In the past seven days we have seen two far reaching and unexpected announcements from NBN that have set in motion the next several years of upgrades to nbn V1.0 that was completed earlier this year.

As you may know, the original plan for the nbn was a universal FTTP model for the city and suburb areas of Australia with Fixed Wireless and Satellite covering the regional and remote communities.

With the election of the Tony Abbott Liberal Governments in 2013, this plan was altered to what is known as a Multi Technology Mix (MTM) network where other technologies, FTTN, HFC and later FTTC, were utilised to speed up and reduce the cost the rollout of the nbn by utilising some of the older copper infrastructure that had been deployed previously. It is arguable whether they actually saw a speedup or reduced their costs, but we will now never know for sure.

Launceston was lucky to be in the position where most of the deployment for FTTP had already commenced and we now enjoy 100% FTTP connectivity across the city and suburbs (the largest pure fibre footprint in the country) whereas other commercial areas in the state (notably Burnie, Devonport, wide areas of Hobart and other commercial zones such as the airport precincts) ended up with the FTTN network, a network that suffers from variable speed, poor reliability and quality and a hard limit of 100Mbps.

The twin announcements from nbn last week covered two main points;

• Enterprise Ethernet: That specially designated ‘Business Zones’ around the country would be earmarked to receive a lower priced premium business grade service of the nbn’s Enterprise Ethernet network if they choose. I have previously written about Enterprise Ethernet and debated the value that this service actually provides over a well provisioned regular nbn service on FTTP. However there is no doubt it is worthwhile improvement over the other technologies. These zones will see reduced pricing for new orders placed in the next 2 years and will be a quick option for businesses requiring more out of their connection than their existing FTTN/HFC/FTTC infrastructure can deliver. The process is to essentially pick a symmetrical speed tier and sign a 1 to 3 year contract. Nbn will then deliver dedicated fibre to your building within the following 3 month period.
  
  
• NEBS (aka “regular” NBN): The announcement about the upgrade of approximately half of the existing FTTN footprint to FTTP ‘enabled’ areas. This program will have a longer deployment timeframe and will involve fibre being run down the street into the existing FTTN areas of both business and residential areas. Any client that then wishes to order a speed tier from their RSP that their current technology cannot deliver will activate a works order for the nbn to visit the site and install the last mile of fibre directly into the premises. The exact mechanics of this ordering and delivery system are still to be announced.

Impact for our region

As I have mentioned in many previous blog posts, the future for any industrially advanced economy such as Australia is a strong and widespread fibre network. It’s the only technology that can deliver the large (and growing at 40% pa) amounts of traffic in an efficient, predictable and reliable manner. Since the completion of the Launceston portion of the nbn, all on FTTP, and activation of gigabit speeds across the city in 2017, Launtel have seen many local and relocated businesses from the mainland take advantage of the new possibilities and grow their businesses, without a limited internet connection getting in the way. From this point of view, Launceston doesn’t have much to gain from these recent announcements given the existing FTTP.

If we zoom out a bit though, these announcements will have a dramatic effect on the people and businesses in all the surrounding areas such as Burnie & Devonport, regional industrial hubs such as the Launceston Airport & Legana and all the surrounding small towns, not to forget the suburban areas where many small businesses start from the proverbial garage.

 

These areas are now on the cusp of having nbn services that are on a par to the services in Launceston and therefore being able to grow their businesses both locally and internationally just as we have seen businesses do in Launceston.

This will be a boon to all of these areas and will in turn have a positive economic effect on the whole region including Launceston. 

 

As an aside, there was also a further announcement made by nbn. This involved the provision of an additional $300M for regional co investment opportunities between local and state government and nbn. Launtel has recently been advocating for the State Government to step in and provide an upgrade path for the commercial areas in Tasmania that missed out on the FTTP rollout in nbn V1.0. This would have been a $50M investment in the digital infrastructure of the State and would have seen most business addresses in the state being upgraded to FTTP. The intention is to inject a post COVID stimulus and create an ongoing commercial return in more employment in digital businesses. Although the announcements made by nbn cover off a lot of these ideas, there will still be work to do. There are vast swathes of Tasmania that are covered by oversubscribed Fixed Wireless towers with no fibre backhaul and there will still be commercial and suburban areas that miss out on FTTP. 

