What can you do with 1TB of data?

Recent weeks have seen some immense shifts in the home broadband space in Australia. It all kicked off when Telstra announced new and surprisingly competitive plans. I say surprisingly simply because, historically speaking, Telstra’s been amongst the last of the ISPs to shift its data offerings forwards, pursuing more of the premium market (through its Next G wireless) or bundled offerings through mobile phones and landlines.

Suddenly, for less than $100, you could get 200GB of data per month, from Telstra. Competing ISPs weren’t happy, not the least because some of these prices were cheaper than they were selling wholesale to other ISPs. Many of them rely on using Telstra’s wholesale services in bulk to make their money, and if consumer rates are cheaper than wholesale rates they can’t do that.

While that plays out in the legal sphere, the other ISPs haven’t been sitting still. A week after Telstra dropped its pricing bombshell, Internode answered with plans offering 240GB.  A week later iiNet announced plans with a total of 1TB (1,000GB) per month download plans. Within hours, Primus was offering 1.1TB plans, and TPG now offers a 1TB plan as well.

Storage is cheaper than it’s ever been, but it’s a fair guess that many readers won’t have that much storage space in their entire PC. So, if relatively few users have 1Tb per month to spare, is there actually value in these plans?

To an extent – and it’s even a legal extent –  yes, there can be. The ISPs in question aren’t banking on every user on a 1TB plan using the whole 1TB per month. Like many services, they figure most users won’t go through that much, but they’ll get the money either way.

What 1TB does buy you is a fair amount of security in terms of getting shaped. You could download a month’s worth of legal download movies (from, say, iTunes) and still be within your cap. Stream an awful lot of video from those services that the given ISPs don’t already allow under the cap, catching up on as much free-to-air TV as you like.  Obviously there’s a market of people who will never need 1TB, but if you’re sitting on a plan where you consistently get shaped for the last couple of months of your plan, and it’s close to the typical $99 price point that many of these plans go for, there’s a strong argument to say that you could be doing better.

Getting a Web perspective

I don’t watch a lot of TV news these days, largely because I often find the news a little quicker online.  Just like watching the news on TV, though, it can sometimes be tough when following news to judge the scale of events, especially those of a tragic nature. I find that the often obvious TV film script is usually more concerned on the fate of individuals, because there’s no easy way to convey a disaster of any scale in simple TV terms.

The Web isn’t constrained by the terms of television, however. I’ve recently become aware of a fascinating project being undertaken by the BBC, called Dimensions. Dimensions is, in its own words, an experiment in “in trying to find new ways to communicate history.”. Specifically, what Dimensions does is use global map data — if you can name it you can find it — and then superimpose the effects of a given historical event over that area, to give the reader a genuine sense of the scale of an event.

There’s some fun stuff in there — like being able to see how long the Space Shuttle runway would be if it was located in the middle of Melbourne (http://howbigreally.com/dimension/space/shuttle_runway#Melbourne) or what would happen if you dropped St Peter’s Basilica in the middle of Canberra (http://howbigreally.com/dimension/festivals_and_specticles/pope_st_paul#canberra).

What really grabbed my attention were the disaster superimpositions. It’s all too easy to forget about a crisis when it’s a thirty second news spot and the camera only focuses on a couple of people. But drop it into your neighbourhood, and you get a proper sense of the scale, and almost inevitably start thinking about the consequences. The recent floods in Pakistan might seem quite far away, but if you dropped them, on say, Adelaide (http://howbigreally.com/dimension/environmental_disasters/pakistan_floods#adelaide), the scope of the disaster shifts from distant to breathtakingly close.

Or take the Pacific Garbage Patch. This was one I didn’t know anything about, and the short version is this; there’s two large swirling patches of garbage floating either side of Hawaii, held in place by ocean currents. When you think of Hawaii, you probably think of dusky island maidens and delicately lit beaches, rather than fetid stinking pools of swirling plastic and muck. But hey, it’s only a little garbage in a big ocean, right?

Well, not so small. If you superimpose it over, say, Alice Springs (http://howbigreally.com/dimension/environmental_disasters/great_pacific_garbage_patch#Alice_Springs) you’ll get a better idea of the scope of the problem — especially as that’s only half of it!

What are you spending your tech dollars on?

