BrainBeat Productions Multimedia blog

I feel now that the coalition has released their “brodband” plan (or lack there of) that it would be appropriate to comment on my views of the plans on the table for the future of Internet in Australia. I am not affiliated with any party but as an Internet based business I feel I have a good understanding of what is the best option for the future of Australia. Blow I have highlighted some of the some of the key points of both plans in order to be fair with my comments.
Labor’s plan

• offers speeds between 12mbps (for wireless) up to 1gigabit (was 100mbps up until the 12/8/2010)
• As the bulk of the roll-out is with optical fibre it is somewhat future proof as if the now 1 gigabit is not fast enough they can always upgrade the hardware in the exchanges and offer 10gigabit or more as the theoretical maximum capacity of a single optical fibre strand is at least 100TBPS (100000 times faster than the current proposed maximum)
• 93% of Australia’s population will be covered by the optical fibre network
• the remainder of Australian homes and businesses will be serviced by a combination of next generation wireless and satellite technologies with a minimum speed of 12Mbps
• cost up to A$43 billion

problems with Labor’s plan

• while not strictly part of Labors NBN plan it is a key related issue and that is the mandatory internet filter which is a good idea in theory there are a lot of major problems with it. It will slow down internet throughput, it is mandatory, what is blocked is secret and could be abused making us like china and other states with similar filters restricting free speech, it is easily bypassed with a proxy server and so is unlikely to stop anyone who wants to get access to the banned content anyway.

Liberals plan

These are direct quotes and paraphrases from  http://www.liberal.org.au/Latest-News/2010/08/10/Real-Action-on-Broadband.aspx

• To offer speeds between 12 to 100mbps
• total cost of $6.315 billion over seven years completed by 2017
• $2.75 billion to build a nation-wide competitive fibre optic ‘backbone’
• $750 million for Fixed Broadband Optimisation to significantly increase the number of households which can receive a DSL service or high speed equivalent.
• Up to $1 billion in grant funding for new fixed wireless networks in rural and remote Australia.
• Up to $1 billion in investment funding for new fixed wireless networks in metropolitan
• $700 million to support the provision of improved satellite delivered broadband services to the last three percent of the population.
• Access prices will be set under the telecommunications access regime administered by the ACCC

Problems I can see with this plan

• Short sighted reusing an old plan from when they were last in power.
• Unlikely to improve internet speeds for people who are stuck on a Telstra rim at least for a while
• Relies on the market to drive build and invest in the networks which they have and would already be doing
• Relies somewhat on 4G mobile technology which at this stage is still in testing and can\’t be fully rolled out until the analogue TV signals to be switched off. This technology is always going to be rolled out by the phone and other companies. In theory 4G wireless internet has a maximum speed of 1gigabit but in reality you would only be able to get about 1 1/10th that much and could well be a lot slower than that if more than 1 person is also downloading from the same tower.
• Wireless internet is more convenient for not being tied to 1 place true but there is a very significant price premium for this option and download capps are still very small compared to fixed line internet.
• The 100mbps fixed speed connections will only be available to Telstra and Optus cable customers and possibly only in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane

To sum up With Labours plan we will get a future proof offering to 93% of housholds at a cost up to A$43 billion and a mandatory internet filter. Or with the Liberals a short-sighted patch job which will not deliver anything new to the majority of Australians and to keep the Telstra monopoly going.

This morning the Prime Minister of Australia has announced that the Federal Government in partnership with the private sector will build an Australia wide fiber to the home network. This was a surprise as the general thought was one of the bidding consortium would win the tender to build the network. I do approve of the Governments move to build and hopefully own the network themselves as that way we should not have the problems that we have been having with the current telephone network. I like a lot of people felt that when the previous government sold of Tel$tra they should have sold it as a telephone provider and retained ownership of the infrastructure. By the government owning the infrastructure and not one company then each player in the market has a fair go and not have a monopoly on the market who can force their own way and potentially hinder or exclude their competition.

By going down the fiber to the home approach we gain some big advantages over what some of the other proposals where. Fiber to the home pretty much future proofs the Australia’s communications for the next 50 years at least (maybe more). Australians will get broadband speeds comparable to many countries in the world and not the slow one we have now (dial up and ADSL). True a lot of people do have ADSL2+, cable, and even there are some who already have fiber to the home (mostly in the ACT and some other suburbs around Australia) Fiber links can provide tera bits per second not the ~24MBPS we have now. It will also allow a whole new entertainment revolutions to take place by having such high speeds the general public will be able to whatch HD movies on demand as well IPTV.

I look forward to hearing more about the proposal and I hope they start constructing the network soon.

Edit: you can find the press release here

In a previous post I highlighted the BOINC project which is a global distributive computing shell which allow research group do to use users idle computing power to process data and so help with their research. That leads me to this post where I thought you might be interested in looking as some stats on how much data I have been processing. The below two images are both for all the projects we run here. The reason that there are 2 is that half of the my brother (dns) join us up for and the other I did and we have not bothered to combine them. Both images are generated real-time by the BOINC stats website and are linked to it. If you ever want to find out more information about how you are going with respect to the rest of the world or even you self a few months the BOINC stats website has it all there layout out in a neat and easy navigable way.

