myKP, the ISP (Internet Service Provider) that hardly anyone has heard of, has come out of the dark to let everyone know that they’ve settled with Telstra ADSL2+ as their preferred delivery platform for an unlimited broadband service.
myKP may not be best known for being a consumer ISP, as it first began setting up free Wi-Fi hotspots around Sydney’s CBD in August 2007.
The ISP then poked its head out in January of this year to let everyone know that it had found a way of providing an internet connection to Australians without a download cap.
The catch? Well there’s a couple – the most prominent being that of advertising. The service was to be funded partly from a subscription-based fee and the rest from advertisements that would be targeted at individual subscribers upon login to the service.
It was said to not include free telephone support, nor would it include an email or static IP address. A once off churn fee of $199 or install of $299 and a monthly fee of $79.95 was all that was asked of.
An internet service without a limit sounds ridiculous to most of those in-the-know about broadband in Australia, particularly after seeing Brisbane-based ISP Direct Data going into receivership soon after it started offering such a service.
myKP founder George Kaloudis initially kept users of Whirlpool informed about his company, though many questions remain unanswered such as why the company hasn’t obtained membership to the TIO (Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman), as pointed out by one Whirlpool user.
A startled George Kaloudis replied by asking:
“Are you sure its required by law ? Where does it say that ? point me to a URL …”
Tech Wired filed for an Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) report on the companies entity, finding that it had three companies under the myKP brand.
myKP Pty Ltd, myKP Mobile Pty Ltd and myKP Networks Pty Limited were the 3 brands myKP were (and still are) operating under.
myKP Pty Ltd looks to have 2 directors, 1 being Mr Kaloudis and the other a Mr Grahame Miles.
Among the shareholders are 2 other members from the Miles family. However, myKP Networks Pty Limited is operated by a completely different set of people, with Mr Kaloudis being the director alongside a Justin Cussel and John Huson.
The ISP initially started a trial of its service in January and found that some trial users were able to pull up to 10 Gigabytes of data per day, according to ITNews.
ASIC records indicate Mr Kaloudis was born in Greece and is 34 years old; Perhaps he didn’t know the potential of us Australian internet leechers?
Adding to all of this, the Terms of Service state:
2.2 The actual speed of the service can vary substantially due to factors such as but not limited to, Telstra phone line condition, distance from an exchange. MYKP makes no obligation on the actual speeds achievable.
5.9 We may modify your Broadband Service from time to time, as we consider necessary to improve and enhance it.
5.10 From time to time, you may find that the actual throughput speeds achieved with the Broadband Service vary.
7.1 The Customer aggress that MYKP does not offer free telephone technical support for any service or product.
15.1 MYKP Hero Broadband trial services provides dynamic IP addresses only.
And the AUP:
5. Excessive use
You must use your Internet Service in accordance with any download or capacity limits stated in the specific plan that you subscribe to for the use of that Service. We may limit, suspend or terminate your Internet Service if you unreasonably exceed such limits or excessively use the capacity or resources of our Network in a manner which may hinder or prevent us from providing services to other customers or which may pose a threat to the integrity of our Network or systems. If your upload data is two times that of your download we may limit, suspend or terminate your Internet Service.
Tech Wired has received information that…
- Internode will start retailing Telstra Wholesale Fixed Line Services.
- TiVo will launch retail on Monday.
Update: In relation to the expected TiVo launch day Simon has said “Don’t believe everything you read from ‘unnamed sources’” link.
We wish to clarify that both our unnamed sources are employed by Internode. - 3G mobile and broadband services will launch in the next 2-3 weeks.
Simon Hackett, Managing Director of Internode, sat down with Tech Wired to chat about some of the key issues affecting them in the Australian Internet Service Provider (ISP) landscape.
We talk about their upcoming 3G mobile and 3G broadband services, Basslink, Telstra’s ‘ridiculous wholesale pricing’, TiVo, unmetering of content and how they can afford to do it as well as their efforts to deliver ‘last mile broadband’ to those in the Yorke Peninsula area in Sourth Australia.
