Networking

I’ve been building websites since 1995. Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, you can even see the slightly cringe-worthy first one I ever put up. You’ll need to make your browser much narrower because it was designed in the days when screens were only 800 pixels wide.
With 26 years of experience making sites, it’s fair to say I’ve been asked, “So Dave, what do I need to do to get my own website?” a few hundred times, minimum. In this article, we’re going to answer that question. To get started, let’s define our terms.

Website hosting and building

What is a website?
From a website visitor’s perspective, a website is someplace online you visit to get information or to do something. But from a site operator’s perspective, a website is, fundamentally, one or more directories of files, possibly accompanied by one or more databases of tables.
You may have heard terms like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, PHP, and more. These are all, more or less, computer languages in that they follow a specifically defined syntax and, when processed, produce a result of some kind.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language): This is a text file containing formatting commands for constructing a webpage. You can control the text style, add headings, lists, and place media content. Most HTML pages also embed or include content from other web languages as well, like CSS.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): These are files that help format the webpage. They contain positioning and styling information that gives a page its pleasant look.
JavaScript and Java: These are programming languages, initially developed to run in the browser to modify a page’s behavior on the fly. Now, there are server-side versions, like Node.js for JavaScript and Enterprise Java Beans for Java. Almost all web applications, like Gmail and Facebook, use Java and JavaScript (or a modified dialect) to make the pages more dynamic.