A $50M co investment in the nbn by the state government is still a great idea, would expedite last week’s announcements and would enable a wider footprint to be covered.

While it is tempting to dwell on why we took this circuitous route and why we didn’t just do a full FTTP rollout from the beginning, at some point we have to put all this behind us and just acknowledge that we got there in the end. 

Damian Ivereigh
Launtel
28 Sept 2020

We very much welcome the announcement by NBN that they are reducing the monthly costs and mostly removing the up front fees associated with Enterprise Ethernet (EE). We expect that we will be able to offer this service in many more places and to smaller businesses than we do currently. More than likely this is NBN reacting to price reductions by other big fibre providers who they are in direct competition with and also making life harder for the fibre overbuilders. NBN are a business (though government owned) and they have a responsibility to maximise their revenue opportunity.

However we are very disappointed that this has not been accompanied by an equivalent investment in the regular NBN infrastructure (aka “NEBS”). The most obvious one being starting the upgrade to FTTP. NBN originally had a scheme called “NBN Select” where they were offering a fixed price (and relatively cheap – around $3600) upgrade to FTTP in various business areas. They were upgrading the in-street infrastructure and then inviting people to upgrade their individual premises. Once upgraded they are free to use whichever provider they like. This scheme seems to have mostly fallen away as the NBN Business team appears to now regard NEBS with a certain amount of disdain, claiming it is a low grade, residential, product.

While there is no question that Enterprise Ethernet is a good product, it is still expensive and comes with long contracts. It’s value is really only apparent when compared to non FTTP (HFC, FTTN, FTTC etc) technologies. While there are some use cases for EE where FTTP is already available, they are extremely rare in our experience. Most businesses only buy EE because the technology they have been given is not up to scratch to running a business. This is around performance, but much more importantly around reliability and certainty – the reliability and certainty that only fibre can provide.  

In some ways the fact the EE even exists is a testament to how poor the decision was to move away from the original FTTP rollout back in 2014. The original “business grade” product was Traffic Class 2, that ran over FTTP. Sales of this product were fairly poor because people realised that the standard, and much cheaper, Traffic Class 4 FTTP product was good enough for all but the large businesses. Most business applications (including conferencing systems: Teams, Webex, Zoom etc) do not need high quality, low jitter connections that EE or Traffic Class 2 provide – if they did no-one would use them. 

We have built our business on no contracts – because we prefer to keep our clients through good service rather than locking them in. EE goes against this idea due to the need to take on a long term contract from NBN. This reduces competition overall as customers are locked in to their provider for up to 3 years. There is no opportunity to change provider during that time. 

In many way NBN’s EE is a product of the classical old style telco thinking. We believe we are part of the new style, flexible telco model. A model that allows people to change speeds when they need to, change provider when they need to with a minimum of fuss (within 20 minutes). This is the same model being made available by cloud companies where you can buy computing power by the hour – think Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

If there is one thing Covid-19 has taught us is that it is not enough to have reliable internet in the office, we also need it at home as part of our desire to do more working from home than ever before.

We look forward to NBN making equivalent announcements in the much more flexible NEBS space. These are the investments that are needed to start us down the road of the inevitable FTTP upgrade for Australia.

Damian Ivereigh
Launtel
22nd Sept 2020

Today, for about 4 hours, we saw a major disruption to our voice (telephone call) network. The problem was in the systems of our upstream provider, Vocus. While we don’t have any detailed information of what failed at Vocus, it is already clear that there is a fundamental design flaw in the telephone network of Australia.

During the outage we were able to send outbound calls via an alternate carrier, such that our clients were able to make phone calls without interruption. However we were unable to do this for inbound calls. Unfortunately inbound calls are the calls that most businesses rely on for sales and so this was particularly disruptive. Why were we unable to use an alternate carrier? 

