Media statement from the Greater Oceania Movement
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By Juha Saarinen | Auckland | Friday, 2 March, 2007
Top Stories
Cicada, cicado
- Media statement from the Greater Oceania Movement
- Peering zombie awakes
Media statement from the Greater Oceania Movement
“Open Letter to Prime Minister Helen Clark
National Synergies Sought
Dear Helen,
Our organisation represents several likeminded people, pushing for change. We are encouraged to note that the artificial Tasman Divide that separates Australia and that other one in the South Pacific that’s a bit like Tasmania but not quite, is shrinking by the day.
An increasing number of synergies are found that remove unnecessary duplication and allow business to focus on what they’re doing best, from Australia.
Take Telecom New Zealand in your country for instance: not only is it stumping up half a billion dollars in Australia this year to further safeguard its two-billion dollar existing investment in telecommunications, but it is also accelerating the removal of redundant offerings in New Zealand.
By moving the Xtra brand – and we mean literally, because the servers are hosted in Australia – Telecom is realising impressive efficiencies for Kiwis. It made no sense to keep Xtra in New Zealand when Yahoo in Australia could look after it for much less money.
It is also inspiring to see that Microsoft didn’t fall into the trap of setting up a truly local version of MSN. Such a move would have been fatuous at best and positively dangerous at worst, as it may have encouraged further such undesirable local developments.
For the Doubting Thomases and Luddites, let us just repeat that word again: synergies.
What benefits do the synergies bring you ask? For the first time in the history of both Xtra and MSN, there is now balanced content on both sites. It has been adjusted to reflect the status and size of the New Zealand market, with superfluous content available to Australians carefully excised. Email, search facilities, advertising and news delivered by Australians will delight Kiwis looking for the best Internet experience there is for them.
Such synergies would have been impossible to achieve had the sites remained in New Zealand.
Is New Zealand doing enough however?
No; while banks and media in New Zealand have long seen the true Southern Cross light, we note with disappointment that your country has not adopted the Australian currency. It has not moved Parliament to Canberra, even though space has been cleared next to the Abos’ Tent Embassy there.
Such folly must not continue, for the future is:
AustraliaNZ!
ENDS
”
- Microsoft joins ACP Media with msn.co.nz
- Lance Wiggs: Yahoo!xtra versus MSN
- Jama blog: Yahoo and Xtra Retardo Mail
- Aboriginal Tent Embassy
- MSN “New Zealand” as hosted by Hostworks, Findon, South Australia
- Yahoo!Xtra, or nz.yahoo.com
Peering zombie awakes
Just to show the world how little actually gets done in New Zealand, the peering issue is back on the radar. Regular readers of Computerworld and the Herald when it had a tech section in the paper will remember how Chris Barton, Paul Brislen and I banging on about the issue since 2003 at least.
That’s when I had a taste of what a broken Internet is like: TelstraClear pulled out of the Auckland Peering Exchange (APE) in an effort to force providers to either buy circuits from them so as to send data into their networks, or have the traffic go via expensive and slower overseas links.
At the time, I was a Paradise Net customer, and a reasonably happy camper too. My DSL was expensive, but it worked well. However, after TelstraClear depeered from ICONZ, I wasn’t able to reach IDG which then owned Computerworld and PC World. That meant I couldn’t work from home, so I had to dump my Paradise connection and pick another ISP that had a connection to ICONZ (it was Xtra, believe it or not).
Nothing’s changed since then though. The New Zealand Internet survived as smaller providers caved and bought expensive national circuits so that their customers could reach the two large telcos’ ones, and that’s where we are at the moment.
ISPANZ is very belatedly trying to breathe life into the peering issue again, a month after IT and Communications Minister David Cunliffe declared that it was on his agenda for this year, after being briefed on the matter at the Foo Camp in Warkworth.
Some of the arguments put forward include TelstraClear and Telecom hauling traffic from the US at a rate of hundreds of megabits rather than picking it up locally, which is obviously inefficient. However, it’s not like the telcos care about that, because they have the fat pipes to punt such traffic volumes. The smaller ISPs don’t, hence why they want a more efficient Internet in NZ.
I’m more in favour of Rod Drury’s suggestion of a new Open Access fibre-optic network being built by the government instead. That is, as Rod sees it, a national investment in infrastructure that will benefit all of us and better yet, routes around the two telcos who won’t ever act in our interest, only in their own, narrow ones.
There’s a far greater chance of Drury’s envisaged network happening than the two telcos relenting and starting to peer, so let’s get digging.
