2018 / ISSUE 6Championing better broadband for New Zealand

KATE MCKENZIE

Chorus CEO on challenge and innovation

SMART CITIES

How technology can transform our population centres

FIBRE AND WIRELESS

Our future networks work together

Brought to you by

Orcon sold for millions. Now serial entrepreneur, Seeby Woodhouse, returns with Voyager

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HOW STREAMING TV WORKS The key lies in red server boxes

16Kate McKenzie The Chorus CEO doesn't plan to run a boring utility19Broadband Compare Mining for ISP gold20 Where fibre meets wireless Often seen as rivals, fibre and wireless work best together

Contents 2018 / ISSUE 6

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SMART CITIES Putting intelligence into our population centres needs more than just technology14 Sensing Water Tussock Innovation uses IoT to keep water clean

VIEWPOINT

33 Why don't you have fibre yet? InternetNZ deputy CEO Andrew Cushen thinks uptake could be higher

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8 COVER STORY: SEEBY WOODHOUSE The Voyager CEO says the move to fibre is an opportunity he can't resist

22 Closing Taranaki digital divide PrimoWireless is pushing fibre deep into hard-to-reach rural areas27 Networking in the cloud Software Defined Networks promise much, but can they really deliver?28 Amazon threat inspires retailers Local stores respond to global online competition

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THE BEST WAY TO NETWORK YOUR HOME Moving data around your house doesn't have to be hard

REGULARS

1 EditorialFibre and wireless

2 In BriefFalling broadband prices, Stuff Pix, school Wi-Fi trial

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2018 / Issue 6

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Editor Bill Bennett

Chorus Editorial Consultants Ian Bonnar, Steve Pettigrew, Holly Cushen

Contributors Rob O’Neill, Scott Bartley, Heather Wright, Hadyn Green, Johanna Egar, Andrew Cushen

Senior Account Director LauraGrace McFarland

Senior Designer Julian Pettitt

Publisher Ben Fahy

On the cover Photography by Robin Hodgkinson, art direction by LauraGrace McFarland, design by Julian Pettitt

Published by Tangible Media, ICG.PO Box 77027, Mt AlbertAuckland 1350, New Zealandwww.tangiblemedia.co.nz

The Download is championed by Chorus PO Box 632, Wellington 6140www.chorus.co.nz

The contents of The Download are protected by copyright. Please feel free to use the information in this issue of The Download, with attribution to The Download by Chorus New Zealand Limited. Opinions expressed in The Download are not necessarily those of the publisher or the editor. Information contained in The Download is correct at the time of printing and while all due care and diligence has been taken in the preparation of this magazine, the publisher is not responsible for any mistakes, omissions, typographical errors or changes to product and service descriptions over time.

www.thedownload.co.nz

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WHILE THERE ARE times when the two go head to head, that’s rare compared with the times when fibre and wireless go hand in hand. The two are complementary technologies, not opponents.

This is a theme that runs through many of the stories in this edition of The Download. We look at the issue in some depth in Fibre and wireless, on page 20. You rarely see fibre without wireless. And wireless works so much better when fibre is part of the picture. It almost always is too.

When New Zealand’s UFB fibre network reaches a neighbourhood, strands of glass carry data from the exchange to the cabinet and from the cabinet to the buildings. Once the data is inside the house or office, nine times out of 10 the job of moving it is then handed over to Wi-Fi.

Scott Bartley covers this in The best ways to network your home, on page 30. Even when homes and offices have Ethernet connections to smart televisions or desktop PCs, Wi-Fi is used to connect tablets and phones.

At first sight, the name of Matthew Harrison’s Taranaki-based PrimoWireless — see page 22 — firmly nails the company’s colours to one technology mast.

And yet Primo uses fibre to fuel its wireless connections. Fibre means PrimoWireless can reach further and deliver better performance to its rural customers.

It’s also worth remembering that when Telecom, now Spark, first built the cellular network it now uses to deliver fixed-wireless broadband, the company’s marketeers were at pains to point out that it performed better than

its rival because its towers were “fibre-fed”. Fibre gave the company a key advantage then. It still does.

By the time New Zealand’s current wave of land-based networks are complete, fibre will extend to about 87 percent of homes. It will reach an even greater proportion of businesses, schools and medical centres. Because fibre will also reach many of the

towers used for wireless broadband technologies, its benefits will stretch to almost everyone.

Likewise, fibre will have an important role to play in a year or so when the mobile companies start building 5G cellular networks. If 5G is to deliver on its promise, fibre will be essential.

The future is not fibre or wireless, it is fibre and wireless.

Bill Bennett

Because fibre will also reach many of the

towers used for wireless broadband technologies,

its benefits will stretch to almost everyone.

Fibre and wireless, not fibre or wireless Some telecommunications folk like to paint fibre and wireless as rivals. They tell us we have an either/or choice. In most cases they’ll then go on to say why one of the two is preferable and that it is the future.

The Download | Editorial

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In brief

"The New Zealand IoT Alliance's research says that IoT could bring NZ$2.2 billion of benefit to the economy over the next ten years."

IDC New Zealand research manager for telecommunications Monica Collier after reporting the number of local organisations implementing IoT doubled between 2016 and 2017.

Broadband prices tumbled in 2017 Research company IDC says the average price of a residential 100/20 Mbps fibre plan with uncapped data fell from $119.07 to $87.78 during 2017. That's a 26 percent drop. Prices across the telecommunications industry as a whole fell by 6.3 percent. This continues a long-term trend.

Telecommunications Forum CEO Geoff Thorn puts the drop in context, pointing out that the cost of comparable utilities has been increasing over time. “The latest figures continue a trend seen across the board in New Zealand since 2006. The real cost of telecommunications services is decreasing, even as the quality and quantity of services provided is increasing,” he says.

Jason Attewell, Statistics New Zealand's senior manager, Labour Market and Household Statistics, says the price consumers pay for technology effectively falls over time. “In the Consumer Price Index, we adjust prices to reflect improved products or services, even if the sticker prices stay the same,” he says.

Netflix surges Researcher Nielsen says 1.2 million New Zealanders now have Netflix access. The research company's Connected Consumer Report for 2018 says around 434,000 households now subscribe to the video-on-demand service. On this showing, Netflix's New Zealand reach has almost doubled since December 2015, when researcher Roy Morgan reported 684,000 New Zealanders had the service.

Netflix's biggest New Zealand competitor is Spark's Lightbox, which, according to its annual report, currently reaches 810,000 New Zealanders, via 300,000 subscriptions. Spark says around 44 percent of the population now use streaming video. In comparison, Sky TV has around 700,000 subscribers.

Netflix continues to grow fast internationally. It added eight million new subscribers in the last three months of 2017. That's a record and comes after a price increase. Netflix now has close to 120 million subscribers worldwide – that's about the same number as the US television viewing audience.

BY THE NUMBERS

174GBAverage household data internet usage

AVERAGE BROADBAND SPEED IN NZ

64MbpsPeak traffic on the network

on 1 February 2018

1.45Tbps

20,000 GIGABIT CONNECTIONS IN NZ

Uptake of Chorus UFB fibre

42%

300,000 CUSTOMERS WHO COULD BE

ON BETTER CONNECTIONS

2018 / Issue 6

3The Download | In brief

ComCom educates broadband beginners The Commerce Commission has released two more guides as part of its consumer education project. All the consumer education guides are aimed at beginners. The latest additions show users how to choose a telecommunications service provider and how to monitor its performance.

“When consumers experience problems, we want to help them identify the potential causes, as well as giving them practical advice about what they can do to try and improve their broadband before they take it up with their internet service provider,” says Telecommunications Commissioner Dr Stephen Gale.

Communications services flat as NZ spending on IT rises to $12 billion Research company Gartner says it expects the New Zealand technology products and services sector to climb 2.2 percent in 2018. It will rise from NZ$11.7 billion to a shade under $12 billion. This is close to the 2.5 percent growth expected in Australia. Both countries are well behind Gartner's worldwide growth forecast of 4.5 percent

Spending on software is set to see the biggest increase during the year. Gartner says spending on communications services is likely to repeat the recent pattern and post a modest increase of around one percent. In 2017, the market was worth $4.37 billion, in 2018 this will rise to $4.41 billion. Gartner forecasts $4.42 billion in 2019.

The research company includes consumer and enterprise, fixed and mobile, voice and data services in its communications services forecast.

New Zealand 2017 2018 2019

Devices 1,648 1,657 1,635

Data Centre Systems 364 353 345

Software 1,487 1,630 1,788

IT Services 3,836 3,907 3,976

Communications Services 4,378 4,413 4,425

Total Sum of End-User Spending 11,703 11,959 12,169

Source: Gartner (January 2018)

Dr Stephen Gale

KORDIA REVAMPS WITH NEW TV BROADCAST- AS-A-SERVICE OFFERINGKordia is making it easier for local content producers to distribute their content with the aid of its Cloud for Digital Playout service. A one-stop shop, it treats the transmission part of broadcasting as a service that is paid for monthly.

The company’s head of media, Dean Brain, says there is already a lot of interest. Several shopping channels and ethnic television companies – Chinese and Indian, but also some smaller ethnic communities – are interested.

“To play their content, our TV customers have to first load it on to a server, then create a play list, then play it. Some of them can’t afford the equipment needed, so we’ve developed a customer-agnostic service that distributes to web platforms like YouTube or to their own branded platform, like Rhema TV’s; the Christian broadcaster.”

Brain said the new service was aimed at New Zealand-focused television content providers. The service is an initiative of Kordia’s revamped media division. Brain is its newly appointed head.

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4 The Download | In brief

Telco Development Levy finalised The Commerce Commission has released its final decision on the $50 million Telecommunications Development Levy for 2016/17. The levy is, in effect, an extra tax on telecommunications companies. In round numbers, it adds about one percent to the end-user cost of telecommunications services.

The money raised is used to pay for rural broadband, fixing mobile blackspots, the 111 emergency calling service and services to help deaf people use phones.

As in previous years, New Zealand's largest telco, Spark, will pay the lion's share of the levy for the year: almost $18 million. The five biggest telco companies, Spark, Vodafone, Chorus, 2degrees and Vocus, will pay around $48 million of the $50 million total.

2degrees offers Wi-Fi calling to fill mobile coverage gaps 2degrees has introduced a service that allows customers in areas with poor cellular coverage to make calls or send texts using a Wi-Fi hotspot.

The Wi-Fi calling service only works with some handsets. At the moment that's just recent Samsung models. 2degrees says it will add other phones to the service in the coming months. When in use Wi-Fi calling appears like an ordinary phone service.

Wi-Fi calling also works if customers are overseas. It means people can receive incoming calls and texts on their usual phone number.

2degrees' chief marketing officer Roy Ong says: “If you’ve got Wi-Fi, you’ve got 2degrees cell coverage.”

