- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Green Party: technospastic luddites

"I'm somewhat surprised" it starts. No shit!

Frogblog has posted - as an admin post not under any of the MP's names - a hopelessly misguided critique of the government's broadband fibre-to-the-home policy. I'm no technical expert, but what is "obvious to anyone with a slightly technical background" is that the Greens are proving once again that they are at their core nothing more than modern day 'Flat Earthers' and that they will use any argument at all (even if it is internally incoherent) in order to align everything to their mantra of stasis, summed up in the extraordinary conclusion:

We tend to think that more of a good thing is better and that the things which worked well for us in the past will continue to work well in the future. I see ‘ultra fast broadband’ as a small part of that pattern, along with SUVs, iPads (with $30/mo 3G connection!) transmission gully and Airbus A320s. I see blindness about infinite economic growth on a finite planet (with it’s side effects of climate change and peak oil) as part of that too.

Sometimes, more is just not necessary and simply becomes an extra burden to carry.


This is so moronic it is no wonder the four arguments put up to support the proposition were so flawed. Do they deserve to be in parliament? It is one thing to claim that sometimes more of a good thing isn't better - it's just a burden (we may agree this could apply to chocolate, cocaine, fossil fuel devouring engines and so on); but to claim that this applies to the speed of the internet - the flow of communications and the means of displacing wasteful alternatives (eg. having to commute to work) - is possibly the most idiotic thing I have ever heard from a political party. It is so idiotic the only political organisation thick enough to espouse it - one would have thought - would have been the geriatrics of the NZ First Party. Coming from a party so heavily dependent on the under-30s to keep scraping over the threshold a policy paper (such as this) - rubbishing attempts to improve the internet - is an unattractive bout of self mutilation which will drive them away. In so many ways the Greens are precisely like NZ First: deeply conservative.

I am more than "somewhat surprised," so much so that I emailed the post to a technical person involved in the coalface of things and they had the same reaction as me: amazement that the supposedly tech-savvy, comms-literate Green Party could get it so wrong.Ultra fast broadband – $1.5 billion thrown on the fire.

Their argument:
1. There is no need for such fast speeds.
2. People who really need basic broadband exist.
3. Uncertain economic benefits.
4. International bandwidth is the bottleneck.

This is what they pay their parliamentary staff to produce? It's unbelievable.

Better to spend the money on cables going overseas: that is the only credibly defensible thing put forward in the post, everything else is pulled straight out of their arse. But even that doesn't make sense unless the final stretch to the home is complete to a similar standard - so that seems easily dismissed.

The Green argument is as intelligent and well considered as saying that because we don't have an 8 lane Cook Strait bridge linking our two islands we shouldn't bother building a 6 lane bridge over the Manukau Harbour.

1. There is no need for such fast speeds. The speed of our existing internet connections is already far more than adequate – most people’s connections rarely get fully utilised. Take my home – I have a 10 Mb connection, capable of transferring ~1000 kilobytes per second. 1000! Audio-only skype uses around 5 – 12 kilobytes. Skype with video maybe about 50 kilobytes. Youtube uses around 30 kilobytes. Bittorrent uses anything from 5 to 200 kilobytes, depending on the torrent. But hardly anyone uses bittorrent (legally). Web browsing is fine with even a 256k connection. Most computer games use only a couple of dozen kb per second. A couple of years ago I hosted a 12 person skype conference which used ~100 kilobytes per second.

All of these are so far below the maximum speed of my connection that it’s laughable. If there is ever any slowness, it’s because of something maxing out further upstream like a web server with many people using it or a technical problem. A faster connection from the cabinet to my computer won’t help that.

Are there any must-have applications or uses for ultra fast connections that are on the horizon? None that I can think of, and none which won’t blow my measly 10 gig data cap in a day (I’ll come back to the caps).


— I can't see why we need the new stuff, they've invented everything already, and it's all going too fast for me...

Youtube - and the ease of uploading and distributing video clips - only come along in the last five years. No doubt six years ago they would have been saying the same thing - only about 56k "dial up": no need for such fast speeds, all I want and need is short text documents via email... I hosted a 12 person bulletin board and it was fine... 20 miles an hour is too fast to travel, 5 mph on a bike is all we should want and need... It's beyond pathetic.

So they are wrong on two counts: firstly, THE INTERNET IS SLOW it's painfully fucking slow - it's almost as slow as whoever wrote this post. When I want something like an hour long video it should be there as fast as it possibly can - a split second if it is possible; and secondly, THE MUST-HAVE APPS ARE ALREADY HERE and there will be more in the years ahead. We want the internet to be the TV - that's where all this is moving, but we can't get the quality/speed etc and if the government was ever dumb enough to listen to the Greens we will never get it. They assume we don't need - or really want - any of this. Just stick with the Freeview/Sky cartel and have the government and the corporations control it all... that's what the Greens are essentially saying - the status quo is fine. The possibility of the democratisation of the media through the leveling of the broadcast playing field is something I thought the Greens would be in favour of... but no, let the ones who control it now continue to control it "for the forseeable future". And that's the point: the Greens can't see the future and don't want to even think about looking - just stick with what we have because there's not enough human ingenuity to do any better, it all dried up a few years ago apparently. Maybe the Greens' brains shriveled on their stems a long time ago - not so the rest of the population. History has proved them wrong and will do so again when we look back in the future at this absurd post.

2. People who really need basic broadband exist. There are plenty of people still stuck on dialup or on the practically-dialup of 256k. You only need to go a few kilometres out of most small towns and access drops away quickly. Rural broadband just doesn’t exist, and most of those rural homes are also productive businesses not just passive consumers in the suburbs. We’d get more return on our investment by shifting the broadband-starved up to broadband than shifting the already broadband-rich into the stratosphere.

