Article

Telstra lodges its plan to split | The Australian

Previous Coverage

Telstra split ‘wont fix monopoly’ according to rivals

My Comments

As I have previously mentioned in this site, there needs to be further action taken concerning providing a wireline telecommunications service that is really competitive. The idea of Telstra splitting its telecommunications business between wholesale and retail is still about moving the wireline infrastructure to another entity with monopoly powers. This is compared to France where fibre-optic Internet can be provisioned by competing interests who have their own fibre-optic infrastructure but have access to the same ducts, poles, wiring closets and other physical infrastructure.

Other issues that weren’t raised included the definition and provision of the basic telecommunications service. This includes whether universal-service funds should be set up to competitively provide this service, how the national emergency-contact service is to be provided and how disaster-relief and social-telecommunications needs are to be provided in a competitive world. As I have said before, it would be best to look at what the UK and France are doing as they have moved from a government-run “PTT-style” telecommunications monopoly to a lively competitive telecommunications environment.

Article

Skype – The Big Blog – Parliaments across Europe renew calls to protect net neutrality

My Comments

There has been a lot of discussion about the Net Neutrality idea where there is to be equal treatment for data that flows over the Internet compared with a commercial desire to prioritise data that favours an ISP’s or partner’s interests or limit or throttle data that goes against those interests.

In Europe, various national and regional governments are endorsing or mandating the concept of Net Neutrality with the provision of Internet service. For example, the Berlin city-state’s regional government have recently endorsed this concept and Luxembourg have, from 17 November, moved a motion that Net Neutrality is part of that country’s national law and to be promoted through the European Union. It has already been adopted in France who have a lively competitive Internet-service environment as well as the Netherlands. As well, the European Parliament have moved motions to stand behind an open and neutral Internet.

But the mobile operators are seen to be against the Net Neutrality concept due to their investment in their cellular telephony services.

This issue is very much about permitting competitive service providers to exist in the IP-based broadcasting / content-delivery and communications space; but is also about free speech and a free press. It would also ring true with environments that push the competitive-trade issues like France and the UK; and could encompass the issue of whether mobile operators should charge extra for tethering or not.

I stand for Net Neutrality because it permits a competitive environment for providing Internet-hosted communications or content delivery services as well as permitting a free press and freedom of speech. The ISPs should really be seen as common carriage-service providers like telephone companies or public utilities.

Article

What a fight for broadband tells us about democracy | GigaOM

My Comments

A situation that is repeating itself in many US towns and communities that don’t have proper broadband is the desire for these towns to benefit from the broadband service. They will typically use tactics like a wired or wireless broadband Internet service funded by the local government, perhaps in partnership with a telecommunications firm. It can even encompass the provision of full infrastructure by local interests for annexation by a local telecommunications carrier in order to hasten the provision of real Internet service.

But established telecommunications and cable-TV firms like Comcast who have wireline monopoly over these areas fear the arrival of these competitive elements. They have established requirements on towns who want to set up such services to run referenda about such services and run highly-funded campaigns against these services when they come to the vote.

This situation creates a breeding ground for redlining and an anticompetitive trade environment for Internet and other advanced telecommunications services. The redlining can occur based on perceived “lack of profitability” for communities even though the community will benefit economically through access to advanced telecommunications.

At the moment, the Federal Communications Commission are in the throes of reforming the Universal Service Fund which financially offsets universal-service obligations for basic telephony service through the USA. Here, they want to encompass broadband Internet and cable-TV services in this mix and local communities should also lobby the FCC on this issue.

The FCC could also work better by allowing European-style competition regimes like local-loop unbundling for ADSL or mandated access to pits, ducts and poles for cable and fibre-optic service. This ends up favouring the customers through what I have observed in France and the UK.

As well, the Federal Trade Commission could be allowed to be involved in issues concerning anticompetitive behaviour in telecommunications-service provisioning. This can allow for antitrust aspects to be investigated as well as other standards concerning telecommunications service.

