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Microsoft: Have missed the boat on catching up to Apple & Google.

In early 2007 I started opining that Microsoft would "hit a financial pothole" around 2010. Thirty posts followed before I gave it up: the mainstream & financial press were looking seriously at the topic. [A Forbes columnist "called the game" in January.]

What prompted my view in late 2006, pre-iPhone, I'd noticed that Microsoft hadn't been able to maintain it's growth above 10%. They (legally) manipulated their figures to remove extreme volatility. Since the early 1970's, I've seen a bunch of Tech companies falter, stumble and fail. Always starting with one "off" result. When the iPhone appeared, I knew the mechanism of their "pothole".

I missed the GFC in 2008 and its effect (revenue down) and in 2012 went on record saying "I missed the date". I'm a technical person, not a financial analyst.

NBN: Posts moved to a new blog. No more on this blog.

This Blog was intended to be about "I.T." issues in general, but has become overtaken by the NBN.
Posts and Comments have been moved to a dedicated Blog...
Please update any feeds you might have, assuming you want.

I'll be removing the NBN posts from this Blog down the line.

NBN: Conroy responsible for maintaining the politicisation of the debate

The choice of Customer Access Network (CAN) technology and the means of its update are Technical, Commercial and Economic. These are dry, rational discussions, based not on opinion, but hard facts and numbers. Bits are completely agnostic: they work no matter what network or connection they arrive over.

Instead, we have the mess that's the politicised NBN Argument of Ideologies. In no way is it a debate, but it could be changed somewhat.

NBN: Historical perspective on A Need for Speed

One of the quintessential NBN questions is "Why?", as in "Why do we need an NBN (at all)?" and "Why does the Government need to build it?". For anyone who's got a sense of the history of Computing and Information Technology, it seems obvious. The industry is still immature and developing at break-neck speed.

Anyone who claims future demand is limited, saying "nobody will need more than...", hasn't understood the past and the very many failures exactly this thinking has wrought.

NBN: Turnbull obfuscating and misleading on the detail

Mr Turnbull is reported in The Australian as saying that the current NBN Co connections are not free of charge to the subscriber/customer. [Source: CommsDay Crosstalk audio interview].

The opposite is true, but would you expect otherwise from spin-meisters? See my list of detailed questions and unacknowledged problems & charges with the Coalition VDSL/FTTN proposal.

NBN: Connecting VDSL to your home: Apples & Apples with Fibre or a "same-same" fudge?

George Fong on connecting GPON/FTTP NBN to your home made me wonder how different the process of connecting the Coalition VDSL/FTTN would be. I suspect there is some terrible "devil in the detail" for the Coalition.

For Fibre (GPON), you get 3 boxes supporting 2-voice + 4-Data , installed for no charge by NBN Co, the Coalition gives you nothing. The "no disruption" rule pushes large additional & untimately wasted costs onto householders :

An Apples-and-Apples comparison of the current FTTP NBN and the Coalition FTTN would include all costs for identical installs, yet the Coalition costings ignore these.

NBN: (Dis)Economies of simplistic charging

The central problem for Telcos since the convergence of communications into All Digital is charging.

How do they differentiate products and charge different rates for identical bits on the same pipe?

In 1988, I first wrote/talked about the problem which in 1991 I phrased to a journalist as "an embarrassment of riches". With huge, cheap pipes available, how could a Telco construct a rate-card for both 32-64Kbps voice and 4Mbps video which didn't either make low-rate services "nearly free" or high-rate services unaffordable?

NBN: Noalition maths II

What do you get when you subtract $4 billion from $37.5 billion?

With Noalitionomics, you get $20.5 billion. This bodes well for the election promises and possible Budget.

Saving $450 per premise on 9M premises totals $4 billion. That's the maximum CapEx saving possible from the Coalition FTTN ($1350/premise for Fibre vs $900 for VDSL2/FTTN). There are additional costs in dialling back Fibre and swapping to an FTTN fully upgradable to Fibre.

And the small matter of high ($500-$1000) householder out-of-pockets expenses to install Central Splitter or a Network Termination Device (NTD) as in "Did you want a telephone with that?"

It could be they're swapping the missing $13 billion from CapEx to OpEx, but No!, their own figures say they'll also save 10-20% on accumulated OpEx by 2021.

Bizarre... What am I missing that nobody else is calling this?

Software Engineering: Failed profession or not? Windows vs Linux kernel

A fascinating read by a Windows Kernel developer about the social dynamics of Linux vs Windows kernels.

NBN: Coalition Fibre to the Node isn't pure-digital broadband, isn't secure, isn't meant to last

Not only is the Coalition's Fibre to the Node (FTTN) plan to share two mutually-interfering networks, over existing copper, more complex and expensive that it need be, it also flags they aren't designing it for longevity. Implicit in this design choice is "we're building it to throw away, soon." i.e. with a 10-15 year, or less, economic life.