The problem comes down to the mess that our major carriers are in around managing numbers. The basic system is that each carrier announces ahead of time to all the other carriers what numbers it will accept calls for. The process for moving a number between one carrier and another is a ridiculously arduous process called “number porting”, something that often takes days or weeks. So whilst we can send an outbound call via any carrier we like (and just say it comes from xyz number), we have to allocate that same to number to a particular carrier for inbound calls beforehand during the number port process.

You would think there would be some sophisticated protocol (like “SS7”) to do this, however my understanding is that it basically comes down to ad hoc spreadsheets and the file transfer of these between the carriers.

If one of the carriers has a failure there is no method or process for us to quickly tell an alternate carrier to tell all the other carriers to send calls to the alternate carrier instead (and then onto us).

There are only a small number of large carriers that are part of this club that are allowed to send and receive calls to each other. While there are plenty of smaller players, they all have to connect via one of the club members. As you can imagine competition and innovation are rare commodities in this environment.

A good comparison to the issue can be made in the data world with a protocol called BGP. While BGP has its issues, one of the great things about it is that all players (even the smaller ones like us) are allowed to “announce” our addresses (the equivalent of telephone numbers) to the world. We are also allowed to announce via multiple routes, so if one upstream carrier fails another can quickly (in a minute or two) take over, resulting in minimal disruption. Could this technically be done for phone calls, indeed it could – most modern signalling protocols (e.g. SIP that is used by your VoIP phone) can easily handle this.

So unfortunately there really was nothing that we, Launtel, could do about the Vocus outage today. We could choose a different carrier, but in reality all of them will have outages and this is the first system outage they have had in a few years. All providers have to do the same as we do and get their calls through a large provider who is a member of the club.

The one thing we cannot do and the only way to get a fully reliable system, is to use multiple carriers for inbound calls.

Damian Ivereigh
Launtel
15 June 2020

Launch Announcement

As we focus on being Australia’s most innovative ISP, and grow our number of direct connections across Australia, we’re launching a new connection option called FastAF.

#FastAF gives users the confidence that they’re getting the best download connection speed physically possible.

Launtel were the first to launch Gigabit connections in Australia 3 years ago and soon after implemented a User Portal that offered our customers the ultimate flexibility. 

Fast As Fibre is based on the new NBN 1000/50 connection being released on Friday 29th May. 

Not only are we offering FastAF at $4.60 per day, but the Launtel User Portal also allows you to pause the service (stop daily charges) for when you’re away on holiday, change speeds up and down and of course there’s a 7 day free trial for your first week with Launtel.

Assuming a user decides to stay on FastAF without switching to other options in the month, the price for this “up to Gigabit” speed connection amounts to a market leading $139.91 (inc GST) per calendar month.   

We’ve also invested heavily in our nbn network and backhaul capacity to ensure that you experience the fastest speeds possible without peak time slowdowns. You should expect minimum download speeds of 400mbps up to 950mbps. 

We’ve also banished the use of the word “plan”, and are instead reverting to ‘daily options’ to remind everyone that you can choose the speed you have on a daily basis. 

Over 450,000 Australian homes with FTTP and HFC will have access to #FastAF connections. It isn’t available to customers who are in our Vocus/LoLow connection areas, yet, but we’re constantly switching more areas on to direct Launtel Premium connections. There’s also a symmetrical option in there too for those wanting faster uploads!

Check which type of service and connection is available at your home anywhere in Australia here.

Thanks for reading,

Damo
Founder of Launtel

Damian will be live on our Facebook page on Thursday night at 7 doing an AMA with Tech Man Pat to answer your questions about FastAF.

So I’m sure, like many other Australians, you’ve noticed that we’re doing quite well in the battle against COVID19 and how there’s now talk of moving towards elimination rather than just suppression. If we could achieve elimination this would allow us to substantially lift the current lockdown and resume our lives in a relatively normal way.

Elimination is a bit of misnomer because it wouldn’t really be eliminated, but instead reduced in prevalence to such a degree, that we can reasonably hope to catch the virus every time it takes hold again and starts to spread. This is done through a combination of large scale testing and harsh isolation measures of people infected.

