[LINK] Future of Telecommunications in Canberra

[Tom Worthington]

The Australian Computer Society Telecommunications Special Interest
Group (T-SIG) held its first Canberra meeting last Thursday:
<http://www.acs.org.au/acstsa>.

TSIG was formed from a merger of the Telecommunications Society of
Australia (TSA) and ACS. The TSA is much older than ACS, being founded
as the Telegraph Electrical Society in 1874. The merger recognises
convergence between telecommunications and computing into IT:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Society_of_Australia>.

The speaker for the first meeting was David Parkes, General Manager
Retail for Transact on "TransACT – Past and Future":
<http://www.acs.org.au/index.cfm?action=load&area=9002&temID=eventdetails&eveID=30197353049196>.

He detailed Transact's origins as a broadband, telephone and digital TV
provider in Canberra and parts of Victoria. Transact was a pioneers of
fibre to the curb in Australia (there is a Transact fibre optic node in
the basement of my apartment building). They were an early provider of
digital TV: <http://www.tomw.net.au/2001/sa/rt.html>.

Transact is now installing Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) underground in
to Canberra suburbs. The company installs a metal box on the outside of
the house, similar in appearance to an electrical meter box. This houses
the fibre termination, Ethernet and telephone interfaces and,
importantly, a battery backup. The backup lasts for up to eight hours
and maintains voice communications as a priority, first dropping d-TV,
then Internet, to save power. While I and others, have advocated that
battery backup should be part of the new NBN service, it is not clear
this will be done and so Transact's service is superior to NBN in this
respect. During Canberra's fire-storms, the service continued to operate
across the city despite power brownouts (apart from the suburbs where
the infrastructure was destroyed by the fire).

David provided an excellent overview of Transact's history. What was
less clear was where Transact will go in the future. As he pointed out
FTTP provides so much bandwidth that the current decentralised computing
model can be rethought. Computing services can be centralised, with the
desktop computers becoming essentially smart terminals (or thin
clients). There will also be new ways to provide TV and other content.
However, with the arrival of the National Broadband Network (NBN) it is
not clear where Transact will find a business in this.

Transact has for years provided for Canberra, and parts of Victoria,
what the NBN aspires to do for all of Australia: provide a reliable,
high speed digital network to homes, with telephony, Internet, digital
TV and other services. The ACT Government, who are a part owner of
Transact and businesses have invested heavily in providing broadband for
Canberra: what will happen to this investment with the arrival of the
NBN, which has a mandate to connect all Australian homes?

Daivd outlined some of Transact's thinking of how they intend to prosper
in the NBN era. Part of this is to maintain their customers and the
service they provide: Transact have a functioning network and years of
experience in supporting customers, whereas the NBN is still learning
what to do.

No doubt Transact are also lobbying government to ensure that its
investment will not be rendered worthless by NBN. It would be
unfortunate if the debacle where Telestra and Optus wasted billions of
dollars duplicating hybrid pay TV cable down the same streets of Sydney
and Melbourne was repeated in Canberra. There is no pressing reason for
NBN to duplicate Transact's cabling in Canberra. NBN should cable the
suburbs which Transact has not covered.

The likely future is that Transact will continue to provide services
over their network to existing customers. Transact will also aim to
become an NBN Retail Service Provider, delivering services to customers
who use the NBN network.

Less clear are new areas with "The Cloud". David outlined how Transact
were looking to resell Google Apps and Microsoft cloud based services,
branded as "Storm Cloud". The servers will not be based in Australia and
as David pointed out, this imposes legal limitations for commercial and
particularly government customers. Smaller cloud service providers also
offer locally based services from servers located in Transact's own data
centre.

David also hinted at Transact providing virtual services for small
business and home users. With this arrangement a virtual PC s provided
on a shared server in a data centre. The customer using a think client
computer, or an application running on a PC, to access it. The customer
needs not worry about backing up or installing applications, as this is
done for them.

While cloud and virtual PCs are interesting possibilities, these are new
areas and ones Transact does not have any particular advantage in the
market with. I suggest the area Transact does have an advantage in is
being local to Canberra.

Australian government agencies, companies supporting them and companies
providing services to the public are limited in their ability to use
overseas based cloud services. Australian privacy legislation and
security requirements limit the practicality and legality of hosting
data on a cloud service located in another country. This, I suggest,
provides a business opportunity for Transact. As a partly government
owned entity which already meets Australian telecommunications
legislation and has a data centre in Canberra, Transact could provide
government and private customers a level of comfort their data is not
ending up in some foreign location.

Transact could offer a vertical bundle, where they provide a server with
the software and thin client computers (about the size of a paperback
book and costing $200). Companies and smaller government agencies could
afford to have a thin client desktop computer in the office and one at
home for each staff member. As this could would only be used for work
purposes, it would make security much simpler. The Defence project for
thin clients could provide a good model for this which would overcome
security objections. Transact could configure their network to separate
the communications to these computers from other traffic, thus providing
a level of security superior to that on the Internet:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/05/thin-client-and-application.html>.

One problem is educating clients as to what is possible. Google is doing
some of this by having released some Chrome thin client computers.
Goggle's offerings are not that attractively priced and have severe
technical limitations, making it relatively easy for Transact to say
"like Google but better and cheaper":
<http://www.pcworld.com/article/227773/battle_of_the_chromebooks_acer_vs_samsung.html>.

In terms of government customers, the ACT Government is an obvious place
to start. The ACT Government has recently decided to restructure itself
from being a state government, to a large city council. As part of this,
the ACT Government could decide to outsource its computing function and
also adopt the IT standards of the federal government. Along with the
servers, an external provided could provide email, applications and
electronic records management. Staff would get a small thin client box
to replace their desktop computer, to be plugged into their existing
screen, keyboard and mouse. They could also have one to take home.

The application provided would be standardised across the ACT Government
and be based on those of the federal government. This same service could
then be offered to federal agencies.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra