Networking

Australian Domain Name Administrator (AuDA) chair Alan Cameron said the agency has now completed all recommendations arising from the 2018 government review of auDA, noting as well that it now possesses new governance and accountability frameworks and a “revitalised commitment” to transparency, broad engagement, and ensuring ongoing capability.
“We now have a revitalised and robust governance regime, a comprehensive policy framework focusing on transparency and accountability, and a renewed emphasis on consultation and stakeholder engagement,” auDA wrote in its annual report [PDF], released on Monday.
The not-for-profit policy authority and industry self-regulatory body for the .au domain space said it would implement the new auDA licensing framework, which is designed to modernise and simplify the rules around the licensing of .au domain names.
This includes the proposed introduction of direct registration at the second level of the .au namespace. Direct registration allows a registrant to register a domain name that is immediately before the .au.
“Direct registration provides consumers, organisations, and businesses with more choice of namespaces, which is particularly important as the online economy continues to develop and more of the community want to have an online presence,” the report said.
“Australia is currently the only OECD country that does not offer direct registrations in its country code domain. We have consulted widely on this initiative and will continue to communicate with our stakeholders on the timing and process for implementation, which we expect to progress considerably in 2020/2021.”
As of 30 June 2020, the total number of domains under management by auDA was 3,180,395, encompassing the namespaces in the .au country code top-level domain (ccTLD), which includes com.au, net.au, org.au, asn.au, id.au, gov.au, edu.au, vic.au, nsw.au, act.au, qld.au, nt.au, wa.au, sa.au, and tas.au.
The total figure represents a decrease of less than 1% from June 30 in the previous year.
“Creation of new domains in the last three months of the financial year increased significantly over the same period last year, coinciding with COVID-19 measures that saw an increase in businesses and organisations moving online following restrictions placed on the community’s access to bricks and mortar premises,” the report said.
Around 2.8 million have the com.au namespace; just over 223,00 are net.au; more than 73,000 are org.au; and just shy of 1,200 are gov.au.
New South Wales boasts just shy of 1.1 million .au domains under management by auDA.
The registry operations in the .au namespace are performed by Afilias Australia, a subsidiary of registry operator Afilias Inc.
auDA said it works closely with Afilias to ensure that the registry performance “meets the user requirements of being fast, reliable, and secure”.
auDA said traffic on the Afilias servers in 2019-2020 slightly increased compared to 2018-2019. 19,400 was the average number of queries per second (qps) across the Afilias name server infrastructure with a maximum qps of 75,000.
The average qps for Australian origin domains was 5,500 and at peak, traffic from within Australia hit 15,900 qps. Average qps for international traffic was 13,900 and a maximum of 69,400 qps.
Also under auDA’s current remit is complaints handling. When the new licensing rules are implemented in 2021, enquiries and complaints will be handled by registrars in the first instance.
“auDA will continue to be an avenue of review and deal with escalated complaints,” it added.
In 2019-2020, auDA received a total of 4,458 complaints and 3,426 enquiries.
The average time to close a complaint was 14 days.
Of the complaints that were upheld, 2,221 were related to eligibility queries and the next highest category was suspected criminal activity, with 368 enquiries.
auDA said it regularly receives law enforcement requests from state and Commonwealth law enforcement bodies where there has been an alleged breach of the law
“In 2019/2020 we received 52 law enforcement requests. Of those, four were upheld, four were denied, and 44 were closed with the outcome ‘advised’ — where we responded to a request for information,” it wrote on the matter.
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Image: Aussie Broadband
Customers of Aussie Broadband that took up the opportunity to plough up to AU$10,000 into the company could have doubled their money at one stage on Friday.
After selling 40 million shares at AU$1 each during its initial public offering (IPO), of which 10 million were available to customers, the company traded at between AU$1.74 and AU$2.22 during the day. Over 7.8 million shares changed hands during the day.
The oversubscribed IPO process gave the company an enterprise value of AU$190 million, with the current shareholders having their percentage stake reduced to around 80% of the company.
In its prospectus, the company said it did not intend to pay dividends to shareholders, and would instead be investing the money back into the business. Of the money raised, between AU$20 million to AU$26.5 million would be used to build out Aussie Broadband’s own fibre optic backhaul network, AU$7 million to AU$10 million would be set aside for working capital, and around AU$3 million to AU$3.5 million would be used on costs associated with the IPO.
