While driving to work this morning I couldn't help but notice a Harvey Norman ad on the radio promoting their weekend specials, included in this were Nokia N95's for $300 off. I stopped in Harvey Norman on my way home to pick something else up (I don't actually need a new N95!) and couldn't help but look to see how many they had instock, afterall $300 off is a huge saving. A quick glance at the phone cabinet shows N95's with the Vodafone price tag of $999 and apparently the $300 off is the drop in RRP from $1299 to $999. Considering the drop in RRP was weeks ago this could probably be seen as a case of bait marketing or misleading advertising. Every other retailer will be selling N95's for $999 so there is no saving.

If anybody's up for a bit of a fight this weekend and wants a new phone then stop by your local HN. If you complain to the commerce commission I'm sure you'll get your phone for $699! :-)

Reading the Dominion Post today I couldn't but notice the first ad of a new Vodafone advertising campaign promoting their coverage. It features a satellite image of a location with the world "Vodafone works 'round here" plastered over the top.

How ironic then that this ad features an image of the Kapiti Coast with parts of Paraparaumu Beach and Waikanae - places that Vodafone coverage is abysmal. Vodafone's Waikanae Cellsite on Forest Heights has been a dog since BellSouth first installed it and the Ngarara Site has improved coverage into Waikanae Beach but our holiday house and surrounding area still has terrible coverage both indoor and outdoor.

It also shows a section of SH1 between Paraparaumu and Waikanae where calls are virtually guaranteed to drop, again due to the poor performance of the Forest Heights site.

Breaking news - My Ruapehu appears to have had a small eruption around 2030 NZST tonight. There are reports of two lahars and plumes of smoke reported below 15000'.

More details as they come to hand.

I've had an E65 phone since April and one of the features that is great is the VoIP over WiFi capabilities of this phone. It means I can use use my mobile as a cordless phone at home and connect to my Asterisk PBX at home from anywhere I can find WiFi access. 

One issue I've encountered recently was my phone failing to connect to my Asterisk PBX through routers running DD-WRT or Sveasoft Talisman firmware. Both of these 3rd party firmwares are extremely popular with users of Linksys WRT54G/GL routers and will also work with several other brands of router that run on the same chipset. Both of these firmwares turn these routers into extremely powerful units and give you features not found on the standard firmware.

After a bit of time investigating I discovered Asterisk was sending a SIP/401 error back to the phone which was causing the authentication to fail. A bit of searching around led me to some forum posts detailing malformed packets sent by the Nokia SIP stack which were being rejected by the router.

The latest v24 versions of DD-WRT have this problem fixed and the Micro versions of the firmware also work correctly. If you're running Sveasoft Talisman then versions up to 1.2.4 are unaffected by this issue. Versions 1.2.5 and greater are affected due to the inclusion of a new SIP module.

To fix this issue in the new versions of Talisman go to

Administration->Diagnostics->Command Shell and enter the following

nvram set sip_modules=0;nvram commit; reboot

This should hopefully fix the problem!

Last week saw the launch of the Kordia Metro WiFi service. At present coverage is only available in small parts of Whangarei, Auckland, Taupo, Hamilton, Napier, Wellington, Dunedin, Invercargill and Queenstown but Kordia are planning significant coverage areas around the country by 2010. The beauty of their WiFi service is that is supports up to 8 SSID's - meaning that the infrastructure can handle multiple operators who want to make their WiFi service available.

TomiZone, Orcon and Kordia themselves are all available on the platform with Orcon currently offering free access to the service.

I have my doubts about whether there is a future for the project however. With the harsh reality finally being accepted by many people that muni WiFi is a dead duck in the water the whole concept of city wide WiFi is interesting especially when mobile data over cellular networks offers far better coverage and none of the user authentication issues that still plague WiFi. Kordia seem to be adopting a business model that seems to be working succesfully in the UK where The Cloud are building infrastructure and then onselling access to whoever wants to provide a WiFi service. At the end of the day however Vodafone and Telecom only need to be smart about their data offerings and the whole business model can be thrown out the window..

Watch this space..

For those who haven't been following the news over the weekend Ford NZ are very unhappy with the latest road safety tv ad campaign that has been launched by Land Transport New Zealand. Looking very much like a car ad it shows the driver of a late model Ford Falcon (with badge removed) losing control and ending up rolling down a bank.

Ford are very unhappy that their car is being damaged by this campaign - afterall their car contains traction control that may stop such an accident occuring in the first place and does infer that Ford vehicles are unsafe. I must say I have to agree with them fully. The first time I saw the ad I wondered how long it would take for Ford to be concerned about one of their vehicles being used.

What also concern me though is the fact that LTNZ have completely missed the point with this ad. How many serious crashes that occur are middle aged men driving late model vehicles? How many accidents resulting in injury or death are teenage boy racers driving crappy souped up cars crashing at speed? Why are LTNZ not running a campaign featuring boy racers driving a souped up Mazda Familia doing exactly the same thing?

Are you one of these people who spend your whole day at work updating your status on Facebook or buying stuff off auction sites? If so how about doing something really useful - join the search for one of the world's greatest adventurers!

If you've got Google Earth itstalled on your PC you can view actual satellite images from the search area taken after Fossett went missing and hopefully find some trace of wreckage of his plane.

Full details are here


http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=9TSZK4G35XEZJZG21T60&kw=story

The party pill debate and ban imposed by out of touch MP Jim Anderton shows no sign of going away. Liquor outlets in Manukau City have been told over the weekend to stop selling party pills or face losing their liquor licence.

Hello? Anybody home? It's fine to sell one mind altering drug that has strong links to domestic violence, motor vehicle accidents and unlawful behaviour but it's not OK to sell the other?

