Australia's World Largest Ever National Broadband Network

By MERAIAH FOLEY - The New York Time

SYDNEY — The Australian government said on Tuesday that it would create a publicly owned company to build a national high-speed broadband network worth 43 billion Australian dollars, or $31 billion, in one of the largest state-sponsored Internet infrastructure upgrades in the world.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said the eight-year project would create up to 37,000 jobs at the peak of construction, giving a lift to the economy as retail spending slumps and mining companies cut workers amid weakening demand for Australian metals.

The plan is “the most ambitious, far-reaching and long-term nation-building infrastructure project ever undertaken by an Australian government,” Mr. Rudd told reporters.

The government’s announcement was a surprise rebuff to five private telecommunications firms, including Optus of Singapore and Axia NetMedia of Canada, which had been bidding to build a slower, less expensive network, with fiber optic cables reaching as far as local nodes, worth around 10 billion Australian dollars.

But Mr. Rudd scrapped those proposals in favor of a superior but more expensive network that would deliver broadband speeds of up to 100 megabits a second — fast enough to download multiple movies simultaneously — to 90 percent of Australian buildings through fiber optic cables connected directly to the buildings . The remaining 10 percent will receive upgraded wireless access.

Analysts said the government-sponsored project would be the most ambitious fiber-to-the-premises network to have been undertaken by any nation and would be watched carefully by other governments considering Internet infrastructure spending as a way to stimulate growth as the global economic crisis continues.

Britain, Canada, Finland, Germany, Portugal, Spain and the United States have all included measures to expand broadband access and to bolster connection speeds in their planned stimulus packages.

“Compared to what has been done elsewhere, this is quite a unique situation,” said Laurent Horrut, a telecommunications analyst at J. P. Morgan.

Most developed countries have relied heavily on private sector spending to upgrade their Internet networks, and those that have pledged public money have come “nowhere close” to the level of spending announced by Australia, he said.

“This will set Australia up as potentially one of the international leaders here,” Paul Budde, an independent telecommunications analyst, said in a statement posted on his blog. “This government understands the trans-sector approach that is needed to stimulate the digital economy.”

The government would make an initial investment of 4.7 billion Australian dollars in the enterprise, in which taxpayers would hold a 51 percent share.

The remaining costs would be financed by investment from private companies and the sale of infrastructure bonds. Once the network was fully operational, Mr. Rudd said, the government would sell down its interest within five years.

Mr. Rudd’s conservative opponent, Malcolm Turnbull, and some analysts criticized the plan, saying the cost of the project would most likely be passed to consumers in the form of higher Internet fees. They also questioned whether consumers would embrace a fixed-line, fiber-to-the-premises network over increasingly popular wireless services.

Even those who agree that the proposal is both sensible and achievable said setting the right price for companies to access the network would be “a major challenge.”

“A low price will discourage private investors, but a high price will discourage consumer uptake and service innovation,” David Kennedy, research director at global advisory and consulting firm Ovum, said in an e-mail statement.

While most analysts agree that investing in communications technology makes economies more competitive, some are skeptical about whether long-term spending on communications infrastructure will provide the short-term stimulus needed to pull countries out of recession.

The plan fulfills a 2007 election promise Mr. Rudd made to overhaul the country’s sprawling, antiquated Internet infrastructure. But the government is also holding the project up as a job-creating form of fiscal stimulus in a time when the private sector is shedding jobs faster than was expected.

On Tuesday, the Reserve Bank of Australia cut its benchmark cash rate by 0.25 percentage point to 3 percent, its lowest level since March 1960, amid signs the once-booming economy is continuing to deteriorate. The bank has so far slashed 4.25 percentage points from the cash rate since September in a bid to stop the country from slipping into its first recession in nearly two decades.

According to government figures released last week, retail sales fell 2 percent in February, the biggest one-month drop since the introduction of a 10 percent goods and services tax in July 2000.