LEVY ALLOCATION

QLP Qualified revenue ($)

% of industry qualified revenue

Amount of TDL to pay ($)

Spark 1,502,143,973 35.43 17,668,014.48

Vodafone 1,119,526,777 26.34 13,167,722.70

Chorus 960,502,000 22.59 11,297,294.77

2degrees 356,180,198 8.38 4,189,343.37

Vocus 134,057,695 3.15 1,576,768.50

Ultrafast Fibre 38,659,000 0.91 454,701.94

Teamtalk 34,401,000 0.81 404,619.91

Enable Networks 25,674,000 0.60 301,974.12

Vector 21,721,000 0.51 255,479.47

Kordia 16,476,000 0.39 193,788.49

Trustpower 13,901,000 0.33 163,501.68

REANNZ 9,327,000 0.22 109,702.91

Now 5,659,908 0.13 66,571.07

Northpower 5,443,000 0.13 64,019.83

Compass 4,935,000 0.12 58,044.80

Transpower 2,419,000 0.06 28,451.95

Total Industry 4,251,026,551 100 50,000,000.00

New Zealanders less likely to complain about telecoms The New Zealand Telecommunications Forum says the number of consumer complaints about the industry is lower than in other countries.

According to the annual Telecommunications Dispute Resolution report, the number of complaints in the year to July 2017 was steady, following a rise in complaints the previous year.

The TCF says the number is “substantially lower than the number of contacts [complaint enquires] received as a percentage of connections by dispute resolution bodies in other comparable sectors and telecommunications disputes services in other jurisdictions, such as Australia and the UK.”

During the year, the dispute service received 2,252 complaint enquiries from consumers. Only six percent became formal complaints. The TCF says that in most cases service providers were able to resolve the issues raised quickly.

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TESTING UNDERWAY FOR HAEATA COMMUNITY CAMPUS TRIALNetwork for Learning and Greater Christchurch Schools Network have been working with Chorus on a school Wi-Fi trial at Haeata Community Campus in Christchurch. The project is now well underway. 

The trial aims to extend the school’s managed internet service into the homes of students in some of the most deprived areas of the city.

The free service offers students the benefit of internet access outside of normal school hours.

Chorus and Network for Learning have been working on the pilot to help bridge this digital divide since November. A prototype extended Wi-Fi network is now in place in two of the streets within the school’s catchment area and testing is underway in six homes.

Andy Kai Fong, Principal of Haeata Community Campus, described the initiative as a game-changer in that it allows “seamless education between school and home.”

“A good proportion of families here who make weekly decisions about which bills they can afford to pay; whether they pay rent, food or power. When battling this reality, the internet is a luxury you don’t afford,” he says.

“Yet, the notion of learning these days without the internet is almost unthinkable.”

Joseph Wong, Chorus’s network strategy and planning manager, is positive about the programme’s progress. “Considering what we are trying to do is totally different and new, we’re tracking well,” he says.

“We’re making use of our existing copper, fibre and

telephone poles in the street, and even trialling supplying power to the access points over unused copper pairs.”

Once it goes live, the Haeata Community Campus Wi-Fi network will let students log in to their own account from home. They will have full access to online educational resources.

Andy Kai Fong

Stuff Fibre in media play Stuff Fibre now offers Stuff Pix, a movie-streaming service. The ISP says it has a catalogue of movies that can be watched online for between $1 and $7 each.

Paddy Buckley, previously head of Quickflix in New Zealand, is Stuff Pix’s general manager.

Stuff Fibre is a joint venture part-owned by Fairfax New Zealand that boasts a sizeable number of media properties. With rival service providers also offering online media, the movie business gives Stuff Fibre an opportunity to differentiate itself from the pack.

Stuff Pix is a relatively modest entry into the streaming market, which is dominated by Netflix. The company offers a list of 700 movies; they are not exclusive.

Buckley says the operation is a replacement for closed video stores and is not a Netflix competitor. Stuff Pix will be open to all internet users and its main attraction will be price. There is no subscription fee. Instead, customers pay a one-off fee to view each movie.

He says the prices will be the lowest on the market. While it is technically possible to buy movies for less by parallel importing, customers need to set up a VPN (virtual private network) to do this.

New Zealand's two largest ISPs, Vodafone and Spark, have their own media offerings. Vodafone resells Sky TV content through its Vodafone TV service, while Spark has its Lightbox streaming service.

Paddy Buckley

ON THE BALL Kordia’s on the ball when it comes to broadcasting the popular Super Rugby games from the Pacific. It now delivers HD-quality video of Fijian and Samoan games to fans around the world.

Dean Brain, Kordia’s head of media, says flying in and setting up broadcasting equipment

in such remote locations is both a joy and a challenge. “It’s like taking Meccano apart and then putting it back together again.”

However, Pacific rugby is getting global attention, and Kordia is earning an international reputation for its expertise in broadcasting the games to the world. HD’s reliability helps a lot, says Brain.

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6 The Download | In brief

FCC ENDS US NET NEUTRALITY In December, the US Federal Communications Commission voted to undo the net neutrality regulations established by the Obama administration.

This means US internet service providers are free to charge users more to access certain types of content. The ISPs will be able to decide which content their customers can access.

They will also be able to slow the delivery of certain types of content.

In the US, many consumers have little or no choice of ISP. The competitive pressure that acts as a brake on discriminating against

certain types of content often doesn't apply. The US net neutrality debate is often

framed as a fight over free speech. It pits giant telecommunications companies like AT&T and Verizon against wealthy internet giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon.

The internet companies fear the end of net neutrality will give telcos too much power and an added ability to clip the ticket. At the time of writing, they are working to reverse the December vote. A political backlash, especially among younger voters, means Congress may revisit the issue later this year.

Chorus network hits 1.45 terabits per secondChorus’ broadband network hit its 2017 peak at 9.25pm on December 10. At the time it’s network was delivering 1.328 Tbps per second. Less than four weeks later it hit a new high. On January 4, at the same hour, the network was spitting out 1.33 Tbps per second. Within a month that record was passed. On February 1 1.449Tbps passed through the network. New Zealand’s most voracious data consumers are in Porirua. In December, the average Porirua household chewed through 202GB, that’s 34 percent up on a year earlier. Nationwide average data consumption on the Chorus network climbed a similar amount. It is now 174GB a month. That’s up from 123GB a year ago. Users with fibre accounts use more data than those with a copper connection. While the average monthly data use across the entire Chorus network is 174GB, customers with fibre use around 250GB. In September a Chorus forecast said this will climb to an average of around 680GB a month by 2020. In part the rise will come as more accounts move from copper to fibre. The growth is largely about television moving from broadcast distribution to online, on-demand delivery. Chorus network strategy manager Kurt Rodgers says it is not just the big international providers like Netflix driving this change. He says TVNZ and Three launched live streaming in 2017 and that has helped online television become mainstream. Rodgers says people are watching on smart TVs, but they also watch on phones and tablets connected to home Wi-Fi networks. He says phone handsets are used more often with Wi-Fi than cellular data.

Kordia in tune with music lovers’ digital radio Digital radio, beloved of music buffs and quality radio fans, could be coming to New Zealand with a little help from Kordia.

The broadcast-transmission provider turned telco has just revamped its media division and is getting behind Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB). Industry veteran and DAB enthusiast Dean Brain, the division’s new head of media, says Kordia is “in discussions with the new government”.

Brain is “positive” despite the fact DAB trials – with Radio New Zealand and others – have been running

for up to 10 years. He sees digital radio coming to replace AM services because of the latter’s relatively poor sound quality. “DAB is a beautiful clean sound, just amazing,” says Brain.

The fact that many new cars now come equipped with DAB is music to his ears. These cars are now common in the UK and are becoming popular in Australia, he says. They often now come equipped with a digital screen, so broadcasters can, for example, let drivers know if there has been an accident. Brain sees such developments adding to the push for digital radio to be allocated its own frequency. He has his sights on the AM band as he believes digital radio will eventually replace AM because it sounds so much better.

Dean Brain

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2018 / Issue 6

TGA CABLE AND HAWAIKI ADD RESILIENCE TO INTERNATIONAL LINKS Last year scores of international flights were cancelled when the fuel pipe supplying Auckland airport with aviation gas was ruptured.

In the same way, New Zealand’s international telecommunications links were, until recently, vulnerable to a shut-down should anything happen to our sole submarine cable network: the Southern Cross. It links us to Australia, Fiji, Hawaii and the US mainland.

That changed last February when the Tasman Global Access cable went live. The 30Tbps cable, which runs between Auckland and Sydney, provides us with greater capacity and connectivity. It also gives us a back-up cable. And the Spark, Vodafone and Telstra-owned cable makes Kiwi creative hits like the Thunderbirds series more possible too.

Wellington’s Pukeko Pictures, an offshoot of Weta Workshop, which created the movies, works with production shops all over the globe. Vodafone says better cable capacity means it can share big files much more easily with its overseas partners.

New Zealand will soon boast a third submarine cable: the $500 million Hawaiki Cable. This is set to go live mid-year and has a total capacity of 42Tbps. It will link New Zealand, Australia and the US. It is unusual in being a split cable – one cable goes from Northland’s Mangawhai Heads and another from Sydney. They join up underwater to form a single cable that lands in Oregon. There is also a side link to American Samoa.

A fourth cable, Southern Cross’ 60Tbps Next cable, is due to go live late next year. It will also connect New Zealand, Australia and the US, with branches to several Pacific islands.

CEO Anthony Briscoe underscored the importance of submarine cable, saying people may think their Facebook and Snapchat content is delivered by satellite, but “most of it is delivered by undersea cables no thicker than a garden hose.”

“Submarine cable is among the most critical infrastructure projects on the planet.”

Vodafone’s wholesale director Steve Rieger has worked on the TGA cable project and says cable traffic is changing fast. “60 percent of our traffic used to come from the US,

40 percent from Australia, now its 75 percent from Australia, 25 percent from the US. This is mainly the result of Netflix, Amazon and Google’s YouTube now running their content from Australian data centres.”

Entertainment is driving usage, which is doubling every 18 months, he says. But the cable is good for business too, with Pukeko Pictures’ Thunderbirds series being a good example.

Commenting on the four cables, Rieger says: “Submarine cable is a critical path. We need as much diversity as we can afford, and by having Southern Cross, TGA and Hawaiki, and soon Next, we now have this critical infrastructure much better protected.”

‘Thunderbirds Are Go’ – again. Better submarine cable capacity with the advent of the TGA Cable makes it possible for New Zealand to produce movie hits like Thunderbirds

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8 Cover story | Voyager

THIS YEAR IS going to be a very big one for ISP Voyager, says founder and CEO Seeby Woodhouse.

Voyager, which has transformed from a business-focused ISP into a much broader company through a series of acquisitions, is poised to finally unite all its parts, first through its billing systems and then through branding.

Then Woodhouse and his team will focus on growth. They aim to triple the size of the business from just under $30 million in turnover now.

It’s all about the roll-up, he says. Woodhouse made his first fortune from

selling Orcon, the ISP he founded back in 1994, to state-owned broadcasting communications specialist Kordia. He sold it for $24.3 million, in 2007. His share of the sale was 80 percent.

That sale still seems to be on his mind though, both as a benchmark and a regret.

“I think in some ways I sold Orcon too soon,” he says. “I sold it once I got to $24 million turnover and I was kind of disappointed because it got to $150 million in the years afterwards.

“I felt that I sort of missed out on a bit of a hockey stick. So, as a personal goal, I want to get to $100 million in sales. I'm just excited about that journey.”

