Category: Uncategorised

COMPUTERWORLD, 10 July, 2017 – Construction of the National Broadband Network has reached the halfway point, with NBN indicating it believes it is on track to meet its 2020 goal of completing the rollout.

More than 5.7 million premises are able to connect to the NBN. Around 100,000 premises are being hooked up to the network every week, the government-owned company said today.

NBN in May released figures revealing that around 2.2 million households had actually signed up for services on the network; however, it said that on average an additional 130,000 end users were signing up every month.

“I’m proud to announce that one in two Australians are now able to enjoy the benefits of fast broadband by connecting to the NBN network through a retailer,” NBN CEO Bill Morrow said in a statement released today by the company.

“Nationwide access to fast broadband will become the platform to launch Australia into the next phase of its digital future – it will change what our jobs will look like, where we will live and how we fare on a global scale.”

NBN earlier this month restructured its operations as the halfway point approached, with the company saying it was part of a shift in emphasis from “network build” to “network operate and optimise”.

The company last month began rolling out fibre to the curb (FTTC), which is newest member of the company’s “multi-technology mix”.

“The rollout of the NBN network is one of the most complex and ambitious initiatives to be undertaken in any market across the world,” Morrow said.

“We’re building a nationwide network that has the ability to deliver wholesale speeds which are currently around eight times faster than the average capacity available on the majority of Australia’s existing broadband services.

“Our team is on budget and ahead of schedule to connect millions of Australian homes and businesses in the next few years and ask for your patience as we make the transition from the old to the new network.”

Shadow communications minister Michelle Rowland said the milestone was no cause for celebration, however.

“Malcolm Turnbull promised every Australian would have access to the NBN by the end of 2016, yet as of today over 5.5 million homes and small businesses are still waiting,” Rowland said.

“Malcolm Turnbull promised an NBN that was faster and more affordable. Instead he has pushed ahead with a slower, less reliable and more expensive copper-based NBN nightmare. He dug his heels in on copper and that has come back to haunt him.”

The experience of end users on the NBN “has been nothing short of abysmal,” Rowland said.

“People across the community are fed up with ongoing slow speeds, dropouts, buck passing and the inability to have their NBN problems resolved.”

Earlier this year the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman revealed NBN complaints to it had soared, although their growth was still trailing the pace of the rollout.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is in the process of implementing a broadband performance monitoring scheme that will focus on the NBN.

The ACCC has said that the program will help assess whether performance problems encountered by end users are the fault of NBN or of retail service providers (RSPs) selling services on its network.

NBN has previously indicated it believed some speed complaints by consumers related to under-provisioning of network capacity by RSPs.

However, some consumers have also been sold broadband plans with theoretical speeds that exceed what their households’ connections are capable of — Telstra, for example, recently revealed broadband plans with maximum speeds that were not achievable.

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(2017), NBN reaches halfway mark, Computerworld, viewed 10 July 2017, <https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/621575/nbn-reaches-halfway-mark/>.

ZDNET, 28 June, 2017 – The federal government wants to change the way small-to-medium enterprise (SMEs) do business with governments at all levels by introducing a digital identifier for every Australian business.

Speaking at D61+ Live in Melbourne, Australia’s Assistant Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science Craig Laundy said that in order to achieve a digital ID, the government needs to turn to organisations like the CSIRO and its innovation arm, Data61.

Laundy explained on Wednesday the digital identification piece would see the government harness the power of big data and loosen some of the reigns the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) currently has, with information on tax and GST paid by an organisation received automatically by the tax office, negating the need for SMEs to send such information, sometimes on multiple occasions.

Currently, individuals in Australia can interact with 10 government services through its myGov online portal, which sees citizens issued a unique identifier that connects their profiles across the ATO, Centrelink, Australian JobSearch, My Health Record, My Aged Care, Child Support, Department of Veterans’ Affairs, National Disability Insurance Scheme, and the Victorian Housing Register Application.

The end-goal is to have all government agencies on myGov, which will result in the individual being known to every government entity via the one ID that is already verified.

Laundy expects this to be replicated in the business world via business.gov.au.

“What we are working hard on delivering is if you are a business, you have a business identifier, and when you come on to business.gov.au you are uniquely identified,” he explained. “Why is that important? Because it allows us to have a two-way conversation with you, whereas business.gov.au is currently a generic website … the minute we solve the identification piece, we can have a chat with you one-on-one.”

According to Laundy, the solution for government is obvious, but said that while he’s constantly hearing politicians talk about cutting red tape, unfortunately it is a slow process to do so.

“You need regulation, obviously, but what we’ve missed in government … we’re not just a regulator, we’re your business partner,” he said.

Depending on the ownership structure of an organisation in Australia, the government takes approximately 40 cents from every dollar earned in tax, but despite making a buck from SMEs, Laundy said the business partner mentality has been missing from government for 116 years.

