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It seems that a new cable is to be built between New Zealand and Australia and on to Guam, by Pipe Networks and Kordia. This is excellent news because it provides competition on international cables. Kordia is the State Owned Enterprise formerly known as BCL, and it now owns the retail ISP Orcon, so this move makes sense for them. It also makes sense for New Zealand Internet users.

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It’s been two weeks since I got my new phone, and I’m impressed. I’m still in that phase of delight which follows me getting something new from Apple, such as my first iPod or my Powerbook. The iPhone isn’t perfect, but I’m struggling to find ways in which it under-performs my old Treo 650, and there are lots of ways in which it improves on the Treo.

Read on for a fuller review.

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This week on Radio New Zealand National I talked about the core government web site at newzealand.govt.nz, how it’s starting to use some of the ideas of Web 2.0, and how the government is releasing the software that runs it as free software under the GPL. (more…)

For three years I have had a Palm Treo 650, which is one of the PalmOS based phones. That followed on from a succession of Palm Pilots I used from 2001 onwards. I liked the Palm platform – it did some nice things, and most importantly it was easy for people to develop software for so there was lots of it available. As an example, when I went to South America, I went with a Spanish-English dictionary embedded in my telephone.

And my Treo was nice. I liked the full QWERTY keyboard, the integration of the contacts list and calendar with the ones on my computer, the way an SMS conversation was laid out in a chat, and the external ’silent’ switch. Email was possible if rudimentary, and web surfing – well, you had to squint at the screen. Sometimes the phone crashed which was very annoying, but I forgave the instability for years because the phone was just so useful. Then I broke it.

I was sitting on a chair lift in France a couple of weeks ago, and I was slightly in the wrong place on the seat. When the safety bar came down, it and half a dozen burly skiers wound up resting on the screen of my Treo. And that was it for the phone. I wound up borrowing a phone in Switzerland – a small Nokia with menus in German. Then a Sony Ericson P990i in England – theoretically a smart phone, but everything I wanted to do with it was either not possible or just too hard to figure out. Then, back in New Zealand, another tiny Nokia loaner. I didn’t find it liberating trying to do without my contact list in a phone – just frustrating.

That brings me to my new phone. What to get? The Palm platform is looking pretty sick these days. I’d tried a Symbian phone (the P990i), although perhaps not the best example of one, and I was tempted by the Nokia E91i with its QWERTY keyboard and easy syncing to my Mac. But the E91i doesn’t have the SMS as chat feature that Treos have, or the external silent switch. Vodafone  sent me a new Treo as my old one was insured with them, but it runs Windows mobile not PalmOS, and won’t play with my Mac at all. So that’s on Trademe. As you’ve gathered if you are still with me, I care deeply about my technology. Call me finicky.

I have settled on an iPhone. It arrived less than a week ago so it’s early days yet, but I think we are going to get on just fine. It syncs beautifully with my Mac (of course!), has an increasing number of applications available for it, is easy to use, has the SMS chat feature and an external silent switch, and a full QWERTY virtual keyboard. Also, because it’s an iPod as well, that cuts down the number of machines I tote around on a daily basis. And it’s drop-dead gorgeous.

Here’s hoping for a long relationship!

It’s good see the unbundling starting!

Unbundling is about letting other companies have access to Telecom’s local loop. It’s taken a while – more than a while – but finally the first products are available. Orcon can now sell you a bundle involving your broadband Internet – faster than Telecom’s – and a telephone line free local and national calls, using your existing number, all for what they say is $30 a month less than Telecom.

It’s currently available in only 5 exchanges, all of them in Auckland. Orcon say they will be extending into Wellington and other cities soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in faster broadband and cheaper phone calls and you live in Auckland, have a look at the Orcon website and see whether it’s in your suburb.

Orcon are the first to launch but they won;’t be the last. Vodafone – or “Vodahug” to its friends, is definitely up for this. They haven’t launched yet, but they say they will have all of Auckland covered by the end of the year, and make a start in some of the other centres – and they are installing equipment that will give you even faster speeds, up to 50Mbps if you are close to your exchange. Incidentally my spies tell me that Telecom is being pretty good at letting people into the exchanges to install this gear – we haven’t seen keys to the exchange being mislaid as happened in Australia when Telstra was forced to go the same route. There are still problems though figuring out how Telecom’s desire to move a lot of the gear into smaller roadside cabinets will play out, but that’s something for a programme of its own. CallPlus will probably launch sometime this year as well, and I expect others to as well.

The Orcon prices certainly look keen – but the real point of unbundling is that it allows companies to try to sell a range of services of different qualities and prices, whatever they think someone might want and be prepared to pay for. So, you could imagine companies competing at least partly on price, and maybe some delivering much better, more specialist services – faster, lower latency, that kind of thing – at a higher price than Telecom did for its one-size-fits-all model. When there was only one place you could get the service that was never going to happen.

A few links:

Russell Brown’s article about the new Orcon services, and Vodafone’s release about its plans.

And before modern communications technologies, rumours were all most people heard about foreign wars. Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about how that all changed with the reporting via telegraph of a disastrous military engagement over 150 years ago.

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Some undersea cables have been cut by a ship. The results have affected Internet and phone service in the Middle East. (more…)

…is the title of an old book by Harry Harrison which I haven’t read, but I’ve always loved the title. The title captures some of the enthusiasm around connecting our world. And today, we connect our world with undersea fibre cables, as I have written about before.

In New Zealand, our international fibre – our lifeline to the world – is all provided by a single company, the Southern Cross cable company. This company, or rather its backers Telecom and Optus, had the vision and the guts ten years ago to make the large investment necessary to run fibre right across the Pacific Ocean, by two different routes. A ring of fibre provides great service and makes it unlikely that the connection can fail even if a strand of cable is cut. Imagine trying to sell that to investors in the mid 90s!

But here we are a decade down the track and no-one doubts that the Internet is key to our society and our economy, to our place in the world. Undersea cables are a fact of life – they alway have been for New Zealand, of course, but the kind of capacity and robustness provided by Southern Cross is now a necessity in a wired age. Put bluntly, no-one will want to come here or remain here if we can’t be part of the Internet revolution that is happening in developed countries around the world.

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This phrase is the epigraph to EM Forster’s 1910 novel Howard’s End, and it encapsulates both the emptiness of English society he was writing about and the capability the Internet gives us today. Yesterday I spoke at a meeting of IABC Wellington, which is a place where people who communicate for a living come together. The subject was social media – that’s wikis, blogs and so forth, and should communicators look at communicating through them? The answer I gave, as you might guess, was a resounding “yes”.

The Internet is the ultimate communications tool – using the term “communications” in its widest sense – and anyone who communicates for a living needs to be following it as it evolves. And evolve it is: social media on the Internet will drive as much of change in the way we communicate with each other as the introduction of the Internet did, and as the printing press and broadcast media did in their day. It’s good to see many communications professional getting this.

Another speaker at the event was Todd Hattori, the global chair of the IABC. He is a master communicator – as you might imagine – and I am in awe at his skills. As well as the “whether” and “how to” of social media, Todd spoke about ethics in communications. And I think he is right to – there is a stereotype of misleading PR spin, which is sadly justified on a few occasions, and Todd and the IABC are seeking to make such behaviour unacceptable. Good on them.

Earlier this week Consumer released its annual ISP survey. The big news on this, sadly, wasn’t the good, or even the excellent, but the ugly.

For the third year running, Xtra has come bottom. And not just bottom, but 42% – a massive slump from their abysmal 55% last year. On just about every dimension of customer satisfaction Consumer measure, Xtra gets a black mark.

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