Unemployment data has also gone from bad to worse. Australia and New Zealand Banking said Monday that job advertisements in newspapers and on the Internet had dropped 8.5 percent from February to March and 44.6 percent from the year before. It warned that unemployment could exceed 8 percent by next year.

QWERTY Keyboard will replace Numeric on New Cell Phones

• By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer

LAS VEGAS.

Goodbye, numeric cell phone keypads. You're going the way of the rotary dial. Touch screens and QWERTY keyboards will take over from here, thank you.

At North America's largest cell phone trade show, running this week in Las Vegas, there were few new phones for the U.S. market that had a numerical keypad instead of an alphabetic keyboard. Touch screens also were out in force.

These changes are a recognition of the popularity of text messaging and wireless Internet use. Industry organization CTIA Wireless, which hosts the show, said U.S. subscribers sent 1 trillion text messages last year, three times the 2007 volume. Meanwhile, the same people used 2.2 trillion minutes of voice calls, an increase of less than 5 percent.

This shift in how people use their mobile devices has overturned cell phone design. According to NPD Group, 31 percent of phones sold in U.S. stores in the fourth quarter of 2008 had full-alphabet keyboards, up from 5 percent two years earlier.

AT&T Inc., the second-largest wireless carrier after Verizon Wireless, introduced six phones this week, all of which had either a touch screen, a typewriter-style keyboard, or both. At the booth of Samsung Electronics Co., the largest seller of phones in the U.S., there were no new keypad phones.

Motorola Inc., the largest domestic maker of phones, was showing off one low-end handset with a keypad. It went on sale through AT&T two weeks ago. But Motorola's big news was a model called the Evoke, which has a touch screen. It's designed for the U.S. market, though it doesn't have a carrier distribution agreement yet.

LG Electronics Inc. displayed a new handset, the GD900, that seemed to both emphasize a numeric keypad and make it vanish. A pad slides out from the GD900's body, but it's made of transparent plastic, so you can see right through it. You don't need to use keypad at all, since the screen is touch-sensitive. Other new LG phones were also dominated by touch screens.

Even at the low end of the market, keyboards for text messaging are becoming common and affordable. AT&T expects to sell two of the keyboard-equipped phones it introduced, the Samsung Magnet and LG Neon, for about $20 to $30.

Old-fashioned numeric keypads still will have a prominent place — but largely overseas. In a twist of market dynamics, the demand for QWERTY phones is mainly a North American phenomenon, said Ross Rubin, an analyst at NPD.

Although touch screens are gaining in popularity all over the world, people in other countries got into text messaging much earlier and "became acclimated to texting with a keypad," Rubin said. Meanwhile, the U.S. market has been influenced by high-end smart phones like the Treo and the BlackBerry that pioneered small versions of typewriter-style keyboards.

As a result, numeric keypads were still dominant at the CTIA booth of Nokia Corp., the world's largest maker of cell phones, which has a relatively minor presence in the U.S. The same was the case at the booth of Japanese-Swedish manufacturer Sony Ericsson.

Other notable wireless devices at the show (prices are with two-year contracts):

• The Samsung Impression is the first phone on the U.S. market with a screen that uses organic light-emitting diodes rather than liquid crystals. Since OLEDs emit their own light, rather than filtering a fluorescent backlight like LCDs, they can save on battery life and provide better image quality. The Impression has a 3.2-inch touch screen capable of showing very saturated colors and dark blacks, and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. AT&T will sell the phone for $200 starting Tuesday. OLEDs have shown up before in camera displays, and Sony sells a small, expensive OLED TV.

• AT&T will sell the Nokia E71x, which is billed as the thinnest smart phone in the country, less than half an inch thick. The layout is similar to that of a BlackBerry or BlackJack, and includes a keyboard. Nokia has had a hard time penetrating the U.S. smart phone market, and previous, similar Nokia models sold by AT&T haven't made much of dent on the dominant market share of Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry. Despite being so thin, the E71x has a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus. The phone will cost $100. AT&T has no firm launch date.

