Tag Archives: New Zealand

Google’s NZ digital expert plan, not what it seems

Google NZ scored favourable publicity for its 'training plan' but it isn't philanthropy

Google NZ scored favourable publicity for its ‘training plan’ but it isn’t philanthropy

Hats off to Tony Keusgen and Google New Zealand for training recent graduates in the art of helping companies with online strategies. It may help ease smaller businesses into the online world ahead of the UltraFast Broadband roll-out.

Keusgen announced the plan to train 100 people at the recent Telecommunication Carriers Forum Mind Storm conference in Auckland.

He told delegates at the event the UFB network on its own will not get local companies moving online – partly because there aren’t enough people with the right skills serving smaller companies. He has a point.

The plan isn’t what it seems to be.

Google’s two-day training course will give people Google+ certification. Click through to the course details and you’ll see it is about selling the company’s AdWords product.

In other words, it is not general training in online strategies, but training in using Google products and services to offer those online strategies. In other words it will bind 100 young people into Google’s world and by extension will make it easier for Google to sell to the thousands of companies they will consult to.

There’s nothing wrong in this. Nothing at all. Technology companies provide training to help customers and others buy things from them all the time. The products and services are complex. Sales people can’t whizz through these things in five minutes.

While there’s nothing wrong with it, it is not philanthropy. It is business development.

Yet that’s not how Google sold itsmessage to the Mind Storm audience and it is not how the media reported it. See The New Zealand Herald and at Radio New Zealand.

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Can Dotcom kickstart NZ tech?

Guess which silhouette is Kim Dotcom

Guess which silhouette is Kim Dotcom

Management magazine wonders if Kim Dotcom’s Auckland-based Mega start-up can transform  New Zealand’s economy:

Behind Dotcom’s showman public persona – a flamboyant style that undoubtedly grates with Kiwi conservatism – there’s a very smart, very tight business unit with the ability to go from world-class concept development to start-up, and massive scale-up very fast.

Mega is impressive. It has a core team of just four people and by Kim Dotcom’s estimate accounts for around 4% of internet traffic. There’s probably some hype in that number. Even so, an NZ-based business accounting for 1% of traffic would be a huge achievement.

New Zealand is too remote and has too few cable connections to the rest of the world to become an international online destination. But that’s not the only way to make money from the internet.

Dotcom has already breathed fire into the NZ technology sector. He will inspire others to follow in his path. Hopefully a cluster of local companies will form to piggyback off Mega’s products and services and possibly use his name and reputation to help raise investment funds – New Zealanders have difficulty raising start-up finance.

Disclosure: I’ve written a feature about Big Data for Management and will be contributing stories to the magazine.

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Vodafone LTE fibre killer in New Zealand?

When fibre comes down my streetFour days ago I wrote that the best broadband I’m likely to see for the next five or six years will be wireless. If independent consultant Jon Brewer is right, that could come in the shape of a Vodafone-owned network of picocells connected to the company’s own back-haul network.

Brewer says Vodafone has the technology and the spectrum needed to roll out a network much faster and cheaper than the UFB network being built by Chorus. It will offer UFB-like speeds. Brewer doesn’t say so, but the economics he outlines suggest Vodafone would be able to boost data caps.

Until now the arguments against wireless networks have been to do with spectrum scarcity and the high cost of network equipment along with the expensive of getting resource consents. Picocell technology does an end-run around these. 

Where consumers have a choice between fixed and mobile networks, they tend to choose mobile leaving fixed-line for things like bulk downloading of media content.

While Brewer’s post is speculative, there are some sharp minds at Vodafone who must have at least considered this approach. It will probably run into regulatory hurdles – New Zealand’s centre-right government is not keen on letting market competition make decisions about future telecommunications.

Nevertheless, for me this is a far more exciting prospect than waiting for a glass fibre to be strung down my road.

LTE as Fibre Killer? Vodafone’s Quick Win for Fixed Mobile Substitution « Inside Telecommunications New Zealand.

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Vodafone NZ: about your 4G business model

Vodafone 4G mobile dataVodafone NZ has stolen a march on its competitors rolling out 4G mobile to parts of Auckland earlier today.