“Our own fibre in the ground goes to the heart of our approach to the business. It means that we can control quality and improve our customer experience even more, and it means we can start to drive down ourbackhaul costs,” Aussie Broadband managing director Phil Britt said.
“We’ve come a long way from 27,000 customers in June 2017. Last month we connected our 300,000th customer — a 100,000 net gain in just over 5 months.”
In fiscal terms, Aussie Broadband has been able to grow its revenue from AU$49.3 million in FY18 to AU$190.5 million in FY20, and it has forecast a record AU$338 million in the coming year.
Statutory earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) was reported as AU$3 million for the 2020 fiscal year, and forecast to be AU$10.8 million for 2021.
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Image: Supplied
The town of Zilzie, near Rockhampton in Queensland, is a turtle nesting site, with the reptiles building their nest near the town’s esplanade.
However, due to the street lighting around the area, sometimes when the hatchlings leave their eggs, they can become disorientated, fail to find the horizon, and stray from the path they should be taking into the ocean.
Even after they reach the sea, the hatchlings can sometimes be “lured back” by the lights, councillor Andrea Friend said, who holds responsibility for the council’s water, waste management, and environment portfolio.
“Hatchlings have a low chance of survival with only about 1 in 1,000 reaching maturity, so it’s vital council helps to maximise nesting success and hatchling survival,” Friend said.
In an effort to help the turtles out, the council is trialling the replacement of four lights with amber coloured, remotely dimmable smart lights. The lights are connected to a LoRaWAN network provided by NNNCo, which was deployed to the shire in 2019.
“Zilzie is a well-known nesting area for sea turtles and it’s important that council acts to protect the species with this trial. Council has contacted nearby residents to explain the changes to the street lighting which will remain in place throughout the 2021 turtle hatchling season,” Friend added.
See also: LoRaWAN networks are spreading but security researchers say beware
Earlier in the week, NNNCo announced an agreement with New Zealand telco Spark that will allow LoRaWAN users to deploy on either side of the Tasman Sea, and roam on the other side of the ditch.
In order to implement the roaming arrangement, NNNCo’s enterprise platform, N2N-DL, has been integrated into Spark’s network core.
A recent blog post published by CyberArk showed how to conduct a denial of service attack on a Chirpstack network by replaying frames from a malicious LoRaWAN gateway.”The task of the gateway is pretty simple and limited by design,” researcher Emmanuel Ouanounou wrote. 
“The coverage of the network is highly dependent on the number of gateways available and therefore, the LoRaWAN protocol does not require gateways to perform any security checks, so that their implementation is easier.”
After disclosing the attack to Chirpstack, the open source project made changes to prevent unregistered gateways from communicating with the network server.
“An attacker now requires taking over an existing gateway in order to perform this attack,” Ouanounou added. 
“Moreover, it strengthens the consistency of the product with Chirpstack’s philosophy: Gateways should be trusted for the network to be trusted.”
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You couldn’t be blamed if you watched the iPhone 12 release commercial — excuse me, media event — and thought you’d soon be getting Gigabit speeds from 5G.  No, you’re not. Most of you won’t see one byte worth of a faster connection. Only T-Mobile customers may see speeds boosts into the 100 Mbps range. Gigabit? Forget about it!
That’s because Verizon’s 5G claims — that over 200 million people in 1,800 cities around the US can get 5G — are nonsense. In fact, the National Advertising Review Board  told Verizon in September it had to stop claiming it’s building “the most powerful 5G experience for America.” 

In fact, Verizon’ is years away from delivering on its crazy fast 5G promise. And, I speak as a happy Verizon customer. They simply can’t do it.  
Their marketing mouth is making promises that their 5G technology can’t keep. Here’s why.
Verizon’s high-speed 5G promises are based on millimeter-wave (mmWave). This is what Verizon calls 5G Ultra Wideband. Regardless of the name, it runs on 24 and 28 GHz bands. Guess what? At those frequencies, it has a range better measured in yards than miles. Its range is much more like Wi-Fi than it is 4G. 
Besides its limited range, it has no penetration to speak of. Your house’s walls will block it. Leaves can block it.  Even your window can stop it when it’s down. The only way you’ll see 5G inside your office is the same way you get Wi-Fi in it: By filling it with access points. 
