Telstraclear made good money from their peering policy because every ISP in New Zealand that wished to peer with them or Telecom has had to pay for the privilege. So Vodafone now finds itself having to weigh its ideals up against their bottom line. Which will win? Well that probably depends on how much of a contribution peering income makes towards the bottom line of their wholesale division, and unfortunately I am not privy to that information. But if Vodafone were to make the right call, live up to their corporate ideals and the standards the rest of us operate under, Telecom would be left as the only ISP not openly peering with the rest of the market.

My hope is that such a move by Vodafone would put pressure on Telecom to follow suit and the move to an open peering environment would result in lower charges for consumers, because at present, national bandwidth (that is access to Telecom and Vodafone’s TelstraClear network) is expensive and artificially inflates the cost to provide services to NZ consumers.

Brendan Ritchie

As gen Y’s enter the workforce in force and Gen X’ers dominate management positions in the tech space, the cold call been replaced as the primary person to person lead generation option for a number of sales professionals. Approaching people via Linkedin or Twitter has several advantages, both for the sales person and the recipient:

• Gives the sales person a far better chance of reaching their intended recipient. Gate keepers can be extremely effective in filtering out sales calls, and are usually not the best judges as to which sales calls may in fact be in their managers best interest to receive.
• Gives the sales person more time to compose their message. A cold call is a quick affair, and gives only a few seconds to get a sales pitch across the line, time pressure and nerves can cause errors.
• Allows the recipient time to absorb the message. A recipient can take on board the DM or inmail, do some research into company represented and their products/services, and can even ask a follower/connection held in common for a reference, all before feeling obliged to reply.
• In a similar vein, the ability for the recipient to get a feel for the person approaching them adds validity to the approach. If a recipient can see that the approach is being made by a person with a number of recommendations, followers, and a well updated timeline with articulate and industry relevant information, they are far more likely to be well received.
• Where a “no thanks” is received, a sales person has still been effective in creating lasting brand awareness with the recipient, and may well connect with the person or have them follow them, meaning that a future business relationship remains possible.

There are of course negatives to social media as well:

• Often receive no response.
• Time spent finding the appropriate avenue to get to your target (google, linkedin, email address, etc) can be lengthy, and results in a lower volume of approaches.
• The burden of trying to differentiate yourself from common spam.

The cold call is not dead….yet, but it is no longer the default sales generating option, nor the most effective.  While voice/video calls continue to form an important part of  the sales process, especially when complex products/services are being sold, the “cold approach” is the new method of choice.

Brendan Ritchie

Google Fibre has been busy rolling out services in Kansas since late 2012 and is starting the same process in Austin, offering Gbps Internet connections (nearly 100 times faster than the U.S. average) from $70 per month. This has led AT&T to start offering their own Gbps plans in Austin and to offer increased speeds to existing customers in an attempt to secure their recurring income base. What is of even more interest to me is that other providers like CenturyLink are rolling out Gbps capable services in Omaha in a trial project, so across the country we are seeing the early signs of Telco’s adapting to the looming threat of Google Fibre. How real that threat is, and how much further Google will expand its fibre network is uncertain, but existing players are wise not to wait for the answer.

With the advent of UFB in NZ we saw existing fibre providers instantly drop their prices to match the wholesale pricing offered by Chorus, which being in the public domain made many realise just how out of step pre-2011 fibre pricing in parts of the country (*cough* Auckland *cough*) was. But over and above a straight price drop we have seen Telstra ramp up it’s cable speeds and Telecom finally look to embrace VDSL as an interim measure while they grapple with exactly how and when to start offering residential grade UFB services.

Across all markets, and certainly what we have been seeing in NZ, is that customers have been upgrading their circuits to faster speeds at a cost neutral basis or even saving money while getting huge speed increases. And this is happening even where UFB, NBN or Google Fibre circuits do not yet exist.

Brendan Ritchie

I recently had the dubious pleasure of attending a Fibre to the Home Installation workshop hosted in Auckland by Crown Fibre.  I say dubious, because as DTS does not really provide mass market connectivity, the value of a session on home installs might seem a little suspect.  However, with a home environment not that much different than a small stand alone office, or an apartment block not that much different than an office building, and with any definitive information on the UFB installation process in such short supply, I thought I’d participate and take from it what I could.

While much of the material had me feeling a bit like an ISP interloper, there was quite a bit of information on the difficulties faced by Local Fibre Companies (LFCs) and this is important to know.  In the words of G.I. Joe, “knowledge is half the battle.”  I’ll attempt to recount some of that below.

