Martin Kovacs

Research commissioned by the Department of Communications and the Arts about Australian small businesses’ online security practices found that only two per cent of business operators reported that protecting their online business information was a priority.

The research found that only a quarter of small businesses considered that there was a risk of having their electronic system held to ransom, with only 38 per cent considering phishing and scams a threat.

While 60 per cent of businesses claim to be good at installing anti-virus software, only 48 per cent keep it up to date, the research additionally found.

The discussion paper calls for views on how to improve consumer information about broadband speed.

“Consumers are entitled to expect clear and accurate information about broadband services,” ACCC chairman Rod Sims commented.

“At the moment, it is difficult for consumers to access accurate information as broadband advertising is not focusing upon speed and performance. Consumers are being presented with little information or vague claims like ‘boost’ and ‘fast’, or just pictures in advertising of athletes or animals.

“Consumers need accurate information about broadband speed and performance so that they can understand if what they are being offered will actually meet their needs.”

The ACCC notes that in the 2016 first quarter, there were 2,159 issues reported to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) about slow data speeds, with it being the top internet complaint issue, while more consumers contacted the TIO about internet complaints than any other issue.

“The ACCC considers that improved consumer information will minimise the potential for consumers to be misled, reduce consumer search costs and assist consumers to make informed purchasing and switching decisions,” the ACCC stated.

“This will encourage broadband service providers to compete on performance as well as price and inclusions (such as data allowances).”

“IMPACT handles data collection, event processing, device management, data contextualisation, data analytics, end-to-end security and applications enablement for any device, any protocol and across any application,” Nokia states.

It also includes the latest edition of Nokia’s Motive Connected Device Platform, providing life cycle management for more than 80,000 models of broadband, home and IoT devices.

“Our new IMPACT platform with Motive CDP is particularly strong in device management, security and analytics,” Bhaskar Gorti, Nokia Applications & Analytics Business Group president, commented.

“These matter because as we work to collect and derive meaning from IoT data, it becomes more valuable to everyone involved – and more crucial to protect.”

Nokia has also introduced its new Smart Home solution, which it states “lets network operators quickly offer new services to residential customers seeking a digital home solution for the Internet of Things”, supporting an array of sensors, plugs and other connected devices needed for the delivery of home security, automation and smart metering services.

“Providing operators with a single box solution, Nokia’s smart home gateway lets subscribers easily monitor and control everything inside the home with a smartphone or a tablet, including temperature and motion sensors, door and window sensors, smoke detectors, light switches and security cameras,” Nokia states.

Nokia states that the smart home gateway will be available to operators by the end of 2016.

“The Nokia Smart Home solution offers operators the chance to get ahead of the IoT trend and provide customers with a simple plug-and-play solution that is fully interoperable with the leading Wi-Fi technologies and standards needed to manage smart devices and applications,” Federico Guillen, Nokia Fixed Networks president, commented,

The 1 Gbps speed capability was achieved by aggregating 100 MHz of Telstra’s spectrum holdings across five separate 4G channels integrated on its commercial end-to-end network, Wright advised.

With LTE technology reaching speeds of 1 Gbps, Write wrote that it “could be argued to be finally moving beyond the 4G barrier”.

“Our end-to-end tests have been achieving amazing download speeds of over 950 Mbps using a specialised speed test application, so perhaps we can now say LTE has delivered on that original vision of 4G and we can now justifiably look beyond the term ‘4G’ to what comes next,” he wrote.

“Just as importantly, we have also been able to hit speeds of over 843 Mbps end-to-end over the internet to the speedtest.net site.”

As for when such a technology might become commercially available, Wright noted that there is still work to be done.

“Currently Telstra customers can access world-leading speeds on devices capable of up to 450 Mbps on compatible handsets and 600 Mbps on a mobile hotspot in selected 4GX coverage areas,” he wrote.

NBN expects 4.4 million families and business owners to be active on the network by 2018, in turn delivering a ten-fold increase in revenue to $1.7 billion.