“There is no doubt that this country is one of the best research and innovation countries in the world, the missing piece has always been collaboration and commercialisation,” he said.

“Let’s have a digital revolution in the way that business and government interact.

“Why is Adrian [Turner, Data61 CEO] and his team so important to me? Because using platforms, co-defined regulation, leaving them as API interfaces for the public sector to interact with and add value to is the centrepiece to what we are going to attempt to do — it’s not pie in the sky stuff.”

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(2017), Government looking to digital identification for Australian SMEs, ZDNet, viewed 28 June 2017, <https://www.zdnet.com/article/government-looking-to-digital-identification-for-australian-smes/>.

NEWS.COM.AU, 23 June, 2017 – The government is moving ahead with its regional broadband scheme — dubbed an NBN tax — to help fund high quality internet for Australians in the bush but has included an exemption for smaller carriers for the first 25,000 premises for the first five years.

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(2017), Government moves ahead with internet levy to fund regional broadband, News.com.au, viewed 23 June 2017, <https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/nbn/government-moves-ahead-with-internet-levy-to-fund-regional-broadband/news-story/edae5e17aa48f9c7709dbc4637d0ec37>.

NETWORK WORLD, 12 June, 2017 – Both Gartner and Tech Insider agree, the Internet of Things (IoT) will be a major tech category, predicting 20.4 billion units and 23.9 billion devices, respectively, by 2020.

They disagree, however, about where those devices will go. Gartner says two-thirds of the devices will land in consumer applications. Tech Insider says over three-fourths will land in government and business applications.

Why is there such a big difference in forecasts? Which forecaster’s crystal ball is less occluded? Gartner’s forecasts depend on more stable, smaller IoT consumer islands, while Tech Insider’s forecasts depend on large clouds often built on evolving technologies.

The reason why Gartner could be right is the underlying technologies built into consumer IoT are more predictable and rely less on breakthroughs and the consensus on standards and regulation or self-regulation of privacy. Product engineering is easier if the problem can be constrained, like consumer IoT.

Consumer smart assistants, such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Apple Homepod, are the hubs for consumer IoT. They build on stable technologies: Bluetooth (BLE,) W-iFi and derivatives of ARM mobile processors. On the software side, they all rely on natural language processing (NLP) and acoustics that are fairly mature.

BLE transceivers are cheap enough to be built into almost everything, and pairing works predictably. And the range is adequate for most consumer physical environments. The potential for signal interference interrupting BLE is well understood in this environment. The same is true with Wi-Fi. WiFi connects the consumer IoT island to the cloud, which can augment storage and processing limitations of devices and smart assistants.

NLP accuracy has improved dramatically in the past few years because of machine learning advances made to improve the smartphone user interfaces. Likewise, text categorization advances, mostly for understanding what people mean when they search and what text comments mean has also improved.

NLP and text categorization make it possible for these home assistants to understand speech, figure out what it should do with the user’s command, play music, change the TV channel, turn on a light or close the garage door. Go off script, and none of these devices can help. But the scripts have gotten bigger thanks to machine learning investments in mobile, resulting in fewer cases where an action is unavailable to match a command.

The acoustics, both for filtering out users’ voices and reproducing sound, is mature. Mature technologies such as beamforming developed to improve spatial selectivity for antenna transmission and reception has been applied to extract voice from background noise. Using sound, like radar, can define room characteristics to optimize sound recreation for music and other smart assistant sound.

Smart assistants plug into the wall, solving one of the biggest IoT problems: power. And most of the IoT devices they control, such as lighting, thermostats and entertainment devices, all have constant power sources.

Smart assistants’ privacy, safety and security are not a significant issue as long as the consumer doesn’t mind Google, Apple and Amazon listening in. The data stored and local security models are based on mature smartphone and web technologies that all three companies have a decade of experience improving. Plus, the devices they control are UL approved, adequately addressing safety.

Business and government IoT device makers do not enjoy the same constraints.

Factors for IoT device success

This list below just scratches the surface of the more considerations that a design engineer building for these markets needs to consider:

• Radio range — Device applications do not have a predictable distance constraint. Radio range is a last-mile problem. If connectivity needs to be deployed as infrastructure, it changes the economics and perhaps the feasibility of the project.
• Power — Where is the device located and how will power impact design. Lack of a wired power adds a significant maintenance cost unless the device is a very low power device such as a BLE beacon. Changing batteries on millions of devices would make most IoT applications infeasible.
• Radio frequency — Radio frequency is a major design consideration compared to consumer environments. Radio frequency determines transmission distance, power consumption and resistance to radio frequency interference. Designing a general-purpose device for diverse environments and ranges is not possible without some constraints.
• Data rates — Data rates change the design because of power and frequency demands.
• Safety, privacy and security — Safety considerations for mission-critical applications add complexity, especially if it is a control application, such as controlling traffic, that needs very high reliability. Privacy, though different from consumer devices, needs to be considered for regulatory and compliance. The large volume of IoT devices, particularly in smart city applications, adds security complexity, especially in authenticating the devices and physically protecting them.

