‘All you can eat’ Broadband - do we really need it?
New Zealanders will have to stump up $350 each for the planned NZ$1.5 billion UFB network, while Australians will pay nearly $2,000 for their A$43 billion NBN network. The question is: What will we use them for and will it be worth the financial pain? Johanna Bennett takes a look...
It’s all about video. Or, if you’re really cynical, you might say it’s all about the illegal downloading of videos. However, the fact is no other technology chomps through bandwidth at quite the same rate.
So, any consideration of whether the new broadband networks will be worth it must focus on video. And, yes, there are an increasing number of video-intensive applications and services out there already, and they’re set to grow.
Analyst firm Gartner predicts that by 2013 fully 25 percent of what workers see in a day will be either video, pictures or audio. That’s massive growth from the estimated half percent currently. Gartner’s Whit Andrews says the popularity of video among consumers will fuel a similar interest in video within businesses.
“Consumerisation has proven a force of unmatched potency in the past and the same will be true when it comes to the explosive spike in the popularity of consumer online video, fueling a similar interest in video within enterprises.”
His view is backed up by relative newcomer to the New Zealand telecommunications market Vector. Once an electrical lines company, Vector has morphed into an infrastructure provider. It already sells capacity on its Auckland fibre-optic network and is bidding to build the valuable Auckland part of the NZ government’s NZ$1.5 billion Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB) network.
“In many respects, consumer applications have relevance for business service providers,” says Vector’s Julian Sharplin, general manager for marketing services.
Consumer use has definitely been leading the way, he says. But it’s not just about people bringing their consumer tastes to work. Practices in the consumer area have also flowed through into service delivery to businesses and to business models, says Sharplin.
He cites what is shaping up to be the other major use for high broadband capacity: the delivery of services via the cloud, or SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), as it is also termed.
Many businesses are moving to having computing services delivered via the cloud, he says. He points to Amazon’s ‘elastic cloud servers’ as an early example of this in the consumer space. He also points to Skype and its delivery of toll calls over the internet.
Skype continues to lead the way: it has just announced its new video-conferencing service or “group video-calling”.
Although this is in beta, it is promised for Mac users as soon as late 2010.
Sharplin also cites the just announced Google TV service.
Google says the “multimillion channel” service will allow search for content from the television or the web, with users being able to watch the result on their TV.
Gartner has already predicted that such consumer search will put pressure on business to incorporate the same, with content management tools being merged with digital asset management (DAM). This, in turn, will lead to the ability to incorporate video simply into other document types, says Gartner’s Whit Andrews.
“The long-promised world of connectivity is arriving, but in a slightly different format [to that expected], of equipment, plus platform, with services delivered over an IP [Internet Protocol] connection,” says Sharplin. Google TV is perhaps the perfect example of this.
Tipping point
Although this feature focuses on the new applications and services we’re likely to see riding the new broadband networks, Sharplin made a sharp observation [no pun intended] that the underlying game plan is changing.
“I believe we’re at a tipping point, and we’ll soon see services that are not vertically integrated with the network, as is traditional,” he says. Skype is a good example of such a service that rides on the telecommunications networks but is not of them, as it is delivered by an independent, says Sharplin.
Of course, as Vector sells ‘dark fibre’ – base-level network capacity with no added services on top, as is the norm with telecommunications companies – this is in its interest.
However, Sharplin says, “It’s really important to note that this [dark fibre network] is not a network for telcos, who are stuck in a traditional model. [As a result] we’ll see new forms of education and health services that will improve our national productivity it will be the new roading that will also mean we can finally get telecommuting underway.
“As KPMG said of Australia’s UFB equivalent [the NBN], ‘You only need a small gain in GDP to pay for it’.”
Down on the farm
Farmers’ lobbyist Federated Farmers is keen on farmers having access to broadband because it will boost productivity. At present, says spokesman David Broome, only half of NZ’s 16,000 farmers have access to fibre, with the remainder still being on slow copper. An additional problem is that electrical fencing interferes with copper transmission, says Broome.
While wireless services such as 3G and satellite broadband can supplement fibre, to provide a really reliable fast service fibre-optic broadband is needed.
At present, farmers are enthusiastic about the Xero online accounting service for small businesses. This is a Kiwi initiative, but is also now available in Australia, as a Telstra T-suite service.