Must read:
What about 5G in your car? To maintain your connection, you’ll need a cell tower with a clear line of sight to your car every couple of blocks. Then, each of those towers will need an ultra-fast optical internet connection to deliver the bandwidth. 
T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray nailed it when he wrote mmWave 5G  “will never materially scale beyond small pockets of 5G hotspots in dense urban environments.” Sure, he wants to sell you a different kind of 5G, but he’s not wrong either. You will never see ultra-wideband, super-fast bandwidth on the highways, in the suburbs, and the countryside.

So, how can Verizon be making claims that it can reach 200 million users? After all, according to OpenSignal’s June 2020 5G report, T-Mobile users connected to its 5G network 22.5% of the time; Sprint, now owned by T-Mobile. 14.1%; AT&T 10.3%. In last place, by a gigantic margin, Verizon’s users connected to its 5G network just 0.4% of the time.
Verizon is using marketing to paper over a technology hole. Verizon will be using Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) to share its existing 4G spectrum with 5G. So, yeah there will be much broader “5G” coverage, but greater speed? Verizon’s Heidi Hemmer, VP Technology even admitted recently it’s DSS 5G speeds won’t be that much different than its 4G speeds.
What you will see out in the woods with your T-Mobile iPhone 12 is low-band 5G. This works on the 600 MHz spectrum, aka the old UHF TV channels 38-51. With this T-Mobile can cover hundreds of square miles with speeds from 4G LTE’s 20+ Mbps and can reach real-world speeds of over 100 Mbps. 
Generally speaking, though, what you can expect to see from T-Mobile is a lot more coverage and that is no small thing for those of us who live in the countryside. But, if you already get good 4G where you live, you really don’t need to switch up.
There’s one other real 5G variant, midband. It runs between 1 GHz and 6 GHz. It comes with more coverage and penetration than mmWave. But, it’s also not widely used yet in the United States by anyone. T-Mobile is aggressively working to change that by using the 2.5 GHz range it got from Sprint. Outside the US, however, when people talk 5G, they’re usually talking about midband at 3.5GHz. 
So, what can you really expect in the States? I’ll quote PC Magazine’s comprehensive September 2020 speed test of the major wireless networks: 

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon take very different approaches to 5G. To make a long story short, AT&T 5G right now appears to be essentially worthless. T-Mobile 5G can be a big boost over 4G, but its speeds are only what we’d expect from a good 4G network—it isn’t a new experience. Verizon’s 5G is often mind-blowing, but very difficult to find.

In other words, if you want to buy an iPhone 12 to get faster speeds than you’ve ever seen before from a smartphone, you’re wasting your money . You’re also throwing your cash away if you want to get one today to “future-proof” your phone for 5G. By the time, if ever, 5G becomes truly valuable–again except for rural users–you’ll be wanting to buy an iPhone 14 or 15. 

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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has confirmed one more scenario where Starlink could be used to deliver its satellite broadband other than homes: on high-speed trains across the globe.
Sweden-based data scientist, Anton Kanerva, asked Musk via Twitter whether Starlink satellite dishes could be fitted to high-speed trains to deliver reliable broadband in remote areas. 

Networking

It’s a relevant question for Sweden, which has train connections between most major cities but vast tracts between them where mobile coverage is spotty. Indeed, it’s a relevant question for many of Europe’s intercity rail networks and rail networks across North America. 
“Will Starlink dishes be deployable on high-speed moving objects like trains?” Kanerva asked Musk on Twitter. “It would be incredible if trains moving through the middle of nowhere finally could have stable high-speed internet connections.”
Starlink for rail networks would be no problem, according to Musk. “Yes. Everything is slow to a phased array antenna,” he replied. 
SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, which orbit at about 550km (340 miles) above Earth, have four phased-array antennas for downlink and uplink transmissions. The end-user terminals feature a motor that automatically directs the dish towards the optimal satellite’s phased-array antennas. 
In SpaceX’s application to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) earlier this year to deploy a million end-user units, it explained that the end-user “terminals employ advanced phased-array beam-forming and digital processing technologies to make highly efficient use of Ku-band spectrum resources by supporting highly directive, steered antenna beams that track the system’s low-Earth orbit satellites”.
But while Musk says the user terminals are easy to setup – plug in socket, point at sky – and the cost of launching each batch of 60 satellites is down to about $1m per launch, the cost of end-user terminals remains the biggest unsolved challenge for Starlink, according to Musk.
