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April 30, 2009

What makes a great software product?

Whilst I was installing the latest Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007, I mused about what makes the difference between a great software product and a mediocre one. In the Microsoft Office Suite, I would say Microsoft Excel, in each version, goes from strength to strength. And now, Powerpoint 2007 is so far ahead of Powerpoints classic, that it is also starting to show brilliance. Despite the fact that it still doesn’t have the Keynote style card flip that one training participant so drooled over.

Microsoft Word, well, it’s the freshest it’s ever been, with this Office version’s landmark extension of Themes. And it’s even trying to cover up it’s traditional list numbering fumble by clearly identifying to the user, which list numbering style the user currently has in operation. But, that’s a kludge, I bet when the stress happens, Word will fumble again.

Outlook is the least visibly different. Looks like the next version of Outlook will finally see the menu merry-go-round (started from the first Outlook) come to rest in a Ribbon. And Outlook 2007 finally starts making ground in GTD (Getting Things Done) by using quick flagging of items with a date context, tagging with Categories and virtual Search Folders. Service Pack 2 however, claims to improve Outlook 2007’s startup problems and shutdown problems. And that was what triggered to reflect. Outlook, being the client half of an Exchange party, keep repairing the same issues. I remember early versions of Outlook so many years ago, having startup and shutdown problems. And now, they’re still repairing similar issues – of course the causes and complexity is different but that’s the burden of Outlook. When you have software that’s experiencing Groundhog Day, that’s when software lacks brilliance.

Another Microsoft product that often gets caught in a timeloop, I guess is the notorious and famous Windows we all use. Vista experiences must have lent a hand to Microsoft’s lack of brilliance in recent earnings. But if you have some memory, Windows NT 3.1 wasn’t that crash hot (pardon the inference) and who remembers Windows 1.x, 2.x?

Do you have any favourite products of brilliance? No? Of brilliant mediocrity then?

 

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Slowing of Discontent

Here at the Bleeding Edge Institute for Computer Sociology, we seem to have noticed a slowing in the speed of discontent. Regular readers of this column may be aware that we began to track the velocity of this commodity after our discovery of Toad of Toad Hall Syndrome, a condition characterised by a lust for megahertz and megabits which generally condemns the victim, in the constant pursuit of more speed, to a life of misery and poverty.

For years we have been able roughly to predict the rate at which the average user is likely to upgrade software and hardware by charting the progress of the restless desire for change, which generally reaches an irresistible peak within about six months of the marketplace becoming aware of the attractiveness of a piece of technology.

Our own experience reflects the slowing of this imperative. It was more than a year ago, in February 2008, when we coughed up $599 for a 1.5TB Western Digital My Book World Edition hard drive. We had no idea, at the time, that we were joining an international community of the eternally unsatisfied, congregated around the Hacking WD MyBook World Edition Web site. Our report on the consequences is here.

We discovered a number of things as a result of our purchase of what is not, as the average purchaser might imagine, an external hard drive, but a relatively cheap NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. We learnt for instance, that when a manufacturer like Western Digital installs a Linux operating system in its equipment, it opens the way to the user community extending the functionality of the device. We also learnt that when you own a NAS, the typical 10/100Mbps Ethernet that most of us use these days, is very slow indeed.

We do not recommend waiting around for a folder full of video files to be backed up over that sort of network. What you do, instead, is automate the process and let it grind at its petty pace overnight, or indeed several nights.

We knew back then that we'd have to upgrade our network to gigabit ethernet, which moves data at about 10 times the speed of the so-called “Fast Ethernet” which tends to be the home or small office standard. We knew that doing so would be relatively simple.

Since the PCI Express bus was introduced in 2004, true gigabit ethernet has increasingly become standard in motherboards, and we had gigabit ethernet ports in all our PCs. We'd even bought a gigabit router, the D-Link DIR-655 in October 2007.

All we had to do to increase the speed of our backups, and to make video-streaming over the network stutter-free, was to ensure that all our ethernet cable was at least Cat 5e - in fact we already had quite a bit of Cat 6 cabling in place – and buy a gigabit switch.

