SciBlogs

Archive October 2009

Just in from Malaysia – maybe some parallels to draw? John Nixon Oct 30

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October 29, 2009 22:04 PM
Hiring Foreign Firms For HSBB Will Minimise Risks For Local Firms, Says Telecom Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 29 (Bernama) — Telekom Malaysia’s (TM) decision to sign up foreign principal vendors to spearhead the national High-Speed Broadband (HSBB) project will minimise the business risk to local firms while helping them gain technology transfer, TM group chief executive officer, Datuk Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa said Thursday.

This is because, touted as the biggest infrastructure roll-out project by global standards, the HSBB initiative’s liability for failure can exceed the contract value.

“It is therefore important that TM directly signs with the principal so that the principal can be directly accountable for this,” he said in a statement here.

“Therefore, to ensure that the project runs smoothly with minimum risks and the best procurement quality, it only makes sense for TM to conduct an open tender process to principal vendors.”

Zamzamzairani said this in response to an earlier statement by the Malay Chamber of Commerce Malaysia that local firms were being shunned to participate in Class A contracts of the HSBB project and instead made junior partners to foreign principals.

He explained that much of the fibre-optic infrastructure work and core network development required high-technology capabilities and experience that was still hard to come by given the cutting-edge nature of the project.

This project also involves new and complex technologies and the equipments are not manufactured in Malaysia.

“Hence, only international manufacturers are capable of developing and producing the advanced equipment with proven systems,” he said.

But as part of the tender criteria, the bidding principal vendors are required to identify capable local contractors as their Focal Local Partner, as the strategic partnership would enable knowledge transfer, capability building and real value added participation.

The Focal Local Partner will then identify qualified local partners to work with them in the project, he said.

“With this expertise acquired via the “knowledge export” in hand, TM and local partners involved in this project will be able to move up the value chain by offering consulting and other related services to other telecommunication companies in the region who are thinking of introducing IP technology into their networks locally and internationally,” he added.

To further protect the interest of the Focal Local Partner, TM has introduced The Master Agreement to be signed by the telco, the principal and the local partner in a tri-partite arrangement.

This will allow TM to monitor and control the relationship between the Principal and Focal Local Partner to achieve National Policy Objectives.

As at end of September, TM has awarded HSBB-related contract work worth RM1.186 billion, where more than 200 local vendors have been awarded, led by the RM600 million contract for the Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) Passive infrastructure awarded to local fibre optic manufacturers.

However, Zamzamzairani said TM was still finalising other HSBB packages and to uphold confidentiality and governance in respect of the tender process, the telco will make official announcement at the appropriate time.

As an end-to-end project over a 10-year period, the work involved will be done in parcels, he said.

In relation to this, TM has launched a three-year Vendor Development Programme to ensure that its external local contractors have the requisite capacity and capability to undertake HSBB-related work.

TM has also invested in the training of its 800-strong force of HSBB contractors who will oversee the physical fibre access roll-out, he said.

These local partners will be in an excellent position to reap the shared business ecosystem benefits when the service is commercially launched in the first quarter of next year, he said.

Fibre to the Home Council meeting in Auckland John Nixon Oct 28

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It is personally satisfying that for the first time, the FTTH Council (Asia-Pacific) has convened their General Meeting here in Auckland on 18/19 November 2009.
Some 50 member/delegates will meet here from all over the region: China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Australia etc. They are all experts in their specific field of Fibre-optic networks connected to the home.
It is planned to invite professionally interested parties to an “open day” session on the 19th.
We also expect the attendance and presentation from a senior Government official concerning the New Zealand NBN.
Invitations are limited to about 50 attendees. Please contact me if you would like to receive an invitation. Email to:

New Zealand Broadband Infrastructure Deployment John Nixon Oct 18

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On Friday I attended here in Auckland the New Zealand Govenment’s latest workshop on this country’s National Broadband Network.

I was frankly very positively surprised by the presentations.

The NZ program differs substantially from that of Australia. The initial thust is to encourage, possibly help fund, the deployment of dark fibre around, to and between the main population centres of this country.

Then a new Kiwi “NBN Co” will partner with some 25 proposed regional fibre companies who will “Light my Fibre”….

I must say I have sincere reservations about this, having observed the extremely variable performance of the similar number of District Health Boards in the country.

Anyway, it’s not for me to decide.