“I think the biggest challenge will be with the user terminal and getting the user terminal cost to be affordable,” he said in an interview with Aviation Week in May. “That will take us a few years to really sort that, and the user terminal cost is the fully considered cost, so the hardware and everything required to get it setup and running.” 
Musk wants the end-user terminals to be running for a decade or at least more than five years as they’re going to be difficult to repair or service in remote areas. 
“You can’t send people to service these things because a lot of these places will be in the middle of nowhere. So the fully considered cost of the user terminal is the hardest thing for Starlink or any space-based system for the general public. We’ve got a strategy where success is one of the possible outcomes,” he said. 
Part of the terminal cost problem SpaceX faces could be solved by the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), which is making up to $16bn available to ISPs to deliver broadband to underserved and unserved parts of America. 
Fortunately for SpaceX, the FCC this week approved it to bid for a slice of the RDOF. SpaceX was among 386 applications the FCC has qualified to bid in its RDOF broadband auction.    
As noted by Ars Technica, it appears the only other Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite provider to qualify was Hughes Network Systems, a traditional satellite provider that originally invested in OneWeb and this July – after OneWeb filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy – agreed to put $50m in the consortium led by the UK government and Bharti to bring OneWeb out of bankruptcy.
Earlier this month OneWeb announced it was on target to launch the initial 650 satellites under the UK government and Bharti. Hughes president Pradman Kaul said the $50m investment allowed it to offer LEO satellite broadband for the FCC’s RDOF. 
A key concern raised by the FCC for SpaceX and other LEO satellite broadband systems was whether they could deliver low-latency broadband.  
SpaceX recently presented the FCC Starlink internet performance tests showing it was capable of download speeds of between 102Mbps to 103Mbps, upload speeds of about 40.5Mbps, and a latency of 18 milliseconds to 19 milliseconds. While only tests, that performance is well below the 100ms the FCC wanted for a SpaceX to be considered a low-latency provider. 
SpaceX is currently gearing up to launch a public beta of Starlink in northern parts of the US following last week’s launch of 60 more satellites. During the private beta Starlink has been used in parts of Washington state to support emergency response teams following the wildfires in the state. 
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South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT said on Thursday that it has approved 1.2GHz of spectrum in the 6GHz band — the 5,925MHz to 7,125MHz range — for unlicensed use.
With the ministry’s approval, South Korea will become the second country to make the 6GHz band available for unlicensed use after the United States gave the go-ahead in April. 
The decision will make the whole 6GHz band at under 25mW available for free use at indoor settings across the country. 
For device-to-device connections like tethering, spectrum sitting in the 5,925MHz-6,455MHz range will also be available for use everywhere, regardless of whether it is indoors or outdoors. According to the ministry, the decision to allow device-to-device connections in the 6GHz band is a world-first.  
It will also provide more channels for Wi-Fi as well as improve data transfer speed levels to that of 5G networks, the ministry said.
In the ministry’s own testing, it demonstrated that 6GHz Wi-Fi could reach speeds of 2.1Gbps, which is five times faster than the currently available Wi-Fi speed of around 400 to 600Mbps.
With the spectrum being freed up, the ministry said connection quality in places like cafes, schools, and public transport zones would be improved. 
South Korea first made the announcement to make 6GHz band available for Wi-Fi in June. 
When the country made that announcement, it also said it would reallocate 3.7GHz to 4GHz spectrum currently used for satellite communications into 5G wireless communications.
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Amaysim Australia and Lycamobile have each paid a total of AU$126,000 in penalties after the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) issued the mobile service providers with infringement notices for alleged false or misleading representations about their mobile phone plans.
The consumer watchdog alleges that each business separately advertised on social media that their mobile phone plans were offering “unlimited” data to consumers on social media, when in fact each of their plans had a maximum data allowance. For those plans, if customers exceeded those capped amounts, they would be subject to additional charges, according to the ACCC.
The ACCC alleges the messaging on the ads were a breach of Australian Consumer Law and likely misled consumers.
“Consumers who saw the word ‘unlimited’ in the advertisements without any explanation of the limits of the plans were likely to expect they would not be charged additional fees for mobile data, no matter how much data they used,” ACCC chair Rod Sims said.
“The telco industry has been previously put on notice that their advertisements must be clear and transparent, and must not contain claims like ‘unlimited’ without a clear and prominent disclosure of any qualification or exception which applies to the offer.”