— Everyone should be on the lowest amount before anyone can move up to more...

Leveling. That's right, your average cow cocky should have the same access as the urban creatives and people who actual use broadband before anyone gets more. Like saying every rural road should be sealed - no matter what the traffic and how many people live on those roads - and then only after that is finished will we consider adding lanes to unblock the urban centres. Pretending there is no demand differences and therefore there are no priorities amongst locations and groups is just silly.

3. Uncertain economic benefits. There have been studies done which demonstrate economic benefits from upgrading from dial-up to broadband. Anecdotal evidence from my own life certainly backs that up. With basic broadband, you get: it’s always on so no connection delays, web pages that appear instantly, skype, streaming video, large file downloads, etc Fantastic stuff! But the benefits of upgrading from basic broadband (2Mb) to modern broadband (20Mb+) are far less obvious and unproven. The large gains are in the initial leap out of dial-up hell, any further speed improvements offer incremental gains only. Remember that the big push is to get fibre to the home, not to businesses which already have it and need it to share between many staff. So what if you can download porn lolcats faster, you were doing that when you had ADSL 1 anyway.

— It's probably going to cost too much anyway, I can't imagine getting anything out of it...

Is getting TV via internet instead of via a $100 box from Freeview or via a $50 a month box from Sky an economic benefit? I would think so. As for the home/business dichotomy, I would have thought breaking it down so that people can work from home and have home businesses is a positive economic benefit.

4. International bandwidth is the bottleneck. For many years Telstraclear would count national traffic at one tenth the rate of international traffic, for the purposes of computing how much of your cap you had used that month. Local traffic is so cheap that it’s almost not worth measuring – what you’re paying for is to get data from across the sea.

New Zealand is a bit unique among developed countries in that we have data caps (and think it’s normal!). Un-metered broadband is the norm in the USA. The reason that we have data caps is because of geography – we are stuck ages away from the rest of the world, far across the ocean. Only a cable or two connects the country to the rest of the world, and that is what is strangling NZ’s internet. It doesn’t matter how fast the connection from your ISP to your home is, the data cap will remain (small) as long as international bandwidth is expensive.


— It's the fault of the overseas situation and we can't do anything about it, we're unique...

Cables are being laid and will continue to be laid, and then what? We'll need those high speed connexions into the home won't we. We can have an argument about which part gets built first or we could build the part that will benefit the most people as soon as we can - this is what the government is doing isn't it?

A different way ahead

If we want to boost the economy by improving internet access, then faster cheaper connections across the Tasman would lift data caps and allow us to make full use of the already fast internet we have. Improvements to rural and semi-rural connections would make more difference than fibre to the (suburban) home. Reducing the cost of cellphone data plans would revolutionise how people use their mobile phones. There are better uses for that $1.5 billion than digging ditches down every street and burying a lot of plastic.


— It's all wrong, do something different...

OMG FFS. Spend it instead on mobile phones? Will that help the rural people that supposedly need broadband? This is possibly the worst post I've read on Frogblog.

6 Comments:

At 21/2/10 3:18 am, Anonymous Deus said...

Too be fair, the international tubes are far too easily blocked and I would prefer that money was thrown at that bottleneck than at the local infrastructure.
But even then, anyone who thinks that NZ's broadband is remotely satisfactory is deluded, living in the largest city on the best plan available I have to wait ~10 minutes for a minute of youtube to buffer. Also, I think iPads are AWESOME, things like that are pretty much point of living in the future. And what's wrong with Airbuses? As I understand the later models are more fuel efficient and safer. Both of which are good things, and I don't think we can have too much of them.
MASSIVE fail on their part regarding transmission speeds, they should read up on this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_rate_units#Notes

 
At 21/2/10 10:24 am, Anonymous Angry Grandson said...

Fine work Mr Selwyn.
The conservatism of the greens just ticks me off to the point where i can't tick for them at the ballot.

 
At 21/2/10 11:59 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Bomber,
I am currently reading The Upside of Down by Thomas Homer-Dixon of Toronto University polsci faculty.

In it he discusses complex societies/civilizations and what causes them to crash or collapse. He sites 5 tectonic stresses that cause this to come about.

- population stress
- energy stress
- environmental stress [pollution
and overuse]
- climate stress and finally
- economic stress

He argues that a small collapse event are helpfull in that it clears space for new adaptations and improvement, much like a limited forest fire.

What he argues is dangerous is a system that becomes more complex and interconnected. If subjected to a some or all the stresses mntioned and it collapses then the impact will greater= the bigger they are the harder they fall.

I think this is what may be in the minds of the Greens when they express concern about a society that is becoming more self absobed, wishful and consumerist.

Unless we start making some significant changes I can see where we are headed...sumaria, Rome, Maya and Easter Island

with much respect

KiwiM

ref; theupsideofdown.com
homerdixon.com

 
At 21/2/10 1:38 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

My apologies Selwyn for the mistaken Identity
regards

KiwiM

 
At 23/2/10 12:12 pm, Blogger Berend de Boer said...

Tumeke, your argument is basically: my internet is slow, and I want someone else to pay for the fix.

Typical socialists thinking. Refreshing the Greens think slightly different now. What a difference a change of government can do to you! (and DPF...).

I have HD video streaming in my home and can download a movie in a few minutes. Really, downloading it in seconds is really gonna change my life.

It's time the government stops centrally planning our economy. That's far more important then faster internet for a few.

 
At 25/2/10 11:02 am, Blogger Mr. Bear's Shadow said...

This is the worst post I've ever read on Tumeke, and it saddens me. Tim, your passion for the topic distracts you from the argument ... their argument. You first have to embrace where an argument stands before you can challenge it. You ultimately failed to do this.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home