Live on a Mac
I think Microsoft has really hit the nail on the head here. They already have 3.5 million university students using Live@Edu, and these are the same people who are eventually going to go into the workplace and know exacty how to use Outlook and Exchange because they have been trained to use it throughout their university careers. Microsoft has also been very generous about what is included. For the life of me, I cannot see any area of Outlook Live that has been locked to down to give less functionality than my expensive Exchange 2007 account. In fact, Outlook Live is based on Exchange 2010, and therefore offers more than what I have for my corporate mail.
I have been watching this space very closely, with many of my clients needing more and more out of their email systems without paying inflated pre-GFC prices for email. When I next get the opportunity to bore your pants off, I’ll let you in on Microsoft’s next sneaky step to attend to that very matter in the world of corporate email. Google may be the big thing right now, but sometimes I wonder if they know who they’re dealing with.
There is a running joke amongst friends that restaurants and pubs visited by me on any regular basis end up going out of business. Penang Spicy, the Shamrock and the Metro in Fortitude Valley all spring to mind. It now seems that I’ve moved into the media with my dubious talent: after 18 years of gracing Brisbane television screens, Extra has decided to call it quits after having me on it only three times. Its last air date is June 26, and it will be missed by many here in Brisbane.
If anyone wants something shut down, I charge a fixed fee and will travel. Think of me as a modern take on the professional ribbon cutter, just that I close things instead.
I am thrilled at the news of Malcolm Turnbull’s appointment as Opposition communications spokesman. I do believe that he is qualified to hold the post and he will do well in his endeavour to keep Stephen Conroy on his toes. I mean, the man has his own iPhone app for crying out loud! In his “acceptance” blog post, he highlighted the $43 billion cost of the ALP’s National Broadband Network, which is a great concern. I do notice that no mention has been made of the Coalition’s broadband model, which has been largely (and rightly) rubbished since it was announced during the election campaign. I can only hope that he goes back to the drawing board, and realises that FTTH is the way to go – but that it must be done with a close eye on the purse strings.
