On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Steve Martin wrote:

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/NL/356B8A20E567C86DCC256EED00750BAB

"Gerard Linstrom from Telecom Wholesale Services says the UBS was designed with the Jetstream Surf 1GB retail plan as the reference." Why was this plan chosen as the reference? Given the uptake on these plans has been so poor, why use it as a baseline? I am unsure about Telecom, but I think the rest of us would like to actually sell into this market, please. "Asked if static IP addresses will be allowed for UBS, Linstrom says ... [Stuff about Telecoms Retail offering deleted] ... The business JetStream services are sold without a static IP address, but one can be purchased as an optional extra at retail. It is likely that ISPs will do something similar with any business offer they construct using UBS.." So .. "Yes." then. Good. "The limit is an aggregate of 10GB per month, multiplied by customer numbers." Disclaimer: The following math will be done in my head, so may be wrong. 10GB/month? That's roughly 340MB/day (for 30 days). Which is 14MB/hour. Or 242Kbytes/min. Or 4Kbytes/second. Or, if you like, slower than dialup speeds. What a fine wholesale "broadband" offering this is. And to think, we nearly went down that whole unbundling road! Forward, New Zealand! Excelsior! JSR -- John S Russell | Big Geek | Doing geek stuff.

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Dave - Dave.net.nz wrote:

J S Russell wrote:

*SNIP*

average I'd have throught), thats 12kbytes a second, which is just about fine.

Except that UBS is starting off as a 256Kb/s downstream product. Which is 32KB/s. Doesn't seem so rosey now, especially when you consider that there's already word around of a 512Kb/s version. Also, isn't part of the reason for pushing broadband to increase usage of things like streaming audio? And streaming video? On 12 September 2001, streaming the Beeb's 300K feed, I chewed through about a gig in the space of a business day. That's doing nothing else with that particular workstation except streaming. How many people uni-task like that? If you're a graphics designer who works from home, 10GB/month is nothing. Similarly if you're a professional photographer who wants to use the 'net to send product to a publisher or a printer - 10GB isn't very many 200MB images. Sure, nobody with those requirements is going to be using a 256Kb/s product, but if UBS were to get up around the 1024Kb/s mark they might consider it.

I'd have throught the average user would be somewhere nearer to 4 or maybe 6 hours a day, but anyway.

That depends entirely on what they're doing with the service. UBS is not just a consumer offering, it's a whole-of-market offering. ISPs are meant to be spinning it into products for everyone from digital commerce companies to granny wanting to see pictures of the whanau.

There was an interesting study quoted by Bill St Arnaud on his mailing list recently. Internationally 80% of last mile traffic is peer to peer. I'd guess that that could go on 24 hours/day. Its also fairly symmetric. Internationally = America/Europe/Asia. Richard. Dave - Dave.net.nz wrote:

J S Russell wrote:

...

Disclaimer: The following math will be done in my head, so may be wrong. 10GB/month? That's roughly 340MB/day (for 30 days). Which is 14MB/hour. Or 242Kbytes/min. Or 4Kbytes/second. Or, if you like, slower than dialup speeds. What a fine wholesale "broadband" offering this is. And to think, we nearly went down that whole unbundling road!

not really wanting to say this but...

thats assuming that you use it 24hrs a day, the average user(not my average use, or probably yours but...) doesnt use their net connection 24hrs a day, assuming the average user does 8 hrs a day(a fairly high average I'd have throught), thats 12kbytes a second, which is just about fine.

I'd have throught the average user would be somewhere nearer to 4 or maybe 6 hours a day, but anyway.

http://allaboutfrogs.org/stories/scorpion.html sigh. On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 14:32, Keith Davidson wrote:

Certainly appears to be the case. See www.orcon.co.nz/company/press/54318/ text follows below.

Keith Davidson

________________

"11th August 2004 - New Bitstream plans to remain unchanged

On the 27th of July 2004, Orcon released a new, truly affordable 256k Flat rate residential broadband service for $49.95/mth based on the released 'Bitstream' wholesale DSL specification from Telecom. Two week's after Orcon's product release, Telecom have decided to change the specification by imposing a 10GB average traffic limit per user, and an agreement not to promote static IP addresses with the service. Orcon will honor the initial plans offered to customers at our cost, despite the changes that have been made.

Orcon is currently the second largest provider of JetStream DSL in NZ, and was the first company to negotiate a Wholesale Services Agreement (WSA) with Telecom for a broad range of services. Orcon has been eagerly awaiting the wholesale DSL portion of the WSA to be finalised, as we believe that we can offer the consumer significantly better deals than are currently available.

The moment Telecom told us of their planned Wholesale DSL (UBS) product in early July, we created pricing plans for our own DSL product (based on the Wholesale DSL components we would purchase from Telecom) and set about launching an advertising campaign based on these initial figures - taking a bet that Telecom's final wholesale pricing to us would either be the same or better than the initial figures.

The supposed 'final' UBS specification was released by Telecom on 26th July, and as we had guessed, was slightly better than their initial proposal. Our ads for flat rate 256k DSL with a static IP address at the all-inclusive price of $49.95 started to come out a day later. As far as we were concerned, Telecom had finalised the wholesale deal for DSL that they would offer to us, and we had successfully launched our product.

After a couple of weeks, with many thousands of advertising dollars already spent, and several hundred new DSL customer signed up, Telecom told us that the UBS specification they had come up with was going to be changed. Specifically, the 'flat-rate' nature of the product and the ability to advertise static IP addresses.

We don't know whether the fact that Orcon came out with our flat-rate and static IP address product had anything to do with Telecom changing the specification to withdraw these capabilities, however no other ISPs had come out with any other offering, and therefore our product was seen as a 'reference' product in the market.

However - As a champion for affordable broadband, Orcon has decided to wear the 10GB excess traffic charges at our cost so that we can continue to offer a flat rate product, and we will also honor the static IP address for users who have already signed up from an existing promotion wherever possible.

We believe that it should the ISPs choice whether to offer Static IP addresses or provide a truly flat-rate service.

Seeby Woodhouse MD Orcon Internet Limited"

----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Schmidt" To: "nznog" Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2004 11:58 AM Subject: [nznog] Unbudled Bitstream

...

I heard that TCNZ have changed the details of the UBS service and that now it will be a capped 10gb service. Anyone else know anything about this.

Regards Steven Schmidt.

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