State of the Internet in Australia

The National Broadband Network (NBN) is Australia's national wholesale communications network whish id currently being built to bring high speed broadband and telephone services throughout Australia. Depending on where you live in the country the roll out may have already happened or unfortunately may take as long as another decade before it gets to your home, school or workplace.

Given the great expense of this major infrastructure project there has been considerable debate about the cost and method of delivering the project. With the change of Federal Government in 2013 from Labor to Liberal & National Coalition the NBN was placed under a strategic review in an effort to reduce the cost from $72 billion dollars.

As an outcome of this budgeting exercise the NBN Co's strategic review has decided to reduce costs of the broadband architecture by using a mixture of technologies, including fibre to the node (FttN) and use of existing hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) would be implemented rather than the original fibre to the home (FttH)  where the optical fibre is installed right to the premises.

So what does that mean in terms of internet speed?

The Australian Labor Party was offering between 25Mbps and up to 100Mbps download, and 1Mbps up to 40Mbps upload on FttH. The plan was to offer 1Gbps on fibre in the future. On fixed wireless 25Mbps download and 5Mbps upload.

Whereas the Coalition are now promising between 25Mbps and up to 100Mbps download by 2016, increasing to between 50Mbps and up to 100Mbps by 2019 with No minimum upload speeds given.

As of 2014 pre NBN, Australia is ranked 30th in the world with an average peak connection speed of 30.1 megabits per second (Mbps), according to Akamai's latest State of the Internet report. This is a 32 per cent increase from the same period a year ago, when the nation ranked 36th with an average peak speed of 22.8 Mbps.

The top 20 countries for fast internet:

1. Hong Kong, 65.4 Mbps
2. South Korea, 63.6 Mbps
3. Japan, 52 Mbps
4. Singapore, 50.1 Mbps
5. Israel, 47.7 Mbps
6. Romania, 45.4 Mbps
7. Latvia, 43.1 Mbps
8. Taiwan, 42.7 Mbps
9. Netherlands, 39.6 Mbps
10. Belgium, 38.5 Mbps
11. Switzerland, 38.4 Mbps
12. Bulgaria, 37 Mbps
13. United States, 37 Mbps
14. Kuwait, 36.4 Mbps
15. United Arab Emirates, 36 Mbps
16. Britain, 35.7 Mbps
17. Canada, 34.8 Mbps
18. Czech Republic, 34.8 Mbps
19. Macau, 34.4 Mbps
20. Sweden, 33.1 Mbps

 

Figures are average peak connection speeds in megabits per second. Source: Akamai

History of the Internet

Many people use the words Internet (the Net) and the world wide web (the Web) interchangeably, however the two expression are not one and the same. The Internet and the web are two separate but related things.

"The net" is a networking infrastructure. It globally connects millions of computers, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet.

Whereas "The Web" was developed by Tim Berners-Lee for CERN scientists to share documents on the Internet. The web uses URLs to identify systems, files and hyperlinks to move between files on the same or different network.

Take a look at this really interesting video on YouTube that explains the history of the internet

.

Present trends of Interactive Advertising

On 29 October 2008, I attended a event discussing present trends of Interactive Advertising

The event held by AIMIA included a presentation by Mark Armstrong who is the head of Local and Classified Advertising at Google, he spoke about the basic mechanics and value of paid search advertising and the need to combine SEO & SEM.

Mark started with a concepts such as "Moment of relevance" To illustrate his point that people search what is relevant to them. He then invited the audience to particapte in the Awareness Test from You Tube




Mark spoke about the shifts in the market and trends to look out for over the next year. Such as hits spike after an offline event

He then showed a new Volkswagan UK advert

Volkswagan UK advert




He said people would search the term "Best Small Family Car" This was the opportunity for auto comapies to get their product in front of the consumer such as to get into what he called "Consideration Set" That is the top of the list on Google.

He commented that

• 62% dont go past the first page


• 37% make their decision in less than 35 seconds

The second speaker was Andrea Cartwright, GM of Strategy for Sensis Digital (Sensis' digital display business, which includes Media Smart)

She used her observations and case studies to discuss the opportunities and challenges in today's digital display advertising market.

Points were

• Integration is critical, while personalisation, accountability and great content will sort the winners from the losers.


• The market was changing - consumers are more savvy


• Standard banners were evolving and as a result technology was increasing in its sophistication


• Mobile was on the increase


• Video adverts were also increasing


• In Game advertising was being used for hard to reach demographics

Andrea gave a Case Study on Manta Accommodation

Click Through Rate - 1-2%
Using advertorial on Citysearch in the voice of the traveller to drive click through to the website

She also gave a insight into the Brisbane Film Festival which medium to low budget of $20,000 so they used an offline campaign look-a-like compteition, got media coverage for free

Andrea Top 5 for Interactive advertising

1) Undertstand your objective
2) Know your audience
3) Integrate the message
4) Measurement and ROI
5) Be open to suggestion

The third speaker was Alan Long, Asia Pacific Research Director from Hitwise, he explored the topic of behavioural patterns online:

He confirmed an offline event reported in ATL media caused a spike of search traffic and mentioned Organic Search (SEO) accounts for 93% of Click through

Alan said to check out his blog more details

IPTV in Australia

What is IPTV?

The image above demonstrates the new IPTV site called I-View by the ABC.

The definition of IPTV is quite fragmented. It has different meanings depending on which industry you work in. The IPTV focus group uses the following working definition

Multimedia services such as television/video/audio/text/graphics/data delivered
over IP based networks managed to provide the Quality of Service, security,
inactivity and reliability

At a basic level, IPTV is the delivery of multimedia services over a managed IP network. In the communications industry it is used to refer to Telco TV, which is a subscription TV service offered by DSL telco providers to compete with cable broadcasters.

The Australian market for internet protocol television (IPTV) and internet video is less developed than many other international markets according to ACMA, with fewer than five IPTV providers and fifteen internet video providers offering full-length professional content directly to consumers.

In a report by ACMA, industry participants interviewed believed that IPTV and internet video will become more common in Australia with estimates ranging from 18 months to three years.

There are several supply-side factors acting as barriers for IPTV and internet video deployment. Internet video providers believed that capped plans for broadband access and the cost of down loads were important barriers to entry and consumer take-up.

Capital expenditure requirements were cited as a major barrier for potential IPTV deployments, although this may become less important with a national fibre to the node (FTTN) network rollout. The Australian market for internet protocol television (IPTV) and internet video is less developed than many other international markets, with fewer than five IPTV providers and fifteen internet video providers offering full-length professional content directly to consumers.

Overall, the development of IPTV and internet video is all part of the growing number of new online delivery methods, new types of content and engaged consumers are driving significant change in the media and communications industries.

Examples include the appearance of social networking websites, the rise of user-generated content and new online avenues for obtaining entertainment, including music, TV and film content and interactive games.