Orcon was the product of up to 40 acquisitions of small, unprofitable dial-up ISPs.

“I grew the company over its last five years from 3000 or 4000 connections to 60,000 when I sold it,” he says. “With Voyager, I've done a similar thing, where I rolled up 10 or 15 little companies, put them all together and have, hopefully, created something that's a lot bigger than the sum of its parts.”

If the name Voyager rings a bell, then you’ve probably got grey hair and quite a good memory. Woodhouse went to work for a company of the same name in the early 1990s, to learn how an ISP worked and then launch one of his own.

That early Voyager was bought first by Australia’s OzEmail, then by US giant MCI WorldCom subsidiary UUNet. However, when MCI found itself filing for bankruptcy, in 2002, it closed the New Zealand business abruptly, advising its customers to go to Xtra.

Woodhouse later bought the Voyager domain and phone numbers, when their registration expired, and put them in storage, along with a few hundred other domains he’d accumulated, only bringing them out when his Orcon non-compete agreement ended and he was ready for his next venture.

Rolling up unprofitable ISPs works because the customer base is all that’s needed – the costs, mainly of premises and staff, can be cut away.

“We don't need 10 CFOs and, you know, 10 different branch offices and 10 different billing systems,” Woodhouse says.

All of a sudden, a customer base that was making little if any money, and was worth very little, becomes valuable.

Both Orcon and Voyager were launched to take advantage of major one-off industry changes. Orcon took advantage of the arrival of the internet as a consumer service; Voyager has taken advantage of the consumer shift to fibre and the business shift to the cloud.

“The change from DSL [Digital Subscriber Line] to fibre is the last technology change that

most consumers in New Zealand will ever see,” Woodhouse says. “But if you're having to pull out your modem and put in fibre then obviously you’ll look around.

“So, part of the reason I started Voyager was to try and get a percentage of the customers in this final change-over from DSL to fibre.”

He also set about building a hosting business, investing in virtual private server technology from VMware, and in domain hosting and cloud services.

“Voyager started as a business-focused hosting company and then expanded into access; business access and then, eventually, residential access,” he explains.

Two of the company’s most recent acquisitions could be transformative. The buy-out of New Zealand’s first ISP, Actrix, has given Voyager scale – one percent residential market share, in fact. While the acquisition of cloud PBX developer Conversant has delivered intellectual property.

“We don't have any licensing fees, unlike an Avaya phone system or something, so we can actually provide a very nice, full-featured corporate phone system at a low cost and, therefore, make enough money to provide a good service at a good price.”

That’s one major goal for the year: to move into cloud PBX and telephony, and help businesses migrate away from legacy phone systems into applications such as next generation video-conferencing.

Voyager also has a baked-in path to market for this and other services through its domain hosting brands, which already serve 30,000

SEEBY WOODHOUSE AND THE ART OF THE ISP ROLL-UP The CEO of Voyager is taking the company on a second journey as it consolidates and takes advantage of industry changes. Rob O’Neill reports on how Voyager is winning customers as they upgrade to fibre

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– or one in five small and medium-sized New Zealand businesses, Woodhouse says.

“We're actually a lot bigger in that space, and we're quite unusual in that we do everything from the domain name to email, to the website to content management, to broadband to phone services to the PBX. So, we've got a lot of products.”

Retiring Voyager’s multiple legacy brands is another goal for 2018, but first the billing system needs to be sorted.

“We’ve finally got a billing system that can handle everything we're doing and we're moving everyone on to it,” he says. “It's been a plan that's three or four years overdue and a lot harder than we thought, but there will be a lot of synergy once that's actually done.”

Once the integration is complete, Woodhouse thinks his team can raise the company’s profile dramatically and double the size of the business quickly. That’s not to say its growth has been tardy: over one two-year period Voyager grew from around half a million in billings to $14 million. Last year, Woodhouse says, the company grew by another 50 percent.

Woodhouse’s personal approach to business has changed dramatically. He teleconferences and only comes into the office personally about once a month. From being a self-described workaholic, he now spends much of his time at his house in Los Angeles or travelling and taking photographs. He has visited 30 countries in the last two years.

“I think I have a fantastic team at Voyager [and] a really good general manager who is amazing,” he says. “I probably only did about 10 or 20 days’ work all last year.”

Meanwhile, the Orcon sale is still there in the back of his mind.

“Voyager is now bigger than Orcon was when I sold it,” he says. “So that's a real milestone for me.”

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2018 / Issue 6

"We don't have any licensing fees,

unlike an Avaya phone system, so we can

actually provide a very nice, full-featured corporate phone

system at a low cost"Seeby Woodhouse

VOYAGER FOUNDER AND CEO

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Smart evolution

The smart city might be a hot idea but it’s a nebulous one. That’s because it’s still evolving, writes Bill Bennett. It’s also as

much about citizen needs as technology and network smarts PHO

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2018 / Issue 6

11Culture | Smart cities

Every city has a nervous system of some description. In smart cities that nervous system is digital. It can be put to use

making services work better, managing key assets and making people safer, and improving their quality of life.

Building a smart city is not a single project, it is developed over time through a series of small or incremental changes. Some of the changes are invisible to the public. Yet, they all add up quickly. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, especially as the components start to interact with each other.

The key is data. In a smart city you are never more than a metre or so away from moving data. It travels at the speed of light through fibre networks under people’s feet, or over wireless connections. Most of the time, it uses the same digital nervous system that powers industry, enables telecommunications networks and delivers online entertainment.

Data generated by a smart city is at its most powerful when it can report immediately on vital infrastructure, then be used to draw conclusions and feed back what it has learnt into control systems. This can all take place with or without human intervention. Whether people are in the loop or not, you still have the makings of a smart city.

Soon, smart city data will do even more. The fibre networks will reach further and will be complemented by wireless technologies. Systems will become more intelligent and cities will become smarter as a result. As you read this, administrators and private industry around the world are investing in the information and communications systems that control the functioning of everything from a city’s water supply to traffic signals, to crowd control. Sensors can collect and transmit vast amounts of data on everything from pollution levels to traffic flows at key choke points; or anything else that can be usefully measured and acted upon.

All this collected information fills vast databases; these are often stored in the cloud. In some cases, they are open databases, allowing citizens to access or even contribute information about the state of their city. Citizens, non-council organisations and private enterprises can use open data for their own decision-making. Software can then use the data to manage issues, often in real time. This doesn’t all have to be run by councils or government bodies.

Public transport phone apps and websites telling you when the next bus or train will arrive are obvious familiar examples of how smart city data can be used. The same information can be relayed to people through electronic displays

at bus stops and railway stations. Likewise, billboard-sized road signs or phone apps can tell drivers which car parks still have free spaces.

Smart city applications can be as simple as knowing when to turn street lights on. They can also alert engineering crews about trouble spots, issue public health warnings, or re-route traffic flows. In some cases, they can predict what will happen in advance and act to lessen the blow from a potential problem. So, when essential city infrastructure equipment breaks down or, say, a weather forecast suggests a road should be closed, systems can automatically kick into action without human intervention.

Applications can be much more sophisticated than this, however. In Singapore, a phone app lets citizens book seats on one of the city’s privately run bus services. The buses serve remote parts of the city not reached by public transport.

The software collects ride requests, then dispatches a bus to pick up the passengers and take them to their destinations. Software not only automatically guides the bus around traffic choke points, but also determines the optimal route, depending on where passengers want to go. Later, the stored data from these bus requests is analysed to predict demand patterns and learn where new regular transport services may be needed.

In 2016, the US State of Ohio took a different smart city approach to transport by installing technology along a 35-mile (56kms) stretch of highway. The state worked with Honda to build what it calls ‘The Smart Mobility Corridor’. The road is equipped with both fibre cable and embedded wireless sensors. These feed back real-time data so that road monitoring staff working in a central office have frequent reports on traffic conditions, weather updates, news of accidents and information on the road’s surface conditions.

As well as making the road smart, the Ohio team fitted government vehicles with hardware, so they can send and receive data while on the move. The trial has proved successful and the US government is now planning to test similar technology on an interstate highway linking Chicago, Detroit and New York.

Although the term smart city has been around for a decade or so, it’s precise meaning is not always entirely clear. There are no completely smart cities, and these days only a few could be described as dumb.

In part, the idea of a smart city means using sensors and other digital technologies to collect data and make better decisions, but technological descriptions only scratch the surface.

Huawei's chief technology officer of industry solutions, enterprise business group, Joe So, is the company’s smart cities’ champion. He says while there are a lot of smart city components, for now there is no single platform. He says this means the idea remains a concept or a goal more than a clear-cut product.

New Zealander Dr Jenny McArthur is a research associate at the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy, University College London. Her work focuses on urban policy and the governance of infrastructure systems.

She says: “The smart city has shifted from an off-the-shelf bundle of technological solutions to a more integrated approach to governing

"The smart city has shifted from an off-the-shelf bundle of

technological solutions to a more integrated

approach to governing cities… however what

makes the city ‘smart’ is using these technologies

in a user-friendly and democratic way"

Dr Jenny McArthurRESEARCH ASSOCIATE,

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

At the simple end of the scale, Palmerston North Council ran a project using mobile apps and real-time data visualisation to track fly tippers. The technology allowed residents to report incidents, and work crews were then dispatched to clear the rubbish. The council could draw maps to locate the hot spots, and, in a number of cases, collected the data needed to prosecute fly-tippers. PH

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cities. Innovative technology is still central, however what makes the city ‘smart’ is using these technologies in a user-friendly and democratic way.”

McArthur goes further, saying that a city doesn’t necessarily have to be high-tech to be smart. “The smart city integrates a new approach to governance, using real-time data collection to learn and improve the way we manage urban systems,” she says.

This can and often does work in a democratic way, giving citizens the means to communicate directly with decision-makers and participate in debate over possible choices. However, democracy is not a given. Many of the most visible and talked-about smart city projects are in countries where there isn’t a strong democratic tradition.

At a 2016 Huawei conference on Smart Cities in Shanghai, So named Singapore, Nanjing and Cameroon as three of its showcase smart cities. The fourth was our own Christchurch, which committed to becoming a smart city when the post-earthquake rebuild started. New Zealand’s

Joe So HUAWEI CHIEF TECHNOLOGY

OFFICER OF INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS, ENTERPRISE BUSINESS GROUP

Ultrafast Broadband project gives Christchurch and other cities here the underlying technology needed to make its cities smarter, says So.

Huawei also announced its Safe City Integrated Communication Platform at the conference, which, depending on your point of view, could be seen as a means to help police crack down on crime. It could easily be used to supress dissent too. And that’s the downside of smart cities: in the wrong hands, the idea can have a dystopian vibe. In places like New Zealand this is less of an issue.

McArthur says: “When we talk about a smart city, it means that the infrastructure systems are information-rich and interconnected – using new technologies to collect and interpret data, to improve the management of infrastructures such as traffic systems and lighting. What’s smart about this is not the technology, but the way it enables better, more responsive decision-making.”

