It’s been a while since I last acquired new gadgets but I think I’ve made up for lost time with my last weeks purchases.

You may remember that I’ve had my eye on the Openmoko phones since early 2007, but in between shifting across the world and starting a new job I never got around to purchasing one of the first versions. The second version, the “Freerunner”, was released in June this year and I placed an order with Pulster, a local distributor, shortly after. The phones have been in hot demand, so I only received my phone last week, a wait of of almost 2 months, and it turned up missing one of the cables that was meant to come with it. Still some distribution kinks to be worked out.

Distribution kinks are the least of Openmoko’s worries at the moment though. As advertised, the phone is definitely not ready for primetime distribution yet. I’ve tried three different software images on it: the original “stable” 2007.2 image, the current “devel” 2008.8 image and the latest completely rebuilt SHR release which is the most promising yet. With the SHR image I’ve been able to send and receive calls and text messages, although the interface is somewhat arcane. I’m most interested in the GPS which looks to be working reasonably well at this stage.

After almost a week with the phone I’m glad I purchased it, and I’m having fun hacking on it, but there is a huge way to go before I’ll be able to use it as my primary phone. So that’s gadget #1.

The second gadget is a new Digital SLR camera. I’ve been thinking about getting back into photography for a while (I last took photos seriously in high school) and when I saw how affordable digital SLRs had become I couldn’t resist. There isn’t much between Canon and Nikon when comparing mid-range SLRs these days, so after about a week of deliberation I decided on the Canon 450D, primarily because most of my workmates also have Canon SLRs!

I only got the camera on Friday, and spent half the weekend playing with the GPS on the phone (I want to set them up so I can geo tag all my photos), so I haven’t had quite as much time to play with it yet. I expect to spend plenty of quality time with it on our holiday in Malta next week. First impressions are favourable, although I’m fast discovering camera viewfinders were not really designed for people who wear glasses. I may have to consider wearing contacts again.

Once we get back from Malta I’d like to find a local (or online) photography club with some good weekly assignments to fire my creativity and motivate me to get the most out of my new toy.

In just a few hours, I’m hopping on Emirates flight EK433 from Auckland to Singpore, to start the first leg of my trip to Dublin. I’ll be travelling for pretty much the next month, so if you’re trying to get hold of me please don’t be offended if I take several days to reply.

Kat and I have setup another blog to detail our travels, and I’ll try and keep this blog free of too much personal stuff so as to not clutter the various planets that it is syndicated to. If you’re interested in our travels and what we are up to then head over to http://www.mattandkatbrown.com.

There is also a calendar at mattandkatbrown.com if you’re wanting to try and meet up with me for keysigning, etc.

Is thunderbird smarter than it thinks?

Click image to enlarge.

Wow!

It’s out. The government has finally gained the courage to force Telecom to unbundle the local loop. Possibly the most interesting part of the whole announcement is the circumstances of it. Cabinet signed off on it this morning, by midday it had been leaked to Telecom and the Government was forced to scramble to announce it to everyone to avoid regulatory problems from the Sharemarket. No doubt whoever leaked it is feeling very very worried about their job security right now! The Cabinet briefing paper and minutes that accompanied the original press release are a bad quality scan and have obviously been prepared very quickly with hand written corrections to the page
numbers in the latter half of the document. The document has now been removed from the website, which I guess means that it is being touched up. Email me if you want a copy.

[Update 1am: It's now back, but has had information redacted presumably because it is meant to be commercially sensitive!]

If you want the hard facts the following are good sources:

• David Farrar’s Analysis
• The Government Press Release and Summary

So, is this a good a thing?

I think it is in the long term, but the best part of today’s announcement is what goes alongside the LLU decision, not the LLU itself. More on that in a minute. The Cabinet paper (60 pages) appears to be a very thorough summary of the detailed analysis that has obviously been performed over the previous months. What I think is a fairly reasonable argument is made for why the action is needed and why the chosen course of action is the best option. I’m very impressed with David Cunliffe’s handling of the portfolio and I hope that he continues to work to the high standard that he’s set himself in the few short months since the election. He’s certainly going to face some opposition now!