“Farmers need the ability to run their own LAN (local area network) to not only run Xero but also to help manage livestock improvements, by giving them easy online access to genetic databases,” says Broome.
But what Broome, who describes himself as a bit of geek, is really keen on is virtual vet services.
Such services, which need fast, reliable broadband, would be one of the most useful applications for farmers, he says. First, they would help manage vets’ time – much of which is now spent on the road attending to animal health issues that could be dealt with remotely with the aid of 3D animal imaging and telemetry. The results of routine tests could be transmitted quickly back to the vet surgery, says Broome.
“These sorts of technologies are still embryonic, but 3D is already being used in military training.”
Supply chain efficiencies
In the here and now, Federated Farmers is looking at acting as a cooperative buyer on behalf of the agricultural industry. This could be done by providing a technological supply-chain service, run on the likes of SAP or Oracle, to buy in and handle inputs for farmers, says Broome.
“Farmers buy NZ$12.5 billion worth of inputs every year, everything from No.8 fencing wire up. Just a one percent improvement in buying could shave $125 million off farmers’ input bill.”
Such services, as well as specialist information, could be delivered to farmers as cloud services over broadband, says Broome. “We recently ran a ‘Farming in the Cloud’ seminar on this subject.”
Broome says that while Federated Farmers is presently a lobby shop it is seriously considering moving into the supply chain field to support farmers and aid productivity.
“Broadband connectivity will close up the tyranny of distance,” he says. He cites Sweden, which bears some comparison with New Zealand, as having recently installed a broadband network that delivers speeds of 40Mbps. We need to be looking at this, he says. “Old-fashioned, ‘near enough is good enough broadband’ is not good enough.”
YouTube takes bull by the horns
One farmer is already making innovative use of video, according to Geoff Hunt, CEO of Kordia, NZ’s third largest network owner.
Kordia is keen to make good use of both its wireless and fibre capacity – it is building a fibre-optic network in New Zealand’s Far North, as well an undersea cable, Optikor, which will link Auckland and Sydney. But it is his tale of his South Canterbury farmer friend, who is involved in the Shorthorn Bull Society that trades bull semen globally, which captures the imagination.
Obviously enjoying better-than-dial-up connectivity, the man in question one day decided to check out YouTube for similar societies overseas.
In the process, he found a picture of one of the bulls whose semen he had bought online, says Hunt. “He wasn’t walking well, so my friend said, ‘He doesn’t walk properly, if I’d seen this before I wouldn’t have bought it [his semen].”
Remote education
More conventionally, Kordia is involved in using its broadband satellite technology to facilitate remote education. Although, the current focus is on in-the-ground broadband, satellite-delivered services are starting to play a strong supporting role. Even Federated Farmers, while deploring it as “horrifically expensive”, sees it as playing a valuable supplementary role.
Hunt sees education and health in particular as benefiting from broadband. He points to the University of Auckland’s LENScience programme.
This is run by the Liggins Institute in conjunction with Kordia, which provides the satellite communications service.
The prestigious biology institute has produced a series of seminars for scholarship-level school biology students. This is delivered by videosatellite to 86 schools around the country, with the help of KAREN, the high-speed education network.
“While it may have been possible to present this seminar series using the internet, the truth is that many school networks struggle to cope with webcasts and video-conferencing,” says LENScience director Jacqui Bay.
Students can ask questions and hold discussions during the seminars via teleconference link, chat room or a wiki page, allowing them to engage with scientists and other like-minded students across the country, says Bay.
Hunt sees broadband satellite as playing a valuable role in regional New Zealand and says prices are coming down, citing rural satellite service provider Bay City Communications as offering “pretty competitive” prices now.
See the whales
The rural satellite services provider was recently involved in a pilot education programme to two remote South Island schools, in South Canterbury and in Haast, on the West Coast.
Principal Andrena Norrish told Radio New Zealand recently that the eight-week, 10Mbps trial saw her school, Winchester, in South Canterbury, go from “screeching, slow dial-up” to something a lot more reasonable.
It allowed the children to access footage of whales in motion, via YouTube video-clips, as well as identify sea creatures and clarify which ecological group various plants and animals fit into, as part of their study of the sea, said Norrish. “The children were extremely motivated and it enhanced their learning.”