Huawei’s So says that until recently the necessary connections to make a city smart were not in place. This has changed in the

thedownload.co.nz

12 Culture | Smart cities

2018 / Issue 6

last three to four years. However, he says the smart city won’t happen overnight because there is still a lot of work to be done. Huawei is involved in more than 100 smart city projects around the world, yet, he says, it will take time before any of them deliver on the promise of being a truly smart city.

“For a smart city to work you need an integrated, independent system. It has to be an open IT infrastructure and there must be great connections — you can’t have a smart city without connections,” he says.

But So says the underpinning connection infrastructure is now in place In New Zealand. The Ultrafast Broadband network is an example of the communications network needed to make smart city projects viable, he says.

Yet, there’s more to a smart city than networks and sensors. McArthur says: “What makes a city smart is not just the technologies, but using them to collect and interpret data in real-time, enabling continuous improvement of services and system operations. It doesn’t

always have to be high-tech, the real innovation lies in matching technological solutions to people’s everyday needs.”

The Internet-of-Things has an important role to play in building smart cities. These are systems that use simple computing devices and sensors. The hardware can be connected directly to fibre networks but is just as likely to use one of a number of overlapping, low-power, wireless networking technologies to communicate.

Today’s sensors and computers are cheap enough to deploy in large numbers wherever there is a need. They can be built in to other devices without adding more than a few cents to the cost. They make it possible for almost anything to relay back information on operational conditions in real time and to take action in response.

Cities are set to grow even more in importance as more and more people move from small towns to larger centres. Today, more than four billion people, that’s well over half the world’s population, live in urban centres.

We think of New Zealand as being rural, but around three quarters of our citizens live in cities and large towns. By 2050, two thirds of the world’s population and an even higher proportion of New Zealanders will be urban.

There’s a danger city infrastructure will fall behind the pace of growth. You can already see this in Auckland with its housing shortage and the massive investments in transport and water networks being made that are needed to cope with all its new residents.

Technology doesn’t hold all the answers, but it can help to deal with problems like congestion, air pollution, noise and traffic accidents. A slew of innovative ideas and developments together have the potential to help solve these problems; among them increases in computer processing power, sensor technology, better batteries and more. And we are already building the communications networks that will form the nervous system needed to bring these technologies together.

2018 / Issue 6

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Sensing water Tussock Innovation’s IoT technology promises to keep our water clean and us dry. Heather Wright describes how Waterwatch could mean the end of dirty storm water – and more

FLOOD AND SEWAGE contamination of our beaches has become common in recent months, but if Jesse Teat and the team at Tussock Innovation have their way this may become less common in future. Internet of Things (IoT) technologies like Tussock’s Waterwatch should keep cities and citizens much safer – and drier.

Teat is chief executive of Dunedin-based Tussock Innovation, an IoT technology development company and consultancy that has developed Waterwatch, a sensor-based remote water level monitoring system. Using sensors, it detects city storm water drain problems early on, so helping councils prevent flooding during heavy rainfall. It has the potential to be used on farms as well, to monitor water tank levels and effluent remotely.

Tussock is also adapting its sensor-based technology for other uses, including a very smart smoke detector that also monitors other environmental conditions.

Teat started Tussock five years ago with co-founder Mark Butler. They imagined working as contract developers, designing software and hardware, and getting them to work together “really nicely”.

“What we realised over time was that we’re really good at providing connectivity to products – especially low-powered connectivity,” says Teat.

At the same time, IoT began to grow. For Tussock Innovation it was a natural progression.

“IoT is going to be a very, very big part of our future – and by ‘our’ I mean everyone’s,” says Teat.

“IoT technologies that are becoming available now will really be the basis for knowledge. They’re able to generate all the data points we need to make smart decisions for the future.”

And underlying it all, is broadband. “All of the towers around the country that

are gathering information will be broadband-connected and they will end up being the heart of what provides the opportunity for people to gather information,” says Teat.

Waterwatch came out of Dunedin’s Gigatown win – public meetings highlighted solving flooding issues as a key desire of the community.

Waterwatch can do this by alerting council staff to any changes in water levels, whether stormwater or tidal, so the council gets an early warning about areas under pressure from rising water.

“The Waterwatch sensors can be used as an early warning system in waterways, storm water drains and sewerage systems, allowing councils and their contractors to raise flags and so prevent damage to both public and private property,” explains Teat.

However, Weatherwatch can do more than just prevent flooding.

“What tends to happen a lot is that heavy rainfall events put pressure on the stormwater systems and they often overflow into areas like the sewerage systems,” he says. “That puts real pressure on councils because they’re having to either put more sewage through their processing plant, or they’re having to dump raw sewage into waterways.”

It’s a problem New Zealand has seen played out numerous times this year. Heavy rains in January and February resulted in closed beaches around the country.

Using a long-range, low-powered WAN (Wide Area Network) connected to cellular grade networks, Waterwatch’s sensors provide continuous monitoring of water levels, with data being sent to the cloud; Amazon’s IoT cloud service.

The data is then analysed and provides threshold warnings, so action can be taken to resolve potential threats, or to evacuate low-lying or flood prone areas. Data can be presented spatially, or as a graph.

“There’s a surprising amount of data you get from these low-power sensors, so you do need to have a pretty fast broadband connection,” says Teat.

“The broadband really comes into its own in the processing – and then in presenting that data for the user at the end.

“Broadband is what provides all the links for us. The towers that gather all of that information from your sensors – whether via cellular or Sigfox, or some other low-power WAN technology – are broadband-connected towers.

Internet of Things | Tussock Innovation

Teat notes that most councils use their own independent data warehouse, so Waterwatch forwards the data on for them to crunch and use in making any infrastructure change decisions.

“But our system handles things like the early warning call-outs that alert the companies looking after infrastructure for a council [regarding] the state of the pumping stations, manholes or sumps they are monitoring,” says Teat.

The Weatherwatch system is also being used to monitor groundwater in test bores.

“This tells us more about what is happening with groundwater, and how sea levels are affecting it,” says Teat.

“With more data points collected, and a larger distribution of sensors, we are able to correlate

Jesse Teat (left) and Mark Butler of Tussock Innovation

2018 / Issue 6

how the water table reacts to weather events. Irrigation ponds and water tanks can also be monitored for falling levels.

“With Waterwatch, we’re in a space that will be very interesting for the next 20 or probably a hundred or more years. Resources are becoming increasingly scarce and we’re providing people with the ability to study and learn more about the resources they’re consuming.”

“If IoT wasn’t a thing, we wouldn’t be able to do that. Even five years ago, you couldn’t have provided a council with devices you could install in a sewerage system that can operate for more than 10 years on a battery for the price we can now.”

Waterwatch has won the support of Nokia – another opportunity to come out of Dunedin’s

"Even five years ago, you couldn’t have

provided a council with devices you could install

in a sewerage system that can operate for more than

10 years on a battery for the price we can now"

Jesse TeatCHIEF EXECUTIVE OF TUSSOCK INNOVATION

15

Gigatown win, with Tussock Innovation joining the ng Connect group. This is designed to bring com-panies together so they can collaborate on projects.

“Nokia put their hands up to work with us on this project in particular, and they are helping us look for tenders and market partners elsewhere in the world,” says Teat.

The relationship has seen Nokia showcasing Waterwatch globally, with demonstration products currently in Sweden, Poland, Spain, Singapore, Thailand, the United States and Canada.

Tussock Innovation is also developing an internet-connected, very low power, long-life smoke alarm that includes environmental monitoring of humidity and air quality, and is designed for the rental market.

Interview | Kate McKenzie

thedownload.co.nz

16

BEYOND THE UTILITY

Kate McKenzie plans a modern Chorus

When all the UFB fibre has been laid, Chorus’ CEO aims to use it to leverage Internet of Things apps and artificial intelligence, as well as run Netflix movies.

Chorus will not be a boring utility, she tells Bill Bennett

CHORUS CHIEF EXECUTIVE Kate McKenzie has customers in the front of her mind. She says knowing what people value and understanding their experience when they deal with the company is vital.

This is not an unusual sentiment for someone running a large New Zealand business. Yet, Chorus has few customers in the usually accepted sense of the word. By law, it can only sell wholesale services.

Chorus' customers are retail service providers or RSPs. There are around 90 or so of these. They buy wholesale broadband services from Chorus. RSPs then wrap these services into their own packages, sell them to consumers and provide the support.

As McKenzie points out, RSPs pay Chorus’ bills, which is something customers do. So, on one level, her customer focus is all about meeting RSP needs and expectations.

But there's another level. McKenzie says the end-customers, that is the home-owners and businesses who buy from RSPs, are also important to Chorus.

She says: “End-customers get our product; we are the ones who handle its delivery. This means we need an understanding of what’s important to them. How we design systems, build processes and work with RSPs can make a big difference to an end-customer. You have to think of it as an entire customer ecosystem. In that sense, they are all our customers.”

McKenzie says she learnt about meeting customer needs early in her 12 years working at Telstra. Her first job at Australia's largest telco was running the regulatory group. By the time she left Telstra she had managed almost every part of the company.

It was, as she points out, a great grounding for a chief executive. She says: “During my time at Telstra I saw all the different aspects of the company. I was fortunate compared with my peers; I worked on a wide variety of functions.”

As well as the regulatory role, McKenzie worked in mergers and acquisitions, along with strategy, products and pricing. She ran the operations environment and spent three years running Telstra's wholesale operation.

McKenzie says it’s helpful now she is a CEO to have this hands-on knowledge of all aspects of a telco.

When McKenzie first joined Telstra it was a different organisation to the one you see today. The majority of Telstra's shares were still in public ownership. Soon after she started with Telstra it switched from public to private ownership.

This led to a cultural change. Overnight, Telstra had to worry about winning and retaining customers. This was something that had, in the past, been largely taken for granted.

She says: “At that time I went to Stanford and did a strategic marketing course. There I got a bunch of new skills. I first learned how to segment customers, and how to think about what customers value.”

Like any privately owned business, Chorus lives or dies by serving customers. But it has to cater to another constituency: the New Zealand Government. The company de-merged from Telecom NZ, now Spark, as part of a government-led industry restructure in preparation for the fibre roll-out. This means the Commerce Commission PH

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regulates much of Chorus’ business. Among other things the regulations say it can only sell wholesale broadband services.

McKenzie says: “We have a contractual relationship with the government. In effect, it has given us some interest-free loans; they all have to be repaid. Attached to these loans are obligations about how the [UFB] build gets done and to what standard it gets done. At some point, we have to start paying a dividend if we don’t repay the loan. It's a good set-up. That’s why the regulatory environment is so important to us.”

There’s a gulf between the New Zealand Government’s hands-off approach to the fibre network build compared with what happens in Australia. McKenzie says the fact that telecommunications has never become a partisan political issue is a huge difference between New Zealand and Australia. She also admires the NZ Inc approach to doing what’s best for the nation regardless of politics.

She says: “You have to congratulate governments here of both political flavours. They’ve made a decision and successive governments have followed it through. They haven’t changed their minds every two years or so about what they want built and what

they don’t want. If you’re creating long-term infrastructure you can’t afford to have continual change. This bi-partisan support has meant Chorus could focus on what it was supposed to be doing: getting on and building the network.”

