TOCPCs – The Elite Geeks Blog

It’s not actually the Australian Christianity Church Council, no, Telstra have stated that ACCC Chairman Graeme Samuel acts like god and behaves like it.
I suppose they might be confusing the ACCC with the TIO, where the TIO collects fees for those who complain about services delivered, the ACCC on the other hand, does not.
The ACCC [...]

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I recently purchased something that is intangible, and the seller used PayPal as his payment method.
It wasn’t anything overly expensive, but I get annoyed when someone is paid for something and they do not deliver.
So, I lodged a complaint with paypal, that the seller didn’t actually deliver the intangible item, and there was no evidence [...]

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Eftel, an Australian ISP plans to roll out VDSL2+ MSANs to select exchanges.
VDSL2+ doesn’t really seem to have a place however for home users, because the performance from the internet isn’t likely to reach the speeds capable of VDSL2+ connections.
Further, worser than ADSL2+, VDSL2+ will drop speed faster than ADSL2+ technology due to the higher [...]

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A Buzz Broadband CEO recently stated that WiMAX was a ‘disaster’ and it suffered from high latency, and other issues.
He also made comment over the coverage of WiMAX, saying the coverage was non existent indoor at just 2kM.
Airspan, the supplier had followed up the comments made by Garth Freeman, stating reasons such as poor backhaul, [...]

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Soul Telecom seems to be suffering some form of value decline, at least on the sharemarket, where in little less than a year, they have gone from being $1, to close to $0.25, losing 75% of the share value.
They recently announced they had plans to buy TPG, for around $200 million dollars or so, which [...]

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Telstra might find itself reducing prices for a change.
The reasoning behind that is Telstra is forseeing a threat from LSS based competition, which allows others to provide ADSL2+ and VoIP services to consumers, effectively removing a good fair chunk of Telstra’s retail revenue for each customer they move over, and Telstra’s gain after such a [...]

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At least, I tried to trick the new TomTom GPS Navigator we picked up today.
I tried, and tried, took wrong turns and ignored every direction, waiting for it to at some point say … I quit.
But, it was too good. It was a little slow at some points to tell me of how to take [...]

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Should Telstra build FTTN, they insist on a return of 18% as a minimum.
That’s a lot of money to be forcing from consumers struggling with mortgage rises, and other factors, more so in a market where the pressures are on the price being dropped, and value for money being increased.
What makes Telstra so sure it [...]

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That’s of course the male lion at Taronga Zoo, where we decided to visit today, and take a look around at the various animals on display.
The Lion in the above picture is really cool! They keep them in behind ‘glass’ type cages, so you can see them in full view.

The bear wasn’t very playful, and [...]

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Yesterday I wrote about a CommsDay article, and the subject of it was that WiMAX deployment in Hervey Bay by Buzz was miserable.
We can see on Now We Are Talking, this article:
http://www.nowwearetalking.com.au/Home/Page.aspx?mid=364#intNav52
Interesting to note, that no where in that article is the true text of the article mentioned, or even, where to find the true [...]

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The Buzz Broadband CEO has labelled their deployment of WiMAX in the Hervey Bay region a “miserable failure”.
The CEO described problems which are generally common with wireless technologies in poor environments, such as packet loss, low speeds, poor signal, and high latency.
The network is an Airspan supplied network, and Freeman (Buzz CEO) has been previously [...]

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Senator Conroy seems to be living up to his words.
Recently he indicated he wanted network information supplied by all companies with existing networks to provide this information to prospective FTTN bidders.
I’m aware of two companies directly refusing to participate in this process, no prizes for guessing who the first one is, the other is, strangely, [...]

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It was requested recently, that those interested, send submissions to Conroy’s panel of experts on his proposed $4 billion waste of tax payer funds.
FTTN isn’t the way of the future. Look at the potential of returning back to a monopoly, the reduction and lack of interest in investment and competition. How will that improve, if [...]

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Just .. not as fast as trains in some cases.
It’s amazing that I can move 1GB 100kM faster by rail then I could the internet.
Heck, it’d be quicker to deliver 2GB 100kM away, using a car then it would the internet, yet the internet would be the medium of choice to save on driving time, [...]

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I’m getting a new design done for Downtime Web Hosting, I think the current site that I did, whilst was intended to be a simple layout, doesn’t have some of those qualities about it that ‘impress’ the viewer.
So, I’m outsourcing that one, to see what we can get back in a creative design.
One of the key [...]

