[AusNOG] Netflix in AU, break up Go4, or TPG peering breakup?

[Mark ZZZ Smith]

----- Original Message -----
> From: Paul Brooks <pbrooks-ausnog at layer10.com.au>
> To: ausnog at lists.ausnog.net
> Cc: 
> Sent: Wednesday, 23 July 2014 9:29 AM
> Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Netflix in AU, break up Go4, or TPG peering breakup?
> 
> On 23/07/2014 7:53 AM, Mark ZZZ Smith wrote:
>> 
>>  'crappy' to me means unreliable. ADSL in most cases is very 
> reliable, and when it isn't, it has commonly been fixed. The main reason 
> that it isn't as reliable as it could be is because current _regulations_ 
> that Telstra have to comply with say that the local loop only has to support 
> reliable voice services. If regulations were changed such that the local loop 
> had to support reliable ADSL services with a certain minimum signal-to-noise 
> ratio, then ADSL as a whole would become even more reliable than it is today 
> 
> ....by restricting the distance at which service qualification would allow ADSL 
> to be
> deployed, so those within (say) 3 km of the exchange would get reliable ADSL 
> with good
> noise margin, and those beyond the distance would not be allowed to have a low
> noise-margin and unreliable service that drops out occasionally, so they would 
> have
> access to nothing at all (except possibly cellular). That what we used to have 
> when
> Telstra's ADSL1 was limited to 1.5Mbps and 3.7km deployment distance, for 
> this very
> reason - and the industry lobbied hard to remove the distance (noise margin)  
> limit.
> 
> Be careful what you wish for - unintended consequences and all that jazz.
> 

Yes, the 'have cake and eat it too' problem. People wanted as fast as their line would support, but then didn't like ISPs saying 'up to XZY Mbps'.

>> 
>>  Because millions of people are happy with it, as is to doing the job they 
> want for the money they're willing to pay. Paying for something and 
> continuing to pay for it is the final arbiter or "vote for success" of 
> the product.
>> 
>>  However, as per that ABS link above, people are actually starting to 
> 'vote for failure' of wired technologies, by buying less of them. The 
> 'Type of Access' slider shows that between December 2010 and June 2011 
> the use of wired broadband technologies started to decline as mobile and fixed 
> wireless Internet services became dominant.
> That is a completely bogus use of those ABS stats, as it implies that the wired 
> and
> wireless services are mutually exclusive, in the same way that the various wired
> alternatives (HFC, ADSL) are.
> The wireless 'type of access' category is mostly additional to the wired 
> connections,
> not replacing them.

Hmm, that page by the ABS fooled me. The absolute figures that the bottom made me thing that the sliding bar graph was also showing absolute numbers rather than percentages. It would be better if they made the title of the graph the same size and font as they did the table's title.

> The wired broadband connections are not decreasing by number, just by percentage 
> -
> more and more individuals are taking on wireless SIMs per device, so a household
> typically has one wired connection to serve the household, and several SIMS 
> counted as
> 'wireless broadband' for each device and person, used while roaming away 
> from the house.

I still think it is significant that around half of all Internet connections in Australia are wireless. That means that if you're going to release a content product, you have a choice to make. You could make it work well enough over all but the slowest of Internet access links (i.e., dial up modem), making it available over 12 million wired and wireless Internet connections, or you could cut your content availability in half and only bother to make it work well over the 6 million wired connections. I'd say the success of a content product is proportional to the amount of time it is in front of attentive eyeballs, so most content providers will be willing to put effort into making it work well over the 12 rather than 6 million Internet connections.

> 
> P.
> 
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