With the talk of reassigning the portfolio of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (dBCDE) from Sen.Conroy to Sen.Lundy (which I wholeheartedly support, Sen.Lundy would really do well there), I want to question why we actually still have a separate department that deals with communications and IT.

Creating a BCDE department certainly made sense a while ago (a great improvement over the previous scenario), but now IT really is an integral part of any business, and communications is a means of transport, just like the Internet and the road outside your house. It’s infrastructure!

Today, viewing a road and the Internet as separate actually causes more conceptual problems. With hindsight, I really like the old term “Information Super Highway” as it accurately puts the Internet in the context of a road (for information) and also that like a road it’s a bidirectional medium not a one-way provider->consumer path. I believe this perspective is very important.

IT and Internet is not an (optional) extra for people and businesses to work, it’s essential, so integrated planning makes sense. When considering a new suburb or even a new city, you need to consider how people are going to work – having good Internet infra at enables telecommuting (people working remotely for a business elsewhere) and local entrepreneurship (locally operated business, possibly with employees elsewhere!)

For instance, with a good information infrastructure there’s no intrinsic necessity to place offices in a town centre. It completely changes the way town and infrastructure planning works.

The coalition talking about ditching the NBN is (to me) ignorant, it’s a capital infrastructure project just like good roads and water supply. We literally cannot do without when designing and building our future living and work environment. It’s interesting to see how Australian liberals, usually very pro road-building and the like, don’t appear to grasp that what they’re opposing is a road. Not like a road – it IS a road.

Perhaps full integration of these concepts into a new department right now (particularly pre-election) is a step too far, but thinking about it in this context will at least enable us to take the next step in what I think is the right direction.

I recently moved and the new property agent uses Macquarie Bank’s DEFT (www.deft.com.au) online/phone payment system. This costs at least $0.85 per transaction, or more if you use a credit/debit card. Extortion racket, but that’s another matter. I can’t even sign up for this system, because DEFT has now been down for over a week, with apparent security issues:

“Macquarie Payment Services – Powered by DEFT”

This site is currently undergoing maintenance work which is designed to upgraed the security for your DEFT payments. We are working to bring the site back online as soon as possible and will continue to provide updates on this page [they have not]. Existing payments will not be impacted. […] DEFT is committed to providing you with the most up to date protection for your transactions. We apologise for any inconvenience.

So this morning I got two weeks rent out of an ATM, and walked into their offices (by the way, it’s near impossible to get a park nearby so that’s a time drain in itself). Conversation with receptionist follows:

A: I’m here to pay the rent for <my address>.
Receptionist: Sure, how would you like to pay?
A: Cash.
Receptionist: Sorry, we don’t accept cash.
A: Yes you do. The DEFT payment system has been down for over a week, and me having to come in here is a considerable time drain already. I am very unhappy.
Receptionist: I can call the manager?
A: Please do.
Receptionist: Oh. Just a moment please [and vanishes]
Receptionist: Ok we’ll accept cash, as long as the DEFT system is down.
A: Thank you. And please pass this letter on to your manager. Have a good day.

The letter states the payment problem, the DEFT fail and apparent security issues, and a request/demand to remove the arrears notice from my rental record. Attached a printout of the DEFT front fail page, and an invoice for my lost company time, to be repeated bi-weekly until adequate and secure payment facilities are provided.

The cash was a test; apparently they are able to accept it and just prefer not to; I know I can pay through EFT (many agents don’t even accept that and require a cheque or money order which costs even more time/money). Of course I don’t want to do any of that as it requires me to go in to their offices every few weeks, which is downright ridiculous. I just want to be able to set up some automatic system. They don’t accept direct debit either. You must go DEFT.

Why do I bother getting cranky about this? Because I despise unfairness and borked business processes. And because literally thousands of people are getting screwed over by it, and they’ll generally have more hassle getting away from work.

I moved my number from 3 to Optus today, as 3 gave me pretty much no signal at my new home, it would blink out all the time which is of course useless. In terms of bill-readability and general service both Telstra and Optus fail, for coverage I’d prefer Telstra but their data plans (and actually any plans) just suck. So that’s how Optus won. On great merit, eh ;-)

I have a Vodafone 3G data dongle for my laptop so I don’t want Voda for mobile; I want/need to spread the risk in case one of the telcos decides to dig up a cable again and be dead for a day… you may recall that’s happened a few times over recent years and since the telcos and the govt (despite Premier Bligh’s “unacceptable” declarations at the time!) are apparently incapable of building resilience into either the network or the legislation, I’m sorting it out myself.

My home/office ADSL is now Internode on an Agile DSLAM, so that’s different as well. At the old house I was on iiNet which backs on to Optus, as does 3 mobile. So this is how, when Optus dug up their cable, both my ADSL and mobile failed. That was the day I walked into the Vodafone shop and got the dongle.

The landline/mobile/Internet networks are essentially integrated, but worse is that the telcos are quite interdependent (such as iiNet and 3 using parts of the Optus network). With the aforementioned outage some businesses had Telstra backup links, but as Telstra didn’t receive prior notification of the outage (yea, next time you plan to dig up a cable, please call Telstra a day early will you!? -tssk) they couldn’t quite handle the extra traffic. Neat when a failover mechanism doesn’t actually work when you need it.

The mobile networks each only have a single central server, which for most if not all networks is based in Sydney. So if you sever the primary cable that connects Queensland to Sydney, and stuff up the backup cable, then not only do you sever all landline, Internet and mobile connections out of Queensland for that provider, but in addition you can’t actually make calls on your mobile within Queensland!

Yes indeed, Premier Bligh, unacceptable… you said that the first time, and it happened again… and it’ll repeat in the future, until you actually push for federal action. Given there’s currently a labour government (and in most other states also) you have some chance of making something happen… later perhaps not so much.

Part of the reason for this single point of failure is billing – in some cases it could work but activity cannot be billed… telcos of course don’t like that, but it’s their choice to not have resilience in their network so I reckon it’s their problem. Another option would be to create multiple networks (usually done per country, but that’s just an arbitrary choice, so why not states?), as in <telco> Queensland, which when you go to another state then roams to <telco> NSW, and so on. That’s just a technical choice, it simply means that if any part fails, not everything falls down.

Internet and mobile are not luxury extras in Australia, many of us (and definitely businesses) rely on either one or both. Imagine being a plumber or gardener, without your mobile you are simply out of business. Having some service level agreement with your telco that might give you a penalty payment in case of outages just doesn’t cut it! The problems are largely preventable, yet business decisions/imperatives/processes cause them to keep (re)occurring, even within the same telco/network. It’s not just about competition on the front end.