- Rod Drury: Securing our Digital Trade Routes
- ISPANZ, Drury differ on internet peering fix
- Paying the price of peer pressure
- Peering spat disconnects TelstraClear customers from large NZ website
- Citylink Broadband Community: peering
Top Stories
Cicada, cicado
- Media statement from the Greater Oceania Movement
- Peering zombie awakes
Media statement from the Greater Oceania Movement
“Open Letter to Prime Minister Helen Clark
National Synergies Sought
Dear Helen,
Our organisation represents several likeminded people, pushing for change. We are encouraged to note that the artificial Tasman Divide that separates Australia and that other one in the South Pacific that’s a bit like Tasmania but not quite, is shrinking by the day.
An increasing number of synergies are found that remove unnecessary duplication and allow business to focus on what they’re doing best, from Australia.
Take Telecom New Zealand in your country for instance: not only is it stumping up half a billion dollars in Australia this year to further safeguard its two-billion dollar existing investment in telecommunications, but it is also accelerating the removal of redundant offerings in New Zealand.
By moving the Xtra brand – and we mean literally, because the servers are hosted in Australia – Telecom is realising impressive efficiencies for Kiwis. It made no sense to keep Xtra in New Zealand when Yahoo in Australia could look after it for much less money.
It is also inspiring to see that Microsoft didn’t fall into the trap of setting up a truly local version of MSN. Such a move would have been fatuous at best and positively dangerous at worst, as it may have encouraged further such undesirable local developments.
For the Doubting Thomases and Luddites, let us just repeat that word again: synergies.
What benefits do the synergies bring you ask? For the first time in the history of both Xtra and MSN, there is now balanced content on both sites. It has been adjusted to reflect the status and size of the New Zealand market, with superfluous content available to Australians carefully excised. Email, search facilities, advertising and news delivered by Australians will delight Kiwis looking for the best Internet experience there is for them.
Such synergies would have been impossible to achieve had the sites remained in New Zealand.
Is New Zealand doing enough however?
No; while banks and media in New Zealand have long seen the true Southern Cross light, we note with disappointment that your country has not adopted the Australian currency. It has not moved Parliament to Canberra, even though space has been cleared next to the Abos’ Tent Embassy there.
Such folly must not continue, for the future is:
AustraliaNZ!
ENDS
”
- Microsoft joins ACP Media with msn.co.nz
- Lance Wiggs: Yahoo!xtra versus MSN
- Jama blog: Yahoo and Xtra Retardo Mail
- Aboriginal Tent Embassy
- MSN “New Zealand” as hosted by Hostworks, Findon, South Australia
- Yahoo!Xtra, or nz.yahoo.com
Peering zombie awakes
Just to show the world how little actually gets done in New Zealand, the peering issue is back on the radar. Regular readers of Computerworld and the Herald when it had a tech section in the paper will remember how Chris Barton, Paul Brislen and I banging on about the issue since 2003 at least.
That’s when I had a taste of what a broken Internet is like: TelstraClear pulled out of the Auckland Peering Exchange (APE) in an effort to force providers to either buy circuits from them so as to send data into their networks, or have the traffic go via expensive and slower overseas links.
At the time, I was a Paradise Net customer, and a reasonably happy camper too. My DSL was expensive, but it worked well. However, after TelstraClear depeered from ICONZ, I wasn’t able to reach IDG which then owned Computerworld and PC World. That meant I couldn’t work from home, so I had to dump my Paradise connection and pick another ISP that had a connection to ICONZ (it was Xtra, believe it or not).
Nothing’s changed since then though. The New Zealand Internet survived as smaller providers caved and bought expensive national circuits so that their customers could reach the two large telcos’ ones, and that’s where we are at the moment.
ISPANZ is very belatedly trying to breathe life into the peering issue again, a month after IT and Communications Minister David Cunliffe declared that it was on his agenda for this year, after being briefed on the matter at the Foo Camp in Warkworth.
Some of the arguments put forward include TelstraClear and Telecom hauling traffic from the US at a rate of hundreds of megabits rather than picking it up locally, which is obviously inefficient. However, it’s not like the telcos care about that, because they have the fat pipes to punt such traffic volumes. The smaller ISPs don’t, hence why they want a more efficient Internet in NZ.
I’m more in favour of Rod Drury’s suggestion of a new Open Access fibre-optic network being built by the government instead. That is, as Rod sees it, a national investment in infrastructure that will benefit all of us and better yet, routes around the two telcos who won’t ever act in our interest, only in their own, narrow ones.
There’s a far greater chance of Drury’s envisaged network happening than the two telcos relenting and starting to peer, so let’s get digging.
- Rod Drury: Securing our Digital Trade Routes
- ISPANZ, Drury differ on internet peering fix
- Paying the price of peer pressure
- Peering spat disconnects TelstraClear customers from large NZ website
- Citylink Broadband Community: peering
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