• Sprint Nextel Corp. trotted out the Samsung Instinct s30, a follow-up to the first Instinct, which it introduced last year as a touch-screen competitor to the iPhone. The s30 has a thinner, more rounded body and includes a more fully featured Web browser. The s30 will be available April 19 for $130.

• Samsung is making a Web tablet for Clearwire Corp.'s wireless broadband network, which uses a technology known as WiMax. There are laptops and modems for the network, which is live in Portland, Ore., and Baltimore, but there hasn't been a standalone portable device for Clearwire since Nokia discontinued its WiMax tablet in January. Samsung's Mondi will go on sale in the next three months. No price was announced. It doesn't work as a phone, but it could run teleconferencing applications like Skype. The underlying software is Windows Mobile. Naturally, the Mondi has a keyboard and a touch screen, with a 4.3-inch diagonal.

Get Ready for Next Stage of PC Revolution: Ultra Thin & Very Cheap

AT&T announced on Tuesday that customers in Atlanta could get a type of compact PC called a netbook for just $50 if they signed up for an Internet service plan — an offer the phone company may introduce elsewhere after a test period. This year, at least one wireless phone company in the United States will probably offer netbooks free with paid data plans, copying similar programs in Japan, according to industry experts.

But this revolution is not just about falling prices. Personal computers — and the companies that make their crucial components — are about to go through their biggest upheaval since the rise of the laptop. By the end of the year, consumers are likely to see laptops the size of thin paperback books that can run all day on a single charge and are equipped with touch screens or slide-out keyboards.

The industry is buzzing this week about these devices at a telecommunications conference in Las Vegas, and consumers will see the first machines on shelves as early as June, probably from the netbook pioneers Acer and Asustek.

“The era of a perfect Internet computer for $99 is coming this year,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, a maker of PC graphics chips that is trying to adapt to the new technological order. “The primary computer that we know of today is the basic PC, and it’s dying to be reinvented.”

An unexpected group of companies has emerged to help drive this transformation — firms like Qualcomm, Freescale Semiconductor and Samsung Electronics, which make cheap, power-saving chips used in cellphones and are now applying that expertise to PCs.

As in any revolution, the current rulers of the kingdom — Intel and Microsoft, which make the chips and software that run most PCs — face an unprecedented challenge to their dominance. Microsoft is particularly vulnerable, since many of the new netbooks use Linux software instead of Windows.

“A broad shift in the consumer market toward low-cost PCs would clearly put pressure on the revenues of nearly every player in the value chain, from component suppliers to retailers,” wrote A. M. Sacconaghi, a securities analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, in a report last month. “However, we believe the impact would be especially negative for Intel and Microsoft, who today enjoy near monopoly positions in their respective markets.”

So far, netbooks have appealed to a relatively small audience. Some of the devices feel more like toys or overgrown phones than full-featured computers. Still, they are the big success story in the PC industry, with sales predicted to double this year, even as overall PC sales fall 12 percent, according to the research firm Gartner. By the end of 2009, netbooks could account for close to 10 percent of the PC market, an astonishing rise in a short span.

Netbooks have trouble running demanding software like games and photo-editing programs. They cater instead to people who spend most of their time dealing with online services and want a cheap, light device they can use on the go. Most of the netbooks sold today run on an Intel chip called Atom, which is a lower-cost, lower-power version of the company’s standard laptop chips. And about 80 percent of netbooks run Windows XP, the older version of Microsoft’s flagship software.

The new breed of netbooks, built on cellphone innards, threatens to disrupt that oligopoly.

Based on an architecture called ARM, from ARM Holdings in Britain, cellphone chips consume far less power than Atom chips, and they combine many functions onto a single piece of silicon. At around $20, they cost computer makers less than an Atom chip with its associated components.

But the ARM chips come with a severe trade-off — they cannot run the major versions of Windows or its popular complementary software.

Netbook makers have turned to Linux, an open-source operating system that costs $3 instead of the $25 that Microsoft typically charges for Windows XP. They are also exploring the possibility of using the Android operating system from Google, originally designed for cellphones. (Companies like Acer, Dell and Hewlett-Packard already sell some Atom-based netbooks with Linux.)