Somehow we didn't get round to doing that until a couple of weeks ago, when we wandered into Radio Parts new headquarters in West Melbourne and noticed a special on the TP-Link SG1005D five-port switch. We picked one up ($75), and prepared for another project.

In the interim, we'd taken delivery of what to our mind is the Rolls Royce of consumer-level modems, the D-Link DIR-855, which offers such refinements as dual 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz wireless networks, so we hooked that up instead of the DIR-655, which at $179 represents excellent value, unless you happen to have an excess of desire and a spare $390.

We, or someone in the supply chain, managed to crunch the installation CD that came with the DIR-855, but installing it couldn't have been easier. We just plugged the ethernet cable from our ADSL 2 modem into its Internet port, plugged in the switch and the My Book World Edition drive, and suddenly our files were shooting across the wire.

One interesting effect of this new-found speed is that we've been having a look around for additional network storage. We are thinking ultimately of stuffing one of our older PCs with some hard drives and installing Windows Home Server.

\But just last week, while we were looking at OfficeWorks catalogue, we discovered they were selling the Western Digital ShareSpace, a 2TB or 4TB unit which seems to be an advance on the My Book World Edition. The price tag ($899/$1699) reflects the fact that they're equipped with either two or four of Western Digital's GreenPower drives.

They also include a built-in media server that will stream media to multimedia devices, and iTunes server support, automatic network backup and an email alert system.

The fact that we're already thinking about extending our gigabit ethernet project to include one of these things suggests that the speed of discontent may have suddenly accelerated.


Posted by cw at 03:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 28, 2009

On hitting the road

Bleeding Edge can now speak with authority on the experience of hitting a bitumen road at 40kph and sliding on your side for what seemed an inordinately long distance, with a heavy motor scooter bouncing up and down on your shin. It was peak hour on Friday, Wattletree Road. The tram lines (and everything else) were wet, and we evidently tried to cross them at an insufficiently safe angle. It all happened too quickly to remember much, although we're unlikely to forget the sense of sheer helplessness as we slid towards the row of parked cars, to miss by a matter of centimetres. Didn't bang the safety helmet on anything, either.

Aside from the shin, Yours Truly is suffering from a badly corked thigh, sprained right thumb, and most painful of all, possibly some torn chest ligaments. It even hurts to breathe. Nevertheless, considering one's age, we didn't come off too badly, and the motor scooter is in better shape than we'd expected.

We would have been worse off, for sure, if we hadn't been wearing ballistic nylon pants and jacket with shoulder, knee, and thigh pads, and boots. (Pity we weren't wearing the full-length boots though. Then we wouldn't have all those bruises and scrapes.) There's a circular hole punched in the pants, which we imagine is the pattern left by whatever corked the thigh.

The insurance excess is $600 - we're just shy of the three years required to stop being an "inexperienced rider" - so we're hoping a replacement mudguard and a couple of other minor scrapes will come in at a low enough price to avoid making a claim.

The policeman who attended informed us that the same thing had happened to him three times. He informed us that he wouldn't be taking any further action. "You couldn't really call it rider error," he said. "Those tram lines are murder."

But it really was a case of rider error. We'd had quite a fright about half an hour earlier when we were riding down Wattletree Road (ironically, to make an appointment with a medical specialist), when we crossed the tram line and the scooter had bucked wildly. We'd never experienced them as being quite so nasty. So when we were riding back up the street, the bloody tram tracks were on our mind. We looked at the bloody things, to make sure we stayed away from them, and that's what undid us. It's called "target fixation". You go where you look, and we were looking at the wrong thing.

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April 26, 2009

They’re all Dads

Went to watch and photograph the ANZAC March this year, 2009. It was good to see people enthused about the event, with old mates promising to meet up and see each other.

Other people were enthused about the younger participants – one lady in the current mod thin spectacles was heard shouting “Go MLC” very proudly. No doubt, the schools and other bands were there.

I moved around and a nice mother with an adorable son came by to see his grand dad. We waited and then she caught sight of him.  She yelled out “Dad” and there was no response. She yelled several times again and slowly every one was starting to turn – someone helpful in the crowd laughed and said kindly “They’re all Dads – call him by his first name!”. I think this was him.