PHP, Python, Ruby, etc: These are server-side programming languages that run web applications on the server. For example, an online store will need to call out to a payment processor. Most of that payment processing is handled server-side in a web programming language.
Back in 1995, when I got my start on the Web, there were no web builders or content management systems. I had to hand-code all my HTML. Today, unless you’re writing custom functionality, you probably won’t have to know any of these languages in detail to create a successful site. But you might want to have a passing awareness of them and to understand basic HTML and CSS at the least, because little bits of customization in terms of how your site looks may require CSS or HTML tweaking.
A webpage is essentially a single document. A website is a collection of related webpages. Many websites, using web programming languages, also work with databases (which provide fast search and retrieval). These sites build the webpages dynamically, constructing all the elements as a user visits the page, and then transferring that cluster of elements as files to a user’s browser.
Although we hand-crafted our pages — HTML tag by HTML tag — back in the mid-1990s, that’s no longer a preferred practice. Today, you’re almost always going to use some sort of page builder or content management system (CMS), which will do most of the super-tedious page formatting and assembly work for you.
Content site vs. web application?
According to Internet Live Stats, there are 1.8 billion websites live right now. Each site is different (except, of course, for those sites cloned by scammers who hope to get web traffic from the stolen work of others). But even though there are millions of variations in what constitutes a website, right now we’re going to lump them all into two categories: Content site and web app.
Even here, there’s some wiggle room. Many apps have content as well. And many content sites have sections that are web apps. Any site that has a forum, for example, is hosting a web app.
From a “Dave, what do I need to do to get my own website?” point of view, if you’re reading this article or asking that question, let’s agree you’re looking to build a content site. You’re asking because you want to present information about the goods and services you offer, or about a topic of interest, or some other site that’s mostly information-based.
Web applications, although incredibly valuable (see all our writing about the cloud), usually require skilled programmers to create. If you’re looking to set up your first site, you’re not ready to worry about coding. For the rest of this article, we’ll assume your site is mostly content-based, although you may have some app features (like e-commerce or a forum).
Build it yourself or hire a consultant (or get your nephew to do it)
If you run a large corporation that can hire a web team, sure, go out and hire a consultant. And while there are many web developers out there (freelance and with agencies) that do a wonderful job, they can increase complexity considerably. For now, I’m going to tell you a few reasons why I don’t recommend you hire someone. After, I’ll show you some tips for succeeding if you do.
Let’s start with the reasons you might want to avoid hiring someone. At the top of the list is cost. Building a custom website is a lot of work. While it’s possible to crank out cookie-cutter sites where only the logo and colors change, anything built with more of a personal touch will take days to weeks to months.
I volunteer with a nonprofit. I agreed to build their site. It had just a few highly custom features (a tweaked membership list and member-only access). Even with just a few custom features, it took me a couple of weeks to put it together. Even the cost of hiring the least expensive developer, billing for 80 to 100 hours of time, is going to add up.
Beyond cost, however, is the loss of control. I also maintain a free donations app, again as part of my pro bono work. At least once a week, someone contacts me telling me that they lost their developer (or they have no idea who the original developer was) and they need to know how to modify their site.
You are unlikely to have access to the same developer for the entire life of your site. Consultants move on, get new jobs, move away, die, or get fired. If you are solely reliant on someone else to keep your site alive, you’re at serious risk. It’s incredibly valuable, especially for your first few sites, to build them yourself. Learn about hosting. Learn about your content management system. Learn about backups.
If you build up these basic skills, you’ll be able to jump in if your developer is unavailable. At the very least, you’ll have a better chance of understanding whether the consultant’s asking price is reasonable or over-inflated.
If you do want to hire a consultant, my biggest piece of advice is to keep each job simple, with clear objectives and a measurable set of guidelines. Rather than hiring someone to develop your entire site, you might hire someone to configure your e-commerce plugin — and teach you how to maintain it. Rather than having someone design the entire site, you might hire someone to help you choose your site’s colors and tweak your CSS to display them.
You get the idea. Keep the jobs simple, tangible, and objectively measurable. It’s much easier to convince a vendor to make a fix because payments aren’t processing than it is to try to convince a consultant to redesign because you didn’t get the light and airy feeling you were hoping for.
Getting ready to get ready
Up until this point, you’ve been getting ready to get ready. You’ve learned about the different kinds of files a website uses. You’ve learned to think about the difference between content sites and web apps. You’ve looked into hiring consultants and (at least if you follow my advice) you’re going to try to build your first site on your own.
You have a couple of more decisions to make about what web technology to use and what hosting provider. But before you jump into the logistics, you need to think through more about your site itself.
We know it’s going to be content rather than mostly code. But beyond that, what are you trying to accomplish? If you want to take orders, you’re going to need to look into payment gateways and payment processing. If you ship physical goods, you’re going to need your cart software to manage shipping and fulfillment tracking. If you ship digital goods, you’re going to need your cart to manage licensing, expiration, renewal, downloads, and registration.
If you plan on building a mailing list, you’re going to need a mailing services partner to manage your list and deliver your mail messages. And you’ll also want to decide how tightly you want to integrate your mailings with your web content. Do you want a mailing automatically triggered for each new blog post, or do you want to write your own mailer when you’re ready to do a promotion?
Also: Best email hosting in 2021
You’re also going to need a domain. Do not let any of the web hosting providers try to convince you to use something like yourname.theirname.com. It’s better to have yourbrand.com as your domain name. Domain names cost about $10 a year and you go to a domain registrar to buy one. The only challenge, like with vanity license plates, is finding one that hasn’t already been used.
Here’s a caution: Most registrars also offer some form of domain marketplace, where those who own domain names try to sell them to others who want them. Stay away. I have an acquaintance who decided he wanted a very specific name and spent thousands to buy it. Yes, the name of your company might have already been taken. Be creative. There are still many great combinations of letters out there. Don’t spend hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars on a domain name. Just be creative and choose one that’s available.
These decisions will help you look into the features that you’re going to choose when you look for a web builder or content management system. Let’s talk about that now.
Choosing a content management system
There is a wide spectrum between writing every bracket around every tag in every HTML file when coding a site completely on your own, and dumping text and photos into Facebook or Medium and being at the mercy of some walled-garden corporate algorithm.
We’re going to focus in the middle of that spectrum. There will be some configuration and setup decisions and a lot of design decisions, but it isn’t really a choice between writing all your own code or letting Facebook dictate who sees your message. You’ll be able to build a site that’s your property, with your look, feel, and identity.
Here, too, there are decisions. You can go the website builder route. You can sign up to Wix or Squarespace or an equivalent service, and they’ll take care of both hosting and constructing your webpages. All you’ll need to do is choose a theme, and then fill the site with your content.
Also: The best website builder for 2021: Your step by step guide
Depending on your budget, going with a website builder is a very simple and practical solution, especially if the themes provided are appropriate for the kind of work you’re doing. There is, however, a substantial downside: Lock-in. Most web builders are proprietary, so if you want to switch to another service, you’ll have to rebuild your site either mostly or entirely from scratch. At the very least, there will be a ton of cutting and pasting between services.
For smaller sites, that’s not much of an issue. Rebuilding five or 10 webpages is no big deal. But if your site is 50, 100, or even thousands of pages, that’s a lot of copying and pasting (or, if you’re very lucky, exporting and importing). Think about this: If you do one blog post every weekday, you’ll have at least 261 pages by the end of a year. Content expands very quickly.
The other approach is to run a non-proprietary content management system on a hosting provider. That way, you can switch hosting providers and your CMS can move with you. If you run an active website for any number of years, you WILL switch hosting providers. Whatever you start with will become unreliable, more costly, offer less quality support, or give you some other reason where you’ll want to leave. It’s rare to stick with one hosting provider unless you simply have no way out. So planning to be able to switch is useful.
The sweet spot: WordPress
I’m going to go out on a very safe limb and recommend you consider WordPress as the foundation of your website. According to tracking service W3Techs, WordPress now runs 40% of all websites and has a 64.3% market share of all sites based on a content management system.
WordPress is an open-source CMS you install on your hosting provider’s site. Usually, WordPress comes pre-installed, or you need to run a quick installer to create the site. The installation process involves answering a few basic questions. To just get WordPress up and running, it rarely takes more than about five minutes or so.
Also: Best WordPress hosting in 2021
It’s the customization of WordPress that can take a while. That non-profit I told you about earlier was a WordPress site that took weeks to build. Some of that time was spent on getting the non-profit to decide on a logo, gathering all the names of the members, and agreeing on wording and messaging. But the bulk of the time was spent choosing and configuring the plugins, themes, and layouts that best fit the group’s mission and provided the professional look and feel that was desired.
Speaking of plugins and themes, let’s talk about them. Plugins extend WordPress’s capabilities. There are thousands upon thousands of them. I consider plugins the great strength of WordPress because they allow you to customize WordPress to do almost anything. Many are free, many more are paid add-ons. Many offer a free core plugin but sell either a pro version or add-on capabilities.
The second great strength of WordPress is its enormous themes library. There are some very nice free and default themes, and a tremendous number of excellent commercial themes available. This, too, is one of the reasons I confidently recommend WordPress.
But… keep in mind that once you integrate a bunch of plugins and themes into WordPress, you’re going to have something of a lock-in situation as well. It’s not the same as being stuck on one hosting provider, but you may have data formatted just to work with your chosen plugins, or pages formatted to work with just the theme you’ve chosen.
The difference between module-level lock-in and hosting-level lock-in is that you can often find replacement themes and plugins, and you can almost always move your entire WordPress site (including all those plugins and themes) to another host without too much work.
Also, you may have heard about security problems with WordPress. Don’t let that scare you away. Keep in mind that 40% of the internet is running WordPress, so millions of websites run it. That makes a very large target of opportunity for bad guys and opens up a wide range of errors people can make in configuring their sites. But if you do the simple practices of backing up your sites and applying updates as they come out, you’ll almost always be in the clear.
One other benefit of WordPress: Because it’s so huge, there’s an enormous user community and almost unlimited amount of training, help, and support, and a virtual cornucopia of resources, sites, and helpful people out there who know WordPress.
Choose a hosting provider
If you go with one of the all-in-one web builders like Wix or Squarespace, you won’t have to choose a hosting provider. But if you go with some other CMS or WordPress, you’ll need to contract with a company to deliver your webpages to your visitors.
Also: The best cheap web hosting in 2021
I wrote about the hosting provider business model in Best free web hosting in 2021: Cheap gets expensive fast, so click over there and give it a read-through. You’ll learn a ton about how to think about hosting, what services hosting providers offer, and some of the pricing tricks hosting providers try to foist upon their customers.
Another article to check out, on our sister site CNET, is How to choose a web hosting provider. There, I wrote about the different types of hosting and servers to take into consideration.
Also: Best web hosting in 2021: Find the right service for your site
Here’s a quick tip: You can probably get by with shared hosting if you don’t have a ton of pages or a complex site. But stay away from the bottom-of-the-barrel pricing plans. You get what you pay for. Look for a plan that’s roughly about $10 per month if you’re running WordPress or anything with a basic CMS. If you’re running complex e-commerce, expect to spend more. 
The reason for this is that you’ll need a base level of performance to be able to feed pages with any responsiveness. The super-cheap sites will have terrible performance and often lax security. If you’re creating your first impression on the Internet, make it count. Spend a few bucks — way less than we used to spend mailing out brochures back in the pre-Internet dark ages — to get a decent quality but still affordable offering.
Final thought
There’s a lot to learn, but it’s not unreachable. More to the point, if you go through the learning curve, you’ll never be completely at the mercy of expensive consultants who may cost a lot and still leave you unsatisfied. I’m not saying consultants are bad, but taking control by learning how to set up your own site will help you become an informed site operator.
You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.