A big part of this process is contact tracing where every time a test comes back positive it’s important to quickly trace all of the people the infected person has been in contact with. This is where “The Trace Together App” has been proposed by the Australian Government as a key (but not the only) tool to do this. In essence the pitch is “give up some of your privacy and you can be released from the lockdown we’re in”.

Various authorities have described the need for this app to be taken up by at least 40% of people for it to be effective. The app is based on a similar one developed by the Singaporean government who’ve so far only obtained about a 20% take up in what’s typically regarded a significantly more compliant population than Australia. 

There’s been some hysteria about exactly how much privacy we’re being asked to give up. Some have described it as tracking all your movements and sending it back to the government, which isn’t the case. All reports so far say that it uses Bluetooth technology to record who you’ve been around not GPS, so it doesn’t know where you’ve been.

The government have a strong need for people to trust that their privacy will be protected and so far they’ve done a spectacularly bad job at doing this. After all the past scares about cyber security including the Census bungle, the Data Retention Laws etc, the Australian Government has some way to go before the Australian people consider it trustworthy around privacy. So my prediction is that this app will be a complete waste of time due to the low take up rate.

So could it be done better? Could it be done in such a way that people wouldn’t have to trust the government with their privacy? The answer is yes. Using a “Protocol” rather than “Platform” approach along with some open source code practices.

The Protocol 

 

The first way the government could gain a massive amount of trust would be to release the software source code to the app it’s developing. Then we can look at their code and see if truly does what it is only intended to do and in particular doesn’t do anything that they aren’t telling us about. We’re clearly not all coding experts, but there are enough experts who we trust that could give us their opinion.

However, why not go a stage further and actually throw away the code from Singapore and make it a home grown open source project here in Australia? It need not be limited to a single one – people could download the app created by the group that they trust most.

The government would set out the “protocol” which would define how these apps are to interact with each other, how the data is stored and how the data is released.

It would be totally possible to avoid the government ever having the information without your permission.

I imagine a scenario like this:-

1. The app is downloaded and a single random number is created – this number is only stored on the phone and is unique to you.
2. The app turns on bluetooth and watches for interactions with other phones.
3. Once an interaction has exceeded a criteria (as defined by the government protocol) the two phones running the app swap the random number generated in step 1. These numbers are stored along with the date/time on the phone only. Note that these are just numbers, nobody knows who they belong to.
4. Everyone’s app also subscribes to a list of electronically published numbers that the health authorities would like to contact.
5. If at some point in the future you test positive to COVID19. At that point you are asked, but not forced, if you would be willing to share either your random number and/or your list of numbers (interactions) – there are subtle privacy differences here but either will work.
6. Your number is then either added to the list of numbers that other people’s apps should check to see if they have had any interaction with, alternatively a number could be broadcast saying “we need to contact this person”.
7. Your app would then offer up a notification to you saying that the health authorities would like to contact you. You can choose to follow this or just ignore it as you see fit. 

Using the above protocol/procedure and open source code to actually perform the function, the aim of the health authorities could be achieved (contact tracing) without the people involved ever revealing their location, or even proximity to anyone else without their express permission, which would only be sought if it was needed for the purposed of COVID19 tracing. 

Damian Ivereigh
Launtel
20 April 2020

Unfortunately due to the generally poor state of Australia’s internet infrastructure (don’t get me started), testing your internet speed has become a bit of national obsession. We buy plans based on the speed of the connection and get grumpy if our provider doesn’t supply those speeds.

When you think about it this is a pretty crazy state of affairs and is really an indication that what we have probably isn’t enough. Compare that to Europe where most people have no idea how fast their connection is. “It’s fast enough for me”, said a friend of mine in Poland on what turned out to be a 400Mb connection after I suggested he run up a speedtest.

Measuring the speed of your connection is something akin to wanting to know what the amperage rating of the power cable coming into your house. We don’t know because it’s enough for a house and unless we are planning to build a factory there, we don’t and shouldn’t care about it.

Unfortunately to test your speed isn’t quite as simple as spinning up https://speedtest.net, connecting to whatever server it reckons is your closest and hitting GO. It will give you a measure, but is it useful? Will it tell you how fast you can download a file or whether it is enough to watch 4K Netflix? Unfortunately, it probably won’t.

