Furrinners, foul-ups and frictions

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Had some good feedback on this week’s editorial, which was about being unaccountably not from here.

By Juha Saarinen | Auckland | Friday, 24 November, 2006

Top Stories

Email and be damned

- Fitbaw!
- Furrinners!
- Friction!
- And Citylink sold

Fitbaw!

It’s not like SMS-speak, Scots.

- Scots Wikipedia: Rugby Union

How disappointing... nobody’s written an entry on Nou Zealand. Get to it! But don’t forget: DINNA SUBMIT COPYRICHTIT WARK ATHOOT PERMEISSION!

- Scots Wikipedia: Nou Zealand

Furrinners!

Had some good feedback on this week’s editorial, which was about being unaccountably not from here. Thanks to Jari, I now know where to buy Swedish and Russian herring, plus dark rye bread and vodka (watch out!). Günther wrote in to say that ice hockey is a thriving sport in New Zealand, with some 1,300 players around the country and a national league.

The Ice Blacks are currently playing in Division III, but with any luck, should do well in the future as they’re young and hungry — and coached by Mr B.

Immigrants: overqualified and over here?

New Zealand Ice Hockey Federation

Foul-ups!

In between alleged perverted parliamentarians and sword-falling party leaders, ICT news was a bit thin on the ground. Or maybe not: it looks like email played a rather large part in Don Brash vacating the hot seat in favour of John Key (ahem, that’s not official yet though), so there’s that unavoidable technology angle again.

Hager Book: What's in the leaked Brash emails

Frictions!

What is going on at the Internet Service Providers’ Association of New Zealand, or ISPANZ for short? After a litany of customer complaints and many a story in the papers about Ihug having all sorts of problems, ISPANZ sent out a press release.

The ISPANZ press release is headlined: “Ongoing Telecom faults cause disruptions to ISPs, broadband customers” and it was sent out by Ihug’s PR and communications manager, Cherie Lacey. In the release, ISPANZ’ president David Diprose blasts Telecom for “increasingly frequent and severe outages” on the bitstream network.

Diprose, incidentally, also wears the regulatory general manager hat at Ihug. The provider is now owned by Vodafone.

Although the release spoke of ISPs suffering disruptions, there were no names mentioned or even specifics as to the problems. We have asked ISPANZ for more details and hope to hear back from them.

TelstraClear meanwhile reports none of the problems on their UBS broadband. Spokesman Mat Bolland reports that things are copacetic on TelstraClear’s DSL network.

Curiously enough, less than an hour after the ISPANZ release, a communiqué from Orcon arrived. In that release, Orcon’s general manager of operations and regulatory affairs Scott Bartlett “noted with interest” the ISPANZ statement that ISPs were having UBS outages. Orcon hasn’t experienced outages apparently.

Bartlett is the ISPANZ vice-president, as it happens.

Telecom meanwhile is looking into the ISPANZ complaints, but its spokeswoman for the wholesale group says there is nothing to suggest that the problems are within the incumbent’s network. Indeed, Computerworld hasn’t heard from other ISPs or their customers about network issues recently.

What could the problem be? We hope to have an updated report next week.

Ihug still fighting to sort out spam fiasco

Ihug outlines P2P policy

Ongoing Telecom faults cause huge disruptions to ISP's

Orcon unaffected by broadband outages

This just in: TeamTalk buys Citylink

Our Wellington correspondent tells us that Teamtalk has spent big and bought high-speed networking company Citylink. We should have a story up on the web soon, but the press release is linked below. Apparently this will give Citylink money to expand into other centres plus the management expertise from TeamTalk.

TeamTalk buys CityLink

TeamTalk to purchase 67% of CityLink for $12.7 million