They could also access the fabulous educational website Learnz, she added. Also, they went on a virtual field trip to Goat Island, near Auckland. And, in July, they’re going to watch a whale migration trip around New Zealand as it happens and participate in interviewing people on the way.
Norrish is hoping the pilot turns into something more permanent.
It’s all the in cloud
But there are other non-video intensive uses to which broadband is being put, around the delivery of software via the cloud. Cloud services don’t eat up bandwidth in quite the same way, but they do require a reliable, consistent connection.
Christchurch’s DataSouth is in the business of providing hosted or ‘cloud computing’ services. Demand has been growing over the past threeto- four years, says general manager Craig Gerken. What’s making it possible is the increasing availability of dark fibre. This is also putting these services in reach of New Zealand’s many smaller businesses, says Gerken.
In Christchurch, Enable Networks is providing this fibre. An initiative of Christchurch City Council, the fibre company is competing with the telcos and an important effect of this is the pressure it’s putting on them when it comes to throttling back on broadband speeds.
It is this which is impacting favourably on the reliability of cloud services, says Gerken. Fibre companies like Enable don’t operate on the traditional telco model, where they throttle back on speeds during busy times to control costs.
The costs in question are what telcos pay to send traffic down the Southern Cross undersea trans-Tasman cable.
The result is a more reliable, cost-effective and scalable service, says Gerken. “Without that reliable conduit in place organisations can’t do it [use cloud services].”
As a reseller of Microsoft cloud services, Gerken sees this first-hand as Microsoft’s regional data centre in Singapore. Despite this issue, cloud-delivered services are becoming more available to smaller businesses, boosting their productivity, says Gerken. He gives the example of how Microsoft Exchange can now be hosted cost-effectively for SMEs, to their great benefit.
New applications
Commenting on the new applications that will ride on the broadband networks, Gerken says that although we can see a number of them now, there will also be unknown ones.
The “known” ones centre around media and graphics, says Gerken, referring to Gartner’s projections, mentioned earlier, that by 2013 fully 25 percent of all online content will be video and graphics. “It’s currently around half a percent,” says Gerken.
Gerken believes the influence of Generation Y will be felt here. They’re used to graphics-rich communications and will push for it, he says. And good, reliable bandwidth is important for delivering this rich content.
“A lot of their training is with podcasts and video that they just hook into,” he says.
Training
In fact, the use of video for training is already quite popular – witness the proliferation of ‘how-to’ videos on YouTube. One that has been a stunning success, which is a combination of ‘how-to’ and entertainment, is Lauren Luke’s YouTube make-up tutorials. With 31 million viewers, she is the UK’s second biggest YouTube user.
The use of YouTube and value of how-to videos has not been lost on companies. Nearer to home, Auckland-based contact centre technology provider Agile is moving to using YouTube-hosted ‘how-to’ videos to instruct users in how to use their phone systems.
Videos are easy to download and people can go back to them, to help them remember what they didn’t take in during the training session – you usually only take in about 20 percent of the information, says Agile’s marketing manager, Simon Nicholson.
“It’s easier to download a 30-second video clip than to try and find the user guide.”
Off-beat internet TV
But the easy video-hosting provided by YouTube has other even more innovative uses. Jayson Bryant, who runs a wine shop called The Wine Vault in Auckland, makes a short video most days to run on his shop’s website. He has opted for Blip TV however, as, he says, it doesn’t suffer from the buffering problems that often afflict YouTube.
His videos – in which he presents – include wine-tastings and feature a range of other wine-related topics. He says he uses different internet television channels, including iTunes, to reach different demographics.
Phil O’Reilly, of brand-new internet television company Ziln, has another take on video-on-the-internet. He has launched an internet Tmall, where users can access, for free, some of the more unusual content out there. O’Reilly sees it appealing to niche audiences, for example, people who are keen on hunting.
TVNZ used to do some of this, says O’Reilly. But it has abrogated its responsibility in this area of late. But there is a demand for it – from the producers of this content who don’t have many places to show their programmes, as well as the audiences.
Currently, Ziln hosts off-beat programmes like the UK’s Black Books and the irreverent comedy Father Ted, as well as Car Talk.
Video collaboration
Futuretech Labs has yet another take on the use of video-over-the internet – or Digital TV (DTV). CEO Craig Meek has developed what he calls a DTV Online Collaboration system. It shares some of the features of video-conferencing and webinars, but with a big twist.
