Auckland Wifi

Despite the protests of thier more prudish members the Auckland City Council has a great opportunity on it's hands to create & then promote Auckland as the most centre of liberalism in the South Pacific. With a robust communications infrastructure & an open attitude to sexual displays Auckland could become a mecca for tourists.

The strands are there, it just needs a visionary leader to grasp the nettle of religious & ratepayer resistance.


The Auckland Gallery Guide- mapping Aucklands art.

Topless porn bikers get green light
From correspondents in Auckland
August 08, 2006 08:41am

Article from: AAP
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A LUNCHTIME parade of topless porn stars down the main street of New Zealand's biggest city has been given official approval on the grounds that no laws would be broken.

The Boobs on Bikes parade later this month will feature up to 30 porn stars on the back of motorcycles or in cars riding through Auckland's CBD to promote an erotica expo, The New Zealand Herald reported.
The breast-baring drive has been held informally since 2003, but this is the first time permission has been sought and given by the Auckland City Council.

Several city councillors against the parade were surprised to find it had been given a green light without consulting them.

They learned of the approval from a council memo which said it was not against the law to be topless on Queen Street.

Councillor Noelene Raffills said the parade is not acceptable for that time of day in the busy shopping street.

"It is not like a television set you can turn off or a book you can shut," Ms Raffills told the newspaper.

The Auckland Gallery Guide

Intel eyes Kiwi firm for Wimax
06 August 2006

By ROB O'NEILL

Woosh Wireless is in talks with giant chipmaker Intel about building a new broadband network in New Zealand.

The American company has made direct investments in several wireless internet providers around the world, including $A37 million in Sydney-based Unwired in August last year.

Woosh chairman Rod Inglis confirmed last week that discussions were taking place, but would not comment on whether those talks involved a direct investment by Intel.

Simon Curry, Intel's Melbourne-based group manager of communications and media, said the company had been talking to Woosh over a long period. Curry would not comment on whether those discussions included talk of a direct investment by Intel in Woosh.

Woosh is expected to announce a new chief executive any day following the resignation of long-time head Bob Smith, who departs at the end of the month. American wireless industry executive Kevin Wiley joins the company soon as chief operating officer, replacing fellow American Richard Cane who has returned home.

Intel is pushing a new wireless broadband networking standard called Wimax that allows mobile devices to connect to the internet and email while users are on the road. Wimax-capable chips will be included in many laptop computers next year and Intel wants networks to be available for its customers to use.

"We're interested in anything to do with Wimax," Curry said. "We've had discussions about how we can help them. Our interest is as a stakeholder in the success of Wimax. Our discussions are about how we help people to make this market take off."

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Last month, among a spate of developments, Woosh announced it had backing to build a Wimax network.

Inglis said this was an essential piece of the company's evolving strategy to become a "converged" communications company able to deliver fixed and mobile voice services, broadband and content such as internet television (IPTV).

However, the company has already built a broadband network based on a rival technology to Wimax called UMTS TDD. Inglis said there was no conflict in using competing technology.

Many carriers operate two networks and Woosh was continuing to roll out UMTS stations to which Wimax can be added relatively easily, he said.

Woosh has been accumulating spectrum in the 2.3GHz band, most recently through a deal with Sky TV, which could also be part of any future IPTV offering.

Inglis said the company largely has enough bandwidth now to pursue its objectives.

But Woosh's plans face at least one more hurdle, with the Ministry of Economic Development recommending that rights to some of the 2.3 GHz spectrum it holds not be automatically renewed when the arrangements expire in 2010. The ministry says it should not be renewed as it has not been used.

Inglis describes this as an "extraordinary situation". He says the government is being cautious as it wants to be seen as non-discriminatory "but in reality it would be discriminating against us not to renew."

The Auckland Gallery Guide


Vodafone and Telecom pump up mobile broadband

MOBILE BROADBAND technology is making some big leaps ahead this year, and New Zealand is one of the first places in the world to get access to the high-performance upgrades.

GSM provider Vodafone is first. In September the global mobile telecommunications giant is releasing High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), which promises 1.8 or 3.6Mbit/s downloads, depending on the device, and 384kbit/s uploads.

