Telecom Takes UFB Priority

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44 posts

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#417245 14-Dec-2010 20:38

sothereiwas:
. . . but who seriously thinks it is OK to have power generation companies making super profits by exploiting .nz's natural resources?

The W'gton woodenheads do - that's who! What you refer to as
super profits are a stealth tax. Nothing more - nothing less.

DonGould

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#417246 14-Dec-2010 20:39

sothereiwas: UFB model - a National provide acting in the public interest serving service providers operating in an open market. Best of both worlds.

Sure, not going to argue with the concept. Only arguing that Telecom NZ is not the company to deliver that.

If I'd seen them deliver that effectively with their existing network I may have a different view, but I just don't see that.

What I see is a company that now uses different layers to add confusion for small industry players who might be interested in doing business in a small way in a local community (yes, there's a whole back story to that comment).

I see a company that at a retail level has such poor systems that it's staff are frustrated ("Wish I was on a bus in china right about now:)"...

...and is happy to just take consumers for a ride - $8,000 for one customer alone who's got a telephone line he hasn't used in years, another customer who's still being billed for a dial up connection that they haven't used since moving to bb - this was all just in the past 3 weeks.

Is this a company that's working in the interests of New Zealanders?

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DonGould

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#417248 14-Dec-2010 20:42

sothereiwas:
DonGould: How many councils are there in .nz?

87 ish I think

Sort of makes my point doesn't it... they can run road, water and sewers without economy of scale.

How's the Auckland super city working out for rate payers? Didn't I just read 5% rate increases in one of the most expensive parts of the co?

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sothereiwas

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Geek

#417259 14-Dec-2010 21:01

DonGould:
sothereiwas:
DonGould: How many councils are there in .nz?

87 ish I think

Sort of makes my point doesn't it...? they can run road, water and sewers without economy of scale.

How's the Auckland super city working out for rate payers?? Didn't I just read 5% rate increases in one of the most expensive parts of the co?

You can type faster than me on my iPad!!
Actually, there is another side to the local government thing. Google BOPLASS to see what the BOP councils are doing to aggregate buying power and create shared services for 9 councils. They can't do it efficiently by themselves. Think about this - in .nz we have 87 councils for a country about the size of 1/2 of London! And have a look at health. Check out the National Health Board to see what they are doing at a national and regional level. Their main objective is to create a single, transferable, electronic, national health record for everyone. To do that they need interoperability and standardization -which means deconstructing much of what has been created in a fragmented model over the past couple of decades. So, Auckland Super City put the rates up? Don't they have a bunch of really bog projects to do?

PenultimateHop

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#417265 14-Dec-2010 21:07

sothereiwas: IMHO while it is true that .nz is SME and that IS the culture, the problem this creates is lack of scale to do BIG things economically - and UFB is a big thing. To get the economics to work for .nz we should avoid replication of core network and we should also be able to easily do a consistent service delivery anywhere in the country. I can't see how that can be done efficiently with multiple network providers on different billing, provisioning and support systems. Choose one national provider, make it open access, get the oversight and governance right and it will work.

I agree.

The problem I personally have with the current UFB proposal is that it is going to require massive redundant investment by each LFC. This will result in overall higher prices and less flexibility for end users as well as the retail ISPs, plus will almost certainly give different performance characteristics of the network in each region. Definitely not desirable if it's a national broadband network.

One of the biggest problems people bemoan is poor performance of the current networks. The only way the other countries that are often cited achieve consistently good performance is through scale economics (either very low population density on the networks, or very high population density). Take this away and the ISPs and LFCs are all going to be extremely challenged to build networks that will meet and exceed performance characteristics that are expected by end users.

DonGould: The market is more than big enough to support 12 cos in wholesale, network and retail - 4 at each level... seems to be adding some value in the power area?

No, it really isn't.

Beccara: We tried to put in as much govt oversight as we could so this is where we are at now.
12 or 33 LFC's makes no difference to the consumer as thats the ISP's role to work with them all not the end user,

Ask any ISP how enthusiastic they are about working with thirty three additional network partners, each with thirty three different billing systems and processes, order management, fault management, performance management, network performance, and network interfaces.

From a network operations perspective alone that's going to be a nightmare. For everything else it's worse than a nightmare.

DonGould

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#417269 14-Dec-2010 21:09

Ya you're BOP example is great and makes my point. The councils are working together to do different tasks aren't they?

I don't see any issue with Telecom being the outsource co of choice to provide some of the services that the regional fibre cos will need. In fact I think that would be fantastic.

As for health - pffft.... worked in that 13 years ago, it was a mess then and it's still a mess from what I can tell. I really don't see why unified heath records need to be something that's all that hard to do. What I have seen is people who like to just ride the gravy train and milk it for all it's worth. Didn't I read about a guy who 'borrowed $17m' for his personal boat project?

D

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PenultimateHop

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#417271 14-Dec-2010 21:10

DonGould:
sothereiwas:
DonGould: How many councils are there in .nz?

87 ish I think

Sort of makes my point doesn't it... they can run road, water and sewers without economy of scale.

How's the Auckland super city working out for rate payers? Didn't I just read 5% rate increases in one of the most expensive parts of the co?

I take it you are comfortable with differing prices for the same service based on where people live, then? And that you're happy for your rates to subsidise the LFCs, if required?