To understand why, we need to delve a little into the way data is moved across the internet and in particular over the most widely used protocol called “TCP”. Moving data around is not like sending water down a pipe, it is more akin to sending water down a trench. With water if you put too much water at the beginning of your trench, it will overflow and will not make it to the other end. Assuming we have plenty of water available, we probably won’t care about this as long as enough water makes it. One bit of water is the same as the next bit.

However data is quite different, it all has to eventually get there – you don’t want holes in your downloaded file. So anything that overflows has to be detected and resent by the sender. This re-sending process is a waste of capacity and effectively reduces the overall speed of downloading, so should be minimised. So the TCP algorithm incorporates in it a system for pacing it’s sending rate until it just starts to see lost data as an indication that it is going too fast and is overrunning part of the link. It called an congestion avoidance algorithm. It gets this information from the receiver who is constantly sending back information about what packets it has received and therefore what is missing. The key thing to understand is that any lost data creates a signal (via the receiver) to the sender to slow down its sending rate.  

On a perfect data transmission channel no data will get lost until it exceeds the data rate of the channel, at which point data packets will be lost and the sender will peg back its sending rate to match the capacity of the channel. Given that most transmissions are over multiple channels with different data rates, the system quite correctly slows itself to match the speed of the slowest (least capacity) segment.

However what happens if part of the link isn’t working perfectly well and starts losing occasional random packets? The algorithm will mistakenly believe it needs to slow down to try an avoid this packet loss. You run up a speed test and your speed is much slower than it should be. What is the most likely cause of this packet loss? Your wifi! Wifi is a radio system, it is subject to interference and particularly in apartment building, congestion – too many people trying to use the available radio capacity at once. 2.4GHz wifi has just 3 channels, 5GHz has many more, around 30, but because of the higher frequency will not go so far. Once the signal gets too faint you have more packet loss.

Unfortunately this effect of random low level packet loss is not constant. Because of a side effect of the way the TCP algorithm works, latency, the time between a bit of data being sent and the signal back from the receiver, has a massive effect. A lower latency (closer) sender can cope with much higher packet loss than a higher latency one. This is due to delays in the sender algorithm getting updates on what is going on, it tends to overshoot or undershoot the correct sending rate more often.  

The net result is that if you run a speedtest to a server just 5ms away over  your dodgy wifi you will still get a high speed reading. Try the same test to one 30ms away and your reading is much lower. So which is correct? The answer depends on what you are using your connection for. If you are in Perth and most of your traffic comes from Sydney (because in Australia almost everything is hosted in Sydney), then getting a speedtest reading to a server in Perth isn’t very useful, because that is the not speed that you will be seeing in real life.

At Launtel we have recently taken on services via Vocus. The downside of this arrangement is that, at least in the short term, all the traffic is “backhauled” to Sydney before being handed to us. So the closest place we can put a speedtest server to you is in Sydney. Given that most people’s traffic is going to go to Sydney anyway, this is not an issue, but it will affect the speedtest results when comparing to another RSP who has a speedtest server much closer to you. However I would argue this isn’t real. What is worse is sometimes people test against a local server from our network and then the traffic has to make the trip to Sydney and then back to the local server, increasing the latency even more.

However at this point I need to remind you that it is not the latency that is the problem, it is the low level packet loss plus the latency that causes this discrepancy in speed between a local test server versus a remote one. So if you are seeing this, the first step has to be to remove the most likely cause: your wifi. Run the test using a cabled in PC (sorry mac people, I know you guys can’t stand cables, but you will have to get an ethernet adapter!). If that is still showing a difference then there is an issue in your NBN connection or our network. Remember if you seeing a fast reading from a local speedtest server, it is likely it masking your problem. Unless you can understand the result you should always run a speedtest to Sydney on any RSPs network, because that is probably the one you care about. 

In the meantime we will continue to roll out our network and put speedtest servers close to people, even though it is technically pointless, just because it is good for marketing and avoids me having to explain the above. 🙂

Damian Ivereigh
Launtel
March 9, 2020