internet speeds in australia - an ISP speaks out

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 30 May 2006 21:12:00 GMT

as a followup to the recent blog posts about the internet in australia, I thought i’d mention that iiNet has just released a white paper detailing the myth of fiber to the node that Telstra is saying we need in order to get these speeds.

They claim we can already get 8Mbs with ordinary ADSL connections, and that telstra’s wholesale arm has artificially limited the speed to 1.5Mbs (in order to convince the government and the public to pay them 3-5billion to upgrade the network, and more importantly LOCK EVERY ONE ELSE OUT).

I’m not sure if they are claiming this or not (I just skimmed through the report), but I think they are also saying that when iiNet introduced their DSLAMs into the exchange all of a sudden the Telstra DSLAMs performed faster as well (page 7 and 8). nothing illegal here.. but ethical?

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Internet speeds in australia

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 23 May 2006 17:49:00 GMT

In a example of [self-interest](http://www.theage.com.au/news/wireless—broadband/pbl-boss-calls-for-net-to-be-fixed/2006/05/22/1148150189885.html), James Packer, the head of a major media empire (PBL) in Australia is calling for the government to spend the taxpayers money (and other large media companies) to create bigger pipes so to allow his company to put it’s streaming content over it.

While I do agree that the broadband speeds here are slow, and the download caps are annoying, I’m not sure why it is the government’s responsibility to fix it.

Maybe PBL should seed the broadband rollout, similar to how google is partnering with earthlink to enable free-wifi in San Francisco.

By investing in some network infrastructure between the major cities it will cause the backbone data-rates to decrease, allowing ISPs to remove/raise the download caps and make it cheaper for people to go online (and then watch his media)

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a new planet for economists

Posted by Ian Holsman Thu, 20 Apr 2006 16:08:00 GMT

I created a new planet for blogs on the economy and economics in general

If you have any other favorites.. ping me and I’ll add them to it.

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I need help with an assignment

Posted by Ian Holsman Thu, 02 Mar 2006 01:40:00 GMT

For one of my economics course I’m currently doing we are studying the economic development of a country over the last 30 years.

We are looking at Germany, and I was wondering if you readers who know a bit about what important things happened in Europe and Germany over the last 3 decades would post a comment here about the major events which had occured. (ie tearing down the wall, mastricht/EU, the introduction of the euro.. things like that)

Thanks!

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Google Print - my take on why the publishers don't like it

Posted by Ian Holsman Wed, 01 Feb 2006 21:48:00 GMT

I was having a discussion on IRC about google print, talking about how the publishers are crazy not allowing them to index all the content. People couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t be leaping at the chance of monetizing the long tail (in web2.0 speak).

but then it struck me..

  • who would buy the books?
and
  • who would hold them?

the answer to the first would be people who would have bought a new book instead, so the industry as a whole would not be better off, and might in fact be worse of, as the margin on ‘fresh’ books would be bigger, and scarcity is a good thing if you are a seller.

The answer to the second is no-one. it wouldn’t be economical to hold copies ‘just in case’. This would lead to some kind of ‘print on demand’ service or electronic purchase of it, resulting in lower value versions (but maybe higher margins)

Until the publisher has the infrastructure to print on demand, or demand for ebooks rise.. I just see a cannabilization of existing sales.

Or worse a monopoly of the electronic content owned by google (not the IP, just the asset itself) putting them in a very pretty bargaining position when it comes to splitting up the procceeds of a sale.

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Don't Google Us

Posted by Ian Holsman Wed, 01 Feb 2006 20:59:00 GMT

Reuters is carrying a story (which I saw on memeorandum ) about how content providers are getting upset about google ‘stealing’ ( they call it aggregating) their content and commoditizing it.

They are in a very tough situation. On one hand they love the traffic the search engine brings to them, on the other they hate the commoditification of their IP and making their editors choices of what is ‘interesting’ redundant. (you can pick from over 1,700 places to read about the passing away of Coretta Scott King for example).

But the problem they face with google is that they are easily replaced with other news sources (do you care if you have 1,700 places or 1,699?)

The other sad fact is that most of those 1,700 ‘stories’ come from the same wholesale news-services (retuers, or AAP for example). and they are playing a arbitrage game.. (the cost of the feed vs the revenue from ads and subscriptions).

In the economoics lectures/books i’ve been reading lately one of the basic premsises of scarcity. If you are the only one to have something it is more valuable than if everyone had it.

So my suggestion to the major online content providers who think google is a threat.. change the game.. don’t re-publish stories (or if you must don’t let google see them) from a feed, concentrate on unique content which can’t be made into a commodity. The only people to lose out in that would be the Feed providers. (and the aggregators)

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There can only be one

Posted by Ian Holsman Thu, 26 Jan 2006 04:44:00 GMT

I attended a interesting lecture about innovation by Iain Cockburn today where he was talking about standards, and how in any standard war, eventually only one will succeed.

standard examples he used were:

  • VHS vs Betamax and
  • OS/2 and Windows 95

where in both these cases the technically superior product lost. If this is true (and he seemed to have lots of maths and other economists to back him up) it is interesting when you look at linux vs NT, Blue Ray and HDDVD,.. eventually one of these will win out, thanks to network effects / virtuous circles et al.

In the software world (rails vs java vs django for example) this might be

  • more apps written for it
  • more books/blogs about it
  • more developers using it
  • more comitters support the framework
  • more features in the framework
  • leading to faster development times (leading back to more apps written with it)

Personally I think duopolies can exist one they have a ecosystem of complementors in place, and that some ‘wars’ will last for a long time to come thanks to the Deep pockets of the players in the game, and how all the players know the game well enough to know the rules.