It was good to see participants break out in smile and amongst the solemnity.

Posted by Anandasim at 05:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 08, 2009

NBN ... Day Two

The responses to the $43 billion FttH/FttP national broadband network are predictably varied. Kevin Morgan opines in The Age that it's "just another sham" which will "damage the prospects for any large-scale deployment of this much-needed technology for the foreseeable future".

We're not sure why Kevin is so bleak, but he dismisses the strategy as being "concerned more with revising regulations that give competitors access to Telstra's existing copper network, not with a blueprint for reform that would lead to investment in fibre".

He dismisses the plan as cynical rhetoric, says that the real plan is to maintain arbitrage of the copper network, and predicts 21st century broadband in Australia will be delivered over "rotting copper wires".

Bleeding Edge felt like a cup of tea and a good lie-down after reading that. We've got an advanced degree in cynicism too, but we find it hard to believe that the Rudd Government is intent on being ignominiously kicked out of office as a bunch of lying, cheating carpet-baggers, which would be the inevitable result of such a monstrous betrayal of its promises.

In the absence of any real justification for his comments, we can only assume that Kevin remains convinced in his oft-expressed view that only Telstra has the capacity to "readily" build the network. We would have thought that Telstra had long ago shed the research and engineering know-how of network building (it's an expensive tool to store in the cupboard when you're trying to maximise profits), and the know-how would surely come from an operator like Alcatel-Lucent. Or does he think that Telstra is the only corporation with the capacity to stump up the cash? No doubt there will be further instalments in The Age.

We're going to have a preview, surely, of capacity to deliver when Aurora Energy kick-starts Tasmania's entry into the superfast broadband era. You'd expect them to know something, surely, about building networks. And surely mainland electrical distribution network providers must be more than a little interested in getting involved with this project, particularly if they can simultaneously hook up smart meters. We expect a lot of smart people will today be thinking outside the box that Telstra has stuffed so many of the nation's opportunities into for too many years.

Henry Ergas, "adviser to telcos including Telstra", says there are doubts about prices. Pretty serious doubts, as it happens. Henry tells us in a "What They Said" strip on page 9 of The Age (couldn't find it online), that "if the investment is to earn a commercial return, prices may need to be three or more times current levels".

Well, if Henry has been advising Telstra, his view of commercial returns are likely to be considerably higher than everybody else's. And we doubt he's taken into consideration the fact that the lion's share of the network's income will come from elsewhere. Consumer Internet will represent a substantial, but by no means majority revenue source. And if the result of all that investment is that consumers pay 300 per cent or more of their current bills (not that Henry gives us a figure on the current bill, so we don't know if he's talking about three times $40, or $60, or $180 per month), they'll be burning effigies of Conroy and Rudd on the steps of Parliament House.

AAPT's Paul Broad told Communications Day the figures didn't add up ­ and that the $43 billion "seems to me to be an amazing waste of money". That could well be the case. The Government does seem to be plucking figures out of the air. We are, however, assuming that a lot of money is going to be swallowed up in building a fast, accurate, sophisticated billing system - you know, the sort of thing that Telstra has never got right, despite pouring buckets of money into the gaping maws of operators like Andersen Consulting et alia over decades. That's going to be absolutely vital if this new entity is going to be wholesaling services to all comers. The big advantage they have over Telstra is that they don't have a legacy of a spaghetti bowl of largely incompatible systems.

Paul Budde sees electronic health care alone accounting for as much as 25 per cent of the network's capacity, with education and energy and environment services taking up another 25 percent. They both seem a little high to Bleeding Edge, and the percentages apparently don't take into account the fact that a significant number of Telstra's PSTN connections - many millions of them - are likely to shift to the new network. But these new applications are in their infancy, if not totally off the radar screen, and nobody as yet has any idea of what's likely to be around the corner.

The only certainty is that a lot of people are likely to be talking a lot of rubbish over the next couple of years, but not, we hope, as much rubbish as is being generated by the contributors to Telstra's propaganda mill. How would you like to have these people living next door to you? We all might have to shift to Tasmania.