I don't agree with party bills and have never taken them but am not anti party pills. I have friends who take them regularly and they go out clubbing, don't drink, and have a great time. I have friends who go out, drink, get into fights and spend the next day ill in bed. Which is the better of the two? Alcohol causes far more problems in our society and yet apart from restrictions on it's sale from licenced premises and only to those over 18 no other restrictions exist. We have a teenage drinking culture in NZ that's getting worse by the day (in part because it's not illegal for those under 18 to actually consume alcohol) and levels of domestic voilence that should be shaming us as a country. 

Obviously banning party pills is far more important for our politicians.. Yeah right.

I purchased a Nokia E65 in April primarily because I wanted to play with the WiFi and VoIP capabilities of this device. So far this had been limited to using my phone at home as a cordless phone and testing it over various connections in NZ. While I was in Australia last month I spent a fair bit of time playing with my Nokia E65 connecting via both Telstra and Azure WiFi hotspots. Connecting to my Asterisk box at home is great, I can make calls as though I’m at home and only be paying for internet charges (around A$6.60 per hour with Azure). Call quality has been perfect using both providers and VoIP over WiFi is a great solution for bypassing the high roaming costs charged by mobile networks. But is it a replacement for your cellphone? The simple answer is no.

 

We’ve been hearing for years that VoIP over WiFi would kill off cellphones. Anybody who still believes this needs to get a grip on reality and accept that this is nothing but a dream. With the exception of the few large scale WiFi Networks (such as The Cloud in London) WiFi networks just can’t achieve an acceptable level of coverage to ever have a chance of doing this and people don’t want to walk around a city looking for a hotspot that they can use their phone from. Pricing is a significant issue with most hotspots offerering time based charging which may be fine for web browsing but if you want to use a VoIP solution or a instant messenger application then paying hourly rates while your connection is idle can prove rather expensive. Data based charging solves this problem but has the potential to drive down the average hourly revenue generated by a hotspot. In the world of broadband however nobody ever pays their ISP hourly rates for a broadband service so why should the hotspot market be any different? Flat rate charging is possibly the solution to the problem, but more about that later.

 

Hotspot operators also haven’t yet overcome the most basic of problems – that 99% of hotspots use a web based interface for user authentication. Even if you are in a good coverage area trying to open up a web browser on a small cellphone or PDA screen to enter your login details is just a horrible end user experience. The solution to this is simple – use a protocol such as 802.1x EAP or WISPr to authenticate end users without them having to login manually to the hotspot. EAP simply hasn’t taken off in the hotspot world but Boingo, FON & iPass have all adopted WISPr and and any hotspot that is a partner network supports for these supports WISPr - the problem however is that most hotspots only support WISPr for their Boingo & iPass logins and not their own customer base. I have a piece of  3^rd party software on my phone called SmartConnect which supports WISPr for hotspot logins however I’ve so far been unable to test this because neither Azure or Telstra support WISPr for their own user accounts and in New Zealand neither CafeNet or Telecom’s WiFi hotspots support this either. Even Steve from Tomizone has commented  that he would love an application for his new Apple iPhone to automatically connect to a TomiZone Hotspot. Everybody seems to acknowledge that this is a problem but why is a solution taking so long?

Nokia have chosen to support various 802.1x EAP methods of user authentication in their S60 firmware but have so far ignored WISPr. Both iPass and Boingo have also announced Symbian S60 based client software however while iPass issued a press release over a year ago saying that a Symbian S60 client was being launched but trying to get your hands on this is another story. Boingo are currently beta testing a Symbian S60 client which will work with their Boingo Mobile service, a flat rate US$7.95 per month service that offers unlimited VoIP and internet access from a Smartphone or PDA using any of their worldwide hotspots. Looking at it the Boingo Mobile deal has the potential to finally bring VoIP over WiFi to the masses. The Netgear WiFi Skype phone has Boingo software embedded in it and Boingo is trying to establish partnerships with manufacturers to embed their hotspot software into products which allows users to simply stroll up to a Boingo hotspot and their device will automatically connect to the internet with no requirement to manually enter user details. Kodak have had Boingo support in several of their WiFi capable cameras for some time now allowing easy transfer of data from any Boingo hotspot anywhere in the world.

 

This leads on to the next issue – how do any of the small standalone hotspot operators who are starting up today really think they can make money? Sure, there will always be a market for a hotel or café to have it’s own private WiFi system offering internet access and many of these are probably delivering a tidy profit. As an end user however I want a single login that works when I’m at a hotspot which is exactly what large global networks such as iPass and Boingo are offering. By being an aggregator and partnering with WiFi operators around the world they no longer need to spend large amounts of money rolling out their own hotspots but relying on WiFi network operators to partner with and delivering end users to those partner networks. iPass and Boingo differ significantly in that iPass is a true roaming network where you use your existing ISP’s login to connect to hotspots (and dialup) connections any pay an hourly rate for access. Boingo charges a flat monthly fee for access to the Boingo network with some restrictions in place preventing excess downloads from single hotspots and per minute surcharges that exist on some partner networks.

 

 I can hear people saying now that this is just rubbish but people said the same thing about roaming between GSM networks in the early days. If companies such as Boingo manage to start embedding their software in large numbers of WiFi devices then choosing to ignore partnering with large scale aggregators such as iPass or Boingo is a decision that’s going to seriously cripple your business and really does kill the whole concept of having affordable internet anywhere and everywhere.

 

I was going to talk about the concept of Muni WiFi networks and why they’re nothing but a bad business model but I’ll save that for another day..

 

If you're in the market for a new iPod checkout www.dse.co.nz 

If you preorder a new iPod you'll get 15% off the price this weekend only. No sign of the iPod touch yet though as it's not due for release until late September.