But I would see this more likely occurring under a Democrat administration rather than a Republican administration which favours the big corporations and anticompetitive trading. As well, where there is lively competition, there is a greater chance for people to take up the technology and a greater chance for innovation.

Article

Telstra split ‘won’t fix monopoly’ as rivals fear reform will fail | The Australian

My comments

A lively competitive market

When I think of a competitive broadband infrastructure, it needs to be lively and competitive with many different wholesale and retail Internet service providers. Here, I would rather see the competition occur more on value than on who offers the cheapest service.

What can happen if the competitive market focuses on who offers the cheapest service is that companies can cut corners to achieve this goal. This can lead to situations that are consumer-hostile like poor customer service, rigidly-enforced terms of service that don’t allow scope for human variation and budget-tier services that don’t offer what customers need.

The proposed Telstra split

This proposed wholesale-retail breakup of Telstra could sound very much like what is happening with British Telecom in the UK. At the moment, BT are running a retail arm as well as a wholesale-infrastructure arm called Openreach.

In the case of the Telstra split, the infrastructure would be managed by a monopoly which is the National Broadband Network while there is a “wholesale” group and a “retail” group. There will be issues like preferential tariff sheets for the Telstra service as well as something yet undiscussed.

Telstra as the baseline telecommunications provider

This is the provision of the baseline telephone and Internet service. It encompasses the maintenance of public payphones; the definition and provision of the standard telephone line; the provision of the national emergency telephone services, as well as communications needs for the social sector. It can also include covering for communications through natural and other disasters. At the moment, Telstra’s discretionary mobile and Internet services prop up their role as this baseline telephony provider.

What I would also like to see is an improvement in how the baseline telecommunications service is provided and funded for. This could involve the use of tenders to determine the provision of parts of the baseline telecommunication service as well as the creation and management of universal-service funds that subsidise the provision of these services. This avoids the need for a service provider to jack up the price of discretionary services to cover the costs associated with the baseline services.

Wireline infrastructure competition

One driver for real competition is the ability to supply competing wireline infrastructure. This typically comes in the form of sub-loop unbundling where an ADSL service can be provided through the use of equipment installed between the customer’s door and the exchange and the customer’s line connected to that equipment. In an FTTH fibre-optic setup, this would be in the form of extra fibre-optic lines controlled by competing interests run to the customer’s door; a practice that is taking place in France.

For that matter, it may be worth examining what is going on in the UK and France where there was incumbent “PTT” telephone carriers but have now become lively competitive Internet-service markets. This includes how the tariff charts yielded “best-value” plans for retail telecommunications service as well as enabling factors for this level of competition. such as telecommunications legislation and regulations. It would also cover access to established physical telecommunications infrastructure in public areas like poles and pits; as well as creation and use of new infrastructure.

Conclusion

What I would like to see is that our telecommunications ministers and departments talk with their peers in both those countries ie OFCOM in the UK and ARCEP in France so they can know what was achieved for competitive telecommunications.

Article

Apple v Samsung just the tip of the iceberg

My Comments

What the Apple v Samsung court case that is being litigated around many countries in the world is about is the attempt by manufacturers to patent the style or operation interface for classes of manufactured goods, i.e. tablet computers and smartphones.

A manufacturer may work out the style for a particular class of manufactured goods or determine a user interface that is going to be the way this class of goods will be operated. But do they need to patent this style or user interface and chase down to sue other manufacturers who implement this user interface or style.

Established design practices that I have observed

In the case of how manufactured goods are styled, I have seen a large number of device classes that have a very common style and user-interface in place. Take for example, Henry Ford who determined the layout and role of the pedals in a car with the clutch on the left, brake in the centre and accelerator (gas pedal) on the right. This was gradually implemented by other vehicle builders in the early days of the car and became the standard for foot control in the car. Here, you didn’t need to relearn vehicle-control skills and practices just to suit particular manufacturers’ vehicles. For a tablet computer, the multi-touch operating procedures like the “pinch-to-zoom” procedure are really about achieving a consistent user interface. For Apple to patent the multi-touch interface is utter nonsense.