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April 07, 2009

Rudd's bold plan for a broadband nation

What a monster! The Australian Government will build a $43 billion FTTH (Fibre to the Home) National Broadband Network after terminating the bidding process for a Fibre To The Node network.

Calling it "the single largest nation-building infrastructure project in Australia's history", and comparing it to the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme, Prime Minister Rudd announced it would establish a company with 49 per cent private equity to complete the network over the next eight years. Only 90 per cent of the country would enjoy 100Mbps FTTH speeds (we expect it will be faster by the time it's in place), with the holes being filled by ADSL, wireless and satellite. There's a discussion paper on the project here.

It's a bold, visionary plan that deserves the highest praise. In taking this path, the Rudd Government has called Telstra's bluff and set the clock running for an end to its price-gouging.

We haven't yet read the discussion paper for regulatory reform of the communications industry, but our immediate reaction is that this move is the very worst of results for Telstra, and a just reward for its spiteful tactics.

Others see it as a victory of sorts for the gorilla. We see it as a well-earned drubbing.

Telstra completely sabotaged the National Broadband Network by threatening legal challenges which would have allowed the legal fraternity to build small cities on the fees, and by beefing up the speed of its HFC cable network to hack into the commercial underpinnings of the proposal. As the extract from the evaluation report indicates, the global capital squeeze also helped create the perfect storm which (thankfully) sank the original plan.

With FTTH, it looks to us inevitable that in the span of a few years, Telstra's local loop monopoly becomes completely worthless, and their ability to hold the nation and their competition to ransom disappears. We wonder what Telstra shareholders will have to say about this.

Typically, Telstra's propaganda site was busily reshaping the facts.Telstra chairman Donald McGauchie claimed the company "welcomes the opportunity to engage the Government on broadband" and declared the move “will have little short- to medium-term financial impact on Telstra’s business as it would take at least eight years before it is completed". We imagine the share price will reflect the true situation. UPDATE: Well, we obviously know nothing about share prices, because Telstra has posted significant gains. Obviously that's a reflection of the perception that the Government will allow Telstra to become involved in the new network if it wishes. So the Government spends all that money, then allows Telstra to dictate terms? Seems unlikely to us. Re-UPDATE: Some support for our Telstra share price prognostications from Elizabeth Knight. She thinks the Australian sharemarket got it wrong too.

Crikey makes an interesting point. They see the new high-speed network as spelling the end to free-to-air TV. The big proviso to that is that the data charges would have to drop substantially, but that, surely, is the entire point of building the bloody great thing? Crikey says Kerry Packer would have stopped it because of the effect on the Nine Network, but James' idea of getting some other mob of dills to pay a fortune for Nine was surely the smarter idea. The writing has been on the wall for quite a while now.

It's got us speculating on the business case for the new network. The fact that every multimedia content owner is going to be clamouring to board the fast train will add to the bottom line - we expect new models for the delivery of movies and music too - as will the fact that huge chunks of the money that Telstra has been earning from its PSTN network will quickly shift across to VoIP providers who will at last be able to compete fairly with the gorilla. The margins for the wholesale network won't be anything like Telstra's 60 per cent, but they'll be sweet enough.

Then there's the public interest applications including tele-medicine, and possibly a fast knowledge network based on our libraries.

What's your view?

UPDATE AGAIN: Our reading of the discussion paper suggests even more ominous tidings for Telstra. Senator Conroy says the paper formally commences the review required by section 61A of the Telecommunications Act, and says the government will consider key options for reform, including:

Any Telstra executive reading that list must surely be feeling a little queasy.

Worse, the Government is also clearly looking at the possibility of forcing Telstra to divest itself of that HFC network that it planned on using to undermine its competitors.

If you had any Telstra shares, we do hope you took advantage of that odd surge this morning to get rid of them, because it's beginning to look like Telstra will pay a high price for the Amigos' hubris.