Technology’s always been an expensive game to be in. Today’s high end graphics card costs $1,000. In a year’s time it’s so far behind the curve they’re putting them in wristwatches. Business grade tech equipment is equally costly, even if it does largely work on a  three year deprecation cycle. Whatever your angle, there’s always been a significant investment to make. In the current economic environment with plenty of consumers and small businesses feeling the pinch, it’s interesting to take stock of what we are actually spending money on. There’s long been the feeling that a lot of computing and consumer electronics gear is somewhat recession proof. The theory goes that we’re not going out to restaurants or clubs anywhere near as much, but instead concentrating our limited budgets on bigger TVs, more internet connected devices and items that might hold a little more value than a bowl of pasta or glass of beer.

The latest surveyed figures, however tell a different story, at least from looking at the  market research figures that research company GfK released for the second quarter of 2010 in mid-August. In tech terms, it’s a gloomy picture compared to twelve months ago. Admittedly, twelve months prior government stimulus money was theoretically flowing through the economy, but still, that idea that IT is somewhat recession proof didn’t stop a lot of categories going backwards. We’re spending less on notebooks (down 3%), photography (down 6.8%) and consumer electronics (TVs, audio, camcorders, GPS) generally (down 8.3%).

Where we are apparently spending up big is just as interesting. Smartphones sales are way up — 92% year on year. That tallies with what I’ve been told by Telstra, who indicated to me that some 25% of their mobile customers were using smartphones at the end of the financial year, and they expect that to hit 50% by year’s end. Having witnessed the frankly baffling crowds hustling to get hold of an iPhone 4 at the Sydney launch — where simply walking to the end of the Optus queue from front to back was a brisk four minute affair — that’s not too surprising.

The genuinely surprising category to me was in storage. Unit sales were up 62%, although that’s at least due in part to decreased actual prices for things like hard drives and external flash drives; that 62% volume increase only led to a 23% value increase. Whether that means we’re all still continuing to just create more and more data, or the lessons about backups are getting through (you do backup your precious files, don’t you?) is impossible to say.

Waving goodbye

Not every tech product is an instant hit, even when it’s backed by a big brand name. Every tech company has its flop products, and late last week, Google added another to the pile. It’s a rare misstep for Google, though. After all, the company name is effectively synonymous with Internet search. Gmail offers best in breed spam filtering for consumers and businesses alike, and plenty of other Google products have millions of dedicated users. That doesn’t mean that everything the company does works. There’s still folks a little disturbed by the privacy implications of Google’s Street View addition to its map products. Personally, it doesn’t fuss me; if I wanted my house hidden from view, I could always throw a very large sheet over it.

Late last week, Google announced that it’s pulling the plug on one of its most hyped but least successful products, Google Wave (www.google.com/wave). Wave was touted as a collaborative tool that could replace instant messaging, Wikis, social networking and email within one web-based interface. Initially only available to users by invitation, Google did a great job developing hype for the product by limiting availability, but even when Wave was opened to the general public, it failed to catch on as well as Google might have hoped. The learning curve was a little steep, and it was a product — like many social networks — that really relied on having a critical mass of users to be genuinely useful.

For those who like a little home grown feeling with their technology, it’s worth noting that Wave was developed and maintained in Sydney, and in these uncertain economic times it’s nice to note that Google’s stated that none of the developers will be laid off; instead they’ll be reassigned according to this ITNews report: http://itnews.com.au/News/223654,sydney-staff-survive-googles-wave-cutback.aspx

Wave’s closure — which will happen by the end of the year — doesn’t mean that collaborative software in itself is dead. There’s plenty of other products — Microsoft’s SharePoint being the most prominent — and it’s not as though one product will sink Google.

Smartphones in all shapes and sizes

The mobile phone market is seemingly inexorably shifting towards smartphones. You may not think that you could or would want a smartphone, but it seems as though the market is deciding for you, with any number of phone vendors offering up either direct smartphones, or so-called “feature” phones that offer many of the core smartphone offerings. That’s features like included email, web browsing and if you’re lucky a little light document reading.

It’s arguably a similar kind of situation that existed with mobile phones around fifteen years ago. Mobiles themselves were still pretty clunky creatures, and plenty of folk could rather easily say that they had no use for a phone that was always on them. In today’s connected world, there are few that would make that claim. A smartphone just takes that to the next level, matching up your email and other functions to your location no matter where you are. We’re even starting to see some reasonably priced data plans to go with smartphones, taking the bill shock problem out of the equation.