Coming to Chorus, a wholesaler, was something of a leap for McKenzie, despite her time running Telstra’s wholesale business. “I spent 12 years in the telco industry explaining to everybody why structural separation was a terrible idea and should never happen. I’ve definitely changed my view on that,” she says.

The New Zealand regulatory model makes a huge difference, she says. “We now have a set-up where an organisation like ours is open access. It’s agnostic about how the retail service providers operate. This creates a completely different market dynamic.

“It gives us a real focus. It’s one that you don’t have in a vertically integrated organisation.”

McKenzie jokes that the downside is that the structural model makes it easy for all the RSPs to gang up on Chorus. And the lack of vertical integration brings challenges. “There is nowhere for us to hide; we’re transparent,” she says.

Yet, she looks to the positives: “On the plus side, they all get the same inputs. It means they have to think about what it takes to become better retailers. They have to look for points of differentiation to be able to compete with each other. It’s a good model.”

So far much of the competition has centred on price. McKenzie says this is one of the biggest challenges for the industry. “People are consuming enormous amounts of what we produce. Growth is very high. Eventually, price competition is not sustainable because we are spending a motza building these networks. There has to be some way of adding value that customers are willing to pay for that will stop the whole thing from becoming a race to the bottom.” Hence the focus on differentiation.

She says “differentiation can come from different places, that’s perfectly valid. In some ways, the network is so good now that it’s hard to differentiate on network-related features.” She points to moves by Spark and Vodafone to value-

add with Lightbox and Vodafone TV as one kind of differentiation. Then there is Stuff Pix. Less obvious are the moves by brands in the Vocus Group to offer power alongside broadband. And then there are the power retailers who now offer broadband.

Meanwhile, she says Chorus’ main job is to stay focused on getting the various stages of the UFB build completed on time and on budget. “We aim to make sure our processes and systems are fit for purpose, and that the customer experience is good,” she says.

The network build will be complete in about four years’ time. However, McKenzie has no intention of sitting back then and managing a steady-as-you-go network utility.

She acknowledges the U-word describes where the company is today. She says: “We’re the fourth utility. For where we are in history that’s right. These days our broadband services

are as essential as water or electricity.” The company’s shareholder base reflects this. “Compared with Spark, the former parent, we have a different shareholder base. Most of our shareholders are longer term infrastructure investors,” she says.

Utilities are often seen as slow-moving compared with other industrial sectors. Chorus doesn’t have that luxury. It plays in the fast-moving telecommunications sector. The technology has already changed a lot since the company de-merged from Telecom NZ in late 2011. Fibre and wireless networks are both much faster.

The key for Chorus once the UFB build is complete is innovation. McKenzie uses this word often. “We’re starting to turn our minds to what else people can do with the wonderful fibre application that we’ve been creating. I’m optimistic now that I can see more opportunity.”

She says one aspect of technology is that it changes customer behaviour, and business models. Areas singled out for attention in the near term are how the fibre network works with the coming 5G mobile world, and how to use fibre to get more from the Internet-of-Things. McKenzie is also bullish about technologies like

artificial intelligence. “Gaming, Netflix, artificial intelligence and so on all need networks to support them.”

The network is a fantastic asset for Chorus, its shareholders and for the nation, she says. “It’s been very well done and will reach 87 percent of the country by 2022. It was, for the most part, financed by private investors.”

It’s easy to forget that seven years into the UFB project the fibre companies, not only Chorus, have exceeded the expectations set down before the start. Many more people have chosen to connect than the planners anticipated. The build is ahead of schedule and the fibre footprint is about 20 percent bigger than was mapped.

McKenzie says: “Today, we have 61 percent of customers on the 100Mbps plan; it’s by far the most popular plan. Data consumption is going through the roof. Ten years ago, people wondered if any of this would ever happen.”

Interview | Kate McKenzie

“I spent 12 years in the telco industry explaining to everybody why structural separation was a terrible

idea and should never happen. I’ve definitely changed my view on that”

Kate McKenzieCHORUS CHIEF EXECUTIVE

2018 / Issue 6

FOR MANY CONSUMERS the prospect of a broadband connection raises seemingly unan-swerable questions. What plan do I need? Which provider can I trust? Do I really need to upgrade? How long will it take, and what will it involve?

Gavin Male, founder and chief executive of comparison website Broadband Compare once faced similar questions. Back in 2014, fresh off the plane from the UK, he found himself in the same predicament. For most people in the 21st century, being digitally connected is vitally important. Even more so when everything familiar to you is half a globe away.

Male remembers entering the morass that is the world of ISPs and finding only one familiar name: Vodafone. 2Degrees and Spark were of little meaning to him, having no global presence. And the latter had recently rebranded, though he recalls people still referring to “Telecom”. This didn’t help an already confused newcomer.

“It was hard to know who was what,” Male says. And, unlike in the UK, New Zealand did not have a major player in the comparison market who could help him out. “Consumer empowerment websites are very embedded in the UK and that was the sector I was in.”

The UK is dominated by big comparison websites like Compare The Market and uSwitch. There are also broadband-specific comparison sites such as cable.co.uk. In fact, the UK government’s 2017 report on Digital Comparison Tools (DCTs) found 85 percent of UK consumers with access to the internet had used a DCT.

Male looked for something similar here. What he found was outdated or incorrect information. And so Broadband Compare was born.

Launched in June 2016, Broadband Compare now lists 122 ISPs and over 2000 plans from across the country. When asked why the service is important, Male says: “It empowers the consumer.”

The site has had over 430,000 visits since it was launched. In July 2016, just one month after starting, the site saw 16,000 visits. Today, this has increased by nearly 140 percent.

Having been in the country just shy of four years now, Male says he loves New Zealand’s innate entrepreneurial and innovative spirit, and

admires its ability to be the best connected nation on the planet. This, combined with a desire to “educate, save people some money and shout for the little guys”, is the impetus behind Male’s company.

In a nutshell, Male says “We compare and list every single ISP and plan that we know of, whether someone has partnered with us as a paying partner or not.”

This touches on rumours Broadband Compare curries favour with certain ISPs. “We’re straight up. We explain how things are rated. We push the consumer towards the best connection type, which, in our opinion, is fibre. So, if fibre is available, we will push them towards that over any ADSL or VDSL plan.

“The ideal plan for everyone would be fibre, gigabit, free connection, free router, no contract, dirt cheap,” he says. But, given this is a long shot, Broadband Compare aims to tailor its recommendations as much as possible to individual requirements. For instance, some people really only care about price, whereas others value add-ons such as Lightbox or Sky’s Neon TV.

Broadband Compare’s website traffic is driven primarily by people moving house, secondly by those looking for the cheapest deal and thirdly, accounting for 12 percent of traffic, by those who have recently had fibre made available and want to upgrade.

Does Male believe New Zealanders are getting value from their broadband plans?

He responds with a story. “We had someone contact us who was on a legacy plan the other day. The provider shall remain nameless, but the person was paying $176 per month for a 300GB capped plan. In no one’s eyes is that value for money.”

Male doesn’t believe this is particularly unusual. However, it does highlight Broadband Compare’s aim: to educate consumers so they can find what is right and fair for them.

But, for those who have changed because fibre has become available, well “they’re definitely getting value for money.”

In addition to not knowing what is available, many consumers are put off upgrading to fibre for fear they will be off the internet for days or more while they are connected to the fibre network.

“People don’t understand it can literally be a two-hour job.”

But poor install stories will have to become a thing of the past as customer service becomes increasingly important in differentiating one ISP from another, says Male.

So, what’s next for Broadband Compare?“We have soft-launched Power Compare,

which we’re developing under the NZ Compare umbrella. This will compare all the major verticals: broadband, power, mobile, travel, money, KiwiSaver etc.

“We’re looking to be a full website comparison site, but broadband is still our baby,” he says.

19Broadband | ISP comparison

Broadband Compare – mining for ISP gold

BY HOLLY CUSHEN

Gavin Male

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Fibre & wireless

DRIVING THE FUTURE TOGETHER Fibre and wireless are often seen as rival technologies, but they are proving

complementary. May Taylor reports that while 5G will likely be the underlying technology managing driverless cars, fibre will be essential to the network

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Technology | Fibre and wireless

2018 / Issue 6

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EVERY FEW YEARS mobile connectivity under-goes a major evolution – 2G brought voice, 3G brought data, 4G brought faster data. What will 5G bring us? Driverless cars?

Sure, a host of tech and car companies will build the actual driverless cars, but it’s likely they will need a fast network to stop their inventions crashing into each other.

Many people think 5G networks will provide the underlying technology that will enable driverless cars to instantly communicate their location and their next intended move – thus avoiding accidents at busy intersections. That’s because 5G networks will be up to 110 times faster than most cellular connections today. They will have massively reduced latency and significantly more capacity. Even if you prefer to walk, you will still benefit from a 5G network – you will be able to download an entire season of Game of Thrones in seconds.

So, bring it on. Well, you might have to wait a couple of years though. All over the world, telcos are trialling 5G networks and claiming all sorts of breakthroughs, but most are also predicting 5G networks won’t be in market until about 2020. In New Zealand, we’re not immune to 5G fever, with the telco industry here talking up the upgrade.

Here’s what Spark told The Download when approached for a comment on 5G:

“4.5G is an important part of our strategy because it helps us prepare for a 5G future today, keeping up with the changes in the ways people will use wireless technology over the next few years. Because 4.5G combines a range of radio spectrum and uses it more efficiently, we can provide more capacity and speed to our customers. Spark’s plans for 5G are already well advanced and we have now delivered 4.5G to over 20 locations around New Zealand.”

This mix of spectrum and fibre connectivity is thought by many to be essential to the shift to a 5G network. According to a report by Deloitte, published in July 2017 in the US, acquiring large blocks of spectrum was essential in enabling the shift from 2G to 3G and then to 4G, but, while this is still a major element, it is fibre density that is becoming critical.

“Deep fibre can facilitate high-speed access to more homes and more businesses, and support hundreds of thousands of new cell sites and hot spots for 4G and 5G. Previous generations of wireless technology (i.e. 3G and 4G) relied

programmes, will see 87 percent of New Zealand homes and businesses having access to fibre-to-the-premises by 2022. According to comparison website Broadband Compare, one of the cheapest fibre broadband plans for those connected to the UFB starts at 30Mbps for download and 10Mbps for upload.

A separate programme is underway to improve broadband infrastructure for those living in rural areas. The Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) is divided into two phases, with phase one having been completed by Chorus and Vodafone in partnership.

Vodafone wholesale director Steve Rieger, who led the RBI phase one project for Vodafone, says the telco built 154 towers over the five years of roll out, connecting around 1000 schools and 39 hospitals and health centres.

For the next phase, RBI2, mobile providers – Spark, Vodafone and 2degrees – have combined to create a new telco called the Rural Connectivity Group (RCG). The RCG was awarded a $250 million contract to build out the network, which will involve the construction of 450 cell phone towers. The towers will, however, be smaller than those deployed as part of RBI1. In addition, around $8 million in funding has been allocated to regional Wireless Internet Service Providers (see sidebar story on page 22).