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TPG Telecom — the culmination of the TPG Corporation-Vodafone merger — revealed that the financial impact of COVID-19 during the fiscal year 2020 was approximately a AU$90 million hit to its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA), which ended up being AU$1.39 billion.
The results account for 12 months of the former Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) and six months of the now-defunct TPG Corporation (TPG Corp) as the merger was finalised midway through the fiscal year.
Read more: Vodafone Australia and TPG merger: Everything you need to know
Net profit after tax (NPAT) was AU$734 million after the company paid AU$820 million in taxes for the year. The AU$820 million tax bill was the byproduct of an accounting credit to income tax expense that was not previously recognised in the company’s accounts.
For the year to December 31, revenue amounted to AU$4.35 billion, up from AU$3.5 billion from the corresponding period last year, while EBITDA rose 18% to AU$1.39 billion. The revenue boost was due to service revenue growing by 44%.
Looking at TPG’s various customer bases, broadband saw a 6% year-on-year increase to 2.17 million, representing a growth of 117,000. The company’s NBN base also grew by 28% to 1.9 million, adding 415,000 new subscribers for the year.
The company’s mobile base, much like those of other telcos, was impacted by the absence of overseas visitors and migrants coming to Australia due to border closures. As a result, its postpaid mobile subscriber base dipped 5% to 3.26 million while postpaid average revenue per user dipped 5.1% to AU$40.90 from a strong decline in roaming revenue.

