Report on Perth Consumer Consultation Meeting, 5 November 2003
ISOC-AU would like to thank Optus for providing a conference room for the meeting, and also Narelle Clark and Isobel Kay for arranging the venue. Meeting participants were advised that this consultation process is supported by funding from the Department of Communications, IT and the Arts.
Participants began by mentioning their own areas of Internet interest, then the discussion ranged widely over issues with broadband delivery, wireless, open standards, education, regional telecommunications, performance, infrastructure options, spam, denial of services and user education.
Usage of the Internet
- Internet perspective as a user, and now from point of view of a carrier with around 40% of Internet traffic, and seeing significant change in Internet uses since 1992. Good to be able to talk to users, about their needs: VPN to VOIP.
- Believe that the best aspect of the Internet is the common set of standards for internetworking - IP, HTML, FTP and other protocols.
- Use the Internet a lot for policy research. Students are now studying it as a social technology, could not run academic courses without the Internet to deliver to overseas students.
- Strong concern about the performance of ADSL and its availability. WA has the lowest access to ADSL at 13% of geography, even many people in Perth cannot get access (see below).
- Issue with domain names and registration - invoices are deemed to be misleading by auDA, people end up paying for domain names that are junk, domain name squatting is continuing, though industry is maturing.
- Currently the WA government is working on projects to roll out 'DSL standard' services to rural and remote regins.
- ISP Bright is looking at rollout of fibre services, currently a trial, to new land developments (eg Victoria Park), looking at higher bandwidth services with rates to be released in the next few weeks.
- Personal focus is free software, open standards and end to end
availability. ADSL seems to have become a standard but is not delivered as
a symmetric product. The wireless community around Perth have proven
you can build a network without a major telco - about 1000 active
people who wish to use 802.11b, about 100 with active links,
http://www.nodedb.com shows
geographic locations.
- Major usage for software development. Interoperability and open
standards are essential, particularly Web open standards. IP address space
is becoming an issue, now looking to transition to IPv6.
- Strong interest in domain names, using the Internet since 1994-95,
connected via RIM, blocked from access to ADSL. ISPs could look at test
criteria for access, currently tested at 1.5meg despite the lower levels
of service being requested.
- How can other ISPs hope to be competitive against Telstra if buying
wholesale from Telstra? 95% of WA is either Telstra or Telstra resale.
- ACCC decision on pricing did change retail prices, but WA did not get pay-tv cables. Perth has an opportunity with laying of underground power cables, a local high bandwidth provider could be possible.
Regional Provision
- Internet was essential for running a business based in the Pilbara,
administered from Perth, especially for banking and government
information and services.
- Recently involved in the Telecommunications Needs Assessment - a
state government survey of communications needs in regional and rural
WA published in August 2003, more than 1000 households and 1000
businesses were surveyed, many face to face discussions on usage,
satisfaction, key problems. Speed is the major issue, next is access to
a second phone line including cost. General view is that takeup is
higher in metropolitan areas but study showed that takeup is actually
higher in more remote areas - up to 80% of households on the Internet
and using it more than twice a week. The survey is available on CD and
at The Department of Industry and Resources, see
Telecommunications Needs Assessment.
- Is DSL a panacea or a stopgap solution? It will not serve all areas because of distance and speed limitations.
- Multimux approach only 40% worked, but now Telstra has backed away from this solution. But people should be able to choose their relevant solution, not a standard performance criteria. People choose the affordable solution, regional dialup has poor performance in rural areas because of old cable.
- Lack of regional options for high bandwidth domestic: satellite, cable, but latency has been resolved for user experience on satellite with coding and compression compared to traditional approaches, IPstar satellite solution may be promising, latency is very important for video conferencing type applications, the 'old Internet' applications no longer applies because we are looking at a new generation of applications.
Performance and Information Delivery
- The use of the Net has gone beyond a novelty, the frustrations of dialup are becoming too great. The recent BigPond email fiasco was predicted 4 months prior to the event and now ADSL is projected to suffer a major degradation of service about six months from now. The current design of ADSL network won't survive the popularity of the service, but Telstra is offering it as a business grade service. WA spends 2.5 billion dollars on telecommunications a year. Small Internet service providers' traffic has been doubling each year, pricing is substantially less than before, and they are delivering services that business need eg combined voice and data.
