Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: telstra

  • A gigabit milestone for mobile networks

    A gigabit milestone for mobile networks

    Yesterday communications vendors Qualcomm, Netgear, Ericsson and Telstra, unveiled their Australian gigabit LTE service that gives users high speed internet connections over the 4G mobile network.

    Billed as a world’s first, Telstra will offer customers the Netgear supplied hotspots that can connect up to twenty devices over WiFi.

    Listening to the Telstra spiel yesterday, it wasn’t hard to conclude the company is making a pitch for the market frustrated by the National Broadband Network’s tardy rollout and patchy service.

    The service doesn’t come cheap though, as Finder’s Alex Kidman points out, an hour’s movie streaming on one device could easily cost $4500 dollars on Telstra’s current plans with one of the company’s executives emphasising the product is “aimed at the premium end of the market.”

    Being aimed at the premium end of the market is shame for Qualcomm as their spokespeople were keen to show off the gaming, AR and VR potential of the Snapdragon CPUs driving these devices. It would be a brave or very affluent family that bought one of these devices for their kids given the data costs.

    While the Telstra Gigabit LTE service might be an NBN replacement for deep pocketed customers, telco veteran John Lindsay points out the mobile network can’t support too many people doing so unless many more cells are deployed.

    For the moment the Telstra service is going to be attractive for companies needing high speed. low volume connections in the central business district and as the gigabit LTE upgrades roll out across the country, it will be useful for travellers as well as frustrated NBN customers.

    Ultimately the gigabit LTE product is another step toward the 5G networks that we’ll be seeing appear at the end of the decade, something that both the Ericsson and Telstra PR folk were keen to highlight.

    The key message for consumers and businesses is the rate of innovation in the mobile communications market is not slowing and another generation of connected devices is coming that will change things as dramatically as the smartphone did.

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  • An entrepreneur’s journey – a conversation with Muru-D’s Ben Sand

    An entrepreneur’s journey – a conversation with Muru-D’s Ben Sand

    As part of Telstra’s Muru-D business accelerator opening its latest startup intake this week, Annie Parker and Ben Sand, the organisation’s co-founder and Entrepreneur in Chief respectively, spoke to a small group of journalists on Tuesday about what they were looking for in the next batch of applicants and how the tech startup sector is changing.

    Ben’s entrepreneurial journey from a scrappy, underfunded Aussie startup to a hot Silicon Valley property and back to a corporate incubator is an interesting tale in itself.

    His first venture, an edu-tech startup called Brainworth founded in 2010, operated out of a dilapidated inner city Sydney terrace. The business acheived traction and Ben’s team won a ScreenNSW interactive media grant two years later.

    Failing the Kickstarter test

    Ultimately Brainworth petered out after missing a Kickstarter round. As Ben says, “I focused on getting out the maximum viable model rather than the Minimum Viable Model and the money ran out.”

    As Brainworth withered away, Ben joined former university friend, Meron Gribetz at his Augmented Reality startup Meta which went onto join the Y Combinator program. The company went on to attract $23 million dollars in investment, primarily from Hong Kong and Chinese investors, and now has 150 employees.

    Earlier this year, Ben returned to Australia after seeing Mick Liubinskas’ blog post about moving to the United States. In that article, his predecessor put out a call out for those interested in replacing him at the Sydney office which Ben answered.

    Australian advantages

    Now firmly settled into his Sydney role, Ben sees computer vision as one of the biggest opportunities in the tech sector. Bringing together disparate technologies like virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence and smart sensors, computer vision allows machines such as autonomous vehicles, drones and medical diagnostic equipment to pull together sources of data that lets machines see what is going on in the world around them.

    Computer vision is a field where Australia has an advantage, Ben believes. “Adelaide is the second most funded city in the world in computer vision,” he points out with investments like Cisco’s into South Australia’s Kohda Wireless driving the local industry.

    Ben and Annie don’t see the next group of Muru-D applicants being restricted to any one field despite Ben’s background in AR and interest in machine vision. “It’s more the psychology of the founders,” he says.

    Mentoring the next wave

    Three years of experience is also delivering dividends, observes Annie. “I’m starting to see the early cohorts starting to mentor and support the newer ones. That’s part of what Muru-D is part of, creating the ecosystem.”

    Over the three years, there’s also been quite a few adjustments to the Muru-D process, Annie observes. “We change the model each year by about thirty percent.” she says.

    Another thing that has changed is that later stage startups can apply for the program which will be open until November 4.

    “I’m excited and I’m very confident we’re going to get great outcomes for these people,” says Ben of the next Muru-D cohort. “We’ll be working on getting the most confident founders on board and hopefully helping them to aim high.”

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  • Telecommunication’s lost tribes

    Telecommunication’s lost tribes

    This week saw Australia’s telecommunications industry gather for the annual Comms Day Summit at Sydney’s Westin Hotel.

    A constant in the telco industry is change and new technology – few industries have had to reinvent themselves in the same telephone companies have had to over the last 30 years.

    For telcos, that period of change has been immensely profitable as the switch to mobile networks proved to be a river of gold for the industry as consumers enthusiastically moved away from fixed line networks and into lucrative products like SMS services.