The other interesting thing is that all the things you traditionaly think of being ‘wrong’ about how a company operates (as the end customer) is actually shown as a method of creating a dominating standard.

  • Create FUD
  • Signal your intent by burning your bridges behind you, forcing you to move forward
  • Lie about your features/performance, you can fix it in the next release once your standard has won.
  • move as fast as possible to build your market (making sure your profitable, not a dot-bomb)
  • trumpet your wins, to create the impression that everyone is using your standard

other less objectionable methods

  • create complementors, (killer apps or must-see content)
  • low entry prices for the chicken and egg problem
  • low switching costs

Going back to rails I don’t think it has created the circle yet, the apps aren’t there yet/mature enough. Once these are in place say in 6-12 months time it might be game over for other frameworks, but until then a ‘killer app’ in another framework will make it a interesting race.

another interesting point.. you don’t have to be using the dominant standard to make money. being on a popular standard means more (and harder) competition. It might just be easier to learn a less popular framework and consult in it as you could charge a higher price as there are less people with your expertise ;-)

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credible threats

Posted by Ian Holsman Thu, 15 Dec 2005 13:10:00 GMT

Singapore airlines is petitioning the government of australia to allow it to fly between the US and Australia, making it the 3rd carrier to do so. Having have to pay the highway robbery they call a price several times, I’m interested in seeing the outcome of this

I see Qantas are using interesting tactics.

  1. The promise of lower prices.. This is similar to me promising to give up smoking. While I might have the best intentions now when the pressure is on, as soon as people forget I’ll be outside the office lighting up again.

  2. $10 billion in new planes (in 3yrs) + new jobs. An Increase in capacity will put downward pressure on prices (they need bums on seats). But there is nothing saying (and no way to enforce) that they will use these new planes on that route, and that the overall number of passengers per week will change. And for all we know they might build out the planes as ‘luxury’ models keeping the prices constant and putting extra features to justify it.

  3. The upgrades are probably going to take place anyway. For all we know, they are going to spend the money and create the jobs REGARDLESS of what the decision is.

  4. Getting their version of ‘jetblue’ to grab the cheap seats. Personally I like this option. It will give the vactioneer a cheap way to get to their destination, but it will do nothing for the business traveller, and may infact raise the price for him as qantas now can differentiate by plane type as well.

  5. Qantas is a public entity, not a government organisation. How does it benefit the Australian public? (not the shareholders)

So for these 5 reasons I think Singapore airlines should be allowed to fly the route, and Qantas did this to itself by charging ‘what the market will bear’ for so long. If it wasn’t trying to milk the line for so long Singapore Airlines probably wouldn’t have thought to enter the market.

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Communities and open source

Posted by Ian Holsman Sat, 10 Dec 2005 19:35:00 GMT

In Matt Asay’s blog he mentions how he shared a flight with Clint Oram of SugarCRM, where clint quotes..

Of the top 50 contributors to SugarCRM’s development community, 95% of them are SugarCRM partners

And goes on to say that this is a good thing.

Well.. count me in the ignorant pile, because I’m not so sure. For me the signs of a vibrant community is more that the USERS of the product are contributing patches back to it, not the people getting paid to install it.

This might be because we have a different definition of what a community is, or maybe the client base of sugarcrm aren’t technically sophisiticated enough to contribute back to it..

why is this important?

Well there are two major benefits I’ve heard that a ‘open source’ product has.

The improved sales:revenue ratio, with JBoss’s Marc Fluery saying recently :

An optimally functioning FOSS business model needs 20 cents of sales and marketing to acquire 1 dollar of maintenance, where a traditional software company will have to spend around 2 1/2 dollars.

and a decreased R&D:sales ratio (can’t find a quote..sorry). SugarCRM needs to find a way to get it’s users to contribute back into the development. only then will it get the full benefit of being a open source company.

There are 2 other important reasons why you want the users to contribute back as well. Product Innovation, and ownership. the Users are the ones who know what their business needs, not the ‘partners’ who install it, they don’t use the product day in and day out.

The second reason is ownership, if you have put your own sweat and tears into making something work, it will be much harder to give it up for some other product later on. If you can get your users to feel that they play a bigger part than the person signing the check they won’t leave as easily.

of course.. this is all a moot point if they call their ‘users’ ‘partners’ isn’t it ;-)

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Unintended consequences and open source

Posted by Ian Holsman Fri, 09 Dec 2005 20:03:00 GMT

Recently I have been looking back over some of the major turning points in CNET’s IT development history as I prepare for a presentation I plan on giving in May.

What struck me was some of the unintended consequences that moving to open source(ish) products has given CNET and what it did to ROI calculations later on.

The first major OSS ‘win’ in CNET was the weblogic to resin switch, where the case was made that a $500/server licence was better than $10k/CPU licence. (I think those were the numbers it was several years ago). we were all happy with that, but what we didn’t realize at the time was that by doing this we were setting ourselves up for the next OSS win. by switching to a OSS application with a much cheaper licenseing scheme we could now:

a) switch to a different operating system easier.

b) remove the need for those big-ass CPU’s, allowing us to move to slower and cheaper machines.

These two things were not taken into account when we did the cost benefit analysis, but these two things lowered the cost of getting new features/service s up and running (and in turn allowed developers to implement ‘riskier’ features)

we were changing the rules of the game without even realizing it.

It also set in motion the next change (solaris to linux), and others following it, which in turn brought unintended (positive) consequences.

I wish I could articulate better what I am seeing here.. I’m sure this sounds like rambling. but in a nutshell every time we switched to a lower cost basis, we discovered new doors opening up we never thought of, and by going through those doors more appeared.

right now we are removing the last vesitages of the large single database, and moving to multiple replicated smaller ones.. I wonder where this will lead us in times to come.

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