Sky Muster is Coming: Whither ADSL?

Photo Credit: Pixabay CC0

In the village of Gunning, about one hour's drive north of the national capital, Sky Muster^TM has arrived. But rumours abound that if you are not already connected to the existing copper network, then Sky Muster^TM is your only option.

These rumours were reported recently in the Gunning News section in the Goulburn Post, with a request for clarification.

The problem is, if you are on ADSL, you can get 1,000 gigabytes of download for about $120 per month. But on Sky Muster,^TM  customers are typically paying around $159/month for 60GB download.

In a letter to the editor yesterday, and in response to the community's concerns, National's Senator for NSW and Minister for Regional Communications, the Hon Fiona Nash, pointed out that from October this year, customers will be able to receive "100 gigabytes a month of peak data and 150 gigabytes of off-peak data for around $120". This is a far cry from the 1,000 gigabytes ADSL customers can access.

My ADSL usage since April 2017

I have used over 120 gigabytes of my ADSL service only once so far this year, and my average monthly usage has been around 106 gigabytes (see left).

But that is only for two people who both work. If my kids were still at home, then a Sky Muster^TM plan wouldn't keep pace with our broadband demand.

The lack of choice and the non-answering of legitimate questions has been my issue with NBN all along.

Back on 7 April 2009, on ABC's Unleashed (which later became the now-defunct The Drum website) I wrote about the plans to roll out the NBN. I warned that government needed to end "business as usual" and engage with citizens. In particular, I warned that:

In Australia, the historical legacies of centrally-controlled communications policy make it difficult for local solutions to address peculiar local communications problems... [Further,]

If the government is going to invest in the infrastructure, why must it be spent on one solution? [...and]

At the Regional Telecommunications Independent Review Committee in Sydney... [in 2009], the participants represented a range of rural and community groups. They presented stories about how local efforts were simply overlooked and how they were regarded as 'fools' by authorities and other 'people in the know' when they complained about specific communications problems in their local areas. 

Fast-forward eight years, and what do we have? A single solution that appears to be regressive: if you are in the village and on Sky Muster,^TM your service, despite billions of dollars of taxpayers money already spent, may well be worse than what was previously available.

But we can only guess because we do not have the facts: if you build within the village limits in places like Gunning, do you have no other option but to go to  Sky Muster^TM? Is this true, or isn't it? Why can't we be told?

Again, in 2009, I wrote:

Rather than bringing the infrastructure closer to the people, the secrecy over the NBN to date has simply been more of the same. 

The Minister's letter yesterday does not answer the question posed by the Gunning community. Her response is to state that the service will be improved. This is great, but will it be better than the current ADSL service? I don't think so.

Later in 2009, I also wrote:

The broadband reform consultation provides a major opportunity to fix a problem which has plagued Australia for decades.

But it would seem we have slipped right back into the old ways, where telecommunications is a big policy lever to be pulled whenever political parties want to have a go at each other, or when there is need for a new announcement. Indeed, the Minister's response to the village's questions provided an opportunity to have a go at the Opposition with no answers forthcoming. Clearly, NBN remains a political football.

In almost every other country I have visited, if you are prepared to pay, you can get the services you want. But in Australia, the central control model of "doing" telecommunications policy often leaves consumers with limited choices, regardless of how much you are prepared to pay. After decades of market reforms, we haven't progressed all that far in telecommunications, especially in "the bush".

But to have to use billions of dollars in taxpayers money to actually reduce the existing services seems absurd. Some clarity from our political representatives on this problem would be welcomed by many in regional and remote areas who may not be getting what they have already paid for.

When I first started my research into telecommunications policy outcomes, I was interested to know why Canada was so far ahead of Australia. My findings were that the divergent outcomes were the result of historical processes and ways of "doing" telecommunications policy.