HSDPA is in trials at the moment, and I had a go at it over at Vodafone HQ a while ago. In terms of performance, HSDPA seems to deliver, at least on the lightly loaded test network I got to see. Download speeds hit the 1.8Mbit/s mark and, better yet, the latency that is currently very high on the first generation 3G service (at 220ms or higher) has taken a dramatic cut: against local hosts on the internet, I saw round trip times in the 50-80ms region.

Vodafone will release its full range of devices inSeptember: phones, data cards, wireless routers and laptops with embedded HSDPA circuitry.

By the end of the year, Vodafone says it will release data cards capable of 7.2Mbit/s downloads, and in 2007 Nokia intends to roll out the High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSDPA) upgrade. This is part of the full High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) standard and provides peak rates of 5.8Mbit/s, although Nokia estimates the throughput to be only around 1 Mbit/s in practice.

Depending on pricing and data caps, Vodafone's 3G upgrade could be a viable alternative to fixed broadband, especially if it comes with a converged mobile/local calling service so you don't have to pay for a landline as well.

Where does this leave Telecom? The incumbent's Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) digital cellular technology actually makes more efficient use of expensive and hard to obtain licensed frequency spectrum thanthe Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) encoding used by European GSM networks, including Vodafone. CDMA provides higher data rates and lets more customers access the network at the same time.

Telecom's response to HSDPA is EV-DO Rev A, and the incumbent has signed a $16 million deal with Lucent to upgrade its current Rev 0 service to the newer standard. On paper, Rev A looks good: downloads are up to 3.6Mbit/s from 2.4Mbit/s and uploads go at 1.8Mbit/s instead of 144kbit/s - faster than Telecom's DSL. Overseas tests show that latency has been sliced to 50-80ms, comparable to HSDPA. Rev A will also have features missing in the current specification, including video calling.

Furthermore, the CDMA coalition and chip maker Qualcomm announced Revision B of EV-DO last year, which can increase the per-subscriber bandwidth to a staggering 73.5Mbit/s down and 27Mbit/s up, by dynamically allocatingradio frequency blocks. Revision C is in the works too, with the goal of 200Mbit/s speeds courtesy of dynamic channel bandwidth aggregation, so that devices can use between 1.25MHz and 20MHz, and advanced multiple aerial and encoding technologies like MIMO and OFDM.

Those are impressive specifications, but will EV-DO survive the onslaught of the GSMjuggernaut? That's looking less and less certain: Telecom won't have Rev A until the end of the year, and has to compete with existing Rev 0 devices until then.

The incumbent doesn't have Vodafone's market clout and depends on devices its US partner Sprint selects. These may or may not be right for the NZ market.

Adding to Telecom's woes, CDMA roaming is pretty rare, and EV-DO support overseas is even scarcer.

That's Telecom's quandary in a nutshell. Like Betamax succumbing to VHS, EV-DO may provide some compelling features for the operator and impressive performance figures, but GSM's HSDPA is good enough, more widespread and has loads of glitzy devices.


Nuthin' but a G thang
lf you're looking to replace your landline broadband, note that Telecom and Vodafone's coming upgrades (maximum download speeds s listed below) will soon equal the 3.5Mbits/s offered by the average JetStream DSL plan today


Vodafone 3G Now: 384Kbits/sTelecom T3G now: 2Mbits/s
Vodafone 3G from September with HSPDA upgrade: 3.6-7.2Mbits/sWith coming EV-DO Rev A upgrade: 3.6Mbits/s
Vodafone 3G with full HSPA upgrade during 2007: 10.1Mbits/sWith coming EV-DO Rev B upgrade: 73.5Mbits/s

The Auckland Gallery Guide

http://www.fivo.co.nz/fivolocations.html

I've stumbled across what appears to be a new WiFi provider - mainly in hotels. Looking at the location list it looks suspiciously like what used to be Reach Wireless.

The Auckland Gallery Guide

Find Starbucks Ponsonby here : great service, great location & Wifi.