I thought I would also put the stats for the team we are a part of ( Boinc@Australia) too.

long time reader of this blog will know that I have had problems with my Netgear DG834g router since I upgraded my internet account to ADSL2+ where is would at time drop out every few minutes. Now with Internode my isp offering annex m on their ADSL2+ extreme plans I decided to bite the bullet and get another. After much searching I decided on the Billion BiPAC 7401VGPM router as I if fully ADSL2+ and annex M compliant.From a lot of reviews I have read it is one of the best routers for throughput while maintaining good line stability. The router also has many other useful features like a b/g wireless capability, VOIP port, strong Firewall, 4 port Ethernet switch.
From my testing of it over the last few days I have found it to be a lot more stable that my previous with me only having it lose syince once other that the times I have restarted the router etc. I have also found that it was it has synced and good speeds but still falling significantly short of the the theoretical maximum speed of ADSL2+ for downstream but on upstream it has been very good with the bes sync of 2.38Mbps. on a throughput front I have been able to download files at up to 1.5MBps and upload at up to 260kBps which are both very good. It seems that the strength of the signal from the wireless antenna is slightly higher that what I has previously making the wireless experience better and faster.

When Setting up the router I was presented with a very large range of options with which you can set. Some reviews have stated that it is too complicated to set up, to some extent I would have to agree that it is not a great router for a beginner as you can certainly get lost in the options. I however feel that the more options available the better as you can set it up exactly how you want it to run as apposed to what some quick setup page can produce. On the web interface I found it to be nice and clean and well laid out It can be hard to find some options as they are places in places where you would not expect them or requiring to go through another page to get to them. Throughout the setup I only came with a few problems one of which as when I turned on the firewall on at all a majority of programms that require acces to the internet could not connect to get the working requires opening the ports they use to connect to the Internet. The other was with my website where I set up a ‘virtual server’ to point to my website but when I tried accessing my website from within my network I was unable to connect and the page would time out. I did some testing and found the it was still working to the Internet but not to my intra net. I ended up finding the only soluting was to set the router to its factory defaults and setting it up again and have found it to be working fine now. I am thinking that there may be a bug in the current firmware causing the problem.

Overall I have found that this is a much better device that what I had been using previously and would recommend anone who is looking to buy a new router to take a look at the Billion 74x range of routers.

For those who are wondering what annex M is, it as a ADSL2+ standard which increases the theoretical maximum upload speed of an ADSL2+ connection from 1.2Mbps to 2.4Mbps. And I hear you say why is this important and the simple answere is the higher the speed of my upload (or bandwidth) the more people who can connect to my website and at faster speeds.

A few weeks ago Firefox 2 was released and I thought I would highlight the changes in this new version and give you my impressions from using it. First off the interface has been given a face lift with nothing really changed but more of an update of the icons. Here Is a list of all of the changes and added features in the new version. Built-in phishing protection, Enhanced search capabilities, Improved tabbed browsing, Resuming your browsing session, Previewing and subscribing to Web feeds, Inline spell checking, Live Titles, Improved Add-ons manager, JavaScript 1.7, Extended search plugin format, Updates to the extension system, Client-side session and persistent storage, SVG text, New Windows installer. For a more information about the changes and additions take a look at the Firefox website.

Of all of the new features I have found the resuming your browsing session the most usefull as it alows you to continue where you left off browsing the previous browsing session. This feature has been available in the Opera browser for the last few years and so I applaud the programmers for including this feature in Firefox 2. I have however found that it does not allways recover from where you last were browsing especially when you close Firefox and the open it again without restarting the computer.

I have kept one computer with Firefox 1.5 here so I could do a comparison and found the there was an update for it after Firefox 2 was released so It would appear that it will be continued to be supported for a while until a majority of users and extension makers upgrade to the new version.

As I have previously stated I would recommend you download Firefox and try it yourself as you will get a faster, safer and more pleasant browsing experience than with Internet Explorer.

This week I would like to highlight an open source distributive computing project call BOINC. BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing and is a wrapper program that allows various scientific project to use computing power from every day people to further their research. The first project created to use BOINC was SETI which was an independent project who are looking for radio signals from extra terrestrial sources. There are now 10 full projects and and over 10 in alpha and beta releases. Some of the projects include Climate prediction (where they are trying to model what would happen to the earths climate if different factors are altered ), Einstein@home (is a project looking for gravity waves), Rosetta@home ( protein folding for medical research) and many more. There is a comprehensive website that keeps all of the stats for all of the participants which can be great encouragement for you to continue to contribute. I have been running BOINC on computers since it started as I always have some computers on and they are not always doing anything so I thought that it could be both beneficial to me and to the community at large. I am apart of the group BOINC@Australia  which is the 31th ranked group in the world and the top Australian group by a long way. If you have computers that are regularly idle and want to contribute to the advancement of science and help find a cure for cancer or other diseases and others I urge you to download a copy of BOINC, and if you are an Aussie then why not join us in BOINC@Australia.