TPG’s prepaid subscriber base suffered a similar fate, dropping 22% to 1.97 million from 2.52 million. Unlike its postpaid subscriber base, however, the dip in prepaid numbers was due to the company’s “inability to compete aggressively” during the merger process.
On a pro forma basis, which calculates figures to simulate what TPG’s results would have been if the merger had been effective for the entire year, its numbers dropped across the board. Pro forma revenue decreased by 6% to AU$5.52 billion, while both EBITDA and NPAT dropped 10% to AU$1.79 billion and AU$282 million, respectively.
Categorising TPG Telecom’s pro forma revenue into its consumer and corporate segments, both declined by 7%, primarily due to COVID impacts, price erosion, and loss of low-margin NBN wholesale business, it said.
For 2021, TPG said COVID-19 would continue to impact the telco, with lower international roaming and international visitor revenue expected to continue into 2021. It also expects total NBN headwinds of around AU$60 million.
“While we are in a stronger position to respond to aggressive competition in the market and mitigate headwinds, we will continue to be impacted by global travel restrictions, NBN margin erosion, and the new RBS levy,” TPG CEO Inaki Berroeta said.
To counteract NBN headwinds, Berroeta said the telco would work towards shifting customers from NBN to its fixed-wireless services while continuing to progress merger integration activities.
Berroeta added that the telco is targeting AU$70 million in cost synergies as it continues merger integration, which excludes any savings contributions from the cross-selling of fixed-wireless services.
Providing an update on its 5G rollout, Berroeta said the telco expects to offer 5G fixed-wireless services during the first half of 2021 and is on track to provide 85% 5G population coverage by the end of the year.
“As we move into 2021, we are building on momentum gained in the final quarter of 2020, continuing our merger integration plans, our 5G mobile network is on track to reach scale in the top six cities by the end of the year, and we will begin offering 5G fixed wireless services in the first half,” he said.
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Telstra InfraCo’s dark fibre optic network is now available for use across six Australian state capitals.
“Spanning across our nation is 250,000km of untapped potential that we can now begin to offer our customers,” Telstra InfraCo fibre executive Kathryn Jones said. “With our massive fibre footprint underpinning our new offering, it opens up a wealth of capabilities and control.”
Jones said over 250 pre-defined paths across six state capitals that are connected to 68 metro data centres, 78 NBN points of interconnect, and two cable landing stations are now available.
She said opening up the telco’s fixed network to customers is a “profound step in unlocking untapped value” in Telstra’s network assets.
Dark fibre is the first product to be launched by the infrastructure arm of Telstra since its launch in 2018. Jones said it is the first of a series of offerings Telstra InfraCo is planning on bringing to the market.
Towards the end of last year, Telstra announced that by the end of 2021, it intends to split itself into an InfraCo Fixed business that would own and operate passive fixed infrastructure such as ducts, fibre, data centres, subsea cables, and exchanges; an InfraCo Tower business that would own and operate passive tower assets; and ServeCo that would remain as the bulk of Telstra, owning its retail business, active electronics and radio access network, spectrum, as well as offering services and products to customers.
“The proposed restructure is one of the most significant in Telstra’s history and the largest corporate change since privatisation. It will unlock value in the company, improve the returns from the company’s assets and create further optionality for the future,” CEO Andy Penn said at the time.  