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April 05, 2009

On progress

I'm feeling a little ashamed of myself after watching Louis C.K. [below] on the ingratitude of the tech-aware generations. Perhaps I shouldn't complain so much about Telstra and Microsoft and Apple and all the other people I complain about because ... well ... 50 years ago, when I was still growing up, I had to cope with bakelite phones and party lines and typewriters and phonograph records and by comparison, I'm living in some magic kingdom where one never has to lick a stamp, change a needle on a turntable, dirty one's hands prising jammed typewriter keys apart and changing ribbons, and aeroplanes mostly don't crash. Clearly, according to Louis, we've all lost perspective.

Well Louis is a scream, but is he right? I remember my father cursing the family car because he had to crank it. If you weren't careful, you could get a nasty whack from the crank handle. The reason we now have starter motors and ignition keys is that people got, well, terribly cranky about the inconvenience of having to get out of the car, haul out the crank handle, turn it until the compression built up, then give it a huge twist, and sometimes get whacked in the process.

If they'd told themselves how lucky they were not to have horses and carriages, we probably would still have horses and carriages which, I have to admit, might have been a good thing. The Wilkins ice shelf probably wouldn't be collapsing if we still had horses and carts.

But progress surely is the result of dis-satisfaction. And if we're ever going to direct progress into technologies that don't destroy the planet, contentment won't do it. And, dammit, I've probably gone over my ADSL allowance watching every Louis CK piece I can find on You Tube. I'm going to complain.

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April 04, 2009

Everything is amazing, but nobody’s happy…

Spotted this on flotoonie’s blog. It’s hilarious.

Posted by Anandasim at 07:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Cable versus HFC

Here's an interesting angle on the National Broadband Network shambles. Japan's cable giant J:Com has just upgraded its network to 160 megabits per second, which is the world's fastest, and so far ahead of the NBN's target of 12Mbps that one can only weep. And the cost of upgrading the J:Com network to achieve those rates? $US20 per home passed. The costs will obviously be higher in Australia, but obviously nothing like the costs of laying fibre.

What's interesting is that this is the same technology - Docsis 3.0 - which is being used by Telstra for its HFC upgrade in Melbourne. Except that (predictably) we'll only be getting 100Mbps, and lamentably slow upload speeds. There may be technical reasons that limit the capabilities of the Telstra HFC installation, but who knows? And we would have thought that the fact that HFC capacity is shared would surely limit the speed available even in Japan.

The other difference will be that where Japan will be charging $US60 per month for the service, and the Netherlands 80 euros ($107) for 120 Mbps service and 60 euros ($81) for 60 Mbps, we'll be paying who knows how much? The margins that these overseas companies hit their customers with are huge enough, but compared to Telstra's, they're tiny.

The story highlights the paucity of information in this country on the costs and capabilities of the competing solutions. This document suggests that HFC will be a cheaper solution over 13 years while fibre to the home offers vastly increased speeds. Not that we're considering fibre to the home.

We can't help but wonder if Senator Conroy is on top of these issues.

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April 02, 2009

Learning and creating

We can't help but wonder if there's a fascinating insight into the future hidden in the details of the $150 million deal to provide up to 220,000 Lenovo IdeaPad S10e netbooks to NSW school teachers and students.

The IdeaPads will ship with Windows and Microsoft Office - predictable - but will also have Adobe Flash animation, Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements (for movie-making) and Dreamweaver for Web design.

Yesterday we had a chat with Charles Tetaz, who manages DigiDesign in Australia. Its products include the audio editing standard Pro Tools and Avid video editing, which is also the standard for the film and video industries. DigiDesign donated their software to a project which created a professional quality recording studio for the Sydney Rd Community School, which enourages "student self-expression through music, art and film making".

The school lacks its own sports grounds, but who knows what talents might emerge as these kids develop compositional, performing and recording skills and learn to tap their creativity? We like the idea of our schools inspiring their students to be singers and songwriters and scriptwriters and directors and perhaps a few authors, rather than lawyers and merchant bankers.

It's amazing what sort of changes are likely to be wrought as a result of the digitisation of multimedia, the cheap, ubiquitous availability of compositional and editing software and hardware, and widespread fostering of the skills to use them.