“We are using fixed wireless to deliver a better service in rural areas especially. Because it is ‘point to many points’, it is more flexible than fibre which is ‘point to point’,” says Rieger.

While fibre connects to every urban cell site, Rieger says it is not always practical in rural areas. The first choice for backhaul (that is the connection from the cell site back to the main network) is fibre, then copper, then digital microwave radio and, lastly, satellite.

While there is unlikely to be an economic need for driverless cars on rural roads, the advent of faster broadband is enabling innovative solutions to be deployed in remote locations.

In the Coromandel’s remote Kauaeranga Valley, which acquired internet and mobile coverage during RBI1, an eco-cell site keeps trampers safe. While down south, in Methven, farmer Craige Mackenzie uses an application accessed via his mobile phone to check the moisture in his farm’s soil, and by doing so has cut water waste by 30 percent.

Whether it is 5G in the cities, or fast broadband in the country, the lines are blurring between wireless and fixed technologies. As Rieger notes: fibre and wireless are complementary, and this is important as “we are moving into a world where capability and performance are going to be very significant.”

on broader blocks of spectrum and improved spectrum efficiency to generate higher speeds and increased capacity. Increased speed and capacity from 5G will rely more heavily on the use of higher frequencies and [fibre] densification,” the Deloitte report says.

“Rather than building macro towers with mid or low band spectrum, carriers will deploy lower powered small cells and rely on hotspots, each with a coverage radius measured in metres versus kilometres. Densification of access points with small coverage areas implies that fewer users will share the network capacity produced by 4G or 5G small cells, generating enormous gains.”

In other words, the effective deployment of 5G networks will see multiple small sites connected by fibre broadband.

The Deloitte report, which is focused on the US, notes the country’s poor fibre deployment: “Only 38 percent of homes have a choice of two providers offering speeds of at least 25 Mbps. In rural communities, only 61 percent of the population have access to 25 Mbps wireline broadband, and when they do they can pay as much as a three times the premium over suburban customers.”

In New Zealand, the situation is vastly different. The Ultrafast Broadband programme, one of the country’s largest infrastructure

"We are using fixed wireless to deliver a better service in

rural areas especially. Because it is ‘point to

many points’, it is more flexible than fibre which

is ‘point to point’."Steve Rieger

VODAFONE WHOLESALE DIRECTOR

PHO

TOG

RA

PH B

Y ST

EVE

PET

TIG

REW

22 Focus | Primo Wireless ISP

FIBRE IS MAKING TARANAKI’S rural wireless internet service run much better. It can reach deeper into rural areas it couldn’t get to before.

Regional wireless internet service provider PrimoWireless has used fibre for four or five years now, to improve internet speeds and reliability for its rural customers. Fibre also extends its network into those deep rural pockets even satellite can’t reach.

PrimoWireless’ managing director, Matthew Harrison, says fibre is proving particularly valuable to those at the furthest-most points of its network. “Some of those farms can’t even

get satellite because the hill country is too steep. They were stuck on dial-up and they used to wait a whole day for an email,” he says.

Taranaki was one of the first regions to have fibre installed as part of the UFB initiative. The aim is to deliver the kind of fast telecoms service city people take for granted to rural New Zealand.

UFB fibre has helped transform communica-tions in rural Taranaki, says Harrison.

“It’s the fastest there is. Nothing else can go as fast as fibre – you can do 10 GB or 100 GB. You change the equipment on the end and it will go faster.

“We use the fibre to get better speed and latency [faster response times]. We get it as close as we can to our sites, and then we use wireless to deliver the service to the end-user. The closer we can bring the fibre, the closer effectively we can bring Auckland to them – which is where all the internet comes from,” he says.

PrimoWireless’ combined broadband radio wireless and fibre service means its business and rural customers can now, for example, set up a viable home business, no matter how remote their farm. And local marae can

Sheep farmer Brian Hocken may live in deep rural Tarata, but he now enjoys a ‘magic’ internet service ‘regardless of the weather’

CLOSING TARANAKI DIGITAL DIVIDE PrimoWireless mixes fibre and wireless

BY JOHANNA EGAR

thedownload.co.nz

2018 / Issue 6

23

persuade reluctant young Māori to join in their activities as they can now use the internet for downtime entertainment.

In the same way, wool farmers can attract younger shearers as they no longer face being disconnected from the internet while working on a remote farm.

Farmers can now make more use of Internet-of-Things’ precision agriculture applications – for herd testing and to manage irrigation and water levels, for example – because both the cowshed and woolshed can now connect to the internet.

PrimoWireless is 12 years old. It has 3,000 customers and operates 80 broadband radio wireless sites that form a ring around Mount Taranaki. The sites vary in size from small ones serving 10 to 20 people, to big ones serving around 200 customers.

In September 2017, PrimoWireless secured funding from Crown Infrastructure Partners (CIP) to further develop its network. It uses regional radio spectrum on the 2.6Ghz and 5Ghz bands so it can serve both non line-of-sight and line-of-sight customers.

“We’re closing the urban and digital divide,” says Harrison.

“We aim to close that gap up, so rural people can have the same opportunities as townies.”

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24

REDBOX

THE SECRET OF THE

CACHE

CACHE

CACHE

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ORIGIN

All the streaming services, from Netflix to Google to Facebook, come out of red server boxes. Hadyn Green describes how streaming works – and where it’s going

2018 / Issue 6

25Technology | How streaming TV works

"The network needs to handle a

household running five different

streams, with at least one being 4K,

without a hitch."Kurt Rodgers

CHORUS NETWORK STRATEGY MANAGER

IN A DATA CENTRE in Auckland, sitting in a server rack, is a red box. Inside the box are thousands of movies and television shows ready to stream to your home. This is Netflix. And it’s not the only box. Google is here too. And so is Facebook.

The boxes themselves are actually servers, part of a wider network known as a CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDNs are how most large streaming services distribute their content around the country.

Let’s back up though. Why does a company like Netflix need a distributed network of servers all carrying the same content? The answer is traffic and distance.

An estimated 60 to 80 percent of internet traffic is video. While Netflix is the largest contributor, with roughly 40 percent of the video traffic, Google’s YouTube is close behind. Facebook is a big player in video as well and has just launched Facebook Watch (currently US-only), an on-demand video service with original content and live shows.

The amount of content, and the rising demand accompanying it, is increasing data usage on the network. According to Chorus, internet traffic is growing at roughly 56 percent every year. Adding to this growth is the increasing quality and hence larger file sizes of that content (4K, HDR, high frame rate etc).

Right now, there’s still a lot of content that isn’t available online, especially local material.

“When Netflix launched in New Zealand, in 2015, we saw a big surge of traffic,” says Kurt Rodgers, network strategy manager for Chorus. “Now, imagine how big a surge it’ll be with all the current [terrestrial] channels going online.”

It is Rodger’s job to imagine that traffic, and predict the changes needed to keep the network congestion-free.

“We benchmark to the busiest five-minute period of the day, which is roughly 9pm, when everyone is watching TV,” he says.

Of course, by ‘TV’, Rodgers means streaming video from various sources. “The network needs to handle a household running five different streams, with at least one being 4K, without a hitch.”

Of course, Chorus can only do so much. The high speed, ‘fat’ pipe from Christchurch to Auckland helps, but no matter the speed the further you are physically from a piece of content, the longer it will take to load. There is no getting around that. The term for this delay is latency and it is the bane of streaming media, especially live video (more on this below).

A few years ago, when Netflix didn’t exist in New Zealand, those with the ability to access it found the content was good, but the streams would often drop to a lower quality bit-stream. There was also a long lag between pressing ‘play’ and a programme or movie starting. This is what it is like pulling your content from all the way across the Pacific.

But, in 2018, those problems are long gone, because of Netflix’s Open Connect program.

Netflix gives ISPs free CDN caches (edge servers) to slot into their networks. Google

ORIGINWEST

COAST U.S.A

thedownload.co.nz

Technology | How streaming TV works26

and Facebook run similar systems. The caches connect to their nearest hub (origin server) – which for most services in New Zealand is in Sydney – then gather all the content they need and serve it up to their customers.

So, when a new season of Netflix’s Jessica Jones from Marvel Studios is released, it will be sent from the US to the origin server in Sydney, and then, when the first person presses ‘play’, the video gets sent across the Tasman to the multiple CDN boxes here. From then on, any user in New Zealand will only have to access the cached version in this country.

The bigger the ISP the more boxes it gets. It’s a quid pro quo situation. The ISPs get to say that Netflix works on their network and Netflix gets its content to users that much faster. It’s a quick way for ISPs to scale up. Everybody wins.

Another company, Akamai, has its own CDN system that other companies use (for example, TVNZ On-Demand). Akamai rents out virtual real estate on its CDN network to give smaller players in the streaming market the same technological advantages of the giants.

Akamai is usually behind international streaming sites too. Why build your own network when you can rent distribution and capacity?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the choice of New Zealand’s newest movie-streaming service, Stuff Pix. Unlike with Netflix, there isn’t a CDN network for ISPs using AWS yet. So, Stuff Pix users’ traffic will cross between Australia and New Zealand. However, Stuff Pix general manager Paddy Buckley doesn’t see this as an issue. “Other services in New Zealand use the same server and have had very few issues.”

Stuff Pix also has a slightly different model to Netflix, Lightbox, and Neon. It’s TVOD, or Transactional Video On Demand, similar to iTunes or Google Play. “Stuff Pix will launch soon with more than 700 movies available to rent. It’ll also have more of a Kiwi focus than the global services and will be device-agnostic, meaning that it won’t be limited to any specific devices and will be widely accessible,” says Buckley.

Buckley’s comments highlight a clear consumer trend: a move away from linear TV to on-demand. Users want their content fast and crystal clear. And they want to be able to watch it on any screen in their house with no fuss.

So, how is the former big dog of New Zealand media, Sky, dealing with this trend? If its subscription numbers are to be believed, the answer is poorly. However, its latest collaboration with Vodafone may turn this around.

customers to access. This is the ‘user plane’. For the control plane, we use AWS.”

If you’re confused by these terms don’t worry. The user plane is how the service gets the content to you and is similar to that of other services. The control plane refers to how you interact with that content and controls every part of this experience, including when you press ‘play’.

“When you watch content we don’t send you the whole file, instead you are assigned a unique pointer,” explains Baird. The pointer knows exactly where you are in that piece of content. This means sending fewer files, which means it’s more efficient.”

Working with Sky means working with a wide range of content owners. Sometimes owners impose odd rules for their content, while they come to grips with this relatively new form of distribution.

“For example, some content owners don’t want you to be able to rewind, others may not want you to skip. With the control plane we can add and remove these controls as necessary for each piece of content. And with over-the-air updates we can quickly implement new features when they become available.”

David Malpas, general manager of product at TVNZ, has an even bigger job. He has to deal with live television as well, and also with advertising. All TVNZ’s content is sourced from master files held at TVNZ. These go through another company, Brightcove, which transcodes (converts the video files from one format to another), creates the slots for advertisements and then adds DRM (Digital Rights Management) software, before heading to the origin server. With live television, TVNZ bypasses Brightcove and streams directly to the origin server.

“On a mobile device, the ads are put in server-side,” says Malpas, referring to a process whereby the adverts are inserted before the programme reaches you, as opposed to being called in while you’re already watching it.

