Gross overconfidence with public data

The Australian Buerau of Statistics is showing all the signs of being grossly overconfident with every aspect of the 2016 Census, bordering on incompetent.

You've heard all about the data retention in broad terms, but what exactly does it mean? And why could it be bad? After all the data is "anonymized" such that personally identifiable data is removed before being shared, right? Their original non-anonymized versions are encrypted and safe in the hands of ABS administration, so there's nothing to worry about.

Well, it's not that simple.

Lets talk about anonymization vs aggregation, how de-anonymization works, and why the "statistical linkage key" is appallingly flawed.

ACMA submission on wholesaler data usage

I've just made a submission to the Australian Communications and Media Authority regarding the 48 hour data usage reporting delay that mobile service wholesalers like Optus impose on their wholesale customers. This can lead to incredibly huge bills with no warning and no way to prevent the bill as part of the service.

The TCP ACMA bill shock provisions that came out of the RTC enquiry were supposed to prevent this, but left a huge loophole by permitting "up to" 48 hours delay in usage alerts and reporting. Optus, at least, appears to treat this as "at least 48 hours", failing to report usage until the 48 hour time. It was a limit, not a target, Optus.

The spend management alerts were supposed to be implemented by small providers by September 2014, but they have the same 48 hour exception:

Spend management

• Suppliers to send notification alerts of data, voice calls and SMS usage within included value plans no later than 48 hours after the customer has reached data usage and expenditure thresholds of 50, 85 and 100 per cent.
• Suppliers to include additional notification information about charges applying to included value plans when the customer has exceeded 100 per cent of data or expenditure usage

Industry players are seem to be using this to bypass the intent of the code, which was to provide "access to timely, accurate and comprehensible information about their service"

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There's more to the NBN than fast Internet

People keep on framing debate about Australia's NBN (National Broadband Network) as if it's all about building a new service for faster Internet and that keeping the existing copper POTS infrastructure is a viable option.

Cost of services to end users as compared to POTS introduction

Look at the history of telephone rollouts. Initially they were unaffordable for many and there was a great deal of doubt about their utility - after all, you could usually just go to the local post office if you wanted to make a call, so what was the big deal?

Things are a bit different now.

On the other hand, unlike telephone rollouts (and their later enabling of MODEMs and dial-up banks) the NBN replaces an existing service. In that regard it's quite different, so we can't draw a direct comparison with the infrastructure rollout for phones. One could argue that the NBN is improving an existing service, rather than creating a new service, and at its cost is economically unjustifiable.

The POTS network is ailing

There's a reason why copper is being decomissioned where the NBN is being rolled out, and it's not just to provide economic incentive to push people onto the NBN and help fund it.

The copper phone network is ailing. There aren't enough physical lines to service increasing population densities as discrete houses are replaced with flats, high density developments, etc. High-frequency cross-talk from multiple ADSL services on long parallel copper lines is degrading service and causing poorer results for all users. Junctions and pits are needing more and more maintenance as they age and corrode. Installing new copper is more and more expensive as the price for copper goes through the roof.

Money spent on the copper network is being sunk into a network that's going to have to be dropped or massively rebuilt at some point. There's going to be a point where it's better to stop spending on it and replace it instead.

Given that, the NBN rollout is the replacement of infrastructure that'll otherwise become more and more overloaded, ineffective, and expensive to operate. I increasingly see its actual performance benefits as secondary. It's more like replacing that falling-down school with a fancy new building that happens to have air-conditioning and pretty skylights, but has to be built anyway because the old one has to be knocked down and rebuilt soon one way or another.