One thing to keep in mind in reading the paper and analysing the information available is that the Government’s hand was forced and there is probably a lot of implementation detail that they would have planned to release with the offical announcement on the 18th. So theres not much point in nit-picking details at this stage.

The meat of the announcement is that the Government has chosen a two-stage approach to increase the regulation in the sector. The two stages are basically short and long term actions designed to be complementary. The long term action is the LLU itself and promotion of investment in alternative infrastructure. Because this will not be completed and ready to use in any shape or form until 2008 at the earliest there are also a series of measures to beef up the current wholesale offerings to tide us over and improve the market in the interim.

What we get in the short-term:

• UBS without the 128k upstream limitation
• UBS that can support real-time services (VoIP, Games, etc)
• Naked DSL - no Telecom phone service required

With prices and access terms for all these services to be set by the Commerce Commision, which is directed to ensure that the pricing is applied to protect investment incentives.

There are a few juicy paragraphs that suggest the Government has considered opposition and is ready for it, such as 113 that warns that is Telecom does not invest quickly enough then full structural separation will be considered. However there are also suggestions (para 113) that Telecom is going to be thrown a bone in the form of a recalculated TSO that will provide higher levels of compensation to support the necessary network upgrades in rural areas.

Rodney Hide and no doubt other right-wing groups are already bleating about the “stolen” property rights. But as I see it thats not the case. Telecom still owns the local loop. ISPs do not get to use the copper for free! They must pay Telecom a market rent. LLU is about regulating that price and forcing Telecom to offer the service where there is no incentive for Telecom to do otherwise given their vertically integrated monopoly.

Secondly, Telecom was given a chance to avoid this scenario with the 2003 decision not to unbundle. At that point Telecom and its shareholders were warned that if they didn’t invest appropriately and provide a competitive wholesale market the situation would be reviewed. These warnings increased in frequency over the past year. Telecom cannot say that they were not warned. They may have massively misjudged the government, but they were warned. The simple fact is that over the last three years Telecom has played games and stalled as much as possible. In many ways I feel they are the authors of their own misfortune.

Overall, I’m very happy and excited. Its a great time to be involved in the Internet industry in New Zealand. The government has churned out an excellent paper that shows that they have carefully analysed the issues and decide on a course of action that I think has an excellent chance of improving the state of broadband in New Zealand. LLU is not viewed as a magic bullet, other measures have been put in place to ease its introduction and investment incentives to build the next generation of access infrastructure are mentioned and regarded as important. The big risk to watch is how the Government goes with the implementation. It is a hugely complex peice of policy to implement, with lots of potential for mistake and they are fighting against a well resourced company with lots to loose.

No doubt this will not be my last post on the issue.

[Update 8/5/2006: Fixed typo 128k vs 512k, thanks for spotting Juha]

I think I finally have broadband Internet at home that I’m reasonably satisified with!

This afternoon, thanks to the excellent team at WorldXChange my DSL line was upgraded to 2M/512k. Despite the fact that we always want more than we can have I think this combination will actually be very useful and worthwhile for me. 2Mbps is more than adequate for the amount of downloading I do and increasing the upstream to 512k means that I can have an outgoing file transfer running without my SSH sessions locking up every few seconds. There is still a 10G international traffic cap, but I don’t do more than about 6-7GB of International traffic a month so that doesn’t bother me, and I’m really pleased that WorldXChange offer free national traffic.

There is no question that the threat of regulation has done wonders for the state of broadband in New Zealand over the last 18 months. It’s still a pretty tough market for the ISPs and Telecom’s wholesale bitstream product (UBS) is nowhere near the equivalent to unbundling that they promised it would be, however for the average consumer things are certainly a lot better they were. Which is good, because I think whatever the Government decides to do in June (assuming its not nothing) is going to set the Industry back a fair bit as everybody readjusts to the new landscape and works out where they fit. Having a semi-decent set of plans to tide us through that period is going to be great.

If you’re looking for a DSL provider I highly recommend that you use WorldXChange. I’ve not yet found an aspect of their product or service that is below par. They answer the phone on the first ring, the customer service reps are friendly, helpful and always know what they’re doing and best of all they give you free national internet traffic! So don’t delay, swap today to WorldXChange and put mkbrown down as your reference so that I get some credits on my account.