    Missing the passion

    So it was notable how the Comms Day summit was missing a sense of excitement or vision about the approaching opportunities such as 5G networks, the Internet of Things and other new markets. Much of the conversations were mainly focused on the dysfunctional Australian industry and the flawed regulations that got it to where it is.

    As an Australian event it’s not surprising that much of the focus would be on domestic failings – thirty years of misguided policy, political opportunism and schoolboy ideologies have left the nation facing the prospect of the “world’s most expensive broadband”  in the words of Megaport founder Bevan Slattery – however the stasis in the telecoms sector betrays a far deeper uncertainty in the global industry.

    That uncertainty was on show at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where most of the conference’s buzz was around virtual reality headsets and connected cars, areas where telecommunications providers are, at best, a ‘dumb pipe’.

    We are not a utility

    Being relegated to being a ‘mere utility’ is the fear of every telecommunications executive, which is why they spend so much on abortive Pay-TV, online and sports rights acquisitions. In the Australian context, Telstra’s acquisition of PacNet and Slattery’s own East Asian ventures are possibly the most interesting developments in the local industry yet they were barely mentioned at the Comms Day event.

    While the Comms Day Summit told us much about the insular nature of modern Australian business – and the depressing mess three decades of poor regulation has left the local telecommunication industry – the bigger message is the global communications industry is struggling in a world of commoditised bandwidth where the opportunities to make huge profits is not immediately obvious.

    It’s hard to see how telcos can be completely disrupted in the way media companies have been given how regulated their markets are – although the same was being said of the taxi industry five years ago – but it is clear their managements are struggling to find new business models.

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  • Thinking differently about Cyber Security

    Thinking differently about Cyber Security

    “I get quite frustrated with the cybersecurity industry” says Andy France, Deputy Director of Cyber Defence Operations at British Intelligence Agency GCHQ. “We have to think differently.”

    France was speaking at the Telstra Cyber Security Forum at the company’s Sydney experience centre yesterday where he outlined how organisations are rethinking about protecting their data.

    “What we haven’t realised is just like the Bronze Age, the Stone Age, the Industrial Age and the Internet Age, we have to think differently about what that means to in terms of security and privacy. We have to think differently about how we build systems.”

    The biggest problem France sees in the industry itself are the lack of skills to build those secure systems, a situation he believes is partly created by the sector’s credentialism gaining certifications is several orders of magnitude more bureaucratic than becoming a fighter pilot.

    In contrast the bad guys who France splits into five groups – script kiddies, hacker collectives, crime syndicates, hackers for hire and nation states – have no such concerns about certificates and accreditation.

    “You have serial collectors of letters after their names,” he states. “We’re putting an artificial bar against the people with the new thought processes that are going to help us address this problem.”

    “It feels like the criteria has been set up to create a nice little market so we can control day rates,” French says, “in a world where we’re screaming out for talent and need people to come along who are interested and challenged by the subject.”

    Apart from the trap of credentialism, the real concern for businesses and users should be the integrity of data in France’s opinion. We need to be certain information is accurate, a problem that will be exacerbated as businesses processes are automated around data streams being connected by the Internet of Things.

    France suggests three principles should underlie an organisation’s data defences; having systems in place to spot early indications of a problem, obey the five ‘knows’ and understanding your network.

    Understanding your network, what France calls the ‘defender’s advantage’, is the most essential task of all for someone protecting their organisation’s data. “Is someone knows your network better than you then that should be a criminal offense,” he states. “To get the defender’s advantage in place you need to understand your network.”

    “Technology in itself with not keep you safe.” French says and describes security as being subject to Pareto’s Law where most vulnerabilities are mundane background noise, “we need to have a balance where technology looks after the 80% and we have the people and processes in dealing with the unexpected 20%.”

    “It’s certainly not going to get any better,” French warns about the trends for cyber security in 2016. For most companies and system administrators it’s going to be a matter of being alert and having the processes in place to deal with the unexpected.

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  • Telstra’s five ‘knows’ of security

    Telstra’s five ‘knows’ of security

    Telstra, Australia’s incumbent telco, held their Cyber Security Summit in Sydney today looking at the issues facing organisations in protecting their networks and data.

    One of the recurring themes speakers raised were the ‘five knows’ that Telstra’s security people believe are the core of business security.

    Those ‘knows’ sound simple but in truth in they are hard to carry out in even a small, simple network;

    • Know the value of your data
    • Know who has access
    • Know where the data is
    • Know who is protecting the data
    • Know how well that data is being protected

    With these five rules we’re moving into Donald Rumsfeld territory of ‘known unknowns’. In most organisations the honest answer to these questions is “we don’t fully know”, some data that’s seen as irrelevant by management could be a goldmine for a competitor or malicious actor while a relatively junior staffer could be saving critical documents on an external drive or consumer cloud service with a weak password.

    Managing those knowns, or unknowns, is a tough task and one that needs to be tempered by realism.

    In truth no system administrator has full knowledge of their network, for organisations real security comes from having strong leadership, robust processes and delivering the products and services demanded by the public.

    Technology will help deliver those products and services while helping strong leaders implement robust process but ultimately a secure organisation needs good management, not better tech.

    From the cyber security point of view, Telstra’s forum had many useful thoughts and we’ll look at more aspects regarding security that came up in the sessions later in the week.

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