The network design can never be optimum for either phone or digital/broadband, the combination is more complex, expensive and lower reliability than pure-digital and is missing two critical network design element: it doesn't follow the existing NBN design (standard device interfaces, end-end control & L2 Bitstreams) but ignores that engineering designs can only be optimised to for one thing.

NBN: Not just "there's good, cheap, fast: choose any two"

Paul Wallbank, a knowledgable and respected technology journalist, wrote recently on the NBN using the "pick any two" meme. There are exceptions to this Ironclad Rule of Project Management and my contention is the NBN is one of them. Paul wrote:

One of technology’s truisms is there are three factors to almost anything – speed of delivery, reliability and affordability (or cheap, good, quickly) – and you can choose any two. If you choose cheap then you have to be prepared to sacrifice either speed or reliability.

NBN: Coalition Extraordinary Claims require Extraordinary Evidence

In writing another piece, I realised that the Coalition in their NBN policy are actually making an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary proof, in backing an FTTN for the majority broadband network:

25-50Mbps is more than anyone will ever want.

NBN: The Big Little Questions and their difficult answers.

In addressing the Topsy-Turvey Debate,  "what's important isn't discussed and what's trivial is cause for endless turmoil", some hard questions remain unanswered.

As far as I can judge, this whole debate revolves around maintaining a functional copper telephone network, the sole advantage of which is allowing 1925 rotary-dial phone equipment to still work
Not, for me, exactly the strongest or most compelling of arguments.

NBN: The Topsy Turvy Debate

What has marked the "NBN Debate" is the degree of emotion, insult, abuse & attack and the number of highly vocal proponents for each of the two political proposals. The response is out of all proportion to the issue. Something very strange is going on...

This piece is about framing simple, fundamental questions and proposing some answers to them.

There is a simple truth, brilliantly summed up by the Bureau of Statistics in 2001, that is constantly overlooked in this debate. Since the 1850's Australians have been at the forefront of Communications, the NBN is just a continuation of that struggle communicating in our Wide Brown Land:

True to form, Australia was in the forefront of adopting these new developments.

NBN: Political pressure. When facts aren't facts.

I got a long (2200wds), unpleasant letter from a Turnbull staffer objecting to a recent piece I'd written.
If it had cited facts, data or errors-in-logic, you'd be getting a post about that with retractions as necessary.
I'm more than a little concerned at what I read implies: these people are binary - "you're for us or against us" and they can do no wrong, in their own eyes, whilst everybody else is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Do they understand "Democracy" and all that implies? The need for respecting other viewpoints and allowing expression of opposing ideas... Apparently they've met with God, personally, and are transmitting The One True Word, so the rest of us are Infidels, Heritics or Ignorant Savages.

Here's what he thinks of me and what I write, I'm interested in reader opinions and comments as well:

NBN: Noalition Maths - an FTTN can't Break Even.

Using Coalition figures for a VDSL/FTTN, an FTTN won't break-even within 10 years.
It needs to make a profit of $250/year on revenues of $360 and raw costs of at least $125: the Maths fail.

NBN: Turnbulls' Triple Tax - DSL Out of Pocket expenses are the Coalition sting in the tail.

The Coalition has been very silent on one of its biggest and most invasive change to the NBN:

Every DSL-NBN subscriber is going to be saddled with three unavoidable out-of-pocket expenses. All in-house cabling changes have to be done by a registered cabler, it's NOT DIY. You may go on e-Bay and buy a $50 VDSL modem, but it won't work.

NBN: Cost-Effective vs Cost-Efficient. What's what and Who Pays?

Mr Turnbull abhors meaningless terms that are undefined and ambiguous: they can be "spun" and easily manipulated for Political Purposes. Here's what he had to say on the topic in the ZDnet/Our Say Debate with Senator Conroy:

Now as far as the overall issue today is concerned I agree that diversity is absolutely critical.
I don’t agree with a public interest test, it’s interesting to see that Stephen Conroy wants to revive it so that will obviously be a policy going into the next election but I oppose a public interest test because it is completely ambiguous.
It is totally political test, everyone will have a different view on it.

In light of this, why the contradiction in the Coalition NBN rhetoric, liberally peppered with "Cost Effective"?

NBN: When does the NBN Rollout reach "statistically significant" size?

When there's a "statistically significant" sample of households using the NBN, we'll have good data to forecast demand and maybe price-points. We know from the various (political) polling organisations that the demographics of Australian population and householders are very well understood.

With 20,000 households already signed up, are we close now to a 1% error margin?