Will VoIP Join the Telco Counterrevolution?



oice over IP is clearly a revolutionary technology. It has the power to topple traditional technical, business, and regulatory models. Having the power and using it, though, are two different things. VoIP could just as easily become a tool of entrenched telcos, part of the status quo they're trying to protect rather than the competitive turmoil they're trying to prevent.
Which way it will go remains an open question. But the front line in this epic struggle between the established and the disruptive for control of a rapidly evolving technology will be efforts by telcos and other well-funded VoIP providers to block competitors' VoIP on their networks. It's a technically tricky and politically delicate task rife with contradiction.
VoIP blocking actually has a long and colorful history in much of the world. The blocking can be as blatant as closing a router port, or as subtle as forgetting to follow up on certain kinds of incident reports. It can be regulatory or technical, though regulatory blocking usually requires technical enforcement. Either way, it has long been a weapon by which established telecom companies tried to cripple VoIP's potential to bring revolutionary change to their markets.
The U.S. is just beginning to thrash out how VoIP blocking might work and what impact it might have. Such questions are at the heart of the current network neutrality debate. But so far, most of the debate has been speculation about what might happen. For real-life examples, the debaters might want to look overseas. That's where VoIP has done most to undermine old regimes, and VoIP blocking has done most to protect them — even when the old regimes are themselves VoIP operators.
The international VoIP insurrection dates back more than a decade. It has targeted telecom carriers hiding behind regulatory barriers that let them keep prices for international calls at levels akin to extortion.
But international VoIP is just the latest of several methods aimed at undercutting those prices. All of the methods played off the peculiarities and inconsistencies of the global telecom pricing system dating back more than a century. That system established officially negotiated per-minute prices, called settlement rates, for all calls between pairs of countries.
The carrier that originated a call in one country paid the carrier that terminated it in the other exactly half of the settlement rate, and kept the rest for itself. (In the postal system, by contrast, the originating carrier keeps all of the revenue, in the form of postage, for itself.)
When traffic was the same in both directions, the carriers owed each other nothing. But when traffic in one direction was significantly higher, the carrier originating most of the calls paid a lot of money to the one terminating them.
It was a great deal for termination-heavy countries. Often they were developing economies with a lot of citizens earning relatively high incomes overseas. And because the carriers were generally state-owned or -controlled, much of that money typically went straight into government coffers.
It was good incentive for them to keep settlement rates high. But it was less than great for the originating countries. After all, it amounted to one country paying serious sums to another for a product that both were jointly using.
It could also be bad for the originating carriers. As deregulation spread to their markets, competition often forced them to lower their international rates. That meant their take was not 50 percent of the official settlement rate, but a fraction of it, though they still had to pay the full 50 percent to the terminating carrier.
The system was also obviously bad for callers. Even if their own carrier had cut prices, they still had to pay more than half of the settlement rate, which often meant several dollars per minute. It all left a lot of people and telecom companies with an interest in getting around the official system if they could.
One of the earliest methods, dating back decades, of attacking protected pricing was callback. A person in a high-cost country could call a number in a low-cost country, where a machine would immediately call the person back at the lower rates. It would also dial the local number the caller was trying to reach, setting up what was essentially a two-hop call.
But as more markets began to deregulate, several ways emerged to bypass those carriers entirely. The most straightforward was direct interconnect, which involved setting up a high-capacity line into the country, and delivering calls through a gateway for termination by the local phone company. But that only worked where there was at least some degree of deregulation.
A sneakier approach was refiling. That meant routing a call to an expensive country through a carrier in a cheaper third country, which removed all identifying information so that the call looked like it originated there. Often the sum of the calls from say, the U.S. to South Africa and South Africa to Angola is less than the cost of a call from the U.S. to Angola, according to Patrick Christian, senior research analyst at TeleGeography.
International VoIP, the third bypass method, required nothing more than having a gateway in the country that connected to a fat IP pipe on one side and the local phone network on the other. The pipe could be either the Internet or a dedicated IP link.
Interconnect and refiling were good examples of conventional technologies used to drive the development of new business models. But international VoIP, with its decidedly non-conventional technology, had particular advantages. First, because authorities had trouble understanding its implications, in many countries it lived in what TeleGeography calls the "gray area" of international telecom regulation, neither clearly legal nor clearly illegal.
It could also be difficult to detect, especially in countries that had a lot of IP circuits run by different ISPs going in and out. According to Christian, some overseas telcos went so far as to have agents in the U.S. place calls via international VoIP providers, to see if they could trace the calls as they came into their countries. They found it nearly impossible.