So what’s the latest at Internode? With them just signing up for the Basslink cable between Melbourne and Tasmania we asked Simon what this meant for the company:
“There’s been a long term problem with the cost of backhaul to Tasmania because there has only been one provider of it. That provider has been insisting that their prices are reasonable and that they’re somehow based on their costs. Neither of those things have been true for a significant period of time.”
We also thought we’d ask Simon about his thoughts on the ACCC taking action on Telstra and if Internode were still continuing to have access problems with them:
Absolutely we still are. I asked the question to Kate McKenzie [Telstra Wholesale]. We saw the commentary that said Telstra saying ‘gee you don’t need to take this legal action, we solved this problem a year ago’. We heard Kate say today that it’s not really a ‘real problem’, just a ‘process problem’, well it’s not. I named a specific example exchange that got printed as a letter to the editor in CommsDay last week, Brooklyn park in Adelaide, which is the airport and surrounds of the airport in Adelaide. We were being denied access to that over the last several months. It’s not officially capped, but we still couldn’t get in. Twenty four hours after my comment in CommsDay saying ‘see it’s a real problem today’ Telstra spontaneous contacted us and said ‘Ooo, we had a look in that exchange and you know what? We found some space!’. The reality is that when Kate McKenzie [Telstra Wholesale] speaks of there not being no access problem she’s speaking from her point of view. From her point of view they’ve controlled the access problem, they’ve limited it to an extent that is satisfying. That’s not fixing the access problem, it’s actually succeeding in maintaining an access problem. Her world view is to block access, our world view is to gain it. It’s not surprising our views are different.
With Simon agreeing with the ACCC we thought we’d go back to the Basslink saga and ask why there was a delay with the cable being ‘turned on’, he responded by stating that:
“There was a lot of delay in its use for this sort of role because although it existed, what there wasn’t around was a business structure to properly use it. There was an awful lot of assimilation that people actual had control of the fibre, for a long time. They didn’t seem to have much incentive to actually get on with putting it in as they were being paid a maintenance fee annually to have it there, and that would go away once they started earning commercial income from it,”
“For a while it seemed they had the same problem as someone has at McDonald’s…which is you’ve got to have enough incentive to work to earn more money than you’re getting paid anyway, so they got over it and Basslink is on the verge of existing and should be fired up in the next little while.”
Last year Internode had to cease the sales of anything above 8 Megabits per seccond to Tasmania due to an issue with Telstra. We asked Simon if he could further explain what the problem was:
“We stopped selling new high-speed plans for a fair while because we were literally being driven back faster and faster by the ridiculous cost of the Telstra backhaul. To explain ridiculous, it’s several times more expensive per Megabit for us to move data from Melbourne to Hobart than it is to move from Sydney to Los Angeles, it’s massively overpriced. It’s what happens when a monopoly has control of the traffic segments. What we expect now to happen, what has actually happened, is that Basslink is almost in, we’ve signed up to it, and now Telstra have graciously offered to dramatically lower the price of their charge to us. We graciously told them [Telstra] that we think they should be rewarded for their past behaviour by not getting more of our business. We’re winding back our use of the Telstra connection, we’re still keeping it going, it gives us backup, so we now go to a nice high resilience situation where there is two ways to get there [to Tasmania]. In the unlikely event that Basslink went under we’d go back to Telstra and upgrade that link again.“
Several months after suspending these sales to Tasmania, Internode un-suspended 8 Megabit and above plans. We asked how they managed to do this with the costs still being ‘redicuolous’:
“…We turned on new sales for it again a few month ago because although we continue to pay danger money to Telstra till the new thing came in, we didn’t want to disfranchise our customers there any longer than we had to. With Basslink finally on the verge of happening, we opened the taps up a little earlier. We’ve got ADSL Two Plus on Telstra ports and ADSL2+ on the 2 DSLAMs we’ve built so far in Tasmania”
We then went on to chat about TiVo and what Internode is planning to do with it. We asked what the deal was and what services Internode were planning to integrate into it:
“Lots of good things are happening there. We’ve built a very good relationship with Hybrid Television Services who handle TiVo in Australia and New Zealand. We’ve found a set of strengths that compliment each other. We’ve built a new Content Distribution Network (CDN) that is going to be used for Tivo Content designed to make it both technically possible and economically sensible to unmeter that content. That unmetering got turned on for Internode customers last week as it happens, so if you’re TiVo customer and you plug into Internode, the Blockbuster movie of the week services that are running at the moment are now unmetered, as will be the production service when it goes into production some time later in April. As more content gets added to that platform we’ll be carrying it on that CDN and be able to get rid of the metering part of it. We’ll be retailing TiVo’s ourselves and are heading towards doing a bundle in combination to Hybrid Telivision Services to make it possible, like a mobile phone, to buy a TiVo and broadband service on a 2 year contract with little or no upfront costs and actually paying on a monthly basis to get both. What you get out of it is a really good damn media device, a really good broadband network and an awful lot of positive avenues for adding more content to it later.”
