Digital Divide: Three Classes of Internet Citizens

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The government’s Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB) and Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) programs will greatly improve broadband across the country, but over the nine year long process will create three classes of Internet citizens.

75% of households will eventually have access to ultra fast fibre, with an unlimited potential for speed and traffic utilization. Plans starting at 30mbps download and 10mbps upload (30/10mbps) and faster with 150 gigabytes per month (150GB/month) of traffic are on the market today, and users should reasonably expect to be able to download up to a terabyte of traffic a month at 100mbps as new plans come on the market.
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RBI: ADSL2+ Upgrades Where & When

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The Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) will bring new fibre optic powered broadband to around 750 schools across New Zealand. Along the way, RBI grant winners Chorus and Vodafone will be upgrading their existing networks to improve connectivity to surrounding communities.

Chorus is the infrastructure division of Telecom New Zealand and is likely to be its own company soon, as a result of the voluntary demerger of Telecom. After the split, Chorus will be responsible for providing ADSL service on a wholesale basis to more than 900,000 New Zealanders, via retail providers like Telecom, Vodafone, Orcon, Snap, and many others.
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The Police, PPDR & The Digital Dividend

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PPDR is an acronym for Public Protection and Disaster Relief, and in the context of New Zealand’s Digital Dividend spectrum, it stands for a new cellular data network that New Zealand’s Police want to build alongside existing commercial carriers 2° Mobile, Telecom, and Vodafone. The Police have been interested in such a network for several years, and a government working group for the issue has existed since 2006.

The network proposed by Police for the 700MHz Digital Dividend band is separate from and in addition to the Tait-supplied digital mobile radio network based on the APCO P25 standard. The Tait P25 network is being put in to upgrade Police radios, while the Digital Dividend PPDR network is intended to provide high-speed data communications to First Responders.
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Digital Dividend Discussion Submission

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In August of 2011, New Zealand’s Ministry of Economic Development Radio Spectrum Management group published a discussion paper entitled “Digital Dividend – Opportunities for New Zealand”. The Digital Dividend is defined as the part of the radiofrequency spectrum that is able to be freed up following the switch from analogue to digital television, however this discussion paper only considers the “700MHz band” of spectrum and its most likely repurpose for use by cellular telephone and broadband providers. I discuss the Digital Dividend in some detail in an earlier blog post.

This discussion document is part of a consultation process kicked off by the Ministry in April 2011, with an Auckland meeting of industry participants held under Chatham House Rule. A public workshop was held in September to discuss the paper, and written responses were due for submission on Friday the 7th of October. These submissions, including the one below, will be published by the MED, as the initial positions of various industry participants. Comments on submissions will then be sought in a cross-submissions period, with responses due the 9th of November.
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700MHz and The Digital Dividend

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As the process to release Digital Dividend radio spectrum kicks off, media outlets have started covering the issue with enthusiasm. Computerworld, The Dominion Post, NBR, and TUANZ have all featured articles on this spectrum in the last week. There’s plenty of fodder for the news, as matters of contention are both technical and market driven.

From a technical standpoint the most likely bidders (Telecom, Vodafone, and 2Degrees Mobile) agree the spectrum should follow the APT Wireless Forum’s Region 3 Harmonized FDD Arrangement, which divides the 108 MHz available into a pair of 45MHz blocks, separated by guard bands at the bottom, middle, and top of the block. This plan assumes the use of “LTE” or Long Term Evolution technology and allows for subdivision a number of ways, into spectrum for three, four, or five national cellular carriers.
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IPv4 in NZ: This Is All We Get

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IP Addresses are the foundation of the Internet. IPv4, the version used by the majority of devices on the Internet today, was defined in the late 1970s and allowed for a global network of more than four billion unique devices. Design principles stated that with TCP/IP, end to end connectivity could be established between any device on the network.

By the mid 1990s, over half of the four billion available addresses had been assigned to telecommunications providers, research and educational institutions, governments, health care providers, and commercial organizations. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), sensing impending exhaustion, ratified the replacement for IPv4, a new system called IPv6. This new system provides for an entirely new set of numbers and a network with the potential for 2^128 unique devices. IPv4 utilization however carried on, and in April of 2011 APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry servicing the Asia Pacific, exhausted the majority of its IPv4 space and entered a technical lock-down period, preventing any organization from requesting more than 1,024 new addresses for their network – full stop.
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The Economics of UFB & Committed Information Rates

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Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB) is here if you live in Whangarei, where local lines company NorthPower started building a gigabit passive optical network (gPON) in 2008 and recently signed with Crown Fibre Holdings (CFH) to be the area’s Local Fibre Company (LFC). Circuit speeds start at 30mbps download / 10mbps upload, with a Committed Information Rate (CIR) of 2.5mbps symmetric (up/down). While an end user may get 30mbps (or higher for some plans) sometimes, CIR is what they’re guaranteed to get at all times between their homes and the local exchange. Continue reading →