We’re also seeing a lot more variance in what smart phones look like. For the past couple of years, most manufacturers have made smartphone that, for better or worse, aped the simple style of Apple’s iPhone lines. iPhones have been popular, so it made a certain amount of sense to do so. Still, there are those who don’t want a touchscreen-only phone, or don’t want an Apple phone full stop.

I went to a preview — not quite a launch, as it’s not quite clear as to what the company involved will actually sell in the Australian marketplace — of a number of new technology products from Chinese company Huawei recently. You’ve most likely never heard of Huawei, although the chances are decent you may have interacted with some of the company’s technology in one way or the other. As an example, outside of Telstra, all the USB modems currently offered for mobile broadband by Australia’s telecommunications companies are Huawei modems.

One of the potential products that Huawei executives showed off to me were a range of Android phones. There were, predictably, phones that carried that standard “iPhone” style big-screen experience, for those that want it. There was a Google-branded phone that we may see by the end of the year, similar to the HTC Desire but a fair bit smaller, and potentially a bit cheaper. Also in attendance was an oddly small Android phone, the U8300 that featured a tiny physical keyboard. From a very brief test of the phone, it’s not going to challenge a Blackberry for keyboard dominance, but if you wanted a cheap smartphone with a keyboard, it might be worth considering.

There’s no clear indication that any of these phones will come to the Australian marketplace, and even if they do they’re highly unlikely to be directly labelled as Huawei phones. That mirrors a much larger tech reality, however, as many seemingly “competing” tech products come from the same core providers to a given tech company’s recipes. Yes, even Apple’s products are sourced this way.

I guess at least if we are all going to be gently shoved into the smartphone world, it’s good to see that it’s not going to be within a one-size-fits-all model, and variances for taste, style and usability will still be possible. What shape smartphone do you want?

Keep your brain in gear when using GPS

I’ve tested a lot of GPS units over the years — probably more than any other Australian tech journalist. That’s why a recent ABC story regarding a family of four that got trapped after following their GPS unit’s instructions (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/08/02/2970371.htm) made my brain spin a bit. The family got bogged after driving down a closed road that the GPS indicated was the correct route. According to the ABC report, the driver ignored road closure signs to do so, and as a result got bogged in thick mud. Four days later, emergency services were able to tow them out.

While I’ve got sympathy for the family in that spending four days trapped with kids in a car can’t be much fun, that sympathy only goes so far. Yes, the GPS unit may have indicated that the closed road was the way to drive. It’s entirely possible the driver wasn’t familiar with the roads in question. I’ve certainly used GPS in places where I’ve had no road familiarity at all in the past, and will do so in the future. The majority of the problem, however, isn’t in the GPS. It’s in the person behind the wheel ignoring road signs and road rules.

Does that seem harsh? I don’t think so. A GPS is just a big electronic map. It’s not yet feasible to update maps on an absolutely dynamic level. In this case that would involve the local authorities noting on a database somewhere that the road in question was closed due to dangerous conditions, and that data being sent to every nearby GPS system. Currently GPS systems are limited by the data that was present when the maps were drawn up. In that context it’s exactly as smart as a paper map would have been. GPS systems can be smarter, though, as they’re capable of re-routing if you go the “wrong” way. I’ve certainly had a share of GPS units that have given wacky directions. Perhaps the most memorable was when driving back from Adelaide to Sydney, and having a GPS insist that the fastest possible route was via a small country town in Victoria. When I say small, though, that might be a bit of an understatement. I understand Melbourne’s quite bustling these days.

That was daft instruction, and the GPS system’s fault. I read the road signs, realised it was wrong and adjusted my driving accordingly. The GPS spent a very short while thinking I was driving the wrong way before adjusting its outlook and sending me on the right way. If I’m reviewing a unit I’ll certainly note its errors, as they should improve over time, but the correct thing to do isn’t to ignore road signs, road rules or common sense, in exactly the same way that you shouldn’t do when driving without a GPS. Most GPS systems can have maps updated on a regular basis, and many now come with multi-year map subscriptions. GPS systems can and do go wrong, but they don’t drive the car for you. The driver does. They’re an aid to driving, and a very pleasant one that I’d say still gets it right more often than having a badly folded map illegally wrapped around your legs while you try to navigate and drive could ever do.