Elsewhere, Optus on Wednesday announced the launch of Optus U, an employee upskilling program that will deliver accredited short courses to its employees.
Partnering with the La Trobe and Macquarie universities, TAFE, industry associations, and other partners, the “bespoke” curriculums and five micro-credential programs are aimed at bridging the skills gap for in-demand digital skills.
“At Optus, we predict the acceleration of technological change will continue unabated in 2021 and beyond, as the adoption of new technologies such as cloud and AI are brought forward by years,” VP of human resources Katie Aitkin said in a blog post.
“To meet the demands of new technologies, it’s critical that we ensure our people have the right skills and capabilities in place to drive Optus into the future and deliver for our customers across multiple digital domains.”
115 Optus employees have begun undertaking courses across customer experience, data and analytics, and artificial intelligence.
New programs covering 5G, cloud, Internet of Things, and cybersecurity are planned for 2021, with Optus expecting over 300 employees to take part.
In addition to micro-credentials, Aitkin said Optus U will also future proof employees through a lecture and guest speaker series called U Talks. She said Optus U will also feature practical workshops and innovative research projects for employees to collaborate and learn new skills from one another.
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When we think about 5G, we think about the last mile: The actual 5G wireless technologies between our devices and the internet. But there’s another equally important part: The edge and cloud computing that connect the 5G access points with the rest of the internet. Now Google and Intel have joined forces to improve your edge software services once you’re hooked up with the internet.

As Shailesh Shukla, Google Cloud VP and Networking general manager, said, “We believe that by partnering across the telecommunications stack — with application providers, carriers and Communications Service Providers (CSP), hardware providers, and global telecoms — we can decrease the cost and time-to-market needed for the telecommunications industry to shift to cloud-native 5G, and open new lines of business for CSP as they deliver cloud-native 5G for enterprises.”
Special report: 5G: What it means for edge computing
How? By working with Intel to develop reference architectures and technologies to accelerate their deployment of 5G and edge network solutions. “5G,” said Dan Rodriguez, Intel corporate VP and general manager of the Network Platforms Group, “is driving a rapid transition to cloud-native technologies. Our efforts with Google Cloud and the broader ecosystem will help them deliver agile, scalable solutions for emerging 5G and edge use cases.” 
Specifically, they’ll be helping CSPs deploy Virtualized RAN (vRAN) and Open Radio Access Network (ORAN) solutions
VRAN you ask? In vRAN, the baseband unit, traditionally a digital signal processor that processes voice and data to smartphones and back again, is replaced by software running commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. This enables CSPs to use generic software and hardware.
In Google and Intel’s plan, 5G vRAN will be deployed using Google Cloud’s Anthos application platform with Intel cloud-native platforms and solutions. On this platform, you’ll be running Intel’s FlexRay reference software. The win for CSPs here will include improved network performance and spectral efficiency, cost efficiencies, and flexible deployment models.

