bitbucket.kylewelsh.com

Telstra has again dismissed calls for structural or functional separation of the National Broadband Network builder, stating that a call for separation is a call for no NBN.

Presenting at the 2008 Australian Telecommunications Summit, Telstra’s GM for regulatory affairs, Dr. Tony Warren, said his company was committed to building an open access NBN that would encourage competition and innovation.

Warren rebutted the claims of Shadow Communications Minister Bruce Billson, Optus, Terria and others who have called for structural separation of the NBN builder, claiming that enforcing separation would hinder investment and competition.

“The experience from around the world and in other Australian industries is that separation stalls investment. If you don’t want investment, if you are on the gravy train of cheap ULL prices, of course you don’t want an NBN,” he said.

“So what do you do; you try and drag it out, stall it and throw up furphies like separation. In fact you might even get separation if you’re really lucky and then guess what — you definitely won’t get an NBN. Let’s not pretend in any other way that a call for separation is a call for no NBN.”

Warren stated that only a handful of the OECD’s thirty countries have introduced separation in the telco space, and dismissed the two examples most often touted by supporters of separation — the UK and New Zealand — as global laggards in investment.

“There is no substantial FttN investment going on in either the UK or NZ…these are laggards, these are not investment champions. Indeed there is emerging access seeker complaints about the UK model — the very people this was meant to help are claiming in fact that in some cases it’s making things worse.”

Warren pointed to the National Gas Code and the separation of above-rail and below-rail infrastructure as two local examples where structural separation had failed to engender innovation and investment.

“The National Gas Code here in Australia has seen no new gas pipelines built since it was put in place, and this is the poster child that people talk about for structural separation…it’s been an unmitigated failure in terms of investment…[and] separation of above and below-rail [infrastructure] was abandoned in NSW after serious accidents, and it’s been completely unwound in the UK.

“My god, if you can’t coordinate investment across something as technologically simple and stable as rail track and rolling stock, how do you think you can do it in telecoms? [the call for structural separation] is just an amazing statement, and only a statement that I think can come from a lack of coherent analysis of these issues,” he said.

Warren insisted that Telstra has gone and will go into the NBN bidding process with an open access model, because the incumbent acknowledges that there will need to be competition over the NBN in order for it to provide adequate rates of return on investment.

“But where regulation remains necessary we need a paradigm shift. Around the world people are understanding that if you are going to need regulation you need to lock it in for a long time. You need to give investors certainty…on what the regulatory bargain will be, I think that is fundamental.”

Warren contrasted the role of OFCOM in the UK, which acknowledged that a potential investor must have as much regulatory certainty about the future of the market as possible, with the ACCC, who he believes is administering outdated regulation.

He argued that Australia’s current telecommunications regulation regime was set up to deal with the telco environment of 15 years ago where the problem it was trying to solve was reducing the OPEX of formally state-owned infrastructure, not stimulating CAPEX.

“There are common challenges of reinvesting national infrastructure across rail, energy and communication. These challenges are fundamentally different to those that we faced when we designed the current regulatory tools 15 or so years ago…the bottom line is these are yesterday’s tools trying to solve yesterday’s problems.

“What we need to do is rebuild regulation from first principles; facilities-based competition where possible, and it is possible in Australia as long as we get the regulatory incentives right, and where regulation remains necessary — and it does remain necessary in places — then competitive returns with a certain regulatory framework are essential.”

In response to a question from Optus’ head of government affairs, Maha Krishnapillai, over exactly what Telstra’s definition of open access meant, Warren responded that it meant the incumbent’s competitors would have access to services on exactly the same basis as itself.

“The bottom line is we have a proposal on the table that is clearly an open access proposal. What do we mean by that: you will be able to take the service from the network that we build, the wholesale service from the network that we build, and do with it whatever you like — copy what we do if you’re prepared to invest, or differentiate. That’s what we’re proposing, it will be purely open in that sense.”

[Read more →]

Filed under: Gaming

Japan’s Nikkei is reporting what we’ve been hearing Stateside for weeks: Xbox 360 price cuts across the board. Expected to go official sometime later today, the Japanese Xbox 360 Arcade will drop to just ¥19,800 or about $182 (tax inclusive, presumably) in hopes of boosting sales. The new pricing represents a near 30% drop from its previous ¥27,800 (about $256) price and undercuts the Wii sold locally for ¥25,000. Nikkei’s sources also claim that Microsoft will cut the prices on all three Xbox 360 models without going into specifics. If true then this bodes well for the US price cuts expected on September 7th.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

[Read more →]

J.Tatar and a number of other readers alert us to the shooting death of an anti-government webmaster while in police custody in Ingushetiya, a volatile province in southern Russia. Police took Ingushetiya.ru owner Magomed Yevloyev off a plane that had just landed in Ingushetiya. “Yevloyev… was a prominent opponent of the pro-Kremlin president of Ingushetia, Murat Zyazikov [a close ally of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin]. Prosecutors have opened a preliminary manslaughter investigation after Yevloyev was shot in a police car in Narzan, the capital of volatile Ingushetia, a mostly Muslim region that borders Chechnya, Russian media reported. A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, Vladimir Markin, said ‘an incident’ took place after Yevloyev was taken into a police car ‘resulting in a shooting injury to the head and he later died in hospital,’ Interfax reported.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Read more →]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

While Apple’s App Store was far from being the first of its kind, we’re now seeing a job posting over in the Redmond area that suggests that Microsoft is looking to produce something similar for its Windows Mobile platform. The news comes hot on the heels of Google’s own Android Market announcement, and if the Product Manager position writeup is to be believed, said platform will be christened Skymarket. Described as a “marketplace service for Windows Mobile,” Skymarket could seemingly be a critical part of WinMo 7. But don’t take our word for it, the proof is the pudding — or in the read link, in this instance.

