As I posted earlier on Geekzone, Warehouse Stationery leaked the pricing for 2degrees' mobile broadband modem packs.

However, I've also delved a little deeper into Warehouse Stationery's to find a bit of their 3G handset lineup too!

Here they are: 

• Acer Smartphone BE130 - $450
  Correction: it is the Acer beTouch E130. Warehouse Stationery didn't correctly identify it. 


• LG GU285 + SIM + 50MB - $202.38 - I find the price a bit odd


• Nokia 5230 + Hands Free Kit - $399

And to repeat the mobile broadband modem pack info:

• 512MB data + modem for $99


• 10GB data + modem for $199 (yes that's less than $200 for 10GB of mobile broadband with a modem!)

Here are screenshots of the pages before Warehouse Stationery took them down:




UPDATE: Looks like Dick Smith have some of the other 3G handsets too:

• LG GU285 - $199


• Nokia 5230 - $379


• Nokia X6 - $599

DSE say that stock is due 29 July - which possibly means a Thursday or Friday launch for 2degrees 3G.



UPDATE 2: 2degrees appears to also stepping into the (usually lower end) provider-branded phone range with a Huawei U1251, naming it 2degrees 1251.

The phone is 3G, with a 2MP camera, Bluetooth, supports a microSD card and has a 3.5mm audio jack.

This screenshot from PB Technologies, from Google Cache:

This morning I was able to grab a few replacement Cat5e cables - and this time I tested them out before I bought them!

So I went ahead and cut my crappy network cable open to see what it was really made of.



Their way of having 20% copper is to add 1 strand of copper with 4 strands of aluminium!

I'm also pretty certain that it's not 24AWG, even when I twist them together.


Ugh. Piece of garbage.

Recently I purchased a bunch of cheap Ethernet cables. They were listed as (and I quote) "Category 5 Network Patch Cable (5M 4-Pair 24AWG)" and I bought a 2m length of that one as well.


They arrived, and I opened one of them up. Plugged it into my computer to test it out, and my Internet ran as smoothly as it has always been, compared to my usual connection over my Ethernet cable.

They looked the same (apart from the colour), felt the same, tasted the same... ahem. Pretty much they were indistinguishable from what you would call "normal" Ethernet cables.


Hey look - it even says Category 5e! Or maybe not...

So to why I bought them - I was hoping to use them in the transfer of power and some serial data across a string of units I'm making for my Electronics project which will be situated in a semi-outdoor situation. I did a small bit of research which said that Ethernet cables would do the job well. Low resistivity, low per-metre price, great durability, standard plugs, high availability. Why not?

Power over Ethernet for devices already exists, which provides 15W-25W (depending on the standard) - that's enough for what I need! I'm running 24VDC at around 0.6A (~15W) so I thought that the cables should handle it (and if it didn't then I would just use two pairs instead of one - but I need to reserve others for data transmission)


From what I can see, Cat5 cables are 24AWG.

What's AWG then? It stands for American Wire Gauge, a system that compares wires. Numbering goes from 0 (thickest, though there is 0000 for the widest one) to around 40 (thinnest).

24AWG wire is about 0.5mm wide in diameter, and if made of pure copper would have a resistance of roughly 85Ω/km. A few sites state that Cat5 should have a max resistance of around 9.4Ω to 9.8Ω/100m. This varies a little between the sites, so I estimated that to 10Ω/100m = 100Ω/km. That seems to be close to the 85Ω/km pure copper rating for 24AWG wire, and that should be fine since I expected that even if alloys are used in cheap cabling that it should be kept relatively low because data transmission would be affected if impedance is too high.


What I did not expect was that when I plugged it into my project, through one length of the 5m cable, the power dropped considerably on the other side which did not match expected figures.

Here's what I found: (I couldn't put a table here, so used an image instead)


So okay, just reading from that - all of my cables failed? Well, I used a multimeter, held the sharp probes firmly down onto the contacts and waited for a second for the reading to stabilise. I don't have cable testing equipment, so this is as close as I can get.

From the looks of things, my 15m cable comes close to being pure copper in comparison to the others. I threw in a TP-Link supplied cable to see how the cable would compare and by the looks of things it's not too bad since they probably used a lower grade alloy to supply them to the masses cheaply and the short distance means that there isn't a significant difference.

However, the 2m and 5m lengths of cable I bought have a HUGE resistance in comparison to my own cables. Even with uncertainties factored in, it's still huge!

The cables had 10x the resistance per kilometre in comparison to my own 15m cable! That's heaps!

Even though they worked fine in a network, it definitely didn't meet the standards they said that they were tested against, which I highly doubt happened since there are spelling mistakes now that I look at it:

"CERTIFIED" is spelt "UERTIFIED" and "AWG" is spelt "AWC"


So either they used a thinner wire (unlikely - though there have been reports of manufacturers using thinner 26AWG wire rather than 24AWG) or used a really cheap alloy/another metal (extremely likely).

On even closer inspection, you can see the differences in colour of the metals in the wires of the two cables.


Left: 5m cable I bought online. Right: 15m cable I use to connect my PC to my network

I looked at the rest of the 5m cables I bought... and deep inside I had to say that I could curse myself for buying them. Ugh.




If anyone wants 5m Ethernet cable suitable for normal everyday use (the rest haven't been opened yet), you can get them for $3.50ea (+ $3.20 urban courier, rural delivery surcharge applies). Comment below and I'll email you.

As you may know, Telecom and the Commerce Commission today announced that they have reached a settlement regarding misleading advertising in Telecom's "Broadband at Dial-up prices" campaign in 2008.