- Will a public infrastructure be able to deliver defined performance criteria suitable for business requirements, eg latency? Internet has provided a good trade off between price and performance, but will the Internet be the saviour for business applications?
- The actual experience with wireless applications - the Class licenced sticker on the box will not ever be delivered, actual delivery will be slower, actual throughput will be around 5meg for 802.11b with single user in perfect conditions, but shared experience could be 1meg, interference has not been an issue for throughput degrades.
- Always on is even more valuable than speed, many services provided over the internet are not geared to handle DSL type speeds, surety of connection is important, dropouts of dialup are very frustrating.
- Whole of government aggregation of online services is very important. Also, business now highly dependent on DSL services.
- Looking to .gov revolution, due to government capacity to spend on trading in information, does ISOC-AU need to be more active in e-governance to support democratic interaction, privacy concerns, vast cost savings available to government from online provision?
- Internet in two views: substitution of communication method (eg going to the bank), and knowledge economy, where people get access to information that allows them to do things better, eg information to citizens is improving, eg workcover reforms.
- Access to information is often easier than the phone book, see also onlinewa.wa.gov.au
New Infrastructure
- Definitions of metrics important: according to one definition of broadband in metro areas, 15000 homes have alternative broadband access, but with a different definition could be 60000 eg cable fibre coax - a change to set top box could provide 2meg.
- Elements of the last mile have been solved, but some new estates are sold with cable in the ground, yet still have no service - the cost of providing a link back to Perth is prohibitive.
- Much advertising of broadband, but cannot get it or having problems with it, this is the spin vs reality, eg West Perth exchange. Implementing a standard for infrastructure could help, stuck between investing and not having take up or not investing, service level standards.
- Unique problems for WA, time warp, copper network is 100 year old design, difficult to press this into service for data, big organisations are installing fibre to their premises to get the bandwidth, but further away from that for domestic premises.
- New land developments are being provided with fibre now, but provision of conduit is critical - case studies for schools estimate $60000 cost, compared to only $5000 if ducts had already been in place. Councils need to make sure the ducts are available, in Canada local councils own the ducts in the street and cablers rent this space.
- Bright Communications has access to rights of way, can run cable up with the power lines, fibre along existing wires and existing ducts, can deliver more than Internet, also telephone, pay-tv and video.
- WA government associated with underground power project by Western Power, but expensive - good for metrpolitan areas with new trenches and subdivisions, but not economic for regions.
- Two methods of delivery with undergrounding power, second trial is to run it on the power line - that could apply in regional areas, it is fibre to the curb with copper to the house.
- Copper has 3 km limit, fibre 100 km. Fibre will gradually replace copper in the regions but over perhaps 20 years.
- Don't underestimate wireless and don't underestimate the capacity of copper network, could reach 100 Mb on copper in the lab, and wireless solutions possible as well!
Spam, DoS, Viruses, Filtering and User Education
- Spam has not been mentioned so far - has legal issues crossing borders, also defamation, copyright etc, but would the legislative cure be worse than the disease?
- Much SPAM could be resolved by ISP filters, but for example, cutting ICMP traffic from USA caused user complaints. Optin and optout could work well, but creates significant load on the ISP.
- Spam filtering caused problems for a society members' list of about 300 addresses - ISP restrict number of messages with the same subject line. (Could be avoided with mailing-list software like Majordomo, Mailman.)
- Concerted denial of service attacks are also a major problem, eg a recent streaming media attack on particular ports which took down services.
- Viruses result from dominance of Microsoft, reason that availability of open source software is essential.
- Important for societies like ISOC-AU to work to preserve the Internet's functions, and hold event like this in future.
- Must continue pressure to upgrade services for WA's future economic development.
- Education of new users to the Internet is a continuing challenge to provide the right information at the right time.
Tony Hill, President ISOC-AU
Kate Lance, Executive Director ISOC-AU
5 November 2003