We had a really excellent presentation from Ian McCullough on progress with a new NZ guideline for home cabling standards (TCF Code of Practice). Then two power companies gave us their recent experiences with installing fibre “up in the air” alongside power cables, with the comparative costs of putting it underground. Aerial deployment as you would guess is up to 10 times cheaper than underground. But I was impressed by both companies’ efforts to blend the fibre into the existing view of the power cables.

But the workshop’s program made no mention of the bits between the “dark” fibre and the home installation for distributing the services.

A fibre optics cable running past your house is not like a power, gas or water main. You can’t just tap into it, install a meter and pay as you go.

Between the ‘backhaul’ or wholesale ‘fat internet pipe’ and your home service, there must be a very sophisticated secondary network of local fibre services management and delivery.

It’s the ‘FTTH’ bit. This delivery node is called a “headend”. It’s a bit like the old telephone exchange. The service radius from each headend or exchange is typically about 15 to 20 km to the home or business subscriber. The headend equipment pulls in the wholesale services (phone, internet, TV and many new projected additional services), agregates them, and sends all this out over a single fibre to your home.

This is where you enable the various services to subscribers, paramaterise them for each client, control and monitor the Fibre to the Home service delivery. This is a very critical part of the whole project, but so far, has not been taken into consideration (not publically at least).

Again and again, nobody mentions TV distribution. Everybody just deduces that TV will be delivered as IP packets.

NO! WRONG! Neither Australia nor New Zealand are ready for IPTV. Nor is IPTV ready for these countries.

And many housing estates and high-rise buildings just don’t allow individual subscriber antennas.

The “media wavelength” or RF Overlay allows us to multiplex on the same single fibre, at very low cost, ALL the current and future TV programs (plus digital radio), Free to air, satellite etc without hogging bandwidth on the data channel.

These media offerings arrive in their native format, no conversion, just as if everybody had their own antenna(s) on the roof.

This is generally not understood by the majority of FTTH-supportive people.

Anyway thanks MED, it was a very worthwhile workshop today!

ftth

Moore’s Law key to fibre’s promise John Nixon Oct 13

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New Zealand Herald writer Anthony Doesburg is a very professional technical writer here in New Zealand. He called me recently requesting my comments on the real need for higher internet bandwidth – ie via FTTH (fibre to the home).

I was caught on the hop – no time to reflect on the subject. But his article is very readable. I didn’t intend the joke about dogs peeing on DSLAM cabinets to be printed, but that’s OK, no problem.

I’ve since thought a lot about his question. Internet bandwidth expansion is quite similar to Moore’s Law concerning I.C. chip density, but perhaps even more similar compared to the size and use of HDD (Hard Disk Drive) capacity.

I am personally a 2 Terabyte HDD household now.

Step back a few years: I personally oversaw back in the ’80s the design, build and sale around the Pacific of a complete online retail banking system that ran (and backed up) hundreds of thousands of accounts all on a 10 Mb disk system (5 Mb fixed, 5 Mb removable).

Of course it was written in COBOL, with ASCII characters on TTY monitors etc. But it worked fabulously and made my company a lot of money.

We had to do it, because that 10 Mb drive was bigger than a washing machine and cost an arm and a leg.

So what do I do with 2 Terabytes?

Things that didn’t exist before you “could”.

I have FLAC’d (Free lossless audio compression) my whole collection of CDs (countless numbers) on 1 Tb, and back the drive up to an outboard 1 Tb drive.

The point I’m making is that without the huge capacity of HDDs and memory cards today, you wouldn’t have FLAC, let alone MP3.

The same with internet bandwidth. Create the capacity and the (useful, perhaps life-saving) applications will come.

Those “with” will participate in these useful => practical => advantageous => time/money saving => almost mandatory applications (health, government, job interviews, you name it) .

Those “without” will be considerably disadvantaged.

A quote from the article to illustrate my point:

Nixon says fibre connections direct to homes, businesses and institutions open the way for direct access to government servers, with the ability to do electronically much of what still requires face-to-face interaction with State agencies.

“I’m talking five or 10 years out. There will be a lot of medical applications, home consulting with webcams – it all sounds a bit dreamtime, but it is coming.”

The promised connection speeds sound fast in today’s terms but won’t seem so by the time they’re delivered, Nixon says. Equally, fibre-optic data transmission rates are continually being pushed higher.

“I jokingly compare it to the old phone with the two jam tins and a piece of string. Once you put the fibre in the ground, it’s like the piece of string – you’ll never have to change it.

“But you can change the jam tins – the electronics at each end – easily.”

A pair of “jam tins” is good for five to seven years before an upgrade is warranted, but the technology is such that the sky’s the limit in bandwidth terms, Nixon says.