“We want to bring this into non-mobile as well, as it means there’s less chance of something going wrong.”

The increase in New Zealand content with terrestrial channels and local material being added will mean more internet traffic and more strain on the content delivery network, so in the future we will certainly see the number of CDN caches increase alongside demand.

As Chorus’ Rodgers puts it: “The wave of [online] TV is coming, the question is when?”

"When you watch content we don’t send

you the whole file, instead you are assigned

a unique pointer. The pointer knows exactly where you are in that

piece of content."Tony Baird

VODAFONE TECHNOLOGY DIRECTOR

Despite not being allowed to merge, the two companies are working closely together to offer a unique streaming service in New Zealand: Vodafone TV.

Vodafone TV runs on a set-top box or mobile app and is only available to those on fibre or cable (‘Fibre-X’) connections. The box has Netflix and all of the free-to-air on-demand services built in. Subscribers get a live version of Sky, plus access to Sky’s catalogue on demand.

It’s this part that is new, at least for Sky. Tony Baird, technology director for Vodafone, described it:

“We have a scheduler and an ‘origin’ [server] in Auckland, and this sends content out to our CDNs in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. We’ve also got a big fibre-optic link direct to Sky for its Live TV and Video-On-Demand services. The scheduler is responsible for triggering the play out, and the ‘origin’ stores a single unique copy of the content for all

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27

NETWORKING IN THE CLOUD

coming to you sometime soon Software Defined Networks are being described as cloud computing for networks. The promise is SDN will shake up the telecoms world and usher in new and faster

services. The reality is more complicated, Johanna Egar finds

IT’S BEEN CALLED cloud computing for networks, with all the benefits that implies. But creating Software Defined Networks (SDNs) isn’t easy. This task involves turning a large chunk of network hardware – the control management or brain part – of telecoms switches into software, to centralise control.

Doing this means you can use cheaper common hardware. This then gets told what to do by the brain, says Kurt Rodgers, Chorus’ network strategy manager, who is grappling with this technical challenge.

He says: “Networking is like a distributed brain with every switch and router making its own decision. SDN is a trend moving back in the other direction, where you’ve got cheaper devices that are centrally controlled.”

By taking the control management functions out of the hardware and turning them into software, telecoms networks become more flexible and easier to manage.

Cloud services use a similar virtualisation process. It sees software separate physical infrastructures, isolate operating systems and applications from the underlying hardware, and creating copies. These can then be hosted independently and so make cloud computing possible. A similar process is underway with telecoms networks. It is sometimes called Network Function Virtualisation (NFV).

This process is only starting with telecoms; there are still limitations. For instance, it’s not easy to turn the network routers needed to run a telecoms network into cheap, dumb hardware. Their control functions may move to the network, but network performance requirements keep climbing. This means cheap,

off-the-shelf hardware might not be able to perform well enough. Routers are not servers, which are easier to commoditise.

Although centralising control this way should lower operating costs, this is still not proven.

“You can streamline your operational processes and automate – which is the reason IT moved to the cloud – but it’s still early days with telecommunications,” says Chorus’ Rodgers, striking a cautious note.

Rodgers is more positive about SDN helping telcos and others launch and deliver new services faster. Electricity and broadcast companies, indeed any company with a large network, may also get into the game. So a big industry shake up could be coming.

SDN AND FIBRE – A DREAM TEAM? The SDN-fibre ideal is that if you have a broadband fibre connection and your telecoms provider has an SDN network you should be able – with the click of a website button – to add, say, more bandwidth, a new television service or move from a high to a low data plan. In fact, make any change to your telecoms service you want in an instant.

“Buying and interacting with your telco could become like interacting with Netflix or Amazon Web Services, or Google. That should be the goal,” says Rodgers.

“SDN isn’t important in itself. What’s important is being able to have a digital relationship with customers that’s easier, and cuts costs and improves customer experience,” he says.

The road promises to be a rocky one though. Investing in SDN isn’t cheap, and, although telcos are doing this in new areas, they have a

lot of sunk costs. This will make them reluctant to spend on SDN in other areas before an asset comes to end of its life-cycle. This could take as long as five to seven years.

Telcos may get a push from outsiders judging by what’s happening elsewhere. Despite the limits imposed, by spectrum, for example, enterprising newcomers can already do a lot by bolting together fibre, unlicensed spectrum, computing power and Wi-Fi hotspots. This is exactly what US’ Republic Wireless is doing, to provide cheap mobile connectivity. And it’s not the only one.

Republic Wireless may have to use cellular towers if no hotspots are available. Yet its example shows what is already possible. Telecommunications is set to face the kind of disruptive challenge the IT industry did some time ago. With the structural separation of our telecoms industry combined with the roll out of Ultra Fast Broadband, you don’t need to be a telco now to put SDN smarts on the end of a fibre connection and devise a new service.

A blurring is going on between networks and IT that could see integrators and companies with large networks jump into the telecoms pool.

“It’s converging, everyone is doing things digitally, over IP, using internet technology, and converging in the same direction,” says Rodgers. “At the end of the day, it is all just software over fibre.

“The two things of value in the telecoms industry are the physical structure, which gives you physical connectivity, and the service, which is basically software. SDN might mean a closer relationship between those who can deliver value to the customer and those who have the delivery structure.”

Explainer | Understanding Software Defined Networks

Chris Quin

thedownload.co.nz

E-commerce | Retailers and the Amazon threat

Online grocery shopping, an Airbnb tyre service and trolleys that use artificial intelligence – Amazon is having an effect on local retailers, writes Rob O’Neill

E-COMMERCE WAS SUPPOSED to destroy both distance and friction, but the benefits of both are still sheltering Kiwi retailers against a full-frontal assault from the global e-commerce giants.

First eBay and then Amazon and Alibaba set out to cut Kiwi retailers’ lunches from afar. They appeared to be succeeding, claiming chunks of market share from many local book retailers, for instance, and, alongside parallel importing, disrupting local monopoly distribution arrangements.

But for many goods there is no “e-equivalent” as with an e-book. Local retailers still have a moat – a very wide, wet moat – guarding them against competition in physical goods, as long as they understand the needs of local customers, deliver quality service and don’t gouge on price.

“My view has always been we need to act as if they were here now and do the things that customers would love us to do anyway,” says the chief executive of supermarket cooperative Foodstuffs North Island, Chris Quin. “If you wait until competition arrives, you’ve lost trust with your customers.”

Amazon’s Australian invasion in December wasn’t exactly a triumph. One Aussie critic described it as a “huge wet fart”, disappointing on price, product range and the cost and time of local shipping.

That stuttering start means, once again, local retailers might enjoy some breathing space, and some, like Quin, are upbeat about their prospects.

“You’ve got to be very careful to be driven by your customers, not by your competitors,” he says.

The drivers in grocery he sees are, first, value when it comes to both price and the customer experience. Second, is convenience. And, finally, rapidly growing customer aspirations for health and well-being.

Quin admits the company has been behind on its e-tail game, but it is now getting online

fast. It is also doing this in a way that takes advantage of the cooperative’s model and its segmented retail brands – New World, Pak ‘n’ Save and Four Square.

Eight supermarkets are offering online sales now and the rest should be doing so this year, he says. Along with this, the culmination of a four-year project to bring all sales on to a single SAP platform also looms. This will allow Foodstuffs to track prices and inventory better, and to integrate with suppliers.

Amazon has shown huge interest in the grocery sector, especially the fast-growing segment of organics, health and well-being. Last year it bought US chain Whole Foods for a huge US$13.7 billion, and has since ramped up deliveries via its Amazon Prime delivery service.

Quin says fresh produce is heading towards half of sales. Private-label house brands are another area of focus for Foodstuffs.

“People understand that house brands can be the same or better quality for quite a different price,” he says. “They understand there’s a brand premium that is paid and if you are smart

Amazon threat inspires retailers to lift game

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2018 / Issue 6

in the way you shop you can avoid that premium and still get a great quality product.”

Those most successful at penetrating the online world have captured about 15 percent of all trade, he says.

The CEO of UK chain Sainsbury’s recently said six percent of UK food and grocery was being sold online, but 35 percent of customers were buying online. For Quin that means if you don’t offer online sales those customers will change to another chain that does.

The store network can also double as a ready-made local fulfilment and distribution system for online sales. That is an opportunity to increase returns on existing infrastructure.

Foodstuffs is also innovating offline, to create an easier, more compelling in-store experience for the cooperative’s 1.3 million customers, who shop on average three times a week. It is about to trial shopping trolleys from local developer Imagr that allow for automatic checkout, using artificial intelligence.

Digital is not all about online sales either. Quin hints at a shopping list app that will sort listed products according to where they are in a local supermarket’s aisles.

And a new Fresh Collective store in Mt Albert is lifting the traditional supermarket experience, aiming to provide inspiration to customers rather than just provision the larder.

In the middle of the store is a hub where food is prepared and ideas shared.

“Completely independent of us a journalist wrote a story asking: “Is this the way to compete with Amazon?” Quin says.

The Warehouse, like Foodstuffs, already has a huge asset in its extensive networks of stores and brands, but it has seen its share price dented by the Amazon threat.

Leading the company’s response is a relatively new hire but a very, very experienced chief information and digital officer, Timothy Kasbe, who has worked for Sears and Russian apparel giant Gloria Jeans.

“Having Amazon enter the market is both good news and an enormous challenge,” he says. “Competition has the effect of bringing everyone’s performance up.”

Kasbe says the company’s store network, including Noel Leeming and Warehouse Stationery, means a group store is within 30 minutes of every Kiwi. Ninety-one percent of Kiwis go through the company’s doors each year.

How to serve customers better, and bring them the best products at the best price, is “business as usual,” Kasbe says.

Where the action lies is in sharpening up the company, so its goods are ready and available

"Integrations are key because they ultimately

keep track of all the tyres and the stock, and make

sure that when somebody orders one there's actually

one available"Simon Furness

HYPER DRIVE FOUNDER

regardless of when or how customers want to shop – and across all offers and brands.

Like Foodstuffs, The Warehouse is experimenting with new technologies such as artificial intelligence and new online models.

For the new school year, for instance, the group launched a new platform Purpleschool.co.nz, bringing all its brands under one online umbrella to serve parents and students with clothing, stationery, computers and more at the start of the new school year.

“We’ve gained a lot of insights from doing that [regarding] what the group value proposition is,” Kasbe says.

The company is also changing the way it develops behind the scenes online, moving away from the traditional periodic releases of software to more of a start-up culture using agile development. Six-month requirement definition cycles are being replaced by rapid prototyping, customer testing and being prepared to “fail fast” and build again using the knowledge gained.

“We’ve taken a lot of the pent-up demand for technology and just unleashed it,” Kasbe says.

“So, my team has done over 1500 releases, for example, in the last six months. That’s never been heard of in this company before.”

In its recent announcements, The Warehouse Group has emphasised a “click and collect” online and offline service combination, but Kasbe says that is only one of many ways the group can serve its customers.

What the company is really losing sleep over is how to create a consistent experience online and offline – and do it in a Kiwi way. The online giants have taken what Kasbe calls “primitive retail experiences” off the table.