Although coverage is limited, only 30% of Auckland gets the faster service at the time of writing, the company is getting runs on the board while rivals seem to be months away from a full launch. Vodafone plans a fast ramp-up with Christchurch getting a service in May, Wellington in August-September and a further 15 towns by year-end.

4G will give users faster data downloads and smoother experience with data heavy applications like   video conferencing and gaming. On a good day and a uncrowded tower, 4G sends data at around 10 times the speed of 3G networks.

How will Vodafone make its 4G investment pay?

First the company will charge most customers an extra $10 a month on top of their existing plans. Big spending customers – those already paying $120 a month or more – won’t pay the surcharge.

The second part is more subtle. There’s no increase in monthly data allowances. Given that 4G makes it easier and quicker to shovel bits into a phone that could see customers bust their existing limits and begin paying for more data. Extra data typically costs more per unit than bundled plan data, so Vodafone has an opportunity to extract more from customers this way.

Or possibly not. Vodafone chief executive Russell Stanners told the NBR’s Chris Keall faster speeds don’t necessarily mean users will download more data. He said overseas users only get through one or two GB a month.

And the business model?

Carriers like Vodafone often treat 4G as a bigger pipe for selling mobile broadband by the gigabyte. That appears to be what’s happening here. Over time Vodafone will collect hundreds of thousands of $10 per 4G account per month and will sell bigger data plans.

There’s another opportunity that Stanners and his executives must have considered: how to boost revenues by adding paid-for applications and extra value-added services to the mix. Carriers around the world struggle with this – can Vodafone’s New Zealand operation come up with some answers?

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New Zealand shows Australia how to do FTTP

Auckland's first fibre

Steven Joyce installing Auckland’s first UFB cable – Albany – 24 August 2011

While Australia’s politicians continue to wrangle over that country’s FTTP (fibre-to-the-premises) project, New Zealand’s is progressing nicely. However, New Zealand’s relatively low fibre uptake could yet inform Australia’s FTTP debate.

Figures releases yesterday by communications minister Amy Adams show that 134,000 homes and businesses are now able to connect to the  UFB (ultrafast broadband) network. Building is taking place in 24 of the 33 towns and cities that will eventually be on the government’s network.

Meanwhile 89,000 rural homes and businesses are able to connect to the Rural Broadband Initiative through fixed wireless connections and a further 36,000 rural users can now use fixed-line services.

To date only 3800 customers have signed for UFB fibre services. That’s a relatively low take-up rate – less that 3%.

The priority at this stage is to sign businesses, schools and medical facilities. Yet the fibre companies deliberately started their residential build in areas where they expected the highest uptake.

GIven that fibre isn’t any more expensive than existing copper-delivered broadband plans, this suggests there could be problems persuading consumers to switch to fibre.

There are two reasons why more haven’t moved. First, the big ISPs, who account for the overwhelming majority of the market, have yet to begin selling fibre services. That’s likely to happen  in the coming months – having more people on the UFB will give them more incentive to move into the fibre market.

Second, the government and the people boosting fibre have done a terrible job selling the advantages of the technology to everyday consumers. Instead of telling people fibre is fast and reliable, there’s been a focus on ridiculous and, to most people, irrelevant high-end applications. Telecom and Vodafone are likely to do a far better sales job than the government.

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VMWare: New Zealand the world’s most virtual nation?

1999_18_160 pp

Alfred Burton, Mount Tarawera in Eruption – copyright free image from Auckland Art Gallery

VMWare took off with a hiss and a roar as companies squeezed servers into fewer and fewer boxes.

Server consolidation has been going on in earnest for more than a decade. I’ve seen numbers from analysts suggesting almost two-thirds of enterprise computing takes place in virtual machines.

The numbers could be higher in New Zealand.

Tim Dacombe-Bird, who runs VMWare’s NZ operation says Australia and New Zealand are ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to server virtualisation. He went on to say New Zealand is running well ahead of Australia. Which means New Zealand could be a world leader when it comes to virtualisation.

This makes sense to me. I still remember in the late 1980s talking to Tom West from Data General who told me New Zealanders squeeze hardware further than users in other countries.

Then as now it was all about economics. New Zealand is a relatively small economy, our organisations are smaller, our data needs are smaller so IT costs spread over a narrower base. This is less about doing things on the cheap and more about maximising efficiency.