The cellphone-chip makers argue that the ARM-Linux combination is just fine for a computer meant to handle e-mail, Facebook, streaming video from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and Web-based documents.

Freescale, for example, gave free netbooks to a group of 14- to 20-year-olds and watched what happened. “They would use it for Internet access when eating breakfast or on the couch, or bring it to class for taking notes,” said Glen Burchers, the director of consumer products marketing at Freescale.

Mr. Burchers said a number of companies already making netbooks would show a new round of machines using cellphone chips at the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan, this June.

Qualcomm, the San Diego company that built an empire on chips for cellphones, recently introduced Snapdragon, a chip created for smartphones and ultralight computers. Already, the company has announced deals to sell the chip to 15 major device manufacturers, including LG, Acer, Samsung and Asustek. Qualcomm said some Snapdragon devices appearing this year would have screens of 10 to 12 inches.

Intel and Microsoft warn that consumers should remain skeptical about the performance of a computer that costs less than $300.

“When these things are sold, they need clear warnings labels about what they won’t be able to do,” said Sean M. Maloney, the chief sales and marketing officer at Intel. “It would be good to wait and play with one of these products before the industry gets carried away.”

Still, the rise of netbooks could hurt both companies. In its last quarter, Microsoft posted the first sales decline in its history for the PC version of Windows. It blamed netbooks for the drop. On average, Microsoft charges computer makers $73 for Windows Vista, the version of Windows used in desktop and high-powered laptop PCs. That is triple what it receives for a sale of Windows XP for a netbook.

For Intel, the Atom chips represent lower-profit products, which could turn into a major sore spot if consumers become comfortable with netbooks and start to view them as replacements for standard computers.

In his recent report, Mr. Sacconaghi speculated that 50 percent of consumers could get by with an Atom-based computer for their everyday tasks. PC makers like H.P., Acer and Dell, which face razor-thin profit margins selling laptops, could use the rising competition to place more price pressure on both Microsoft and Intel, Mr. Sacconaghi said.

The big winners in the rise of netbooks that use cellphone chips could be the cellphone carriers, which would have access to a whole new market: PC users.

Intel, meanwhile, expects cheap netbooks to expand the PC market to include hundreds of millions of children who have cellphones but no computers. The company has dozens of deals in the works with service providers to seize on this potential, Mr. Maloney said. As for the emerging competition, he said Intel would show off some surprising computer designs at Computex as well.

Mr. Huang of Nvidia said the PC industry sat at an inflection point. “Disruption will come in from the bottom and forever change the market.”
(Source: The New York Time)

EU may take action on Deep Packet Inspection Technologies

At last the European Union is investigate so-called "deep packet inspection" technologies (as provided by the likes of Phorm) on the grounds that consumer profiling by online advertising companies based on the technology will breach consumer's "basic rights in terms of transparency, control and risk", writes Martyn Warwick.

There is growing unease over deep packet inspection (or "deep and secret
snooping into an individual's web browsing habits" as it should more properly be called) mainly because the technology can continue to track and record web activity by an individual subscriber even after cookies have been disabled.

The idea behind deep packet inspection system such as that from Phorm is that by tracking a web users browsing proclivities advertisers can send closely targeted ads to individuals based on their particular Internet histories and preferences. In other words, it's all about making more money.

In the UK, BT has controversially trialed the Phorm technology and Virgin Media and Talk Talk believed to be considering doing the same.
ISP's across the rest of the European Union and elsewhere have also evinced considerable enthusiasm for the technology but many users have complained about the sneaky intrusiveness of systems like Phorm's.

The growing groundswell of concern has had little effect on the UK's Labour administration and the government has declined to mount any serious investigation into the implications of deep packet inspection and its possible compromising of an individual's right to privacy.

