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.

Saw the movie ‘The Island’ tonight starting Ewan McGregor and Scarlet Johannsen. I’d read some good reviews of it previously and I was not dissapointed, while much of the action and chase scenes was completely unbelievable it was of such high quality and originality that you couldn’t help enjoy it. The story and acting was also reasonably strong. Sean Bean also put in a good performance as the (evil?) director of the facility. Overall I’d give it a 9/10 and highly recommend seeing it.

Seeing as everyone else online was talking about it I found a Nasa TV feed and watched the final 10 minutes of Discovery’s approach and landing. Starts out a big white blob from an infrared camera and finally morhps into a more distinguishable shuttle shape as it lands. Despite having a 256/128k DSL connection I could only get a steady stream that didn’t buffer every 5 seconds if I see my average/maximum bandwidth in the Real Player preferences down to 56/128k.

Well it’s been a productive weekend. Not only did I get Planet WLUG up and running but I also managed to get my personal blog (Matt’s Musings) setup and running at http://www.mattb.net.nz/blog/. Along the way I also redesigned the theme that I use for my personal site.

I’ve been meaning to setup a blog for a while now, but never really got around to it. I had a blog during my 420 project last year and I found it really useful to be able to look back and see what I was working on a month or two ago. I certainly don’t intend to post daily diary entries here but hopefully I’ll keep a record of some of the more interesting things I’ve been doing. I guess we’ll see how things evolve as they go along.