[Via The Raw Feed]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

[Read more →]

A well-known Web site owner in one of Russia’s most restive regions was shot to death after he was arrested by authorities on Sunday, according to Russian news reports.

[Read more →]

A well-known Web site owner in one of Russia’s most restive regions was shot to death after he was arrested by authorities on Sunday, according to Russian news reports.

[Read more →]

billybob2 writes “VIA has released a 113,800 line open source graphics driver with full mode-setting support for CRT, LCD, and DVI devices along with 2D, X-Video, and cursor acceleration. Harald Welte, VIA’s open source representative, states that the next step is to add 3D (see preview), TV-out, and hardware codec support while integrating this work with existing open source projects. VIA has pre-installed Linux on a significant portion of the company’s latest products, including the EVEREX gPC2, 15.4″ gBook, and CloudBook. It has also helped port the open source CoreBoot BIOS (previously LinuxBIOS) to several of its motherboards.” VIA seems to be making good on the promise of its open source initiative announced last April.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Read more →]

Filed under: Laptops

There are two kinds of Dell rumors: sure things, and ones that aren’t sure things. This one falls in the latter camp, so proceed with caution. We’ve got a tipster who says a friend of his from Dell handed him this shot of what is purportedly a new XPS M1330 / M1530 design. As you can see, pretty much the same old fare… but what’s this? A large glossy touchpad? Here’s our hunch: Dell is tired of drawing inspiration from Apple after the fact, and decided to turn the tables by capitalizing on one of the most persisten (and outlandish) Apple rumors in existence. A good capacitive touchscreen for the trackpad on a laptop would undoubtedly be a blast if it was done right, with the right software support, and at least seems like a good gimmick. Or maybe it’d just be lame. We won’t go further than that, this could just as easily be a Photoshop, but we will be keeping an eye out.

Update: False alarm, turns out this is just a still from an NVIDIA Tegra demo on YouTube. Thanks, shiv, for pointing this out in comments. Boo, tipster, boo.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

[Read more →]

Long Zheng / istartedsomething:

Microsoft to launch “Skymarket” applications marketplace for Windows Mobile 7  —  If one of the most compelling features of the iPhone are the third-party applications then it’s a sad fact for Microsoft since Windows Mobile has supported third-party applications since the last ice age.

[Read more →]

An anonymous reader notes that Microsoft has been granted a patent on “Page Up” and “Page Down” keystrokes. The article links an image of an IBM PC keyboard from 1981 with such keys in evidence. “The software giant applied for the patent in 2005, and was granted it on August 19, 2008. US patent number 7,415,666 describes ‘a method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed.’… The company received its 5,000th patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office in March 2006, and is currently approaching the 10,000 mark.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Read more →]

Filed under: Cellphones

After what feels like centuries of waiting (and suffering through that painful CeBIT demo), we finally get to see the Meizu M8’s OS in action… and it’s not as bad as you think. Sure, the interface is totally derivative of the iPhone, and there is that pesky cursor floating around, but all-in-all it looks like the company has managed to knock out a decent — if incredibly familiar — UI for its long-delayed phone. Still, there’s some low rent hilarity in this video. Our favorites? The smattering of soft porn pictures and video, and Meizu CEO and all-around bon vivant Jack Wong revealed in a reflection… wearing a face mask! Don’t believe it? Check the clip after the break (and freeze frame of Mr. Wong).

[Thanks, Patrick P.]

Continue reading A functional Meizu M8 UI, CEO Jack Wong finally caught on video

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

[Read more →]

Back in 2006, Oscar Diös heard there was a dead Boeing 747-200 built in 1976 on one of the runways at Arlanda Airport, the largest international airport in Sweden, north of Stockholm. It was once…

[Read more →]

newVideoPlayer(”/marufightingbots_giz.flv”, 475, 376,”"); Naoki Maru may live in Hikone, north of Kyoto, down the road from a samurai castle full of katana swords and armor, but for him, the ancient…

[Read more →]

Nick O’Neill / All Facebook:

Facebook Live Feed Kills Twitter & FriendFeed  —  Yes, I love calling Facebook the Twitter and FriendFeed killer but I seriously think they may have one-upped the competition on their latest release: the Live Feed.  You can sit and watch in real-time what is taking place with your friends across their profiles in an unfiltered manner.

[Read more →]

Fred / A VC:

Web Services That Cater To Both The Publisher And The Reader  —  I’ve been noticing a trend lately that certain web services are starting to cater to both the publisher and the reader.  And I think this is an important direction for a host of reasons.  —  You have to build a service …

[Read more →]