Despite my research, many others were convinced it was simply a matter of time and effort and Australia would catch up. Let's have a look. Here's how it was in 2002:

OECD Fixed Line Broadband Statistics 2002. Source: OECD (2003: 173) Telecommunications Outlook 2003

And here is the same graph for December 2016. It must be noted that only smaller countries have surpassed Canada's early leadership:

Source: OECD Broadband Portal

Did Canadians spend billions on a government-controlled monolith? No. And the difference in speeds has been a persistent issue in Canada's favour, too.

Surely Australian citizens have a right to ask, has it all been worth it? and, Are we getting what we paid for?

Book Notes: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" by James Fitzjames Stephen

Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 1st Baronet, KCSI (3 March 1829 – 11 March 1894). Photos via Wikimedia [Public Domain]

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity by James Fitzjames Stephen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I discovered this book while reading something about Mill. It was a critique of Mill's On Liberty and it presents a number of arguments that are hard to fault, but also a number of arguments that, if spoken today, would require endless apologies and may even require a politician to step down from office. Nevertheless, Stephen was a lawyer (and later a notable judge) and at times he could be verbose, at other times insightful, at still others rather strange. Yet his critique of Mill leaves me with plenty of food for thought. He argues in the same way I have listened to conservatives argue against a Bill of Rights for Australia. There is a modicum of liberalism in the English sense of the word, and I might be presumptuous and say in a similar vein to Edmund Burke. When I read Mill, I felt like I was reading my own education in summary. When I read Stephen, I feel like I am getting an education. Some suggest that Liberty, Equality, Fraternity was James Fitzjames Stephen's masterpiece, and apparently Oxford is reproducing his works in several volumes. Stephen didn't disagree with utilitarianism nor liberalism, but he did disagree with the extremes of liberalism that Mill advocated, and especially against the emancipation of women as outlined in Mill's On the Subjection of Women. Stephen's arguments were deeply rooted in his conception of the evidence observed in nature, rather than an idealism as characterised by Mill. Yet Stephen's conclusion displays another form of idealism, and I couldn't help thinking that it was a rather weak way of summing up, rather like an undergraduate essay that lost its argument and tries to finish in an upbeat fashion. Yet there were many lessons to be gleaned from Stephen, and the Liberty Fund's inclusion of this work as an important contribution is well-founded, despite history's favouring Mill. I must admit that it took me a while to get through this, and the combination of wordy ideas and arguments, along with rather fine print, made this somewhat of an exercise in discipline rather than enlightenment. And I am all the wiser for doing so.

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How do I podcast?

My new podcast logo, based on an oil pastel on paper work by Margarita Georgiadis.

After spending my sabbatical on reading and thinking about my research philosophy and trying to find a unifying principle for my work, I arrived at 'the concept of le flâneur politique becomes my "vehicle for the examination of the conditions of modernity"' (Walter Benjamin). In effect, I could be in the world but not of it. 

I didn't want to be a political scientist of the left or the right - these concepts are rigid and they are not reflected in the variety of arrangements that would otherwise be possible. I wrote about this recently. 

So once I had settled on the concept of one who wanders through the arcades of life to observe and understand, it enabled me to find connections in my research, teaching, and reading interests. I like the idea of the old, like federation houses and open fireplaces, but I also like blogging and radio and podcasts. 

"Le flâneur politique" gave me a kind of "steampunk" freedom to mix and match the past and the future and "straddle" the best of both worlds.

I've been blogging regularly for ten years this year. I have also presented a radio program on community radio for about the same length of time, although since I moved out to Gunning I haven't done a show. I have promised to provide a pre-recorded show but to date it hasn't happened. But that may change soon.

I decided to start a podcast show. I didn't know where to start but I liked the idea of Stitcher, which I have been using for a while as I commute to Canberra. Podcasts have opened up a whole new world to me and the commute is an exciting part of my day. It is certainly never dull.

I thought, too, that if I could get the podcast setup right, I could also record my radio show and then get back into it regularly. I started with the microphone for my digital camera. It is a Rode Stereo VideoMic. Not ideal for podcasts, but good quality recording for now.

