Thursday 6 July 2006

'Predators' head this way

HERALD: Foreign predators continue to eye New Zealand

What a strange view of business investment is evinced by that headline. It's not a flock of vampire bats or a plague of locusts heading this way, it's a bunch of cashed-up investors looking to spend money, "making New Zealand business owners offers they can't refuse." Bringing capital to New Zealand -- like this is a bad thing?

TAGS: Politics-NZ, Economics

6 comments:

writeups said...

I'm sure if the article writer Adam Bennett was given 'an offer he couldn't refuse' for his business he'd accept. Funny how business journalists aren't always the ones who understand business.

Peter Cresswell said...

Hey, thanks Write Ups. Could you perhaps email me at organon at ihug dot co dot nz? I've got a question and a thank-you for you.

Anonymous said...

writeups said:
"Funny how business journalists aren't always the ones who understand business."

Yep, I agree here. The entire Herald's business IT journalists are a bunch of lobbyists and writing anti-business articles. This Herald business writer called Peter Nowak has been one of the instrumental news media lobbyists who have been publishing non-stop anti-Telecom articles about its monopoly in the NZ market. His points are more like Annette Presley. They are:

#1) Price will not come down unless Telecom lines are unbundled.

#2) Speed of internet download will improve if Telecom lines are unbundled.

It shows how people like Nowak & Presley are out of touch with Business and Engineering. I won't be surprised here because, first they are both lobbyists. Second, they are lay people in terms of technology and have no background at all to understand how telecommunication lines handle signal transmission.

Unbundling will not solve the speed issue. The limiting factor in transmission lines (copper or fibre-optic) is a phenomenon called 'dispersion'. This is when the signal travelling down the lines broadens its width, thereby limiting the information (bits) that can be transmitted. Signal also decays during its journey, meaning that its amplitude does decrease as distance travelled increases. Telecommunication networks install repeaters (amplifiers) in between cities to process the dispersed & decayed signal so that the original shape and width can be restored, which is ready for its next leg of transmission. Since copper has limitations imposed by the laws of physics, and regardless of how sophisticated the electronic communication equipments are, the 'dispersion' and 'decaying' of signals are still the hurdle, which can't be overcome by unbundling. Of course, the unbundling will lead to competitors attaching their own boxes and devices to the local loop to speed it the transmission, however the dispersion & decaying factor of the lines still limit the amount of bits that can be send. Sophisticated DSP (digital signal processor) devices can help but again, the transmission lines limitations are the problem. When services as 'video-on-demand' and 'internet-gaming' start to become popular within the next few years, copper will not be able to handle such high-bandwidth transmission & download. The solution is fibre-optics. Now, state-of-the-art technology developed within the last 7 years or so has produced a type of Tsunami fibre-optics which is super-fast that can reach up to transmission speed of 80 Gigabits/seconds. The state-of-the-art Tsunami fibre-optics is called 'Soliton' fibre. Soliton is a non-linear wave (laser pulse) fibre-optic transmission system. Tsunami ocean wave is also a non-linear wave. The physics of the waves for both soliton and tsunami are the same except that they travel in different medium. One travels in water while the other travels in a non-linear fibre. Such non-linear waves can travel in thousands of kilometres with its width and height (amplitude) stays the same. This ability of non-linear wave to maintain its original widths and height without degradation during its journey, is what make 'soliton' packed huge amount of information for transmission which leads to high speed , high volume transmission.

Soliton is the only way that is going to solve the broadband issue and not unbundling.

I have followed Peter Nowak's anti-Telecom's Herald's publications and never had he brought the issues regarding the limitations of the 'transmission-lines'. He thinks that unbundling will solve the issue. If he is a true technology journalist, he would have tried to interview Professor John Harvey from the Auckland University , Physics Department who is a world expert in 'Opto-Electronics' communication systems (ie, soliton fibre-optic telecommunications systems). Prof Harvey would have told him that the unbundling will not solve the problem of speed when services as ‘video on demand’ arrive.

The only way to solve speed is via business competition. Telstra could have taken telecom by installing their own fibre network (conventional, ie linear fibre optic or non-conventional , ie soliton non-linear systems). Once a competitor of telecom can improve the speed by installing their own, then Telecom will be forced to do the same. This competition will drive down the price.

With this unbundling coming into force, I can't see if Telecom will be keen to install Soliton network in the next 20 years or so. This means , we (NZ) is stuck in the old 100 year copper technology with slow speed. I expect that when high speed service arrives such as video on demand arrives, then Telecom's opponents will cry-baby to the government to draft a legislation to force telecom to install Soliton Network.


I would advice Peter Nowak & Annette Presley to attend Prof. Harvey's Physics lectures in Opto Electronics which is now combined with the School of Engineering (Electrical & Electronics) students and learn about principles of 'communication networks'. Then they would understand that they had been barking on wrong issues thus misrepresenting them to the public.


“John Scott Russell first observed Soliton in 1834”
http://www.answers.com/topic/john-scott-russell


“John Scott Russell's Soliton Wave Re-created”
http://www.ma.hw.ac.uk/solitons/press.html


"Lucent Technologies takes communications to the gigabit level"
http://www.lucent.com/press/0397/970315.nsa.html


“Quantum solitons”
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/12/2/8/1


“Non-linear Evolution Equations for Waves (Soliton & Tsunami)”
http://dmpeli.math.mcmaster.ca/ResearchProjects/ResearchPage4.html

writeups said...

Thank heaven Nowak is back off to the socialist Canada he comes from.

Anonymous said...

"Falafulu Fisi said"
[He (Peter Nowak) thinks that unbundling will solve the issue. If he is a true technology journalist, he would have tried to interview Professor John Harvey from the Auckland University , Physics Department who is a world expert in 'Opto-Electronics' communication systems (ie, soliton fibre-optic telecommunications systems)]

I forgot to paste Prof. Harvey's web link (shown at the end). He is one of a group of expert referees for papers submitted to the "Optic Letters" international peer review Physics journals. I wish that our journalists (newspapers & television) would get more time to interview academic experts in whatever disciplines that concern the subject of thei articles be it economics, physics, engineerings, statistics, etc, as long as they get a balance view where it is up to the public to make up their own mind and avoid one-sided rubbish that are being fed to them by writers such as Peter Nowak. I am no journalist, but there is a danger when journalists try to assume that they know the issues of the subject at hand, thus publishing their own opinions where the general public think that it is the truth without realising that it isn't. A good journalist will always seek opinions of the experts in a particular field that is related to the subject of his/her article.

"Professor J.D. Harvey"
http://www.phy.auckland.ac.nz/html/j_harvey.html

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling said...

It's the same sort of depressing insular ignorance and xenophobia that flows through the Kiwibank adverts, the whole "loyal" thing and much anti-nuclear / anti-american sentiments.