ICANN adds IPv6 for root zone DNS servers
ICANN has just added IPv6 connectivity to six of the root DNS servers (A, F, H, J, K, M). This is a good step forward for IPv6 deployment which has been fairly slow to date.
More info in the ICANN IPv6 announcement.
Do adjust your mindset ( The Age / Alan Kohler )
In this article Alan Kohler takes a look at some of the challenges facing the free to air TV stations in Australia. Audiences are in decline, costs are on the rise, and there are increasing challenges from other forms of entertainment. What does this mean for the industry, and what impact will technology like IPTV have?
This needs no further comment:
IPTV is here … but don’t hold your breath ( The Age / Louisa Hearn )
From the article: “While telecommunication companies in many other developed countries have been investing heavily in improving broadband services, Telstra has been accused within the industry of lagging behind - something that Optus and other smaller telcos and ISPs say they are working hard to reverse by building up their own broadband infrastructures.”
With residential VoIP slowly making its way into households providers are starting to look towards the next step in the so called ‘triple play’ - IPTV. IPTV is simply the delivery of TV programming over the internet, although more specifically realtime or on-demand programming. This is in contrast to existing video distribution over the internet which requires the user to wait while the video file downloads before they are able to start watching it.
There is nothing magic or mystical about IPTV, but it does require a lot of bandwidth between the provider and the subscriber. ADSL2+ is going a long way towards solving this problem, but many households are not close enough to their exchange to be able to get a reliable high-speed connection. With Telstra’s FTTN rollout in doubt consumers may have to wait a little longer before IPTV becomes a reality.
Yahoo, ninemsn tackle telcos (Australian IT / Michael Sainsbury and John Lehmann)
From the article: “LOCAL internet joint ventures Yahoo!7 and ninemsn are gearing up to inflict more pain on the ailing $33 billion telco sector, with the launch of cut-price internet-based voice services (VOIP) later this year.
The two groups join eBay’s ground-breaking Skype service as the latest threat to fixed-line revenues that last year earned Telstra $8 billion.”
Customer VoIP uptake is a major threat to the revenue base of the major telcos, especially when the consumer accesses the internet via Wireless or other alternative technologies. The startup costs for a VoIP provider are tiny relative to a traditional phone service provider so I think we’ll be seeing a lot of competition over the next couple of years.
They’ve lost their Sensis ( The Age / Edward Mandla)
I won’t quote from the article, but it is a good summary of whats lacking from Telstra’s Sensis operation. In summary - everything.
At any rate, it’s a bit of a rip-off ( The Guardian / Adam Webb )
This article is a good look at the bitrate encoding of various paid music download services and what sort of difference in quality you can expect. Personally I have not purchased any 128k encoded files, such as those from iTunes, and I have no intention to in the future. I’d probably buy 320k encoded files, but I wouldn’t pay more than the 128k version. Ideally I’d prefer to get the audio uncompressed and do my own compression on it. It’s probably a very small minority of users who would want to do that..
Australian VoIP services to get their own number range
ACMA proposes new number range for VoIP services (ACMA press release)
From the release: “ACMA is proposing to introduce a new service definition, ‘emerging communications service’, to accommodate VoIP and other emerging services. A new number range for emerging communications services (0550) is proposed. Emerging communications services may be fixed, somewhat nomadic or wholly nomadic but the numbers allocated to them will have no geographic significance.”
I see the creation of a dedicated number range for services which are not geographically fixed to be a good thing. Those of us who run our own VoIP switches or ATAs will be able to easily route this range to a particular destination without needing to guess what is VoIP and what is not. I’m not sure how the fixed line telcos will react to this from a pricing perspective. They may want to price PSTN to VoIP calls at a fairly high rate to try to discourage people from abandoning the legacy networks, but this could just as easily have the opposite effect as being the final straw in what people will put up with from the existing pricing models. Other people are speculating the cost of all fixed line calls will be coming down to a rate closer to what is being charged by VoIP providers. We will have to wait and see what eventuates.
The ACMA is accepting comments on their proposal until 14 February 2006.
Over the last couple of days some joker has been sending out spam using my domain name, wonk.org. Please be assured the spam is not from me and I do not recommend you buy any fake r0lex watches or anything of the sort.
If you are a mail server administrator please consider using SPF. It is not the silver bullet solution to spam, but it will stop forgeries such as the one currently in progress against wonk.org.
Australian Government to tackle VoIP regulations
VoIP rules on way, providers told (Australian IT / Andrew Colley)
From the article: “The federal Government said it would soon respond to industry calls to introduce measures to regulate low-cost voice-over-internet-protocol telephony services.
The announcement has been expected since last year when the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) co-operated with VoIP providers to develop a discussion paper on IP telephony for Senator Coonan.
“An announcement on the Government’s response to the ACMA report on VoIP is imminent,” a spokeswoman for Communications Minister Helen Coonan said.”
There are certainly a lot of regulatory issues that need to be examined with VoIP services. The main ones being emergency call handling and the portable nature of VoIP services. There is also some ambiguity currently as to whether a telecommunications licence is required to operate a VoIP service, or whether they are just considered to be part of an internet service which does not need to be provided by a licensed carrier.
The article also mentions a local VoIP industry group, the Australian Voice over IP Association. Their website says they have been operating since February 2005 however there is no information about what the organisation does or who the members are. Hopefully if they start getting a little publicity it will prompt them to publish some information on their site.