On the same platform, the pair will also use Intel’s cloud-native Open Network Edge Service Software (OpenNESS) deployment model. OpenNESS is a Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) software toolkit. It enables highly optimized and performance edge platforms to onboard and manage applications and network functions with cloud-like agility across any type of network. 
The OpenNESS open-source distribution makes it easier for cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) developers to create edge computing applications. Specifically, it offers capabilities to speed up application development by:

Abstracting out the network complexity for Cloud and IoT developers making migration of applications from the cloud to the edge easier.

Enabling secure onboarding and application management with an intuitive web-based GUI.

Providing a modular, microservices-based architecture for building functionalities such as access termination, traffic steering, multi-tenancy for services, service registry, service authentication, telemetry, application frameworks, appliance discovery, and control. 

Finally, it’s built on top of consistent, standardized APIs.

It does this on top of Intel’s Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and Intel Xeon processors to make sure whatever you built on this all works in the field as expected from your testbed operations. The two also provide a Google Cloud-based Network Functions Validation Lab.
To back this up with both business and software support, Google also recently announced an initiative to deliver over 200 partner applications to the edge via Google Cloud’s network and 5G.
Sound interesting? Both Google and Intel will be happy to talk to you about how you can work with them to deliver your 5G applications to your customers.
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Australian carrier Vocus has reported recurring revenue increased by 2% to AU$896 million while underlying earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) remained steady, hovering around AU$192 million, which the company credited to “disciplined overhead reductions”.
Underlying net profit after tax was AU$45.4 million, which was a 11% year-on-year dip.
Broken down by division, Vocus Network Services (VNS) chipped in AU$340.2 million of the carrier’s overall revenue, which was an 11% improvement from its performance in the year prior. This was primarily comprised of revenue from data networks, which accounted for 63% of VNS’ recurring revenues and 77% of its gross margin.
VNS’ EBITDA also increased by 8%, driven by higher margin data network revenues despite its large infrastructure revenue dropping from AU$25.5 million to only AU$1.4 million.
Vocus’ New Zealand arm also delivered growth in the half, with both revenue and EBITDA up by around 5%. The addition of Stuff Fibre helped its consumer and business division grow by 11%, with underlying EBITDA growing by 5% largely driven by growth in Ultra-Fast Broadband and the bundling of energy services.
Vocus Retail, however, continued to see its overall revenue decline. During the half, overall revenue dropped by 6% to AU$350 million. Retail’s EBITDA also declined 20%, which was slightly less than the 22% decline experienced in the year prior.
The company said it remained optimistic about its retail business as consumer revenue returned a 1% year-on-year growth.

“Vocus group and the Australian retail business can now see a clear path to an end of legacy products decline. Legacy gross margin in the half now represents 15% of the retail business; the majority of this lies within the small and medium business standalone voice products,” Vocus CFO Nitesh Naidoo said in the half-year results presentation.
“With consumer now returning to growth, there is a clear line of sight to a stable retail business.”
Providing an update about its New Zealand IPO at the results presentation, Vocus CEO Kevin Russell said the IPO is still on track to be completed by the end of the 2021 financial year. He added that the carrier is still planning to exit its New Zealand business post-IPO.
With Vocus currently in talks to be sold to Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets Holdings (MIRA), the carrier was scant in providing additional details about the proposed deal during the results presentation. 
Yesterday, the carrier revealed that Aware Super joined MIRA’s bid for the company under the same AU$5.50 per share terms.
“Vocus has been advised by MIRA that it has entered into a co-operation agreement with Aware Super … to progress its proposal via a consortium,” Vocus told the ASX.
“The consortium’s due diligence investigations are continuing. The Vocus board notes that there is no certainty that the proposal will result in a binding offer.”
Meanwhile, Webcentral, which is still being pursued by 5G Networks, reported in its interim results for the half year to December that revenue declined due to the impact of COVID-19 and poor customer experience, posting AU$31.5 million in total revenue, a drop of 15% year-on-year.
The company said poor customer experience was spread across three main areas: Support services, console experience, and technical stability.
“We’ve undertaken a number of initiatives to address these issues. Management is confident that revenue growth will return across all four core services as these short-term issues are resolved,” the company said.
Underlying EBITDA also more than halved year-on-year, going from AU$7.6 million to AU$3.7 million.
The 5G Networks deal has not yet been finalised as there is still a takeovers panel application being processed, which has impeded the deal from crossing the finish line.
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Image: Spark
Spark New Zealand reported its revenue decreased by 1.5% to around NZ$1.8 billion for the half year to December 31, attributing the drop to sustained COVID-19 border closures.
According to the telco, broadband and prepaid markets were heavily impacted by COVID-19 as approximately 44,000 fewer people migrated to New Zealand during the six months to December when compared to the period immediately prior. As a result, the telco’s mobile services revenue declined by 1.2% year-on-year to NZ$5 million.
Spark said it was optimistic about its mobile business’ future outlook, however, as mobile services revenue increased by 3.8% year-on-year when the impact of the loss of roaming is excluded.
“The broadband market was impacted during the half as COVID-19 border closures reduced the number of people moving to New Zealand and needing a connection. While this has impacted our growth aspirations in the short term, our longer-term wireless ambitions have not changed,” Spark CEO Jolie Hodson said.
“There remains a significant addressable market, which continues to grow as we roll out 5G, and precision marketing is helping us to identify customers who are best suited to wireless broadband and provide them compelling, tailored offers.”
Spark’s cloud, security, and service management business, meanwhile, continued to chug along, with revenue growing by 4.6% to NZ$229 million.
Despite the drop in overall revenue, earnings before finance income and expense, income tax, depreciation, amortisation, and net investment income (EBITDAI) remained flat at NZ$502 million as operating expenses decreased by NZ$30 million during the period.

