How community spirit got a Gigabit Broadband Network well on the way. Watch this clip of for some inspiration. The locals come out with their spades and tractors, digging the first fibre cable trench for their very own fibre optic broadband network. Why wait ten years for NBN Co if you can get started today yourself. The cable comes for less than a dollar a meter and the tractors you borrow from the local farmers/stakeholders/council/members. Go and have a look how B4RN pulled it off..........

Our very own Australian NBN Co posted a blog with some pictures of what a standard NBN Co fibre to the home installation will look like. Surely a this is a masterpiece of advanced fibre optic transmission technology bringing Gigabit Ethernet connectivity right to your doorstep.

Just a crying shame that from these pictures there doesn't seem to be any thoughts for basic child safety in the home, let alone dog safety. Now, it appears that there are many different items needed to be installed, complete with a confetti of connection wires, all in full sight and all within easy reach of toddlers and dogs alike. Somewhere in what looks like a corridor all very close to floor level.

So, if some message didn't arrive in the pre-Internet days we said: 'The dog ate my mail'.   But once we all have NBN we can now say with confidence: 'The dog ate my modem'.

The NBN Blog is here:
Curious to know what it will look like when the National Broadband Network is installed into your house? We've put together this gallery of a fibre installation to give you an idea..........
Read more.........

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world. (Jack Layton - Last letter to Canadians)

Well, the pandemonium on IPTV in Australia is now gearing up. Where are we today?

NBN Co Ltd has called for expressions of interest for IPTV service providers to come and play in the NBN multicast sandpit. It doesn't look like this is going to be a walk in the park for anyone. There will be plenty of hurdles. At least setting up some sandbox trials is a good start to get a handle on the problems.

The television manufacturers have already seen the confusing fibre lights on NBN broadband IPTV and are now setting up their own association called Connected TV Marketing Association to define a set of standards for connected TV sets marketed in Australia.

Internode have found an-in-house solution to roll out Fetch-TV on their network, but you guess, it will only work with an Internode set-top box on an Internode broadband connection.

Telstra is rolling out their T-Box (an IPTV set-top box) with a heavy marketing swing and a full complement of Foxtel Pay-TV channels plus movies on demand. Only works on Telstra broadband though.

Apple has had their TV box for a while, and it works fine. As long as you buy your movies and content from the Apple Store.

The NBN fibre network construction works have taken a real serious start this year. During 2012 more than half a million Australian premises will be passed with Gigabit fibre. And in doing so our NBN is creating a rather big market opportunity for 'Connected Television' and for IPTV capable set-top boxes.

That is, if we can settle on the multicast issues in good time and adopt some Australian standards for IPTV end devices. Really wonder when our Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is going to put up their hands to bring some harmony into the sandpit.

Now, wouldn't that be lovely.

Once upon a time, in a country far over the seas, there was a new technology born called cable television.

This little wonder provided the subscribers with easy access to large numbers of television programs. Many more programs than could be received with an antenna on your own roof. In the urban areas these television antennas were growing into entire woods that looked rather ugly. Cable television was just the right fix to get rid of the antenna jungles. And so, municipal by-laws were made to prevent people from building their own antennas above a certain height in places where a cable television service was offered. Not that it needed much encouragement. Cable television was cheap and easy, and offered a lot more variety in programs than you could ever achieve with your own antenna on your own roof. So, the penetration grade was very high and roof antennas quickly became a thing of the past.

All was nice and easy when every country, state or region only had one television station and the number of programs could still be counted on two hands. But progress is not easy stopped and it did not take too long before many more television transmitters and programs became available. And the cable television systems of those days only had a certain capacity. And the question of which programs should be carried in the large but not unlimited space on the cable became a matter of public interest. Some cable companies favoured programs that some subscribers did not like, and those programs took the space of dropped channels that some other subscriber groups would rather have. Like having a family of four with one TV set having a 'domestic' fight on which program to see, now entire villages and cities went into battle on which programs should be on 'their' cable and which not.

And this was the start of the 'program committees' and the 'must-carry' rules. The National programs and some defined regional programs had to be carried as part of the cable licencing schemes. No ifs, no buts, that was the basic program bundle that every subscriber should have access to.

Australia never really had that problem and never needed a 'must carry' solution either. When cable came to Australia some fifteen years ago, it was to provide additional programming against payment (pay-tv). All free-to-air programs were already served very well through roof antennas and unless this antenna would fall over or blow down there wasn't any point in getting cable just to receive the local set of programs.