There may be some truth in both Gartner and Tech Insider’s forecast. Consumer IoT with its design constraints and mature technologies will grow faster as the device makers building for business and government find high-volume applications and understand related constraints that make building devices less expensive.

(2017), Consumer IoT could outpace industrial IoT, Network World, viewed 12 June 2017, <https://www.networkworld.com/article/3200134/internet-of-things/consumer-iot-could-outpace-industrial-iot.html>.

ITNEWS, 6 June, 2017 – NBN Co has used a hybrid-fibre coaxial (HFC) test set-up in Melbourne to put DOCSIS 3.1 through its paces, hitting peak layer two downlink speeds of around 984 Mbps.

The company used a current DOCSIS 3.1 network termination device (NTD) – which it started deploying in the field back in January – at a HFC outside plant lab, which is housed at the Technical Aggregation Node and Development (TAND) facility in Nunawading, about 18km east of Melbourne’s CBD.

This was connected to a DOCSIS 3.1 capable cable modem termination system (CMTS) based at NBN Co’s National Test Facility (NTF) in Docklands, near the CBD.

Spectrum analysers and traffic generators were used at both ends to simulate downstream and upstream traffic.

It is understood that for the downstream portion, DOCSIS 3.1 was configured using a 192 MHz orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) block.

For the upstream portion, DOCSIS 3.1 was configured using a 48 MHz orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) block.

OFDM is a new introduction to the DOCSIS 3.1 specification. It promises better transmission efficiency “by effectively allowing all end users to access the whole road rather than being restricted to a limited number of lanes”, according to research commissioned by NBN Co last year.

Within the 3.1 specification, OFDM is used for the downlink, while OFDMA is used for the uplink.

The service configured in the lab used a service profile of 1000 Mbps down and 100 Mbps up. There is a 1Gbps physical port limit on the DOCSIS 3.1 HFC cable modem.

The test is understood to have achieved around 984 Mbps down and 100 Mbps up. Further lab tests are scheduled to run in August.

NBN Co said in a statement that “in-field trials” of DOCSIS 3.1 could occur as early as December this year, “ahead of a potential commercial launch of DOCSIS 3.1 services in 2018.”

CEO Bill Morrow used senate estimates a week ago to outline his expectations that roughly half of the NBN network would be capable of supporting gigabit speeds. This accounts for the FTTP, HFC and future FTTC portions.

But NBN Co has consistently said it does not currently see a demand for 1 Gbps services.

While it is technically feasible to offer 1 Gbps speeds over the FTTP network already, no RSPs have launched commercial residential services to date. Launtel launched a business service over the NBN last week.

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(2017), NBN Co takes HFC up to 984 Mbps in lab trials, ITnews, viewed 6 June 2017, <https://www.itnews.com.au/news/nbn-co-takes-hfc-up-to-984-mbps-in-lab-trials-464263>.

CRN, 3 May, 2017 – The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has released its fifth quarterly NBN Wholesale Market Indicators Report, revealing data on new access services, hybrid fibre co-axial (HFC) services and rollout information.

Highlights of the report, which cover data up to 31 March, said NBN Co was now supplying 2.07 million broadband wholesale access services, up 366,000 since the last December quarter. Operational HFC services reached 63,475, up 14,500 from the previous reporting period.

Aggregate network capacity is reportedly on the rise, with NBN expected to supply 2149Gbps, up 20 percent from 1785Gbps in December.

The report also indicates a shifting tide in the regional wholesaler market, according to ACCC chairman Rod Sims.

“Competitors to Telstra are supplying 46 percent of services in the regions compared with traditional market shares for broadband services where Telstra often had well over 60 percent market share,” he said.

The other major access seekers were TPG, Optus, Vocus Communications, Aussie Broadband, Australian Private Networks, SkyMesh, Harbour ISP and IpStar Australia.

The two million access services in operation cover connections such as fibre-to-the-premises, fibre-to-the-building, fibre-to-the-node, HFC, fixed wireless and satellite. The ACCC also reported that just over half of all services acquired were on the 25/5Mbps speed tier, at 55 percent.

The NBN has started replacing FTTN services with FTTC, as reported by CRN’s sister publication iTnews, in line with a reconstructed plan for the NBN rollout.

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(2017), ACCC releases fifth quarterly NBN wholesale market indicators report, CRN, viewed 3 May 2017, <https://www.crn.com.au/news/accc-releases-fifth-quarterly-nbn-wholesale-market-indicators-report-460326>.