Net profit after tax reduced by 11.4% to NZ$148 million, driven by a NZ$29 million increase in depreciation and amortisation charges which resulted from the shorter asset lives of new digital technologies, and an increase in depreciation related to customer and property leases. 
Looking ahead, Spark said it has revised its EBITDAI guidance as the implications of border closures have become clearer when compared to six months ago.
Spark’s FY21 EBITDA impact has now been set at NZ$50 million, down from the previous NZ$75 million estimate. As a result, Spark’s EBITDA guidance range has been changed to NZ$1.1 billion to NZ$1.13 billion. The guidance range was previously NZ$1.09 billion to NZ$1.13 billion.
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SpaceX’s satellite broadband service Starlink will begin delivering download speeds of 300 Mbps, or double the top speeds users can currently get on the beta service, at some point this year, according to its CEO Elon Musk.
The Starlink beta is advertised as having data speeds that vary from 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s and latency from 20ms to 40ms. It’s targeted at regional areas with poor coverage. Since October it’s been charging a fixed fee of $499 for the Wi-Fi router, power supply, cables and mounting tripod, and then a $99 monthly subscription for the satellite broadband service.  

ZDNet sister site CNET notes that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has now said that Starlink will double the available speeds within the next year. 
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Musk confirmed the speed boost in a tweet responding to a user who tapped Netflix’s broadband speed test site fast.com after installing the Starlink dish and reported a speed of 130 Mbps. 
“Speed will double to ~300Mb/s & latency will drop to ~20ms later this year,” Musk replied. 
Starlink users need to install a mobile app and ensure the Starlkink dish has a direct field of view to Starlink’s satellites.

“If any object such as a tree, chimney, pole, etc. interrupts the path of the beam, even briefly, your internet service will be interrupted,” SpaceX notes.   
Latency, a measure of how long it takes your internet signal to travel to space and back, will also drop to around 20ms this year, according to Musk. Latency of less than 100 ms was one of the key measures SpaceX had to reach in order to participate in the Federal Communication Commission’s up to $16bn Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. 
Starlink currently has over 10,000 users in its North American beta program, according to recent filings with the FCC. It’s also delivering services to users in the UK.
SEE: 10 tech predictions that could mean huge changes ahead
“Over 10,000 users in the United States and abroad are using the service today. While its performance is rapidly accelerating in real time as part of its public beta program, the Starlink network has already successfully demonstrated it can surpass the Commission’s “Above Baseline” and “Low Latency” performance tiers,” SpaceX said in the document. 
It claims to be able to meet or exceed 100/20 Mbps throughput to individual users, and attaining performance of 95% of network round-trip latency measurements at or below 31 milliseconds. It has also successfully tested a standalone voice service over the Starlink network.