Meek describes the system as “an integrated collaboration platform that integrates with a company’s website so people (shareholders) can register and participate in public company meetings.”
“Rather than this just being a tool, it’s integrated inside the fabric of the company’s communications.”
Meek says DTV online collaboration brings together elements that are available in other VC and webinar products but is more focused on content and storage than they are.
“We’re more content-oriented”, he says. “We have Facebook elements, in the profile pictures of participants that feature at top of screen, [for example].”
There is also instant messaging, and the screen is split, so other information can feature on the second pane – the first one features real-time video of the speaker. The information can be presented in a variety of formats, including flash video (like YouTube), PowerPoint, Excel, Word, PDF etc.
At the moment, the product is being pitched at shareholders in large global companies, as a means of allowing them to participate more meaningfully – and question senior management – in AGMs, wherever they may be held, says Meek.
Which brings us on to video-conferencing itself, the newer high definition version of which Gartner thinks is set to replace much business travel.
Video-conferencing with oomph!
Gartner predicts that by 2012 what it calls “high-definition videomeeting solutions” will replace 2.1 million airline seats annually.
Gartner uses the term “video telepresence” to make clear that these systems are more sophisticated than older ones.
“The challenge of the current economic conditions demands that every organisation revisit the need for face-to-face meetings,” says Gartner Fellow Steve Prentice.
“Telepresence is not the answer in every circumstance and there will always be strong cultural and other reasons for face-to-face encounters, particularly in Asia. But not every meeting needs to be face-to-face and there is no doubt that telepresence and other approaches to virtual collaboration…will provide a real alternative for many businesses. Companies should put aside previous prejudices and bad memories of older videoconferencing services and seriously investigate these new technologies.”
Tandberg, which is a leader in this field, is represented by Canon in New Zealand. iStart spoke to VC specialist Dave Gee. He described how high-quality VC was coming in reach of smaller businesses with Tandberg’s Movi system.
This is proving hugely popular in New Zealand as the recent 3.1 version can deliver a business grade experience, he says. This is largely achieved by means of the system’s medium high-definition webcam – at 720p it compares well with television images, which are 1080p.
In New Zealand, NIWA (National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research) is a big Movi user, having recently bought a 500-seat licence.
“Their staff often work odd hours and you can imagine someone sitting on a rock somewhere observing the weather; this system allows them to stay in touch,” says Gee.
In Australia, with its “tyranny of distance” issue, Movi is proving a boon to remote learning. Gee gives the example of a student at Adelaide TAFE who lives three hours from the city. She used to routinely drive to and from Adelaide to attend a TAFE class. Now, via Movi, she attends the class remotely, which gives her the time to attend to her children in the evening, instead of spending hours on the road.
Lack-lustre experience
While the above paints a rather rosy picture of video-meetings, the reality, with older equipment, is rather different.
Paul Starr is an independent fisheries consultant to the New Zealand fisheries industry. His work involves a lot of travel both around the country and abroad. He also works in Canada part of the year. As such, he is a frequent video-conference user and, despite all the recent advances in this technology, finds it a variable experience.
iStart asked him about his experience because VC is seen as one of main applications set to benefit from improved broadband capacity. He says he has sat through a lot of webinars. These can last up to seven hours and while they feature instant messaging (IM), making them somewhat interactive, they’re still hard going.
Using a laptop with an audio and video link (via webcam), to view both PowerPoint presentations and other participants, inadequate audio can be a problem. It’s also difficult to see people’s facial expressions, says Starr, who feels handicapped by not being able to read people’s body language.
However, he has also experienced big VC, at the Ministry of Fisheries, where a big wall screen can show a number of participants at once. While this is better, Starr says it’s still hard to see those further away from the screen well enough to read facial and body cues properly. But he concedes that faced with the choice of a video-conference or a flight from Canada to New Zealand, VC would win out.
Even a trip to Auckland from Wellington results in a 12-13 hour day, when travel is taken into account, and is arduous, so VC can help here too – just not all the time.
“It’s never going to be as good as being there. It will always suffer from the fact that webcam resolution is low and it’s only pointing in one direction.”
Hopefully, Tandberg’s Movi desktop VC solution will help address one of these issues as desktop VC systems move closer towards television standard.
It also encapsulates nicely what broadband could do for telecommunications networks – and the services that will run on them.
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