Microphone solved. Next was the recording software. I tried a bunch of different apps on my Alienware 15 R3. It really is the best thing ever. In the end, I settled back with Audacity with the LAME MP3 converter. I'd used it a while back when making video lectures but it has been a while.

Then I went looking for some music. The Free Music Archive (FMA) provides music licenced through Creative Commons. My blog is CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 AU so this worked well. FMA has a good range of music and I will use it as my "go to" site for now.

But I also found an interesting sound effects site, AR Sound Effects, which is licenced using Creative Commons, but with a CC BY licence which can be used for anything as long as you attribute the work to the creator.

This site is really cool. It took me a while to work out how to convert YouTube videos to mp3 files, but the aptly-named YouTube mp3 did the job no problems. 

Next was to work out something to say and to test it all. I made a couple of false starts, but there was some media training happening nearby so I reflected on that and began recording. The first thing I noticed was that I had to get the Audacity setup right. I needed to hear what I was saying and hear the music and sound effects at the same time.

And here was the first big problem that I can only solve with a new microphone. Latency. When you listen to the playback through Audacity, there is a lag between you speaking and you hearing what you are saying, I had some marching feet sound effects and I was trying to speak to the beat. But it came so slow through the microphone that I started slowing down my voice and the recording sounded terrible. 

I solved it by listening to the sound effect through my headphones and speaking without hearing my voice. I felt like I was Geoffrey Rush's patient on The King's Speech, except I wasn't the king, I was just some charity case:

This is the problem with digital recording. Given all our technological advances of late it seems rather lame that we don't have a digital solution to a problem that going analogue would solve!

So I will look to microphones. I probably need two to do interviews, so a I will have to investigate whether a USB podcast microphone will work, or whether I need a mixer (which is what other podcasters do). 

The Rode Podcaster is an Australian-made podcast mic. It has a headphone jack in the actual microphone, so you can hear yourself speak without the latency. But I am not sure whether this will allow me to hear the sound effects or music at the same time. The next problem is whether I can use two of these at once in different USB slots.

If I go to the mixer, then the Rode Procaster might be the go. I will need to take some advice but I suspect this will be the best setup for interviews.

Once I had the raw product, it took a little while to play around with it in Audacity. Listening to the completed product often is required - my first few attempts left wild gaps in the middle of nowhere and my intended puns with the sound effects were completely lost because my timing was all over the shop. It would seem that "time spent in [editing] is seldom wasted".

First, I had to find a way to create the RSS feed for my blog. I played around with Feedburner (I had used this years before). No problems, all set up. But no.

I went to setup on Stitcher, thinking I could add my RSS feed and off I would go. But you need to register as a partner. You can't use the same email address as the one you used to become a listener. So off I went back to my ISP's site to add a new email address. 

Second, I had to enter the RSS feed into the application for a station. This failed. So off I went to the W3C Feed Validator. Validation successful! But there was no podcast anywhere. I needed to have this uploaded somewhere first.

Lifewire had the solution. This made sense of some parts of Blogger I had never used before. The article covers everything you need. Except how to host your podcast to somewhere.

So off I go to Soundcloud. So much easier than Stitcher. Soundcloud allows you to set up with Creative Commons, and in Settings>Content I found the program's RSS feed. So back to W3C Feed Validator and bam! no problems, so over to Stitcher and bam! no problems. The Soundcloud info is brought into Stitcher, so if you don't like the profile picture or info in Stitcher, you have to change it in Soundcloud. 

And from there it was time to add the logo (with the appropriate permission!) and there it is. I have added the Soundcloud player to Blogger. It was pretty straight-forward once I solved the initial dramas.

But that is how it all panned out. Below is my first Stitcher podcast, and I hope very soon to have some interviews appearing on Stitcher and Soundcloud, and later iTunes. Hopefully this will be of some use to others.