However, Meglena Kuneva, the EU's Commissioner of Consumer Affairs and
Protection is in the vanguard of European resistance to the spread of deep packet inspection. She is Bulgarian by birth (June 1957) and having lived there when it was a communist state knows a thing or two about an imposed and institutionalised lack of privacy. Ms Kuneva says that the small print of the interminable and usually indecipherable "Terms and Conditions" that web users routinely (have to) accept to surf commercial websites are often in direct contravention of privacy legislation.

She says that the vast majority of Europeans have no idea what personal data is being collected, how it is being collected, how safely it is being stored, who has access to it and how it is used for commercial purposes. They are also unaware that, as things presently stand, even when individuals believe they have opted out of deep packet inspection, the myriad of technological (and invisible) hurdles placed in front of them means that may well have not actually done so.

Later on this week Ms. Kuneva will give a presentation outlining the EU's intent to gather evidence from both users and the broadband industry on exactly what information is being collected and manipulated by ISPs and advertisers.

The intent is to determine whether or not new regulations and controls are necessary. There can be little doubt about that.

In her upcoming speech Ms. Kuneva will say, “Consumers are in fact paying for services with their personal data and their exposure to advertising. This amounts to a new kind of commercial exchange. We need to investigate this quickly, we cannot afford foot-dragging. If we fail to see an adequate response to consumers’ concerns on the issue of data collection and profiling, we will not shy away from our duties.”

The news of the potential regulation of deep packet inspection comes after the European Commission (EC) sent a third letter to the British government demanding to know the details of and legal justification for the secret trials of the Phorm system that were carried out by BT.

Experts in Internet law at the Foundation for Information Policy Research, an independent think tank based at Cambridge University, have long said that Phorm and the incumbent UK telco were in breach of the European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations as well as national laws.
BT though maintains it took legal advice prior to running the trials secretly and without informing individual subscribers that their web-browsing habits were being spied upon. However, despite many requests the carrier has declined to make public the legal advice it says it obtained.

Meanwhile, the UK government has stated publicly that any future deployments of deep packet inspection technologies "would be legal", but has refused several requests made under the aegis of the Freedom of Information Act to release the full text of its response to the EC.

It seems likely though that things are now on the move. When the national governments of individual Member States of the European Union do not implement implement European law, the EC has full recourse to the independent European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

It now seems more likely than ever that Deep Packet Inspection could find itself in the dock there and fighting for its parasitic life in the months to come.

US and UK Governments Adopt Openness and Lead Collaborations, Not Mandates

In the Age of Crises the Government of President Barrack Obama of the United States of America and the UK Government had been trying to find new ways to reduce government costs and overheads, among others is in the area of computer operating system and application software to improve productivity. It’s not often you hear a business executive say that government is pushing the envelope on technology. This happened the first time in our 25 years of experience.

The government was observed to adopt collaboration methodologies, open development, and community sourcing to build software that results in lower cost development and deployments, higher quality code and the transparency that we all expect in our applications today.

The indicators that government is beginning to lead in a collaborative approach to building technology are multiple:

The appointment of our first federal CIO Vivek Kundra, an amazing professional dedicated to openness and with years of experience that include successes in both the executive suite and the public office.

• The incredible response and support we’ve received from the Open Letter to President Obama tells us that this is an industry movement, not a handful of companies, that will bring open development to the steps of local, state and federal governments around the world. More than 100 individuals have signed the letter to date.

• Most recently, the UK’s decision to enact a 10-point action plan to encourage greater use of open source software speaks volumes about the benefits of openness in the public sector.

The switch toward the use of open source software was not directly a mandatory. It’s important for software vendors, users and developers to keep things in perspective. One size does not fit all. And, “open” doesn’t have to explicitly translate to mean open source software. There has never been a question in our mind whether IT environments should include only open source software or only proprietary software. A combination is reality, and that reality is achieved through collaboration.