 The UFB installation process essentially starts with obtaining consents from the building owner(s).  With a single owner, this can be quick and easy, but with multiple owners, or in a Multi-Dwelling Unit (MDU), it can easily drag on for months.  This period of time can be hard for the ISP to communicate to clients as there isn’t any reliable or timely system to provide updates on consent hiccups.

External issues in the installation include a need for drilling and building penetration.  Also, LFCs simply cannot restore certain ground effects like polished concrete or other custom surfaces.

Internal, other obstacles await the installers such as a lack of a wiring/equipment cabinet to fit the ONT and a lack of convenient power or internal wiring. Often customer’s onsite aren’t sure where to have the ONT installed, or want the ONT installed in a difficult location.  The LFC really just wants to dump the ONT right at the entry point, but these are sizeable boxes and no one really wants them attached at random to a wall.  If additional costs are to apply to a particular placement of the ONT, RSPs really need to know this in advance to communicate and contract for this with the customer.  MDUs are the most complex jobs in that installers cannot always count on usable riser access, ducting, entry points, etc.

Currently, it takes an LFC 2 man crew between 4-12 hours to do a home installation.  That’s right, up to 12 hours.  To put that in perspective internationally, a vendor from Japan indicated that a similar job there takes a single engineer about 2 hours.  Sometimes this involves multiple truck rolls as it is not generally feasible to work for 12 hours, or past a certain time.  One installer described to me how one of his crews was working until 10pm last night until a neighbour came out and asked them to stop.  All this has contributed to a large backlog of jobs and with Chorus blaming the backlog on order quantities despite the fact that they only have 3000 homes connected, it seem like it can only get worse unless significant improvements are made.

As an ISP, our challenge will be to continue to learn what we can about the challenges LFCs are facing so that we can try to temper customer expectations and do what little we can to smooth what is a very cumbersome and confused process.

Daniel Bohan

I just don’t see how it can ever be anything other than opt in.

Firstly, why should staff pay for a device they wouldn’t otherwise need if their employer wasn’t telling them their role requires it? Any decent employer will supply their staff with the equipment that will allow them to best utilise their work hours in pursuit of the objectives they are paid to achieve. I believe that any company forcing staff members to provide their own hardware for use at work is putting their own brand at risk, as the act smells of financial weakness and tight fisted management.  In this scenario, any savings in hardware for the company may well be offset by losses in productivity.

How could an employer reasonably enforce phone, tablet or PC standards in a compulsory BYOD environment? And if an employer was relaxed about the standard of devices brought in to work by staff, surely that puts their effectiveness in question and is counter productive?

There have also been a number of concerns raised for a long time about security in a BYOD workplace, and how to keep workplace networks secure when ownership of the devices connected to the network is so diverse. My concern here is the ethical question of how an employer can hope to enforce user policies on hardware they don’t own?

We have an opt in policy at DTS, a few staff really like their Mac’s and run with those, but it’s certainly not expected, and the clear understanding is that they will need to conform to the same polices as staff with company supplied phone/laptops during work hours.

Brendan Ritchie

Recently we provisioned a WAN for a company that has over 500 staff spread across its offices in Sydney and Wellington. They needed to be able to run HD video and IP voice between sites, and the design needed to be scalable and highly available.

This is what we went with:

The key is to find a solution that fits well within best practice deployment, client expectations and budgeted costs. In the case study above, we had a client with substantial ICT knowledge within their team so they had a fair idea as to the design they were after, our job was to put the parts together and present a number of options with different speeds and price points so they could choose the solution that best met their needs.

Some key benefits to the DTS model:

• We can provide one invoice for all locations in a single currency (NZD or AUD) if desired
• Have help desks located in both countries, staffed by techs with strong local knowledge
• Single point account management for all locations
• End to end visibility and vendor simplification, no more blame game with different vendors blaming each other when faults occur

Hopefully that brief explanation helps shed some light on what we do here at DTS to facilitate trans-Tasman business operations.

If you have any questions, we are always happy to talk.

Brendan Ritchie

Upload speeds are becoming ever more important as video conferencing, IP telephony and cloud based applications are embraced at an exponentially greater rate and working from home becomes more common (unless you work for Yahoo). The result is that satellite offices and home users now require the ability to push content out to other sites at a faster rate, and the required speeds will only increase as new applications are developed and refined.

