I’m running a poll on a question I’ve been pondering recently. I won’t go into it other than to put the poll in for now. I don’t want to cloud your thinking one way or the other.
If you want to wade into this more than the poll allows, leave some comments. I’d love to discuss this with you.
Ben Grubb over at It News has reported that Exetel is planning on banning P2P use (that is Bittorrent, Limewire, Kazaa (does that even exist still?), etc) during their off-peak period. I’m not surprised that John Linton, the founder and CEO of Exetel is considering such drastic measures, however I was concerned for my ability to download Linux ISOs at night. (Yes, all P2P is Linux ISOs — didn’t you know?)
At the beginning of this month, our off-peak time was trimmed from 12am-12pm to 2am-12pm. This was to stop a phenomenon that would basically kill the entire Exetel network at midnight. People just have to have that latest Linux ISO at 12:01am so start all of their downloads at the very start of off-peak. No worries, except people who wanted to browse web pages, use VOIP or do anything else suffered.
As John has mentioned many times over on his blog, most downloads would be finished by 12:30am or 1am and the network would be back to normal speeds. Despite years of trying to fix it, nothing worked.
This was a great cost to Exetel, who would continue to try different ways to combat this, including a P2P cache, asking for downloaders to be fair and push back their downloads and purchasing a ton of bandwidth they didn’t need except for that half hour. Seems this new tactic worked. So since most souls are in bed by 2am, they bit the bullet and moved off-peak back.
So what about the threat of banning all P2P during off-peak? Well this would only be after November, and only after they move back to a 12am-12pm off-peak period. And only if you choose that period over 1am-1pm or 2am-2pm. And it’s only banned during the first two hours. And it’s self-regulated.
A whole lot of ands really.
So I can have 60Gb of downloads over half of the month, and I either avoid P2P for two hours (which I was doing anyway voluntarily after a request another previous post from John) or move my off-peak to 2am-2pm, which since we are late risers would help us out anyway. Woah, I better get the tin foil hat out.
I still find Exetel to be extraordinary value. They usually have good service, and if it is bad they will be upfront and admit their issue. They aren’t for the faint hearted, as you have to know your stuff well and live with a support culture expecting you to find your own help in the forums, but if you can live with that you will get more from them than your regular ISP.
Free SMS from the web, they do email to fax and fax to email ($1 a month – wtf?), and more. I love them. I really do.
A bunch of people at BTUB
As always for the first Friday in the month, it was the regular BTUB meet-up at the Ship Inn. It seems that the group is getting too big for the venue now (over 80 people attended) so it will be interesting to see where we end up next month. It’s great to see so many twits in attendance and there are so many networking opportunities – it’s more than likely you will find someone with similar interests to connect with. The problem I often have with BTUB is working out who to talk to next!
What can be difficult in situations where you have a large group of people together is when you get a few people who decide to have a few too many drinks. Thankfully it seems that most at BTUB drink responsibly and don’t become a nuisance. So if you have been concerned by reports of unsavoury activities at ‘net geek’ meet-ups I think you can relax.
Another side of BTUB has shown me that I’m getting old. I can live with that. So many people that I met last night (and at other BTUBs) were considerably younger than me. The main group of people who organise these events are younglings (well to me) so it’s a credit to their organisational abilities. Perhaps some of these people who whinge about Generation Y should come along and see all the business and social networking connections being made.
We love Mustache Necklace Fun at BTUB
But BTUB is:
Come along next month, and follow the #btub hashtag on Twitter.
Thanks to a find for mine for pointing me to this Google Maps link. It’s a custom map showing details of the current Swine Flu outbreak.
It is amazing the information that is now available to us. Ten years ago something like this would be hard for ordinary people to imagine. Just think what the world will be like in another 10 or 20 years time.
The Federal Government has announced the winner of the National Broadband Network tender process. Nobody wins! Yay! I’m sure you’re thinking WTF? right about now, so lets get into some of the details.
The current tender process has been ended and the Government will create a new private-public owned company to spend $43 billion on fibre to the premises. That’s significantly better than fibre to the node. Kevin Rudd calls it “Nation building”. I call it bloody awesome.
The company structure will be such that the Government is majority shareholder and the company will provide wholesale services only. No more monopoly held by Telstra – that surely has to be a good thing. Well worth $43 billion I’d say.
90% of premises in Australia are to receive this new fibre to the premises service, which offers speeds of up to 100Mbps. That is just amazing to think about, considering most of us can get 1Mbps at the most with current infrastructure. The other 10% of Australia receives broadband through “next generation” wireless and satelite services. Speeds will only be 12 Mbps. Only.
It stinks of Nationalism. I don’t care though. Years of neglect of the country’s broadband networks by the current big players means that I’ll happily have the Government own the new network. They intend to sell down their stake-holding in the company within five years (market conditions may vary this) so I’m not to concerned at all. Just give me good Internet.
The low point of the announcement was having Senator Stephen Conroy drone on about the benefits of the package. It seems Kevin Rudd has sidelined him yet again so that he can take the glory. We didn’t need him here now and we don’t need him to filter the Internet.
I wonder whether this will be a way the Government gets their filter into our homes. If they are the wholesaler, they can say “Hey, we decide what you can access. So here, have our filtered feed. Guaranteed to be free of smut and free speech.” That is one worry, but hopefully they will work out the filter isn’t going to work anyway.
The Government also announced immediate funding to get fibre optic backbones developed into major regional centres, such as Darwin, Broken Hill, Mount Gambier and Mount Isa. This is to be done as soon as possible, so hopefully these regional centres will get some competitive broadband services soon.
Perhaps Senator Conroy could use a fibre optic backbone. Might make backflipping easier for him when it comes time to back down from the filter plan.