Similarly, there have been devices that used the same or similar industrial design, usually with a few variations. A common example are the interlocking rim deadbolts used in the USA and Australia. A lot of these units have a very common styling, with the turn-knob being the only part that differs between manufacturers in most cases. There have also been the earlier “IBM clone” computers with a system box and monitor styled like the original IBM equipment. In one example the “clone” monitor had a third “on-off” knob as well as the brightness and contrast knobs that were part of IBM’s design. Of course the monitor had the same fascia as the IBM design.

I often find that the use of common designs or user interfaces can work to gain increased acceptance of the device class, while the manufacturers take tome to work on a unique industrial design or different features.

The Samsung Galaxy S smartphone – is it the same as the iPhone 3GS?

I don’t see the Samsung Galaxy S smartphone, which I own, as being a copy of the Apple iPhone 3GS. The differences that I would notice include the installation of the headphone and microUSB jacks on the top edge of the phone, a removeable back to gain access to the microSD card, USIM card and battery as well as two extra touch-buttons at the bottom of the screen that are part of the Android user interface.

A person may think that this phone is an iPhone clone due to the use of the black bezel around the display, a hardware “home” button and a faux-chrome strip around the phone’s edge. This would be more so when the phone is in a hibernation state. Similarly, a “swipe to unlock” user interface which may use different prompt graphics to Apple’s “slide-switch” graphic may still be considered as mimicking Apple’s user interface.

Ramifications of this legal battle

I would suspect that if Apple wins the legal battle on user-interface grounds, it could affect all touchscreen computing applications, whether with a smartphone, tablet computer or even touchscreen implementations in regular computing devices. This could even go as far as Microsoft’s touchscreen computing table or dynamic whiteboards that allow touch interactivity.

It may also affect the abovementioned design practice associated with implementing similar industrial designs in most manufactured goods or the user interface in computer software. It would be more so with the positioning or styling of visual cues in these designs and can even affect how buildings or interiors are styled in case they cross over a brand’s territory.

Conclusion

This issue of using patents to protect the style or user-interface of a manufactured device or computer program shouldn’t be used to stifle the creation of competitive devices and the exploitation of the technology. The concept of patents should be more about providing a way of exploiting the protected technology in a competitive manner but with proper attribution.

The Beatles come to iTunes at last | Circuit Breaker – CNET News

My Comments

Ever since the Beatles have come to iTunes, I have had some concerns about this exclusivity practice. What I fear will happen is that iTunes and EMI will take advantage of the fact that the Fab Four have become a major turning point in popular music and work out ways to gouge the customers.

My first question is whether Apple will extend the exclusive-sale contract beyond the initial year as agreed and when will competing download outlets be able to sell this music after the initial year? This also includes that issue that I had heard about of late where EMI made it possible for iTunes to charge extra to the Australian market for the same material.

My second question is whether the material will be available through iTunes Plus as unprotected MP3 files or as digitally-constrained files that only work with iTunes and the iPod / iPhone / iPad hardware families? There has been a lot of concern about Apple’s digital-rights-management management constraining playback of content from competing devices like DLNA-compliant home networks for example. What I would like to see for the Beatles music is that the content is as MP3 files that are able to be played on competing smartphones and personal media players or via the DLNA home media network even through the period of exclusivity.

I would still be very careful about any period where highly-valued media is made exclusive to one distribution platform over other competing platforms and check for issues like useability on competing devices before committing to it. As well, I am looking forward to the day when competing online music stores can sell the Beatles discography.

Articles – The Age

Buy or beware – competitors gear up to do battle with NBN

No NBN price war, despite competition

My Comments

There have been some recent articles about next-generation broadband services appearing in or being planned for particular locales in Australia that compete with the government-backed National Broadband Network.