We also thought we’d ask how they managed to unmeter content on iView for the ABC website. A little while ago ABC began having load issues. We also asked what the ABC did to make unmetering impossible at times:
“What happened was the ABC used to run their own servers and we peered with them and unmetered everything. They literally plugged into Pipe and then the ABC actually struck some issues with high load and moved big chunks of their content to Akamai, the largest and probably best know CDN provider in the world. The downside of using Akamai is that they are architecturally incompatible with unmetering. In other words they built a service that comes from America where the notion of metering for traffic is still foreign to most Americans. The service is impossible to unmeter because you don’t know which server the traffic is going to come from, and worse than that, a given IP address from Akamai can carry everything Akamai serves, so you can open and unmeter everything or nothing of which doesn’t make any sense. The ABC worked with people like us who recognise that. They are in the process of moving that content so that it’s on Akamai and on other fixed server locations. Right now that content is sitting at Hostworks. Hostwork’s servers are in Adelaide and the ABC are paying them to do that. I’m not clear as to whether that’s their final resting place or if they might go out and commercially pitch again for the CDN. The point is that we’re actually unmetering by pulling the data from Hostwork’s copy of it which comes back into peering points again, that works perfectly well. They’ve got it off Akamai which made unmetering impossible. It’s the same thing with TiVo. TiVo were using Akamai for Blockbuster content and we worked with them to move onto our CDN instead. A lot of the incentive for that was to make unmetering possible.”
When asked what exciting things were to come we mentioned the following topics:
Yorke Peninsula
“We’ve got a couple of fixed WiMax networks along the Yorke Peninsula. We’d like to build more of those and over time government incentive schemes help those things. We’re working on some opportunities to build some more of those in other bits of regional South Australia”
We also asked whether Government funding was still available:
“The grants are there but I’ve been challenging the government to raise the performance bar on some of them. There’s a Federal grant scheme called the Australian Broadband Guarantee (ABG). It’s definition of metro-equivalency hasn’t been raised in years. That scheme wont pay a subsidy if there is deemed to be metro-comparable broadband. NextG is too expensive to meet that test, Optus 3G isn’t too expensive to meet that test. The challenge they’ve got as Optus 3G is rolled out is that it has extinguished the ability to build ABG deployments. In practice the coverage really isn’t as wide spread as it might look. The performance is no where near as good as it is on the WiMax service. We’ve been challenging the Federal Government to raise the performance bar and say well if we can hit 6 or 12 Megabits, if we can get NBN-level speeds, you should pay us to put that out there even if there’s a 3G service because 3G is really still a mobile solution. The fixed solution where you really have no other choice is a a genuine other choice.”
TiVo
“The TiVo thing is big for us because we think that it’s going to be a real start of finally getting interesting content out to people. We found an existing set top box rather than building our own and because of that we can concentrate on actually going out and chasing interesting content for people. I’m hopeful that this will be the year that Hollywood gets a little more relaxed about what’s called ‘release dates’ around the notion of today a movie comes out in a movie theatre and it’s ninety plus days before you can get it as a Video On Demand (VOD) title. If you collapse that window doing it at home suddenly becomes much more interesting. I think this might be the year where that gets better, and we’re excited about that stuff.”
