How technology could prove crucial in the Australian election | Bangkok Post: tech

COMPUTER Currents

I have been following the election process down in Australia. The big ticket IT item for one of the major parties is the National Broadband Network. The stated plan is to connect 95 percent of homes there using a fibre optic connection to provide 100MBPS connectivity and even 1GBPS to each home user. The party concerned uses Singapore, South Korea and Japan as examples of how this is possible. The media in Australia tends to be somewhat one-sided and this extends all the way down to the PC and computer magazines.

Luckily for those who live in Thailand, a technical analysis of such a scheme is possible, which since this article is being written before the results of the election are known, will either indicate how the plan is going to fare when they try to implement it, or why it was subconsciously rejected by the majority of Australians. Don't get me wrong - such a connection would be wonderful if it was cost-effective and delivered the speeds promised, but a purely technical analysis shows why this may not be feasible.

For fibre to be connected directly to a home, there needs to be an optical switch and processing at the termination point. Unlike a regular modem, which is also required, this equipment is expensive. As one importer explained, they cost around $1,000 (31,400 baht) per unit. The same kind of technology is also required at the exchange or switching centre, so the per-house costs are significant as numbers grow.

The examples of Singapore and Japan are also misleading. Not every home in Singapore has a connection today and Singapore is a small, self-contained island state. By Japan, they also mean parts of Tokyo. When the sheer size of Australia is considered, the idea of connecting the majority of homes to an optical backbone becomes a major engineering project. The fibre run from Adelaide to Perth, for example, is around 3,000 km, well over the length of Thailand.

Some time ago I wrote about the shared connectivity of the Internet and how each user is sharing the available bandwidth of the network. If only 10,000 people want to use the full 100MBPS, that is already a 1TBPS bandwidth request.

If you check the international connectivity or even internal connectivity of the bandwidth in most countries, you will find the connectivity lacking. Australia also has download bandwidth limitations. Someone on a high plan of 200GB and a perfect 1GBPS connection, could use their monthly allowance up in around 30 minutes, so what would they do for the other 43K minutes of the month?

Wireless technology, however, has been coming along quite well in terms of speed. There are already 15MBPS links in operation in some parts of the world and lab testing has much higher speeds coming down the pipeline. For places such as Australia and Thailand, wireless could be the more cost-effective solution to reach locations outside the larger population areas. Satellite is also another option, with the reminder that upload speeds are rarely anywhere near available download speeds.

Then there is the issue of the need for speed. While a basic download of, say, a 1TB file would be helped by such high speeds, the average person and even average business does not need this level of connectivity. Even a 5MBPS link is plenty for business operations that includes video conferencing. People have been doing this on slower links with Skype, for example, for some time now and I know of organisations that use similar applications quite successfully.

Yes, it might be argued that higher speeds will be required in the future and I'm sure that they will be. I suspect that wireless options will be able to handle the growth and that in more densely packed environments, optical connectivity will be implemented, or whatever the future connectivity options may bring.

Australia is currently a good example of why governments should not be in the business of providing certain types of services. Thailand is a good example of where articles such as this one can be published to provide a more balanced analysis of technology. I've seen no such analysis in any of the Australian media, nor have I seen any articles pointing out the failings of the iPad. I'm glad a paper like the Bangkok Post exists here, so that I am able to write as I do.

Industry news

Everyone has heard of Walt Disney. Its Internet subsidiary and some of its partners have been sued recently for how it has been using cookies. Through Adobe's Flash player, it was tracking sensitive personal data of its users. Many of these users are minors. Flash cookies are tagged as LSO, or locally shared objects. Same thing, different name, and we have been using them for a long time now.

Apparently Disney was sharing this cookie info between its business groups without really telling their customers about this. Privacy groups immediately went to work, pointing out that even if the cookies were deleted, this sharing arrangement allowed for them to be restored. The industry term for them is "zombie cookies".

The other problem is that Flash cookies themselves are hard to get rid of because the data is typically in binary that bypasses the browser's same-origin security policy. Flash cookies also store up to 100K of data, a lot more than a regular cookie can hold.

Adobe says it condemns "using Local Storage to back up browser cookies for the purpose of restoring them later without user knowledge and express consent". But it has yet to give users a tool that allows people to manage and delete their new cookie type. This is kind of a tacit allowance of the practice.

Pink Floyd have pulled their materials from iTunes and Amazon because EMI is not doing as they have asked. At least any album after Dark Side of the Moon. Their issue is the sale of individual tracks and ringtone versions of their work.

Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital are working together on the future directions of hard drive technology. They are concerned that trying to go at it individually with different technologies will be like a Betamax versus VHS decision. The wrong choice could mean the failure of that business.

Enter the Storage Technology Alliance for the "formation of collaborative joint research initiatives among and between storage industry participants, customers, suppliers, universities and laboratories."

The two current alternatives appear to be Bit-patterned media (BPM) that works by surrounding the magnetic elements with an insulating ring and requires hugely expensive development of lithography tooling and testing.

The second option is Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which uses media in which the recording elements are more stable because heat is needed to change their magnetic charge. There are probably also other options and this is the problem they need to pick the best one and work together to minimise supply chain issues.

No matter what happens, we can expect better and cheaper hard drives for the foreseeable future.