If you're one of the 1,300 Telecom customers who signed up to the Basic plan (which they no longer sell) during this promotion, you should get a whole bunch of credits (even adjusted for inflation) if you haven't been credited for this yet.

For more details, check out the media releases from both Telecom and the Commerce Commission:

• TELECOM AND COMMERCE COMMISSION SETTLEMENT (Telecom)


• 1300 broadband customers to get refunds following Commerce Commission investigation (Commerce Commission)

One thing caught the eye of Mauricio though:

Telecom has also agreed to pay $75,000 to Consumer New Zealand Inc to assist in the funding of a telecommunications Price Comparison Project which is intended to provide an internet-based tool for consumers to compare the prices of different telecommunications products. 

This was interesting - and also ground breaking too. Right now there isn't a large or heavily promoted website which allows consumers to compare plans between all providers (or at least the big players + the well-known smaller ones.) This has led to many uneducated consumers to pretty much "go with the flow" - usually Telecom as most people still have their phone lines with them, so it's an easy, natural "step up" to broadband.

Setting up a site dedicated to show and compare information about Internet plans from telecommunications providers for consumers is definitely a step in the right direction. It works both ways too - some might like flexibility, others cost certainty - providers like Telecom will still continue to pick up new customers (may be even more... who knows!) and having one place to compare also means that it's easy to see which plans are better or not, which potentially increases competition too. Consumers not only want to know about price - speed, allowance, and other factors like overages are definitely important for people to know and understand - and the Commerce Commission recognises this too:

“In particular, in the area of new telecommunications offerings, it is easy for consumers to be confused or misled if advertising is not clear as there are many other important details in addition to price, which may influence a consumer’s decision,” said Mr Wallace [Commerce Commission Enforcement Manager, Christchurch]

The New Zealand Connections wiki has been running for over two and a half years now. While it originally was made to provide information about telecommunications in New Zealand (and it still is) - most people who do use it use the Plan Finder, which helps compare plans in different categories across a wide range of providers (more than those other commerical comparison websites I might add.)

It's open, collaborative, independent, and best of all it definitely didn't need $75,000. Information can easily be improved on by people - immediately. Even if they can't help directly, providing suggestions and talking on our forum is another way that a community works well with sites like ours. Wikipedia works on this model - and I don't see why it can't with this.

It's power to the people - for the people.

While work on it is still in progress (and will always be,) it has come a long way since the early days when all we had were a small bunch of tables all crammed on one page... We recently got a New Zealand based host which offered to host our site for free (in return for a small tag at the bottom of our pages) - this meant that we could present our site ad-free.

Anyway, the point raised by many is that something is out there, doing what this new telco plan comparison website project is meant to do, that's open, free and does that job pretty darn well, and all it needs is a little work to get it up to scratch.



I was very suprised when Mauricio suggested that at least a part of the $75,000 should be given to me to work on the New Zealand Connections wiki. There's even Geekzone community support for the motion. For that, I really am grateful for the support and confidence people have in me - so thank you all 


However, as I approach university (which isn't that far away), I'm becoming increasingly busy from school and preparatory work, and have less time to work on these kind of projects which I work on in my free time - and so even if I do even get a bit of the funds, everything would have to be a collaborative effort of the community.

While I have plans to finish off the 2010 changes to the site (such as the new "Help and Support" system and provider page layouts,) I am no longer able to contribute to the New Zealand Connections wiki in the significant way that I did. I used to be able to have time to completely revamp portions of the site, but progress has been slow over the last year.

I would also like to point out that I don't own nor control the New Zealand Connections website; I am merely a significant contributor - cokemaster is the one behind the scenes, and I would also like to give credit to him for setting this site up and making it work for this long.

I have always worked on stuff like this on a volunteer/free basis - like helping people with their computers (I get that a lot) to making my Telecom T-Stick ZTE MF626/636 software skin - all of them are free and I have a great sense of accomplishment with that. The only need for money is for university studies (overseas... sorry guys) and expenses from next year.

I would actually like that the huge sum of money to be spent in a wiser manner than just throwing it into the new project - surely they must have had some insight/research into the real value of it (though I suspect that the asking cost was partly due to the Commerce Commission.) It would make more sense for a majority of that to go towards charity rather than the project, simply because it just doesn't make sense to spend that much when something similar didn't need to.



At the end of this,

• I will still appreciate it that, if the money does come through, it's forwarded to the New Zealand Connections wiki project and its community.


• I would love to see a community-based wiki project prosper, providing free, open information for all - that's updated quicker, moderated by all, and enabled everyone to contribute.


• I will continue to help, but no longer in any significant capacity.

If anyone would still like to approach me - feel free to do so anytime. I would love to be able to help with making decisions for consumers an easier and more straightforward one, as well as encouraging competition in our broadband market. Just remember that I am still a 17 year old high school student.


It's not about the money. It's about the consumer, and I really do have the interests of them at heart.


I hope I haven't completely wasted the effort of, or disappointed, my supporters. I hope you understand my situation and where I am coming from.

Remember that math question I posted earlier this year? 

Nothing that we found at the time had anything similar to the answer to it that we had derived.


Here's the solution to finding the gradients of the two lines which are tangents of a circle passing through a point:




While we did take 3 days to derive this, the below derivation is different to the one we originally had, but is more refined. Click the below picture for a hand-drawn diagram and derivation.








In other unrelated news: you might have noticed that I changed the theme of my blog a little - from grey to blue to lighten things up. Also moved a few elements around, but most things haven't changed.

Hope you like it!



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EDIT: Ooops... realised that there was a mistake where I didn't swap the algebra right. Fixed it now.