We have word from an unnamed source that TiVo will be launching as a bundle with Internode this Monday.
3G Mobile and Broadband Services
“We’re about to launch the 3G services, 3G mobile data services. So we’ll have a 3G data service later in the year and a 3G mobile phone service and those things should be good. We’re seeing a lot of interest in that already. The usual sort of 3G data stick. That will be driven of the Optus network, We’re using our own branded 3G sticks on the Optus 3G network . Once of the good aspects of what we’re doing is that it’s configured so that the data lands directly into our servers, it doesn’t pass through Optus beyond the radio towers. It’s what’s called a layer 2 service the PPP connection that the device opens lands straight on one of our devices so you get our IP addresses, landing on our network which gives you a lot of flexibility with things like a backup path for say an ADSL business connection. You can have this thin fail-over with the 3G and keep exactly the same IP address and keep working exactly the same way.”
We have word from an unnamed source that 3G Mobile and broadband services will launch in 2-3 weeks and the reason behind the delay is them being so busy launching other services.
Fixed Line Telephone Service
We have word from an unnamed source that Internode is teaming up with Telstra Wholesale to provide a fixed line service that will eliminate Telstra from the grand scheme of things.
We thought we’d lastly ask Simon about the National Broadband Network (NBN) and whether he believed the Government would still continue with its ambition of a Full Node Cut-over. A Full Node Cut-over would deem all existing copper networks unusable.
“I’m certainly starting to have my doubts that a Full Node Cut-over will happen. Today we should have got an announcement. We didn’t. Maybe we’ll get it next week, who knows? The point is that it seems difficult to imagine any third party attempting to cut Telstra’s copper without Telstra suing them into the stone age. No amount of Federal legislation will stop Telstra taking constitutional level legal access to challenge the constitution legality of that. They’ve done it in the past and tried to do the industry in on a constitutional basis last year and failed. Cuting the copper leads to legal action and leads to no network, that’s what the government have to solve. They can solve it by meeting it head on or they can solve it by redefigning the solution as something other than FTTN. Lay a lot of fibre and let the industry figure out how to do the last mile. That’s kind of the obvious way out.”
Simon Hackett – CommsDay 2009 from Ben Grubb on Vimeo.
AUSTRALIAN ISP Internode has said in a press release today that it will be substantially extending its international broadband network by creating a “ring route” into Asia and establishing a peering presence with major companies in Europe. Read more
ADELAIDE-based communications company Internode has signed an agreement with Telstra Wholesale that will allow its customers to access Telstra’s ADSL2+ network which comprises of over 1,400 enabled exchanges. Read more
ACCORDING to a recent report from the Australia Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, us Aussies don’t like our Telecommunication providers.
The report outlines how the TIO has recorded it’s biggest rise in complaints in in the past 10 years for the 07/08 financial year.
Read more
After the Australian Government revealed that they would increases our Internet speeds with a National Broadband Network worth over 4.7 billion dollars, they have now revealed results of tests they have done in Tasmania regarding Internet filtering to block Child Porn from Australian Internet users.
The issue that many people have foreseen with such a system being put into place, including Brent and I, is that it would slow down our Internet speeds, as all Internet traffic would have to pass through a piece of filtering hardware or software, of which in turn would slow down traffic between you and your Internet Service Provider.
“Preliminary results from the ACMA study showed that five of the six filters tested degraded Internet throughput speeds by between 22 percent and 75 percent, or more.
Just introducing a filter to the test network — without actively filtering any content — resulted in up to 10 percent degradation.”
- Source: iTnews
Although such a filter would remove the risk of illegal child pornography being viewed within Australia, as you can see, it would also slow down out Internet connections, of which I’m sure doesn’t seem like something users of whom are doing the ‘right thing’ by not viewing such material, should have to deal with.
Is the Government going backwards yet again?
- Ben