UK and France offering competitive broadband service

Two countries, namely the UK and France, have established the idea of competitive next-generation broadband after their success with achieving competitive ADSL broadband Internet service. This is because the governments in these countries have worked ahead by establishing a mandatory competitive telecommunications regime including encouragement of local-loop and sub-loop unbundling. They have even ben cited by the European Commission as examples when it comes to broadband-Internet service being competitive and affordable for most people.  

In France, the government have encouraged competitive fibre-to-the-premises service in the form of two methods. The first method is for one or more providers to share infrastructure, especially that which goes “to the door”, while the second method permits a provider or provider coalition to have their own fibre infrastructure “to the door”. That same country also encourages unbundled local-loop ADSL provisioning or “degroupage” in order to see competitive ADSL broadband service.

In the UK, the government is encouraging Unbundled local-loop ADSL provisioning and there are companies who are setting up or planning local next-generation broadband infrastructure in certain cities, towns and villages. These setups, which are based on either fibre-to-the-cabinet with VDSL copper runs or fibre-to-the-premises technoligy, are even being done as a way of giving rural households access to real broadband even though Openreach, the UK company in charge of the wired telecommunications infrastructure, are taking their time to provide this service. As well, Openreach is slowly rolling out a next-generation broadband network that will work on either fibre-to-the-cabinet or fibre-to-the-premises technology.

The Australian next-generation broadband direction

In Australia, regular wireline broadband is provided through one of two methods. Cable-modem broadband is provided by Telstra or Optus in the major capital cities or through TransACT in Canberra or Neighborhood Cable in Geelong, Ballarat or Mildura. These companies own their own cable infrastructure “to the door”. ADSL infrastructure is provided by different retail providers who either resell Telstra ADSL service or through Optus who either may resell Telstra service or use local-loop unbundling. Recently, some other ADSL providers are selling retail ADSL broadband in a “local-loop unbundled” manner with a few offering “naked ADSL” service which doesn’t provide classic landline telephony on the same line.

The Labor Party had started action on the National Broadband Network which is to be a fibre-to-the-premises network covering most metropolitan, regional and rural areas of Australia with wireless and satellite technology to cover the rest. It was also intended to be a replacement for the copper telephone network that is managed by Telstra and there was the idea for Telstra to decommission this copper network and hand it over to the National Broadhand Network authority. This is in a similar manner to how the Openreach entity has come about when it came to provisioning wireline telephone and broadhand service in the UK. Lately, there was a key issue raised about the service being delivered on an “opt-out” arrangement with customers being charged AUD$300 if they don’t have their property connected to the NBN during the actual rollout and want to continue with their classic phone service at their property after the copper network is decommissioned.

TransACT and Neighborhood Cable are offering National Broadband Network their infrastructure at a price that suits them or they will run a competing next-generation broadband service in their operating areas. As well, i3 Group are working with the Brisbane municipal government to set up a fibre-to-the-premises next-generation broadband service in inner-north Brisbane and intend to run it as a competing service if National Broadband Network set up infrastructure there.

At the moment, the main markets to watch when it comes to next-generation broadband are the metropolitan Sydney and Melbourne areas because of them being population centres in Australia. It will be interesting to see whether companies or local governments will set up next-generation broadband infrastructure there in competition to National Broadband Network.

Questions to be answered

One main question that is to be answered is whether it will be feasible for competing infrastructure providers to set up shop alongside the NBN especially in major markets. This includes whether a building landlord or body corporate can have control over the provision of infrastructure for competing service providers.

Another question is whether IP-based broadcasting and voice / video telephony will be controlled on the NBN so as to prevent access to the network by competing IP-based telephony and TV providers. This may be a game changer when it comes to the provision of subscription TV through Australia because it could open up a pathway for retail operators and others to offer competing or complementary multi-channel TV services. It may also affect IP-based telephony providers like Skype or “virtual-network operators” who don’t own their own infrastructure locally but want to provide competing or complementary telephony services.

Conclusion

If there is a desire to see competitive next-generation broadband service in Australia, there will have to be rules and regulations set up to ensure this kind of competition and if the government is serious about this, they should look at what France and the UK are doing to achieve the competitive broadband market there.