I made it back to Auckland from NZNOG this evening. We drove to Wellington and back to save on airfares seeing as there were four of us attending. The drive didn’t seem quite as long as I thought it would. It took about 7 hours from Hamilton to Wellington and vice versa, although the roadworks every 5 kilometres from Cambridge to Bulls were getting very tedious.

Without a doubt the most interesting part of the drive was seeing some activity around the vicinity of Palmerston North where there were trenchers and tractors and some big loops of blue fibre lying on the ground. Very nice to know that progress if finally being made!

The remainder of the conference was also very positive. During the conference dinner on Thursday night we talked to many people about the idea of setting up a NZ routeviews project. There seems to be lots of enthusiasm for it, so hopefully we’ll be able to get something underway promptly.

I also did a very short lightening talk on dhcparpd. The software that we used to spoof ARP replies based on the DHCP lease database at LCA. Its a very nifty little utility and we’re hoping some more people will find some use for it. I’ve written up a page with some information which you can find in the WAND research software repository.

NZNOG’06 is currently on at Victoria University in Wellington and we’ve been down here since late Tuesday.

Wellington must have the most dismal and disgusting weather in New Zealand. Since we arrived, I don’t think we’ve seen the sun at all, and its been raining almost continuously. Gray, dark and dismal.

The conference started yesterday with the tutorial day. Dean Pemberton and Joe Abley’s tutorial - “IPv6 Deployment - Theory and Practice” was well attended and very useful. They started off with a brief refresher on the basics of IPv6 before starting to deal with some of the issues that are preventing more widespread adoption and finishing with a great audience discussion about why we even need IPv6 at all.

The two key points that I got out of it were:

• We don’t have any real pressing driver for IPv6 deployment at the moment, other than we all want it as geeks. The only real justification that anyone could come up with for a NZ organisation to deploy IPv6 is future proofing - that is gaining experience so that once we actually find a reason to use it we already know how.
• Many people see the lack of ability to multi-home as a significant problem preventing IPv6 deployment by organisations. Its not a problem for carriers, they can multihome just as they do not, it’s a problem for organisations like universities that don’t resell connections, but have a desire for multihoming. The point that Joe made was that there is no technical reason why you can’t multihome with IPv6. The lack of ability to multihome as an end-site is based no policy, and that policy was designed and implemented by the proponents of IPv6. Once the carriers and others who are still happy on v4 start to migrate to v6 its entirely possible that we’ll see some of these policies loosened as people ignore the policy and start multihoming anyway.

The conference network has been handing out v6 addresses with native connectivity provided by TCL. Kinda nifty, but again, I’ve got an IPv6 address to play with, I can look at the dancing turtle, now what…
The rest of the program is looking interesting as well, lots of talks on peering this morning and an intruiging talk by Bill Woodcock from PCH about building global content distribution networks (basically anycast for TCP).

There has been a lot of rhetoric lately about broadband in New Zealand, from the Prime Ministers statements in the opening speech to Parliament, through to the Campbell Live edition dedicated to the state of NZ broadband. It’s encouraging that the poor state of broadband in NZ has become a high profile issue.

It’s also encouraging to see that ISPs such as iHug actually have a reasonable strategy to present to the Government about how things should work.

I think its becoming clear that Telecom’s arrogance has met its end and there are some fairly serious changes on the horizon. I’m hearing a lot of people saying that it’s no longer a question fo whether the Government will proceed with LLU, but whether they will force a structural split of Telecom in addition to LLU.

Personally, I’m not going to be making any predictions in public yet, the Government has talked tough and not followed through before, but the signs are definitely looking positive for hearing some good news later in the year.

I stumbled across a Journal call First Monday in my trawls through the web today. It is an online peer reviewed journal focussing on "Internet Topics". It contains lots of F/OSS articles and analysis by lots of interesting luminaries such as Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond and Benjamin Mako Hill.

I’ve only had time to browse through a few of the articles in the latest edition, but the quality of writing seems to be high and the points of view are interesting and thought provoking.

A recommended read:

First Monday - Peer Reviewed Journal on the Internet

A good paper from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, covers Open Source in the bigger picture of things.

Get it from the link below.

Roadmap for Open Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Ecosystems.