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DonGould

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#417274 14-Dec-2010 21:16

PenultimateHop:I take it you are comfortable with differing prices for the same service based on where people live, then? And that you're happy for your rates to subsidise the LFCs, if required?

Yip. Happens with rates now. Only caviet I put on it is that .govt.nz needs to ensure that rural areas that are hard to reach don't end up paying $30k each just to get .5mbit connection.

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DonGould

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#417276 14-Dec-2010 21:17

PenultimateHop: Ask any ISP how enthusiastic they are about working with thirty three additional network partners, each with thirty three different billing systems and processes, order management, fault management, performance management, network performance, and network interfaces.

From a network operations perspective alone that's going to be a nightmare. For everything else it's worse than a nightmare.

Again, that's what standards are all about. .industry needs to develop a standard for message interchange. I'm sure most of this work must have been done, but it's really not that complex, didn't we build xml for this sort of crap?

D

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PenultimateHop

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#417277 14-Dec-2010 21:19

DonGould:
PenultimateHop:I take it you are comfortable with differing prices for the same service based on where people live, then? And that you're happy for your rates to subsidise the LFCs, if required?

Yip. Happens with rates now. Only caviet I put on it is that .govt.nz needs to ensure that rural areas that are hard to reach don't end up paying $30k each just to get .5mbit connection.

Cool. Personally I don't have a problem with differential pricing either (if you choose to live in the middle of nowhere then it's going to be more expensive), but the majority of people do seem to have a problem with it.

However I think you will be underwhelmed by the service offerings that will be made accordingly, because of the high costs incurred and regulated prices that the LFCs will have to operate under, while struggling to get any kind of ROI and economy of scale going.

Not to mention will ISPs really pick to service all 33 LFCs? Maybe and maybe not - potentially good for boutique regional ISPs but they too suffer from the economy of scale issue.

DonGould

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#417279 14-Dec-2010 21:22

PenultimateHop: potentially good for boutique regional ISPs but they too suffer from the economy of scale issue.

I'm currently looking at that concept just in my local chch suburb, so I don't know if it will work. I'm just doing the research at present on a proof of concept.

I tried talking about idea with a couple of providers and found the doors really closed to boutique operators.

...and yes F, that's what the count down timer is ;)

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PenultimateHop

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#417280 14-Dec-2010 21:23

DonGould: Again, that's what standards are all about. .industry needs to develop a standard for message interchange. I'm sure most of this work must have been done, but it's really not that complex, didn't we build xml for this sort of crap?

D

I take it you've never worked with telco OSS or sat on any standards bodies. If enforce standardise it we can wait til 2017 (check out how long xUBA took to define, or any major RFC, or anything the ITU does) so that the standards are defined (and out of date to their relevance) and that all major vendors can support it; or we will suffer legislated standards that don't make sense/scale.

I've built networks and sat on standards bodies (including those for two NBNs now); and this is one of the toughest areas to get correct. It certainly is not straight forward -- go look at the massive investments being made by NBNCo into their IT domain to try and get this right, or any telco in general with how much they spend on OSS/BSS platforms (and still struggle to get it right).

Implementing it 33 times over for each LFC multipled by each ISP and making it workable? I believe there is a Tui billboard in that.

Pro-question: How many ISPs have fully automated interfaces to TNZ's provisioning systems? (This used to be called OOT, it may have a new name now)

DonGould

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#417286 14-Dec-2010 21:31

I've seen crap get sorted by key industry players in .nz just dragging all the players into a room and telling them to sort the business.

Let's not get in to NBNCo... $630m, 5000 houses passed, 2250 drops, 4 ISPs, battery issues and a web site with a default IBM 500 fault pages when their web site goes down.

Took 3 weeks to get some answers to some fairly basic questions... so I really do take your point - I'm kidding myself to think that 33 are going to work well with 12 ISPs any time soon.

I still don't see 1 national provider who has a proven track record of holding the country back as being the best solution either.

D

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sbiddle

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#417289 14-Dec-2010 21:33

PenultimateHop: Pro-question: How many ISPs have fully automated interfaces to TNZ's provisioning systems? (This used to be called OOT, it may have a new name now)

It's still called OOT and it hasn't changed much!

PenultimateHop

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#417300 14-Dec-2010 21:43

DonGould: I've seen crap get sorted by key industry players in .nz just dragging all the players into a room and telling them to sort the business.

I'd be interested to hear examples of this resulting in "getting sorted". I've sat in some meetings like this (yes, in NZ) so I'm not sure I agree.

DonGould: Let's not get in to NBNCo... $630m, 5000 houses passed, 2250 drops, 4 ISPs, battery issues and a web site with a default IBM 500 fault pages when their web site goes down.

Yes, you're right - what they've achieved so far is pretty admirable considering their fairly short existence (and significant uncertainty in that existence).

DonGold: I still don't see 1 national provider who has a proven track record of holding the country back as being the best solution either.

Best it may not be. Most pragmatic? Quite possibly. I'd also caution against tarring a company that doesn't exist with feathers it might not deserve - it's difficult to have a track record before you exist.

Just out of curiosity, why do you think NZ went from ~200 access focussed ISPs to less than 30? (And really, probably less than 20).

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