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M1 has unveiled a new brand strategy that promises to deliver more personalised customer experience and services that more closely leverage its ties with parent company, Keppel. The move comes almost two years after the Singapore telco delisted and, during which, moved to a new technology that now runs 90% on the cloud. 
This was part of a various digital transformation initiatives that were necessary to enable M1 to transition from a pure mobile operator to a more wholistic technology provider, said its CEO Manjot Singh Mann, who was speaking to local media via video Tuesday. He championed the “brand refresh” as a way to “revolutionise” communications in Singapore with “made to measure” offerings, and address rapid shifts in customer behaviour as well as demand for service personalisation. 
It required significant transformation on M1’s part, including a move to a new digital tech stack that now ran 90% on the cloud, compared to 12% previously, and streamlining its applications to 30, down from 150 before. It also slashed more than 200 databases to a single centralised data lake. 

In response to ZDNet’s question on the challenges it faced prompting the transformation, Mann said M1 had “a long legacy” of disrupting the market, but the way technology developed over the years meant it did not have the best infrastructure to adapt to customers’ changing needs fast enough. 
The transformation was needed to provide more agility to create new services quickly and engage customers digitally, he said.
The new tech platform would provide real-time data analytics and deeper insights that better matched up to customers’ needs contextually and instantaneously. It also would facilitate a fully automated frontend offering more self-service options for customers as well as better integration with M1’s business partners, Mann added. 
“Now we have the ability to hyper-personalise products and services and business solutions more rapidly, accurately, and contextually, catering to customers’ specific needs,” he said, noting that the telco had delivered on its original goal of “linking anyone and anything, anytime and anywhere”. 

“Today, we want to be measured by a different and higher bar. We want to deliver products that are unique and as personal as they can get, bespoke and tailored…we want to be the brand that is made to measure,” the CEO said.
Apart from a redesigned website and mobile app, M1 is looking to do this through three new mobile plans — Bespoke Contract, Bespoke SIM, and Bespoke Flexi — the last of which is touted to allow customers to decide, amongst others, how much upfront payment they want to give, the device they want to purchase, and how much data or voice minutes they require.
In fact, some 6 million permutations could be created from the Bespoke Flexi service plan, Mann noted. “The idea here is that once we create this model, we can create ecosystems of other services that can be accessed through our app, which will be tailor-made and personalised for our customers.”
All nine M1 retail shops also were transformed to be in line with the new branding.
Betting on Keppel ties, product synergies
The rebranding is a culmination of a two-year journey that saw the Singapore telco’s delisting in March 2019 and buyout deal with Keppel, which has been a shareholder since M1’s inception in 1994. 
The second telco at that time, in a market held by incumbent Singtel, M1 had to be an “insurgent”. And as the market changed, M1 has had to reinvent itself and business, according to Keppel CEO Loh Chin Hua, who was also present at the media briefing, 
This need to transform led to the decision to delist, giving M1 a private setting to be remade, Loh said. 
In particular, he noted that connectivity was going to be an important growth engine for Keppel’s own Vision 2030 strategy. Here, M1 played a “pivotal role” alongside Keppel’s data centres. 
“More and more world is connected. You need data, and data needs to be stored and devices to be connected. You need to be able to provide data analytics and actionable insights. It’s clear to us connectivity is going to be a key growth sector for the group,” he said.
He said the two companies over the past two years had worked to identify potential areas to collaborate that included tieups with Keppel Electric and Keppel Offshore & Marine, the latter of which involved tests that used autonomous vessel technology on M1’s network. 
Such partnerships would further expand with the impending rollout of M1’s 5G standalone network, Loh said, adding that the group’s Vision 2030 strategy aimed to the organisation as an integrated business providing services on urban development, asset management, connectivity, and energy and environment.  
Products and services that both companies developed in Singapore could potentially be rolled out globally, he noted. He pointed to Keppel’s development of Saigon Sports City as a potential development testbed for smart urban products.
Mann added that Keppel provided an “in-house” lab that M1 could tap to develop use cases as well as test and learn how 5G could be used to build applications for various industry segments.
Loh said: “There are clearly opportunities for some of our painpoints to be shared with M1 and how M1 can provide potential solutions. Keppel will be the starting point and once we find appropriate 5G solutions for Keppel, our ambition is that this can then be rolled out to other players in the industry.”
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