Australian business users on existing high cost/low speed legacy symmetrical connections will likely move to NBN connections in high numbers given the low costs and higher top end speeds. But given they are deployed using GPON technology and are asymmetrical, the details around traffic classes and upload speeds will be crucial if the ICT community is to have any clarity on the overall effectiveness of the coalitions plan, and the effect that a migration by SME’s to NBN plans would have on business function.

Graph: Percentage of symmetrical versus asymmetrical circuits on the DTS network in Australia and New Zealand.

The Ultra-Fast Broadband initiative in New Zealand had a clear focus on the business, health and education sectors, and has ensured that part of its product suite includes low cost, high speed, symmetrical and fully allocated CIR options alongside very well priced asymmetrical connections that are largely EIR. The suggested NBN model put forward by the coalition has a lot of work needed before it becomes a blueprint for future business success.

The key is that we don’t want to move clients from xDSL technology to an equivalent, we need improvement from the outset and scalability, and right now I don’t believe the coalition has provided us with enough information to definitively state that their version of the NBN will deliver.

To see our comparison of the NZ UFB and Australian NBN initiatives click here.

Brendan Ritchie

When I first started with DTS 6+ years ago, data was a core earner, one which we based a large proportion of our business model on, but it is increasingly irrelevant in terms of being a driver of future growth. Usage will continue to rocket upwards, but per unit price decreases driven by wholesale cost reductions and competitive market pressures will continue at an equivalent or greater rate, negating growth in client numbers to some extent.

Diversification is what is needed for future growth. As seen in our new data centre and growth in voice and managed hardware sales, future growth will come from selling more services that are logical additions to the core traditional ISP offerings of circuit + data.

The other clear result from the last financial year to is DTS’s continued fast paced growth. We met or exceeded all key budgeted goals which leaves me to say a big thank you to our customers, channel partners and staff for making that possible. With a big team effort we have grown revenue 20% on last year, built our first data centre, met voice revenue budget, deployed several large WAN’s with between 50-200 sites, and moved to a 10Gbps core network.

Thanks again to all those that have contributed to our success over the last 12 months.

Brendan Ritchie

We are very pleased to announce that our new Data centre is now open!

Located on level 4 of CBD Towers in Main Street Upper Hutt, our facility has already attracted clients such as Hutt City Council, Upper Hutt City Council, Resolve Technology, BDO and others.

For pictures of the build and final product, you can visit our gallery here.

Our Data Centre has the following features:

• 24/7 swipe card access for full rack holders, 24/7 accompanied access for those with gear in a community rack
• Dual diverse FTTF fibre access
• 24/7 service monitoring and reporting
• 10/100/1000Mbps ports available
• Generator and N+1 redundant UPS backup power included (cutover tested monthly)
• Redundant Cisco and Juniper switching and routing
• Peering at CHIX, WIX, HIX and APE
• Smart hands service available
• Cabinets are 1.2m deep and .8m wide (1.2m by 19″ mounting depth)

If you would like to come in and inspect the new facility, please give us a call on 0508 387 669 and we will be happy to organise a time to do a walk through with you.

For pricing information please visit http://dts.net.nz/hosting/co-location/

Kind regards,

The DTS Team

The clear facts are that Orcon has been up for sale for some time now, but no buyer has been forthcoming, at least not with an acceptable offer, until the last few weeks. The identity of the buyer is not known for sure at this stage, but fairly well grounded market speculation is that a director of Vivid Networks, Warren Hurst, is heading up the sale.

I am led to believe that Orcon is not profitable in it’s own right, and having failed to sell off this unproductive asset, Kordia chose to merge the two companies in order to reduce costs and secure some economies of scale. Having undertaken the merging of the Kordia/Orcon brands, an offer was put forward, and given that Kordia’s net debt has increased $9.4 million from December 2011 to a current total of $75.3 million, a one off cash influx to the tune of $40 million is crucially important. Add to that the analogue shut down that looms ever closer (set for the end of 2013) which will leave a big hole in Kordia’s recurring revenue, and you have the sale of Orcon as a top priority.

While Orcon and Kordia have merged in recent weeks, it seems that former Orcon staff are now set to be de-merged, so that process, which included several redundancies, looks to have been an unfortunate misadventure.  So, it is the mixture of an under performing asset, looming reductions in Kordia’s earnings and a high level of debt that has lead to the (probable) sale of one of New Zealand’s top 4 ISP’s.

Anything in here I have got wrong? Let me know.

Brendan