This is a very interesting twist, and I wonder how New Zealand will continue their policy of simple fibre backbone service, particularly in light of Telecom NZ’s recent dramas with their new XT network outages. Yes mobile 3G networks are not FTTH, but design and implementation competence is so important.

As our new business year kicks in after the holiday break, I think we are in for some very interesting happenings with the national fibre networks in both Australia and New Zealand.

Stay tuned!

Otherwise not much else of note to pass on.
I’m at my Gold Coast home right now, (yes I’m an Aussie by birth), and my ISP has just gunned me down by telling me that “OntheNet ADVISE THAT 100% OF PEAK QUOTA HAS BEEN EXCEEDED, RESULTING IN THIS SERVICE BEING SHAPED. **”
So I’ve been hobbled to dial-up speeds until my next billing cycle, which is? Who knows, I have too many more important things to worry about…
The sooner we get “pay as you use”, the better we will be.
I rotate regularly between countries, and have to maintain ADSL accounts in the three main ones. You pay 12 months a year, even if you are only there for two months.
Enough griping! S.E. Queensland has just received in places over 400 mm of rain in 24 hours. I just had a helicopter run over the Hinze dam which is full and overflowing, boats are being washed away in the overnight flooding.
See here.
Quite an amazing clip…

I try to avoid politics here. We live in our own countries and we deserve (dit-on) the government we elect.
But when we discuss the Internet and Next Generation Networks, we also need to discuss what goes over those networks around the world.
One interesting article about the current Google versus China debate can be found at: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10439049-265.html?tag=nl.e496

I have visited China, like most of our readers I imagine, a few times in recent years. And of course I had a broadband internet connection in each of my hotel rooms there.
But to my surprise, always so many of my regular web sites were “unavailable”. And I’m not talking about any site that could be considered politically sensitive, or of doubtful morals.
Just so many sites, of different ilk were “unavailable” on the China mainland.
You cross the border into Hong Kong and miraculously these sites are suddenly available again.
There must be an army of “faithful” monitors who run every site through a translation program that highlights any word or phrase that smells potentially of something unwelcome to their regime. And BOOM, the site is gone!
I have many excellent Chinese friends here in New Zealand. Most have good academic qualifications, and some of them in my own field of Electronics Engineering. Technically they are great, but often still adhere to what they have been taught back home.
OK enough of politics. These people are usually great migrants for New Zealand, but I applaud Google in thumbing their nose to the rampant censorship and spying that goes on over there.
Let’s hope that the Chinese Government sees the light and opens up “their ” internet.

I thought that many of you would be interested to see a pictorial visit to the Verizon (USA) “Super Headend” where all the hundreds of television channels are brought together and dispatched out to their nearly 1 million Fios (FTTH) subscribers across the United States.

Verizon's satellite head-end. Source: Engadget

Yes, they use RF Overlay for their broadcast channels plus IPTV for their Video on Demand.

Just before I left Auckland to spend the festive season with my family here in Noumea, I had the opportunity to be given a detailed tour of the SKY TV headquarters in Mt Wellington (an Auckland suburb).

My enthusiastic and expert guide, Mr Wayne Tibby, took me through this quite gigantic place, which resembled closely the Verizon installations.

When you arrive by car at SKY TV, the entrance is via a narrow laneway, surrounded by brick cottages. When you drive in, you have no idea of the extent of their installations. They are perched on a flat hill-top, giving their satellite antenna farm a clear shot skywards.

Wayne explained that they had just converted to HD (high definition) transmissions, and this required a massive change-over of equipment and subsequent investment. They had also recently converted their storage from tape to disk, and their total disk capacity runs into multiple petabytes.

Well done SKY!

“Welcome to National Censorship Day”
“Conroy’s blind adherence to his net filtering plan will abandon net neutrality ideals and push ISPs down a slippery slope of unprecedented responsibility for a callously politicised Australian internet.”
“Brave Labor MP rejects Conroy’s filter plan”
“NSW Labor MP Penny Sharpe has slammed her Federal colleagues’ plan to censor the internet.
Sharpe said the announcement was “a backward step” that, if adopted, would be “a triumph of fear and false promise [over] good sense”
“The Australian Government’s plan for mandatory filtering of a broad range of ‘refused classification content’ will put Australia at odds with almost every other liberal Western democracy and align it with states such as Belarus, Eritrea, The UAE, Yemen and Zimbabwe that force all ISPs to remove ‘inappropriate content’ from their services, according to a new research study.”

Anybody who has tried to use the internet in China would have encountered the nonsensical blocking of innocent sites which have no political bias or cultural sensitivity. Some public servant in a back room just decides that this or that site is not good for local consumption and bingo, its gone!
It will be a sad day if Australia adopts this course. And I hope that Wellington is not even thinking about it.

To get light to travel along an optical fiber, it must concentrated, aimed and bounced along the inside walls of the fiber which acts like a pipe for light. But as the size of the fiber shrinks (in our never-ending quest for smaller, faster, better), the light becomes more and more confined too, until it reaches the ultimate limit – the point beyond which it cannot be squeezed any smaller.

This ultimate point occurs when the strand of glass (fiber) is just a few hundred nanometers in diameter, about one thousandth of the size of a human hair. If you go smaller than this, light begins to spread out again.

The Adelaide researchers say they have discovered a way in which they can push beyond that limit by at least a factor of two. They can do this due to new breakthroughs in the theoretical understanding of how light behaves at the nanoscale, and by using a new generation of nanoscale optical fibers being developed at the institute.

This discovery by IPAS Reserach Fellow Dr Shahraam Afshar is expected to lead to more efficient tools for optical data processing in telecommunications networks and optical computing, as well as new light sources. Federation Fellow at the University of Adelaide and Director of IPAS, Prof Tanya Monro, says Dr Afshar’s discovery is “a fundamental breakthrough in the science of light”.

“By being able to use our optical fibers as sensors – rather than just using them as pipes to transmit light – we can develop tools that, for example, could easily detect the presence of a flu virus at an airport; could help IVF (in vitro fertilization) specialists to determine which egg should be chosen for fertilization; could gauge the safety of drinking water; or could alert maintenance crews to corrosion occurring in the structure of an aircraft,” says Professor Monro.

Another IPAS researcher, Dr Yinlan Ruan, also recently created what is thought to be the world’s smallest hole inside an optical fiber – just 25 nanometers in diameter.

“These breakthroughs feed directly into our applied work to develop nanoscale sensors,” Prof Monro says. “They will enable us to study the applications of light at much smaller scales than we’ve ever thought possible. It will help us to better understand and probe our world in ever smaller dimensions.”