Sponsor's Message

In today's NZ Herald, Douglas Webb, the man who recommended against unbundling, airs his perspective on the matter and, in my opinion, shows a little naivety in respect to the pace at which technology is advancing.

Unfortunately, Mr Webb seems to have given insufficient weight to the fact that communications speeds have their own Moore's Law type of growth.

Back in the mid 1980s, the standard communications speed was either 300bps full duplex or 1200/75.

By the early 1990s, this had grown to an amazing 14.4Kbps (an almost 5-fold increase in a few short years).

By the mid 1990s, 33.6Kbps was the norm and, just a couple of years later, most Net users were up to 56Kbps -- another four-fold increase.

So, in 20 less than years we've seen dial-up access speeds jump 186-fold.

With the arrival of DSL, we saw affordable access speeds jump from the 56Kbps dial-up rate to the 128Kbps offered by Telecom's Jetstream Starter package.

Now, most likely due only to the threat of unbundling, Telecom has offered us an affordable 256Kbps DSL access.

That's another speed doubling which means many the affordable maximum access speed has increased by an incredible factor of almost 900 times in just two short decades. However, thanks to the government's decision of earlier this week, I don't think we'll see any further progress for quite some time.

Now have your say Got something to say about today's column, or want to see what others think?  Visit The Forums While you're here, why not visit the Aardvark Hall of Shame and perhaps make your own nomination.

You see, while improvements in data speeds were driven by modem manufacturers, the growth, driven by intense competition, continued to be significant.

However, now that the government has (on the Mr Webb's recommendation) effectively decided that nobody will ever need more than 256Kbps, I suspect that this is exactly where we'll stay -- for a long, long time.

In an unbundled loop situation, other providers would be free to offer whatever speeds their technology could provide -- but as it stands, they'll only be able to provide whatever speeds and technology Telecom chooses to provide to them at a wholesale level.

Imagine if the NZ government had listened to the uninformed claims of "experts" that Bill Gates had authoritatively stated "640Kbytes is all the memory anyone will need" -- and passed a law to restrict RAM sizes on PCs.

Well that's effectively what we now have in the broadband arena.

Oh yes, the CC/government can go back to Telecom and "put them on notice" that they need to offer faster services to their competitors -- but I have no doubt that this would be a process not too dissimilar to pulling teeth, with each and every concession being very hard-won.

I also have to wonder whether Telecom has the capacity to offer faster services anyway.

My JetSurf 10GB plan really starts to crawl in the early evening due to latency which jumps through the roof and increasing levels of packet-loss. What's more, if I use my Xtra connection, their DNS can sometimes take in excess of 20 seconds to resolve a name at peak times.

Perhaps this is specific to the section of the network to which my DSLAM is connected -- but I wouldn't have thought that Tokoroa was a hotbed of broadband use.

This doesn't sound like a system that can support faster speeds or more users without some more expenditure.

And, if we extrapolate past growth rates, an affordable 1Mbps connection should only be a couple of years away.

Given their apparent reluctance to preemptively add bandwidth and other capacity so as to ensure optimal levels of service, what chance do we have of seeing world-standard DSL connections at an affordable rate in the wake of the government's decision not to unbundle?

Lighten Up
There's no lighten up this week because nobody has sent me any links!

Come on folks, trawl those bookmarks for something worth sharing.

If you feel that this is a good thing and/or you hold a "geniune affection" for yours truly -- then you are welcome to gift me some money using the buttons provided. In gifting this money you accept that no goods, service or other consideration is offered, provided, accepted or anticipated in return. Just click on the button to gift whatever you can afford. NOTE: PayPal bills in US dollars so don't accidentally gift more than what you were intending :-)

Contacting Aardvark
I'm always happy to hear from readers, whether they're delivering brickbats, bouquets or news tip-offs. If you'd like to contact me directly, please this form. If you're happy for me to republish your comments then please be sure and select For Publication.

Other media organisations seeking more information or republication rights are also invited to contact me.

Just add a couple of lines of JavaScript to your pages and you can get a free summary of Aardvark's daily commentary -- automatically updated each and every week-day.

Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using the RSS format. More details can be found here.

Contact me if you decide to use either of these feeds and have any problems.

Linking Policy
Want to link to this site? Check out Aardvark's Linking Policy.

Did you tell someone else about Aardvark today? If not then do it now!