The big studios are trying to maintain their stranglehold over artists and audiences, but they're fighting a losing battle. These kids probably won't buy music the way we have in the past. It will probably be free, with the artists making their money from performances to audiences created through avenues like YouTube.

Posted by cw at 10:34 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 01, 2009

The Skype's the limit

The world's telcos, particularly greedy telcos like Telstra, got an unpleasant call today, with the news that Skype for the iPhone is about to hit the Apps Store. This is what Intel's Andy Grove calls a "strategic inflection point".

The fact that iPhone (and iPod Touch Generation 2) users will be able to make free Skype-to-Skype calls from any Wi-Fi zone, or call landline or mobile phones at rates that are substantially less than, say, Telstra's, to say nothing of the fact that instant messaging looks a lot cheaper than using SMS means the crazy logic of chaps like Sol Trujillo - "Hey, our customers are dying to pay us heaps of money despite international recessions and the desire to have a little cash for things like food" - is about to be proven the idiocy that it always was.

Trujillo, good riddance, is on his way with his sackfuls of money, but Donald "Bosses aren't Bastards" McGaughey, who employed him, fostered his bloody-minded attitudes and signed off on his staggering pay cheques, should also be shown the door. These people are dinosaurs, and the world will be better off without them. It simply isn't good business to be seen always to be scheming new ways of gouging cash from customers.

It also means that - as we observed in our recent piece on coffee-spoon economics - free Wi-Fi is about to become an absolute necessity for any cafe or bar or any business that wants to attract customers to spend time and money with them.

Obviously this won't happen overnight, but the writing is clearly on the wall.

What the next Telstra CEO has to do is send the managers back to school to learn that the key to business survival is to provide value for customers, to actually serve customers ... more than that, to endear themselves to customers. But the board that gave us Sol won't be looking for someone like that. And even if they were open to change, it won't be easy to implement. The Telstra culture, essentially, is that the world owes them easy pickings.

If they had any sense, they'd be cutting their capped plans, dramatically reducing the cost of data packs and trying to reinvent themselves. But there's not a lot of sense around Telstra. We doubt they even realise that their world has just been struck by an asteroid.

LATEST: Telecommunications analyst Paul Budde, quoted in the Wall St Journal, predicts the government may look to award the NBN tender to a coalition of bidders in an open access network that would leave the door open for Telstra to partner its own infrastructure to the network.

He says Telstra currently enjoys "fantastic" margins of up to 60% on its fixed-line network, but it "can't keep charging monopoly rents forever".

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NBN shock ... umm ... check the date

We admit that we were taken in, for roughly five seconds, then the shock announcement that a secret consortium led by the Murdoch and Packer families had won the NBN contract fell into perspective. Yes, it's that one morning in April when it's better to doubt pretty much everything you read or hear.

Our colleague Garry Barker's opinion piece in The Age is anything but an April Fool's Day joke. He says the Government's broadband plan is doomed to failure, citing Michael Malone's comments about the "corrupt" tender process in support of his contention that the network will never be built, or at least not without Telstra's involvement.

That's scarcely a radical view. It's pretty much what Kevin Morgan has been writing, and it may well prove ultimately to be right.

There's an alternative view, however, which seemed to have informed The 7.30 Report last night. That view is that a successful tenderer will be announced shortly after the Prime Minister's return from saving the world's economy etc., and we'll all be enjoying those blinding network speeds Sol Trujillo loved to torment us with, as we contemplated the damage to our bank accounts if we actually tried to take advantage of them.

We do have some reservations about Garry's piece. He seems completely satisfied with the Telstra line that it was kicked out of the tender process on "what looks like a thin bureaucratic ploy" and that the Government is damaging the share value of the company.

We tend to agree with The 7.30 Report that Telstra knocked itself out of the ring. And we can't quite understand why the Government should be responsible for maintaining Telstra's share price. Isn't that what privatisation is all about?

Garry declares: "Love it or hate it — and many people do for no more logical a reason than it is Telstra, which used to be Telecom Australia, which used to be the PMG, and we hated them, too — Telstra is the only real game in town."