“The introduction of additional technologies, a projected boost to the size of the construction workforce and newly signed agreements with the construction industry are anticipated to see the total number of premises that are able to connect double over each of the next three years to 9.1 million,” NBN stated in unveiling its targets.

NBN CEO Bill Morrow has described it as a “bold plan”, putting NBN within “striking distance” of its “ultimate goal of delivering better broadband to every Australian by 2020”.

“The steps we have taken over the past 12 months have already delivered increases in revenue, activations and serviceable premises,” Morrow commented. “The work to date has also given us a more accurate picture of the actual costs of the build.”

Delivering the service could be significantly more expensive than formerly predicted, with estimates for the multi-technology mix (MTM) rollout having risen.

The plan estimates an increase in peak funding, which it estimates as being in the range of $46 to $56 billion, with a base case peak funding of $49 billion being targeted, up from a previous estimate of $41 billion.

Meanwhile, a joint media release issued today by Minister for Communications Malcolm Turnbull and Minister for Finance Mathias Cormann has touted the benefits of the NBN’s MTM approach as opposed to fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP).

The release notes NBN “is free to use whatever mix of technologies is required to get the job done as quickly and cost-effectively as possible”.

“The company therefore has, in the light of its extensive experience building FTTP, determined what the peak funding requirement and time to complete would be for an all-FTTP build,” the release states. The company’s conclusion is that an all-FTTP approach, as proposed by Labor, would have a peak funding requirement of $74 billion to $84 billion and would not be finished until as late as 2028.

“We know more bandwidth can mean a better broadband experience for homes and businesses, so we are excited to evolve our CVC pricing model for our retailers,” NBN CEO Bill Morrow commented.

“The broadband market is changing and consumption continues to boom. We have seen average usage on the NBN network increase from 75 gigabytes in February 2015 to 125 gigabytes today.

“We know increased usage has presented challenges to our retailers, and we have consulted with them on a new CVC pricing model that creates greater flexibility and opportunity for the industry – acknowledging that broadband use is expanding.”

The model calculates the average CVC bandwidth assigned by all retailers to all end-users on the NBN network at an industry level, with the more CVC bandwidth provisioned per end-user, the bigger the discount available to the industry, calculated on a quarterly basis.

It will be available equally to all NBN wholesale customers, with NBN stating it “aims to encourage retail providers to deliver a higher quality service”.

NBN states it is intended for the model to remain in place for up to two years, with it to be reviewed on an ongoing basis in conjunction with customers.

“The model aims to encourage our retail providers to better dimension their network, and help retailers to provide a better broadband experience for homes and businesses,” Morrow commented.

“We do not plan to stop here. We see the DBD model evolving further and ideally being applied directly to each retailer rather than an industry level. We will continue to evolve it in close consultation with our customers.”

The person told Bloomberg that the change could occur within the next couple of weeks.

Twitter currently alters a URL of any length to 23 characters, which sees the space available for users within which to compose any accompanying tweet reduced.

Twitter last year removed the 140-character limit on Direct Messages, allowing users to expand on private conversations, installing a Direct Message limit of 10,000 characters.

On May 20, Telstra stated via a tweet that: “All NBN voice and data services and ADSL services affected today were restored earlier this evening.”

Telstra also subsequently tweeted on May 20 that: “We’re aware a small number of NBN & ADSL customers are still having residual service difficulties.”

Customers are still taking to Twitter and Facebook today to complain about lack of service.

“In this case, the complexity of the issue meant it took some time to identify and it impacted customers in different ways at different times, depending on the type of modem that individual customers had and the environment that it was operating in,” McKenzie wrote via a blog post today.

“This made the fix on this occasion longer and more difficult.

“In simple terms, there was a fault with the device that manages the interaction between our network and all of the different types of customer modems. It commenced late on Thursday night and was restored from a network perspective on Friday afternoon.”

MzKenzie wrote that once Telstra identified the issue, it was “able to isolate the problematic device and start restoring individual services”.

“This addressed the underlying issue for most customers automatically, however subsequently we discovered that some customers’ modems continued to experience a connection issue,” MzKenzie wrote.

“We advised these customers to restart the modem, which has fixed the vast majority of the remaining connection issues.”