Broadband Pricing: A Study - Part 2

It has now been almost 3 months since we started this study. It's now time to check back and see what (if any) movement there has been since the Local Loop unbundling announcement was made.

Changes in Pricing?

Slingshot
No change - all the prices are the same as they were three months ago

IHUG
No change - even though the website claims to have "all new plans"

Orcon
No change here either, but the Light data cap has been expanded to 5Gb

Xtra
What a surprise - no change.

I guess three months was a little to soon to expect a major change. The other companies are pretty much limited to hanging off Xtra's coat tails. I don't expect to see much of a change in the next three months either.
I did read in the press that Telecom are bringing out 24mbit/s to the major CBD's by Xmas. I guess that is a start to real broadband - time will tell.....

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Bad Luck Aussie, you were robbed

As a New Zealander I have had my fair share of World Cup misery (in Rugby of course), but I can only imagine how inconsolable the populace of Australia are this morning.

I mean when we have dipped out of previous RWC we have been fairly beaten - Australia 2003, France 1999 with the possible exception of "SuziGate" in 1995. To my mind however, Australia were robbed. They were as good if not better than Italy and looked the stronger, fitter team heading into extra time. Then the referee in what surely is the single worst decision in the history of football gave the penalty.

32 years of blood sweat and tears ruined in a blink of an eye. Surely the time has come for television officials in football, it would n't take long for a TV official to realise that it was no foul and play on. It may slow the game down a little bit, but surely no team deserves to lose by way of a terrible decision?

Head up Aussies, you were awesome, and I'm sure this isn't the last time you reach the second round of the WC.

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What the future holds?

I was looking at my daughter in the week end and wondered what new tech will she see by the time she reaches my age (30), that wasn't around today?

For example in my life time I have seen the invention (or popularization) of things that my parents couldn't have imagined. Such as:

VHS Video, Color Television, CD's, Personal Computers, DVD, Laptop Computers, the Internet, Satelitte Television to name a very few.

The are things that were popular in my youth, that children of today have never seen, things like Tapes and Records instantly come to mind.

Looking forward, I would imagine that by the time Maddy is a teenager, CRT TV's will be fossilised making way for I guess LCD and Plasma or some new tech - OLED maybe?

I think there will be a new platform for computing by the time she is say 20 also. I definitely think the current desktop model will be obsolete, and our reliance on single vendors will be gone too. I would like to think that you could take your data anywhere by then, with a number of different devices, but I still think there will be a place for the humble desktop style PC. My mind boggles at what the speed of the things we be by then.

I guess convergence will be the big thing, with the blurring between PC/Tablet/Phone/PDA/Camera disappearing.

If you compare games from 1986 to games of 2006 for example, I can't even imagine how the improvement from 2006 to 2026 will be. Obviously realistic graphics, but Virtual Reality maybe?

And what will I be doing? Still involved in the Software Development industry, because one thing is certain - no matter what the future holds platform or hardware wise, there will always be a need for software. Great isn't it!

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