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The ACCC released draft report on the ISDN and Digital Data Access Services.
The ACCC believes there is still a need for the services to be declared services in regional areas, until the 30th of June 2009, this is in comparison to the Metro services, which were no longer declared since 30th June 2006.
Could it really [...]

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As I mentioned yesterday’s post, I setup and have established Downtime Web Hosting, and it’s ready to accept customers.
I started marketing it some point earlier, to see what sort of turnaround it’d have with visitor responses, and I have to say, Google Adwords is disappointingly expensive.
You’ll get the idea of what I mean when the [...]

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I’ve finished the setup of Downtime Web Hosting.
It is a web host I have setup to offer stable hosting in a market where hosts can be unpredictable, and in other cases directly mislead and lie to consumers.
Simply put, I’ve seen bad, I’ve seen so called ‘quality’, I’ve seen ‘business’, and I find that the quality [...]

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Internode, an ADSL2+ DSLAM investing ISP has decided to use Optus DSLAMs for it’s Naked DSL plans.
I first think. How lazy is that. Internode, an ISP who has been investing into ADSL2+ DSLAMs has instead decided they’ll go and use Optus ADSL2+ ports for it’s Naked DSL product.
Then I think, Optus have the larger reach, [...]

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Today I was fixing a credit card gateway issue with someones website.
What seemed to be the case was that a cart system was purchased, and just on the fly someone decided to break away one of the existing payment modules and slap something together which would work with eWay.
The system was passed back to them [...]

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An article in Australian IT has quoted an industry member as suggesting that wireless is the BEST option to regional, rural and remote areas. And he is right.
WiMAX is capable of speeds far exceeding that of the proposed FTTN network. Look at FTTN as providing a maximum (yep, even Telstra’s own claim) of 50Mbps.
Look at [...]

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It amazes me how stupid those who get elected are.
The previous government setup a $2 billion communications fund, of which the interest would be used to invest in further regional and rural communications infrastructure.
Brilliant plan. There’s no burden on taxpayers for the funds to advance regional communications, there’s no burden on private industry to make [...]

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I see that the government has taken it’s sweet time with the handover of the OPEL decision making documents to Telstra. I imagine there is a fair bit of information there to collate, and place in order for Telstra to review, so they can finally conclude that the process was fair enough, and the best [...]

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Telstra’s loss in the High Court yesterday has a much more strong message behind it for Telstra. One which isn’t really obvious from the outset.
The G9 propose to setup an FTTN network, migrating copper wire to their nodes using a “Pillar Migration” method.
This method means that interconnection to the copper access network will occur at [...]

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And so did the High Court today when it released it’s verdict on Telstra’s “The Castle” style legal action against the ACCC’s declaration and continuation of competition.
Telstra’s case was that the fair rates set by the ACCC for access to spectrum on a copper line, or access to a complete copper line was a compulsory [...]

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It would seem that BPL isn’t taking off after the sparks it originally created when first anticipated by the industry as a replacement for the expensive copper from Telstra.
BPL is running broadband over infrastructure that is sure to reach nearly every home in Australia, the common power line.
It’s an easy and assured way to reach [...]

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According to a recent article in SMH’s “Business Day”, it’s revealed nearly everytime a pricing decision is released by the ACCC, they take that decision for legal action.
The idea here is pretty clear. With a pricing decision made by the ACCC, Telstra takes it to court, the competitor who wanted to have the decision made, [...]

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It’s amazing, the number of products you can get a guarantee on. For example, through the USO, a basic telephone service is guaranteed to any fixed residence.
And, there’s those “guaranteed, or your money back” style marketing done by various services and products providers in various industries.
But, one thing regional and rural Australia can’t count on, [...]

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Whirlpool have done it again, finally releasing the results of their annual broadband survey, and the results are well, expected.
Survey Results Here
What can be seen from the survey is pretty average.
1. Broadband value is pretty much the same, or even worse, over the last 1 year, which suggests that there has been little done to [...]

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When it comes to node based deployment, the issues for regional and rural areas are cost based issues, centred mainly around trenching through a fibre cable to the node, and then cutting the customers over.
Of these however, the costly option is the fibre cutover, as they would need to dig their cable in, and use [...]

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