Today I thought I would write a review of my experiences with using the new Yahoo Mail Beta. Fist of all it has been designed to look and feel like a stand alone email client. All actions are now dynamic where you now see your emails appear strait away in the email window as apposed to what you had to do before of having to open an email in to a full window. You are now able to move emails between folders a lot easier than before as you can now simply click and drag 1 or many files to their new folder. They have also added an RSS feed reader but I have not been able to add any feeds other than the ones that are built in. It is also possible for you to open many emails at once as they have added tabbed browsing, I think this could be very useful feature in the future. I have found that the overall performance of the new design far slower that what it was with the old design or a stand alone email client. I have also found that not all features may be been included yet. I have tried sending an where I wanted to include a Hyperlink and was unable to see any buttons to do so or any automatic conversion to complete my task so I had to go without.

As Yahoo Mail Beta is still a Beta version there are obviously some features that may yet be changed and added and overall I think it will be an improvement over the previous version.

The first open source program I thought I would review is Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla Firefox was created to be a standalone web browser as apposed to it’s bigger brother Mozilla which has a web browser, news and email client, WYSIWYG editor, and more all in one interface. I have been using Firefox for the last few years now as my primary web browser and have been very happy with the experience. There are still the odd page that is unviewable in Forfox as they have been developed by web developers who don’t care about sticking to web standards a create paged for the inferior Internet explorer only. I have also found some stability issues when using third party plug ins such as flash occasionally causing the browser to crash.

There are many reasons why I use Firefox over its competition and here they are:

• I like to support the work the open source software community.

• It is regularly updated to fix any security issues and program faults where Internet explorer will only have any problems fixed after a problem has been found and heavily exploited. Updates are automatically downloaded when a new version is released and is installed the next time you run Firfox.

• It has tabbed browsing so you can easily brows pages from multiple websites in one window and not clutter up your status bar.

• More secure and user friendly to use than Internet Explorer as it blocks unwanted spyware, addwear, viruses, popups, and even advertising.

• It is a small download taking up less than 5Mb

• It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 44 languages (some are not available as of yet with the most recent update)

• It requires very low hardware specifications to run only requiring a 233MHz and 64Mb or RAM.

• Webpages load faster while accurately displaying the page as is was intended (as long as the page is not using IE only code).

• It has an integrated search function where you can use Google or many other specialized search engines.

• There are hundreds of extension plug-ins that you can download to further enhance you browsing experience (I personally use a few different website development ones to he me create better web pages as well and other general ones).

• It contains a fully functionally RSS feed reader where you can subscribe to a feed from a website and get updates of changes without having to visit the website itself.

• Firefox is the most W3C compliant browser.

I urge everyone to download a copy of Mozilla Firefox for themselves and try it out. You will get a faster more secure userfriendly experience all for free.

As a small business owner I am always looking for a way to keep my cost down, one way I have found is to use open source software (OSS).Open-source software is computer software whose source code is available under a copyright license that permits users to study, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form (wikipedia 2006). I thought that I would start a new series of reviews of various multimedia and business related programs that I regularly use to show that you don’t always have to pay lots of money for good software. Some of the reviews in this series will include OpenOffice.org, Gizmo project, Mozilla Fire Fox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Gimp and Gimpshop, Ink scape, BOINC with more to be added later.

Yesterday I thought I would try out Google Analytics on my website. From what I have seen of its statistics if seems a lot more informative than the current website hit and click analysis package i am using being webalizer. The set up process is very easy and straightforward only taking a few steps to set up.

• First you need a Google or Gmain account - I already had an account so that step was done.
• Then you had to decide if you wanted to have a Google Adword account attached to Analytics - I am at this stage not interested in advertising using Adwords, however I am think I might try putting some advertising on the blog.
• Then you have to put in an email address to get an invite code to use Analytics as Google say that the service is very popular and may not be able to allow you to create an account immediately. I put my email address in and got and email promptly from google with the invitation code.
• Then you put the Invitation code in the field on the registration page.
• Then you need to put in some basic information about you (name) and the website ( account name, website address, timezone etc.)
• And lastly you need to copy a small piece of Java script code and place in in the html of all of the pages you want statistics gathered for.

Once you have completed all of the steps all you have to do is wait for some traffic on your website and then view the reports. You are able to set up filters so that Google does not count all of your visits to your website as well as as set up traffic targets.Analytics can produce a whole lot of reports target to 3 groups executives, marketers and web masters. One of the best features that all statistics are updated on an at least hourly basis so you can always see what traffic your website is getting any time of the day as a posed to most sever based analysis programs which normally only update 1 time a day. For anyone wit a website I would recommend you to check out Analytics for yourself. It is not perfect mainly as your website will load a fraction slower as there is more to download and process but seems like s very useful tool especially if you are also run advertising campaigns with Google.

Brainbeat Productions