But now we have an NBN fibre optic cable coming down the road. And this fibre optic cable has the capacity to deliver many thousands of programs from worldwide sources to the subscribers in digital quality. So, things are looking up for the Australian television viewers. But look a little further. Whilst the optical fibre itself has a sheer infinite capacity to carry television programs, the switches, routers and domestic equipment along the way don't have this luxury. There are some capacity limits here and there. And this is why we have the so-called 'multicast' protocol which permits a single program datastream to be shared by many subscribers on the network. This actually works very well and relies on an IP join/unjoin mechanism whereas a program stream only gets turned on in your network segment when you actually want to tune into the particular multicast stream. So, when nobody in your fibre distribution area is tuned (joined) into a certain program stream, then that bandwidth is released and available for other purposes. So far so good.

But now, NBN has released a document which spells out how they plan to run the multicast services. And it appears that there could be multiple ISPs running the same program sets on different VLANs but within the same fibre serving areas. And that will lead to much duplication of bandwidth whereas the same content will be carried simultaneously by different ISPs along the same fibre circuits. Besides that, there is the little issue of how the multicast join/unjoin relay agents would behave in a situation where multiple ISPs share the same PON segments and upstream segments up to the ISP's own router. It doesn't look like there is an easy solution here. We'll have to see with what magic the NBN engineers will come up with, but it looks like a pretty tough problem.

Unless of course when the multicast domain will be managed by NBN Co Ltd themselves. In that case multicast television distribution can work as it was intended without any waste or duplication of bandwidth. And NBN could give a think on the 'must-carry' content which will include any and all regional free to air. Additional content can be provided by any ISP as a subscription service, by using standard conditional access (encryption) techniques but still use the common NBN multicast domain for the delivery. This would most certainly make the connection of 'connected' television sets and IPTV set-top boxes a lot more easy than in the currently proposed highly fragmented solution. If we let things go as they go, then each ISP's set-top box will only work with that ISP's service and cannot be used for anything else. And that doesn't go down very well in the TV viewers households. We already have far too many set-top boxes for this, that and the other.

And maybe it is about time for our Department of Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy to start setting some National standards or to create a Code of Practice for Digital Television delivery via the NBN IP multicast network. Just like they did for the Digital free to air television conversion. And in the process put into NBN Co a 'Must Carry' rule for the regional free to air programs, so when you get a fibre optic connection the basic program feed will be part and parcel of the connection fees. Would be nice :-)

... and they all lived happily ever after!

Google+ is the new buzzword. If you are lucky enough to be invited you can have a taste of this new way to keep in touch with your circles of friends and acquaintances. It has been a really long way from the days of Fidonet, UUCP, Minitel and dialup modems.

The Internet came and replaced our ancient text-only communications with colour rich pictures and graphics. ICQ started the instant messengers wave and is now just another relic of the past. Just like Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger. Nice try but little in the way of functionality. Skype won the hearts of many and is still with us to keep families and friends talking to each other. Hopefully Mr Balmer and his crew will turn it into an enduring blessing, but we still have to see about that. MySpace had its hay-days and is now pretty much an empty space, vacated by most of the movers and shakers. Facebook is today clearly on top of the hill, but is expected to soon be picking up speed on the way down. Twitter has been hi-jacked by people who cannot stop talking. Tumblr is signing up the young and the old by the droves, but clearly doesn't have the Facebook chemistry.

And then, from the ashes of Google Buzz and Google Talk, we now have Google+ to play with. The first looks are a bit empty. In good Google style there are no unnecessary things to clutter up the white screens. Only the bare essentials to get the job done. And starting out with no profile, no pictures, no links and no eye-candy it really does look a little empty. Nothing like the Facebook style façades of colours and layouts. But go and explore this new social tool to find that you can link to Picasa as you picture repository, link to your blogs and your websites like an entry portal to your entire Internet presence. Create news streams for your circles of friends and acquaintances, and to top it of have a multi-party video conference at the push of a button, something you can only do in Skype if you spend the money to buy the business version.

And the Chocolate Factory (Google) will no doubt come up with lots of welcome additions when Google+ comes out of Beta. There is already an iPhone app and that seems to work fine for a start. So, if you want to keep up with a Broadband Enabled Society, get someone to invite you to Google+ and join in to the fun. Warmly recommended.

Well, Australia will have its National Broadband Network. Fibre to the home or something that resembles that for everyone in the "93% of the population" proposed footprint. But what when you have your connection? Well, look at what the folks at the upcoming PICNIC Festival in Amsterdam can bring:

The next PICNIC festival is in Amsterdam on 14, 15 and 16 September 2011. Book here.

Broadband service in the USA lags behind a dozen or more industrialized countries – and getting worse every year. Need to Know correspondent Rick Karr traveled to the UK and the Netherlands to find out how these two countries have jumped ahead.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.