 AMD jettisons ATI brand name, makes Radeon its own – The Tech Report

My comments

Some of us who have observed what has happened with the ATI graphics chipset name was taken over by AMD and were wondering what would happen with this name and the graphics-chipset scene.

Now that AMD has changed the brand for the ATI chipsets to their own brand, who knows what could happen next especially when it comes to computer display solutions, especially integrated-display setups like in laptops, all-in-one PCs and low-profile desktop computers.

One way that the situation could evolve would be for AMD to end up making motherboard or chipset solutions centred around an AMD CPU and GPU setup. This may be in a similar vein to the Intel Centrino solutions which include an Intel Wi-Fi chipset as well as the Intel CPU.

The worst thing that could affect high-end graphics and gaming users is for AMD to pull out of the plug-in display-card scene thus reducing a competitive aftermarket when it comes to performance graphics. This is because the ATI brand has been put up as an alternative to NVIDIA when it came to aftermarket and OEM plug-in display cards pitched at the gaming, multimedia and performance graphics scene.

Once we see disappearance of brands that are part of a competitive market, there has to be others who well provide competing products or a nasty monopoly or cartel can start to exist.

 Broadband pricing in US and Europe falls • The Register

My comments

This article talks of a highly-competitive broadband Internet-service that exists in the US and Europe, with this aided and abetted by the provision of lower-cost prepaid mobile broadband services with generous usage caps and the provision of multiple-play services by the ISPs. In some countries like the UK and France, this would be augmented by telecommunications competition regulations that “have teeth” and the willingness for telecommunications regulators like OFCOM (UK) and ARCEP (France) to enforce these regulations.

In the case of multiple-play (triple-play) services, the ISPs can make up for the low-cost Internet through highly-differentiated telephone and pay-TV packages as well as selling or leasing-out hardware for these services.

But there are some other factors worth considering here. One would be that the cost of a regular cable or ADSL fixed-line service would be going downhill because most of the countries are rolling out fibre-optic-based “next-generation broadband”. Here, users who are technologically “switched on” would head to these services and the ADSL services would then be freed up and sold to most people who have regular broadband needs at a “dime-a-dozen”. It would then make the “modest-bandwidth” services become less valuable to the ISPs and these would be sold as “entry-level” services while existing customers would be shifted up to the higher-bandwidth services.

In Australia, we are missing out on this because we have a series of problems:

• The role of the universal telephony service provider is on Telstra’s hands with people who buy Telstra’s discretionary services like Internet or mobile-telephony service bearing the cost of them furnishing this basic requirement through high costs or reduced download quotas.
• Reduced infrastructure-based competition between mainstream telcos for Internet and mobile-telephony service with some operators charging others a premium to use their infrastructure.
• Higher costs and reduced international-link competition that also keep the Internet costs high.

At least the broadband issue has been one of the main playing cards in the last Federal election. This could put everyone “on notice” about the providing of cost-effective Internet service across the country.

Article

E-Government-Offensive im Microsoft-Browser | news.ORF.at (Austria – German language)

My comments and brief interpretation

Judging from my basic understanding of the German language together with use of Google’s machine translation, I had “got the gist” of this situation which would be considered hostile to the European Commission’s agenda concerning Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.

What I was reading here was that the federal government in Austria were placing heavy emphasis on Internet Explorer 8 as part of their “e-government” initiative. This was including a downloadable toolbar add-in amongst obvious page-optimisation for this browser.

Most likely, I would suspect that, like most large organisations, the Austrian government uses Internet Explorer 8 as part of their standard operating environment and they expect that most users in that country may have stuck with IE8 even during the “Browser Choice Screen” switchover. One could say that this government could get away with this practice because many public and private organisations supply iPhone client apps to make their “front-end” useable on an iPhone which may be platform-specific.

What I would like to see with this is that if the government sites become less useful or unable to fulfil their function because of the preference for a particular browser is concerned, then the sites should be organised to at least fulfil their function no matter the desktop-computer user agent.