Well we can't recall hating the PMG, and for that matter we don't hate Telstra, although we're sure that the Telstra executives who go out of their way to silence Bleeding Edge and deny us access to information are convinced we hate them. Hating a corporation's behaviour isnt the same thing as hating the corporation. Isn't it possible that some of us object to Telstra's tactics on completely rational grounds that have nothing to do with hatred? We can't help feeling mildly patronised when what we regard as perfectly reasonable objections are dismissed as an immature emotional reaction. Will we be grown-ups only when we stop objecting to being ripped off? That sort of comment represents an insult to the reader's intelligence, in our view.

It isn't childish to object to Telstra's tactics in pursuit of maintaining its monopoly. It isn't immature to believe that Telstra might have fared better had it not been so hell-bent on exploiting its monopoly position and sacrificing the best interests of its customers and the nation for its own commercial greed.

One is surely entitled to form the opinion that Telstra's views on what constitute a fair return on investment threaten the strangulation of Australian businesses which increasingly find Telstra's charges make it impossible to compete with overseas competitors. It seems undeniable to us that if Telstra is the only game in town, it's a bloody expensive game, and not all of us are going to be able to afford to play.

Garry says that in dramatically increasing the speed of its HFC cable network, Telstra has picked the plums out of the telecommunications pie, which agrees with Stephen Bartholomeusz's intepretation, although Stephen says it's a cherry pie.

The question Garry poses is whether the Government considered HFC when it drew up its tender "or, as Telstra has suggested, were bidders restricted to fibre to the node (FTTN), for which access to (Telstra says confiscation of) Telstra's wires from telephone exchanges to nodes and then to premises was essential?"

We're possibly misguided here, but wasn't FTTN Sol Trujillo's idea? Wasn't he intent on rolling out FTTN, if only the Government abandoned its old-fashioned regulatory requirements that would have allowed its competitors access to the network?

We almost choked when David Quilty, Telstra's public policy chief, assaying the prospect that Canberra might legislate to stop Telstra's cherry or plum picking, told the ABC it was “somewhat of an outrage if a bidder who purports to support competition is actually asking for a statutory monopoly”. Apparently it's only OK to ask for a statutory monopoly if you don't purport to support competition. Certainly, by its every deed and public pronouncement, Telstra has been outraged by the concepts of fair competition and level playing grounds. It feels completely entitled to extortionate rates of return.

No doubt we're exposing our naivete here, but if HFC was the solution all along, why didn't Trujillo just say so? Why was he so insistent that we had to have fibre to the node? We can't help but think that ulterior motives involving the crushing of potential competition were at work. We agree, by the way, that we need fibre, although in our opinion, we need fibre to the home, rather than to the node.

Experts on The 7.30 Report seem confident that last year's High Court decision that the telecommunications access regime did not constitute acquisition of Telstra's property make the NBN plain sailing.

David Lindsay, senior lecturer in law at Monash University has a completely different interpretation of that decision. In an article in the Telecommunications Journal of Australia last year, he suggested that court's expansive understanding of what amounts to an 'acquisition of property' under s 51(xxxi), however, suggests that proposals for greater regulatory intervention, including structural separation and divestiture of the access network, may well amount to a breach of Section 51(xxxi) of the Constitution, requiring payment of compensation to Telstra. We're grateful to Kevin Morgan for pointing that article out to us. If David Lindsay is right (and his arguments look pretty sound) quite how the Government proposes to legislate its way around that isn't obvious to us.

David Quilty's comment that "the important thing in terms of any cost we might incur in terms of interconnection [of the NBN to the CAN] that we're fully reimbursed for those costs up front" surely must have sent a chill up Senator Conroy's spine.

We can't help but feel that The 7.30 Report has taken an unnecessarily optimistic view on this issue. Kevin Morgan's view of the outcome - and Garry's - seem more compelling to us. But any public breast-beating on behalf of Telstra makes us gag. Obviously that's just our emotions getting in the way again.

LATEST: Five views from a panel at the Comms Day Summit.

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