“It has sharpened up a lot of the traditional physical retailers into serving customers at a world-class level, as opposed to giving them a sub-optimal or primitive experience in the store.”

Some local retailers, however, aren’t thinking about defence but about joining the disruptors.

Penrose, Auckland-based Hyper Drive and Hyper Ride are related companies selling tyres and vehicle accessories, and action sports equipment, respectively. Hyper Drive is busy developing a new business model for the tyre market.

“We are looking at the Amazons, and that side of it as really the opportunity,” says founder Simon Furness, who describes the challenge as “internetising tyres”.

“Traditionally, it’s been quite hard to do because most people don't want to buy a set of tyres online and have them delivered to their home,” he says. “So, we've set up 240-odd localised installers around the country. We kind of think about it as like Airbnb for tyres, I guess.”

Customers can go on to the Hyper Drive site, purchase and then have tyres shipped to a local installer to be fitted. The installer charges Hyper Drive at a contracted rate, so the experience is seamless for the customer.

A software package from local company First Software is integrated with supplier’s systems. The tyres ordered go straight to the installer – Hyper Drive never even touches them.

“Those integrations are key because they ultimately keep track of all the tyres and the stock, and make sure that when somebody orders one there’s actually one available,” explains Furness.

The traditional tyre-buying experience has been “pretty average,” he says.

“There’s no transparency around pricing and stuff, so we’re trying to bring some transparency to the price and it’s been really positive.”

While competitors have reacted to Hyper Drive’s insurgency, they haven’t yet reacted online. The internet has flattened prices globally, Furness says, and Hyper Drive is doing the same with tyres locally. The business is on a huge growth curve, Furness says, and is signing up more installers.

thedownload.co.nz

Connectivity | Networking your home30

The best way to network your home

There are some simple things you can do, and, while some of the more complicated suggestions may sound

a bit techie, they’re not that hard, writes Scott Bartley

WHEN IT COMES to the internet, nobody likes to hear the word ‘bottleneck’. However, as internet connections become faster, thanks to the Ultra Fast Broadband roll out, creaky home networks are suddenly being exposed as frauds. They find themselves unable to shift data around the home as fast as it comes down the line. While there’s never going to be a one-size-fits-all solution to wringing the best possible speed out of a home network, there’s plenty that can be done to smooth the path.

FIND THE PERFECT HOME FOR THE ROUTER A typical home network will likely consist solely of a single, ISP-supplied Wi-Fi router. This set up will often do the job, but in a data-heavy modern home its ability to broadcast a decent signal to every room will be limited. More so if it’s been plunked down next to the nearest convenient power socket or next to the phone jack, or ONT (Optical Network Terminal) without a care in the world. Positioning the router is a crucial first step, so let’s start here.

Placing the router centrally in the home is best for maximum Wi-Fi coverage. Because Wi-Fi works best with a direct line of sight between the router and the device, look for a high spot with as few obstructions as possible.

However, because of the vagaries of house design, be prepared to think outside the box when placing the router.

Consider how the internet is going to be used. Is Netflix the main source of video entertainment? Are there any gamers in the

house playing online? What about streaming music? And, will the network be extended?

If it’s likely the majority of bandwidth-critical activities (such as streaming video and online gaming) are going to take place in front of the television in the lounge, it’s worth favouring this location at the expense of more far flung corners of the house. Position the router closer to these

devices, depending on individual priorities. In fact, if at all possible, ditch the Wi-Fi

altogether for static devices like televisions and game consoles and use an Ethernet cable.

Not only will this provide a faster, more reliable connection, it will free up valuable

Wi-Fi bandwidth for mobile devices.

FINE-TUNE THE WI-FI With the router optimally positioned and a few mission-critical devices hardwired in, it’s time to fine-tune the Wi-Fi.

When it comes to Wi-Fi, line of sight matters. The fewer obstacles between the router

and the device being used, the more reliable the network will be.

With this in mind, try to remove as many obstacles as possible.

This includes avoiding having large appliances such as a fridge between

the router and the device – fridges are amazingly good at blocking Wi-Fi signals. Walls are another obvious culprit. Sadly, they

tend to be more difficult to move, so, instead,

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consider the material the walls are made from. For instance, wooden walls will degrade a Wi-Fi signal less than concrete or brick. If there’s a choice between having concrete or wood between the router and the device, choose the path of least resistance.

REDUCE RADIO INTERFERENCE Wi-Fi is radio. This means it’s susceptible to interference from other radio sources. Cordless phones, microwave ovens and baby monitors can all affect performance – never place a router near any such appliance. There is nothing worse than a Wi-Fi drop-out because someone decided to cook some two-minute noodles.

Some interference is going to be unavoidable. For people living in apartment buildings or even a compact city suburb, the neighbour’s Wi-Fi signal will be flooding the local airspace. Short of sabotage, there’s not much that can be done about this, but it is possible to mitigate the damage somewhat by changing the Wi-Fi channel settings in the router.

In the settings of any Wi-Fi router is a ‘channel selection’ box. Often this is set to ‘auto’, but the channels can be selected manually if needed.

Before doing this, it’s necessary to find which channels are least congested. Use an app

such as WiFi Analyzer (Android) or WiFi Info View (Windows) to see potentially interfering networks and the channels they’re using. Then set the router to the least busy channel.

EXTENDING THE WI-FI NETWORK If no amount of fine-tuning can fill in the dead spots or patchy coverage, or the house is simply too vast for a single router to adequately cover it with Wi-Fi, it’s time to extend the network using small repeaters called Wi-Fi extenders.

Extenders come in a variety of guises. Some extenders rely on being within range of the main router’s Wi-Fi so that it can rebroadcast the signal. Others use an Ethernet cable to be run between the router and the extender. The cable is a pain, but having proper Ethernet backhaul like this creates a much more robust network.

A third variety are powerline extenders. These are an excellent option as they use a home’s network of power cables as backhaul instead of Ethernet – this means each and every power socket in the house becomes a potential Wi-Fi hotspot. It sounds a bit dodgy, but powerline adaptors are reliable, fast and perfectly safe.

For a DIY flavour, dig out an old Wi-Fi router and turn it into an extender – there are plenty of tutorials online that demonstrate how to do this.

Wi-Fi networksA single Wi-Fi router is enough for most small homes. In larger buildings Wi-Fi range extenders expand their coverage

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32 Connectivity | Networking your home

MESH NETWORKS While extenders do a great job, they can be tricky to manage as each extender is effectively creating a new Wi-Fi network, usually requiring users to manually switch between them as they walk around their home in order to get the best reception. Mesh networks operate almost identically except they pack some extra smarts to provide a ‘smart hand off ’ as people move around the home. A proper Mesh network will appear as single, seamless Wi-Fi network.

WI-FI SECURITY With all of this done, the Wi-Fi is likely going to be going as well as it possibly can and it’s time to think about security.

Because broadcasting an internet connection over Wi-Fi leaves it inherently vulnerable to attacks, locking it down nice and tight is vital.

WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access) is the current standard for securing a Wi-Fi network and has been for a number of years now. As ever, the crooks never stand still and security standards must evolve to remain relevant. Later this year, WPA3 will begin appearing in new Wi-Fi equipment, offering further protection. Keep an eye out for devices supporting the new standards and choose one that does when possible.

CHOOSING A ROUTER All modern Wi-Fi routers will tout ‘dual-band’ or ‘tri-band’ capabilities.

2.4GHz devices will work with (the unhelpfully named) 802.11b/g/n devices. 5GHz generally appears on newer devices supporting 802.11a/n/ac.

What’s the difference? Generally speaking, the 2.4GHz band offers better range as it’s more adept at penetrating walls. Expect theoretical maximum throughput speeds of around 450Mbps to 600Mbps from a 2.4GHz device.

5GHz offers wider bandwidth, allowing more devices to connect at once without interfering with each other, and better speeds of up to 1300Mbps. The downside is 5GHz isn’t as good at pushing signals through walls, so range is reduced.

Tri-band routers cost more because they have a second 5GHz radio installed that can usually transmit simultaneously, making more bandwidth available that devices can connect to. Tri-band routers will often tout blazingly fast top speeds of 2600Mbps by adding together the top speeds of both 5GHz radios. Be wary of such speed claims, these are best case scenarios and not likely to be seen in real world use.

The upshot to all this is 5GHz is best for demanding use like 4K video, but has less range, whereas 2.4GHz will be fine for most other uses.

This year will see the introduction of the latest version of Wi-Fi, called 802.11ax, which promises to be significantly faster with less congestion, while also using less energy.

The standard is currently in the final stages of ratification, so watch out for new routers and devices that offer support for this in the near future.

LOCK IT DOWN Six basic tips to lock down a home network

1 Change the default SSID (name) of the network (avoid using personal details)

2 Set a strong WPA2 password 3 Change the default

administrator user name and the password of the router

4 Disable remote access 5 Keep the router’s software

up to date 6 Consider turning the router

off completely if away for long periods of time and you have no internet-connected security devices (such as cameras)

2018 / Issue 6

Rant | Better Internet

I HAVE GIGABIT fibre at home. It’s brilliant. I can download content at incredible speeds. We can watch 4k Netflix while fiddling on our phones. The idea of waiting for content to load is almost a thing of the past for us. We live in the future and it’s fantastic.

Now, I admit that I’m not likely to be representative of all New Zealanders. I work in the industry and I am a big fan of better internet. I’m not quite a millennial. In fact, I read the other day that I’m a xennial – someone who has enjoyed the internet all their teenage and adult life. What this means is that I am likely to take excellent internet connectivity seriously.

That also means I am bewildered as to why only 43 percent of those able to buy fibre are actually doing so. I find myself regularly asking people: “Why don’t you have fibre yet?”

Now, I know that in many ways the uptake of fibre so far is quite impressive – 43 percent is good. I also recognise that many New

Zealanders would love to but can’t get fibre yet, or ever, because they are outside the rollout area.

However, it still astonishes me that fewer than half of those who could buy fibre are doing so. I also remember that for many, many years people would express concern and dismay that New Zealand’s internet wasn’t good enough.

Well, for many of us now our internet is good enough. Fibre is better than every single other form of connectivity. It is almost certainly faster. And it is almost certainly more stable and reliable. It may even be cheaper than what people are currently using. It requires a bit of effort to install, but after that it’s all gravy.

I want to issue a challenge, not just to internet users but to Internet Service Providers as well. I challenge you to answer my question: “Why don’t you have fibre yet?” Then I want you to consider taking the plunge. Why are you still buying – or, indeed, selling – products that are based on copper? Is it really the best

solution for your customers, or your family? I doubt it, or that it is the right answer for the more than half of New Zealanders who have yet to go the fibre route.

We all have the chance right now to enjoy better, world class, in fact, connectivity in many of our homes and our businesses. If you don’t have fibre yet, ask yourself: why not? Then have a look at fibre. I think you will be pleased you did.

Andrew Cushen is deputy CEO of InternetNZ but writes in a personal capacity here.

Why don’t you have fibre yet?

BY ANDREW CUSHEN

Upload, download, reload,

all at the same time.

Fibre is here,ask for it.

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