Collaborative methodologies and community sourcing are paving the way for how applications are being developed today and will be developed in the future. A reference is given here for the CSI-sponsored open source project TriSano, because it’s one of the best current examples of collaboration in government. It’s a collaborative effort among government, public health professionals, and software developers that is resulting in a surveillance and outbreak management system built and deployed at a fraction of the cost of alternative solutions. We see the possibility of replicating this process across government departments and divisions. So, as government continues to push the envelope, there is so much opportunity for collaboration, open development and community sourcing. Let’s not sell ourselves short. If we think in absolutes, such as “all software must be open source or all software must be closed,” we belittle our industry as we represent it to government.

Thus a correct steps in reducing costs and at the same time still maintaining work efficiency and productivity is as shown by the two example governments of the USA and UK by taking leadership and collaboration in the application and development of open source software as much as possible for the government and public sectors, without having it as a mandatory requirement.

Revenue Model for Creating Business from Free OS Software

Revenue models for creating a product from FOSS:

1. Per-unit royalties. Who said open source was free? While the Linux kernel may be accessible to anyone with a web browser (subject to GPL terms), there is a huge leap between a kernel and a fully integrated, optimised, customised, certified and stable operating system. That’s why vendors like Azingo, ALP, Purple Labs and Mizi Research do charge royalties for the Linux-based software stacks.

2. NREs (non-recurring engineering fees) for integration & productisation. Most open source projects are designed to be 90% complete.. but the remaining 10% of pushing a project to ’shrink-wrap’ product status requires an entity with commercial interests to the deliver the project to the finishing line. As such, system integrators and software vendors such as MontaVista and WindRiver will happily engage in integration and productisation project for Linux-based OSes, in exchange for professional services or NRE fees.

3. Subscriptions for product updates & support. This revenue model is common with dual-licensed open-source products, where the product is branched into a version that’s available under GPL non-commercial terms and one that’s available under commercial non-copyleft terms. Companies like Funambol, Volantis, and Trolltech offer paid-for subscriptions to product updates as a service to customers of the commercial product branch and an incentive to move from trying the GPL branch to to buying/licensing the commercial branch. This revenue model presents a growing opportunity for any system integrator involved in the mobile industry, as both device-side and network-side software products based on open source are becoming increasingly used, while at the same time lacking support contracts and service level agreements (SLAs) that customers have come to rely on.

4. Certification and compliance testing fees. In the case where open-source-based products need to be certified or pass a compliance test - as is the case with Java JSRs - an additional fee may be leveraged for undergoing these tests - as is the case with the TCKs for Sun-owned JSRs, specifically the phoneME MIDP2 implementation.

5. Hardware sales. A more subtle revenue model is that of making the software available for free, but charging for the hardware. Taiwanese manufacturer FIC practices this model for OpenMoko, the distribution which is almost 100% open source. Here customers have a reason to go to FIC to build OpenMoko-based devices for them, so as to leverage from the product know-how and hardware integration expertise that the manufacturer has on OpenMoko.

6. Insurance for product liability and indemnification. This is a straightforward insurance service that software vendors often provide as a premium, which indemnifies or insures the customer of an open-source software product against liabilities.

7. Sharing development costs. Last and certainly not least, open source licensing can be used as a modern approach to shaving costs off software development, by pooling that development effort across multiple industry participants. Companies participating for example in Eclipse, Webkit, Maemo and Android projects seek to share their development costs of a commoditising software base with other peers (even competitors), while leveraging on that base to build essential value add.

BlackBerry Niagara a new must have device

A major summer showdown is shaping up for the smartphone market. Currently, the must-have device of the forthcoming summer is Palm's Pre. However, rumors are also swirling about an iPhone refresh from Apple and now word comes that Research in Motion is planning to toss the BlackBerry Niagara into the ring as soon as May.

Expected to be bigger than the Curve, but smaller than the Bold, Niagara will feature a QWERTY keyboard, EV-DO Rev. A, GPS, a 3.2 megapixel camera and BES support, ChannelWeb reports. PDA Blast speculates that the device could arrive via Verizon in May and possibly with Sprint during Q3.

The Boy Genius Report calls the Niagara the best BlackBerry ever.