This is not the first time the companies have landed in hot water with the ACCC for misleading conduct.
The ACCC took legal action against Amaysim two years ago on claims that the company made false and misleading ads about discounts on the company’s energy brand, Click Energy. At the time, the ACCC described Click Energy’s advertising as being “among the worst practices” it had seen in retail electricity.
Lycamobile has also been fined previously for failing to comply with the Telecommunications Consumer Protections Code.
In 2018, the ACCC warned Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone about using the word “unlimited” in their advertising to promote mobile data plans.
Meanwhile, Communications Minister Paul Fletcher has issued a statement of expectations to the ACCC “so that the government can clearly set out its priorities and perspectives, for the independent regulator to take account of as it goes about its work” around how it deals with NBN wholesale prices, business market competition, and spectrum.
The statement, according to Fletcher, addresses the federal government’s “preference” toward wanting the ACCC to make changes to the NBN’s special access undertaking. He also encouraged “sustainable investment, domestic, and international competitiveness, national security, access to services and the efficient deployment of new networks and technologies” in the statement.
See also: Bravo ACCC: Telstra begins flogging NBN overprovisioning as 15% speed boost
The ACCC will now be “expected” to provide a statement of intent in response to the federal government’s statement of expectation within the next three months, Fletcher said.
Elsewhere on Thursday, Optus tested the speed of its 5G network on a live network in Sydney, and boasted that it managed to deliver download speeds of over 2.5Gbps on a Samsung Galaxy S20 5G device.
The Australian telco said it worked with Ericsson and Samsung as part of the test, which used mid-band spectrum and 5G carrier aggregation.
The test comes ahead of Optus’ plan to launch a further 150 5G sites by November in selected areas across Sydney and Melbourne.
“As they roll out, these new ultra-high-speed sites will provide a real speed boost to Optus customers with capable 5G handsets and 5G SIM,” Optus managing director networks Lambo Kanagaratnam, said.
“The speeds we have achieved today are a real taste of what we are capable of delivering to Optus 5G Mobile customers in the coming months as we progressively roll out 5G ultra-high-speed sites in Sydney and Melbourne.”
In addition, the telco announced that from next month, it plans to make 100Mhz of 3500Mhz mid-band spectrum available to 5G Home Internet customers in selected areas of Sydney and Melbourne. It touted that those currently experiencing average download speeds of 214Mbps would receive a 60% boost on average speeds.
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Communications Alliance and Energy Networks Australia (ENA) have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to improve the way the two sectors collaborate and share knowledge when responding to emergency situations.
Under the MoU, the pair have agreed to improve the safety of communities by mitigating risks caused by telecommunications or power outages during emergencies, as well as the sustainability of telecommunications and power supply services to communities affected by emergencies to support their recovery.
The MoU also sets out that the two sectors will collaborate and coordinate on preparing telecommunications and electricity networks and infrastructure for responding to emergencies at local, regional, and state level.
A report prepared by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in May found that during the peak period of the Black Summer bushfires, most telecommunication outages were due to power failures rather than direct fire damage to communication assets.
The report found that during the period from 19 December 2019 to 31 January 2020, only 3% of tower outages were due to fire damage, and of the 1,390 total facilities that were impacted by the fires outages, only 1% of incidents were a direct result of fire damage.
See also: Twitter bots and trolls promote conspiracy theories about Australian bushfires  
Similar findings were disclosed by the company responsible for deploying the National Broadband Network (NBN) across Australia. In June, NBN revealed in response to Senate Estimates Question on Notice that bushfires impacted 1% of all NBN services.
“12% (or 6,367 services) of all services impacted were directly impacted by fire over the duration of the bushfires,” the company said at the time.
“The remaining services were impacted by power outages as a result of the bushfires.”
The federal government has previously announced it would spend AU$37.1 million to improve the resiliency of the nation’s telco infrastructure in the wake of the Black Summer bushfires.
The funds will be allocated towards upgrading battery backup power at mobile base stations; purchasing portable temporary connectivity, such as cells on wheels, mobile exchanges on wheels, and NBN Sky Muster trucks; installing 2,000 NBN satellite services at rural and country fire service depots and designated evacuation centres; and on an information program over the next two bushfire seasons to promote “practical information and advice for communities and businesses about how to keep connected during emergencies”.
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