Big news from Telecom this afteroon.

http://www.telecom-media.co.nz/releases_detail.asp?id=3487&page=index

Telecom have just announced reductions in their landline to mobile calling rates.


What fantastic news!

  

That's sensational I hear you say!


I knew that reducing MTR's would make my calls cheaper I hear you say!


 So..


Telecom's Anytime rate has now dropped from 71c per minute to 67c per minute!

Is this some kind of April fools joke? Are Telecom trying to star on a Tui billboard?

How can you justify a 4c reduction in your Anytime calling rates when the 71c rate was set 16 years ago when mobile termination rates were set at around 45c per minute? That's MTR's are now 20c per minute and falling and all you can do is cut 4c per minute off? How pathetic.

Reading Stuff this morning I came across a story "Fault dogs NZ printer owners" which talks about the known issues with Brother inkjet printers and fax machines coming up with a Error 41 code indicating a failed printhead. It amazes me that these problems are still continuing and that Brother have done nothing about this. I blogged about this a year ago and yet Brother seem to have done very little despite a known problem with their printers.

It would probably pay to avoid any Brother printers while Brother still want to act like this and try and deny there really is an issue.



 

Anybody who's followed the news in the past 24 hours would be aware of the APEC conference that is about to start in Sydney. Australian media have also been leading with a story raising security fears for the APEC conference due to the theft of 3 Police radios in recent weeks.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22345160-2,00.html

http://abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/09/02/2021522.htm?section=australia

Hmm..

Now lets look at the radio system used by the NSW Police. It's an APCO 25 digital network that supports encryption with the appropiate radios. Radios are "keyed" with an algorithm to decode the encrypted radio traffic which prevents unauthorised people from listening into the system. One of the best features of APCO 25 over other digital systems is it's OTAR - Over The Air Rekeying. Unlike older digital encryption systems where radios had to be rekeyed by individually programming each radio this system allows rekeying of radios over the common air interface. This means that if a radio is stolen or lost then all of the radios on the network can be rekeyed and the missing radios removed from the system which renders them useless.

Either the NSW Police want the media to feed on this story as added justification for their security crackdown since stolen radios would seem to pose a credible security threat or the NSW Police have idiots running their radio network.

From The Times in the UK comes Warne's list of top 50 all time cricketers. I guess the big unanswered question will be whether he rates himself as number 1 - he hasn't mentioned himself yet in this countdown and he's already at 20! :-)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/cricket/article2337428.ece

Good on ya Warnee, you're still a legend in the making!

Mauricio blogged about Telecom's NGN this morning and the discussed the issue of power failures affecting VoIP. Whereas traditional POTS/PSTN phones are powered by the switch in a VoIP environment your internet connection and phones are powered by your household power which means that if you're not running your equipment on a UPS you face an outage during power cuts.

Telecom's Trinity Project is the replacement of the existing POTS network with a 100% VoIP solution meaning that somewhere within the next 5-7 years every household in the country will be using a VoIP solution for their home phone as the existing NEC NEAX switches are retired. There is no need to replace your existing phone or household wiring as you will be able to continue to use your existing phones and an ATA which will convert your regular phone to function as a VoIP phone. People who do want to upgrade however will be able to use true VoIP phones which will offer enhanced features & functionality.

Anybody who's building a new house or modernising their house should make this Telecom PTC106
 essential reading. If you're building a new house you should be future proofing your house now. If your electrician wants to run regular phone cable and had no idea what the word structured cabling means then find a new one who does. Running structured cabling also doesn't need to cost the earth - I've run cabling in two new houses for friends lately and with a box of cat5e cable only costing around $130 for a 305m box and RG6 cable at less than $1 per metre for triple shielded it's not a huge expense. There are plenty of custom home structured cabling systems available but beware of paying big $$ to get the same solution.

Since I'm 100% VoIP at home I have a patch panel in the hallway cupboard with a 24 port switch, cable modem and Linksys PAP2 all powered off a UPS. I have 12 jackpoints around the house and my Linksys SPA921 VoIP phones and single cordless phone all run off their own standalone plug packs but I will soon be building my own PoE injectors to run my SPA921's since these phones don't support the PoE standard.

Spotted in the local Countdown supermarket today

Honestly, does anybody care?

How about sorting our our 3rd world health system Mr Hodgson instead of wasting all your time being obsessed by everybody else. Companis who obsess themselves about what everybody else is doing rather than focusing on their own ideas normally self destruct and go bust. The current Labour government is heading down that very same path.

So corrections want to install cellphone jammers in prisons to stop prisoners making calls? This is an issue I spent some time discussing yesterday afternoon with a friend who had done some brief work on cellphone jamming in NZ a while back when corrections first proposed installing equipment into prisons. The technology can work in some circumstances but can also prove unreliable. What it doesn't deal with however is the issue of blocking WiFi signals. With the number of cellphones now with VoIP and WiFi capabilities the move by corrections to install cellphone jamming equipment is going to about as effective as giving somebody a two roadcones to block a road. It will stop some people but anybody who has a brain (ie many prisoners) will realise an exploit to get around the system is dead easy.

Firstly smuggle your WiFi/VoIP capable Nokia phone or Netgear Skype phone into a prison (very easy). Next your mate parks outside with a WiFi AP hooked up to a cellphone (again very easy) and before you know it you're connected to the real world again. Simple isn't it. I wonder why not a single person at corrections was aware of such an exploit? They're going to waste $5 million of taxpayers money on a system that will have exploits from day one.

It reminds me of their stupid system about 10 years ago were prisoners were only able to dial fixed nominated numbers from the prison payphones. They would nominate friend X on number 1234567 and were free to call them. Corrections spent a lot of money implimenting this rock solid system to discover that some smart people realised if you rang your nominated mate he could put his phone on divert to another number and talk to anybody they wanted.

Bruce over at Aarkvark has also posted about the issue of cellphones in prison and has a few comments  in regards to it.

Our currency is in meltdown.

Currently falls 3c against the $US in a single day and almost 1.5c against the A$.

My New Years prediction this year was that the NZ economoy would be buggered by October/November and we'd be in a near recession. It looks like it's actually occuring a little earlier.

What's going to happen to house prices and interest rates now when our banks no longer have cheap money to loan? What's going to happen to inflation as the cost of petrol and imported goods starts to sky rocket? 

Has anybody else noticed that despite our dollar dropping by 10c compared to the US$ in the past two weeks that the price of unleaded has stayed at 153.9 per litre? I smell something a little fishy here, the main fuel players in NZ normally raise their prices pretty quickly when our dollar starts going downward or oil prices start fluctuating. The only assumption I can make is that they're been ripping us off so much in the past few months they can afford to sustain their current price point.