Either way, international VoIP was a big success. Traffic volumes grew at triple-digit rates between 1997 and 2001, according to TeleGeography. It was almost a case study in how a new technology and business model can demolish the old. But international VoIP growth fell significantly after its initial spurt, Christian says — mainly because of its success. By offering a way around the conventional carriers in protected markets, it forced the carriers to lower their prices to compete.
Ironically, when they did, they often found their call volumes skyrocketing. Many of them, deciding to join rather than fight, also began openly terminating incoming VoIP traffic, according to Christian. In short, the new competition forced conventional carriers to learn new ways to hang onto their business. And the growth rate for international VoIP dropped to 26 percent in 2003.
Still, In-Stat principal analyst Keith Nissen notes that international VoIP, up to and including the free type running over the Internet, has brought a fundamental shift in caller thinking. "It's generating a different kind of calling behavior," he says. "At three to five dollars a minute, you're only going to make a two-minute phone call. With Skype, you're going to talk for two hours."
And the revolution continues to spread. Even now, developing and/or still-regulated countries in places like Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America remain hot markets for VoIP bypass, according to TeleGeography.
Overall growth is picking up again, too. In 2004 and 2005, international VoIP's growth rate crept back towards 40 percent, three times higher than that of switched telephone traffic, according to TeleGeography. And last year, VoIP accounted for more than 16 percent of all international phone traffic last year, the research firm estimated.
One thing about international VoIP traffic is decidedly non-revolutionary: most of the calls still originate and terminate on the PSTN. While this might on the surface make the entire business seem like little more than running voice traffic over an IP backbone, the mere fact that it's IP makes a significant difference when trying to get traffic into and out of countries.
Many of the carriers that drove the early growth were wholesalers such as iBasis and the former ITXC (now a part of Indian national carrier VSNL) doing cheap international call completion. Others were retailers offering cheap overseas calling rates via prepaid cards. And many were combinations of the two types.
Recently, however, dedicated IP telephony providers like Vonage and Lingo, as well as the cable MSOs, have begun to account for increasing amounts of traffic (often through the wholesalers). That fact may account for the growth uptick over the last couple of years. It certainly makes for more imaginative — and telco-threatening — services.
But despite VoIP's success in opening up many international markets, VoIP blocking has been successful in keeping others closed. Many Middle Eastern countries still have a single government-owned or -controlled carrier, and have managed to keep international VoIP traffic to near nothing. They can do so partly because they control their entire domestic networks, and partly because VoIP-detecting technology has improved.
But the most striking example of VoIP blocking is in China, which is itself also a VoIP pioneer. After receiving a license to offer VoIP services in 1999, China Telecom was by 2004 delivering 60 percent of its international traffic, and much of its domestic long-distance calling, as VoIP, according to TeleGeography.
Chinese carriers do terminate international VoIP traffic from major wholesalers, Christian says. But China is also serious about restricting VoIP traffic that doesn't work to its advantage for one reason or another. Last November, for example, an unnamed Tier 1 Chinese telco bought Verso Technologies software for blocking Skype and other peer-to-peer VoIP communications.
And in April, Shanghai Telecom ordered an IP traffic monitoring system from Narus that will let it block "rogue" VoIP traffic on its network. In short, at least two top Chinese carriers were unabashedly determined to use VoIP blocking to prevent competition to their own VoIP services from running over their networks.
A leading South Korean ISP, Dacom, has similarly threatened a number of times, including in late June, to block "illegal" VoIP services, though it has each time backed down. U.S. service personnel stationed in the country were big users of the services in question.
Such attitudes would never fly in the U.S., where the FCC has made clear that it won't tolerate any deliberate VoIP blocking by network operators. But what actually happens may depend on what your definition of the word "block" is. If it means "inadvertently" making it hard for someone else's VoIP traffic to get through with good voice quality, or even failing to make it easy, it will be hard to stop.
The big question, says In-Stat's Nissen, will ultimately be whether the network operator or the provider of the service running over it is responsible for figuring out why the service is performing poorly. In a way, though, it doesn't matter. As long as it is performing poorly, it opens the opportunity for the network operator to offer its own VoIP service, with quality guaranteed to be high, but revolutionary potential likely to be low.
And that may be as effective a way to protect big-carrier VoIP services — and thus traditional telco models — as any deliberate blocking in China. More effective, in fact, because there'll be no way to argue whether it's justified — or even that it's happening.
It's something to keep in mind as the era of video-over-broadband, with all the bandwidth and quality issues that implies, comes into being.
For more on VoIP regulatory issues, see our news section .
To find out more about VoIP Phone Systems see our Phone System Resource Center .