Networking

Image: Chris Duckett/ZDNet
The Australian government released its updated Telecommunications in New Developments (TIND) policy on Tuesday, as Canberra said the existing policy and market was working well and did not need additional regulation. 
“Most participants in the market have been operating in line with the policy and most outcomes are positive. The number of negative outcomes is limited,” it said.
“In this context a lighter touch approach is warranted. The government will, however, look at more direct approaches should this change and greater guidance be required.”
Building on the Statutory Infrastructure Provider (SIP) obligations for NBN to be the default network provider, the new TIND policy is focused mainly on the government-owned wholesaler.
“So they can meet their ongoing SIP requirements, carriers should install fixed-line networks in new developments unless this is not reasonable, in which case they should use either fixed wireless or satellite technologies,” the policy states.
Under the policy, NBN has a number of cost caps for installing connections, which it may lower if market forces demand it.
“These caps are to protect developers and occupants from costs that might otherwise discourage them from accessing telecommunications,” the policy states.
The policy further calls for NBN and carriers to publish costs to build infrastructure and connect premises on their websites.
“Carriers should not charge end-users more than the relevant published rate. The maximum end-user contribution charge is set by this policy at AU$300 for a telephone and internet service,” it states.
“The government will monitor carrier compliance with these aspects of the policy and will consider further regulation if warranted.”
Under the TIND, NBN must “consider” connecting a new development to fixed-line broadband if it is within 1 kilometre of its fixed-line network.
“In all such cases, NBN Co will need to consider whether it is cost effective for it to install fixed-line infrastructure,” the policy states.
“It must keep records where it decides not to use fixed-line infrastructure, including its reasons for not using such infrastructure, and must make those records available to the Minister or Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications on request.”
NBN is also required to submit a charging strategy and schedule with the Minister of Communications, as well as retain records of charging decisions, and reasons why it charged below its cap.
“NBN Co must also retain records of any decisions to build competing infrastructure in new developments being serviced by other carriers and the commercial case for such activities. NBN Co must also keep records of its compliance with competitive neutrality policy in relation to new developments,” the policy states.
In a submission to the Department of Communications, Telstra in March said it wanted NBN to pick up its obligations to supply voice services under the Universal Service Obligation (USO) and behave as a fixed-line infrastructure provider of last resort (IPOLR).
“To support the delivery of USO voice services, NBN Co’s fixed wireless service should be made USO-compliant. This is the logical next step from the SIP legislation, which will require NBN Co’s ‘qualifying fixed wireless network’ to have voice and broadband capability,” the telco said in its submission.
“It also lends support to our position that Telstra should no longer be the IPOLR outside NBN Co’s fixed-line footprint.
“Whether or not Telstra ultimately retains an IPOLR role under the revised TIND policy, the interaction between the SIP regime and the USO must be clarified.”
However that wish was not granted, with Telstra still being required to potentially deploy its own infrastructure for voice services.
“Telstra will generally provide a voice service where required using NBN Co’s infrastructure and wholesale services,” the policy states. “Where Telstra is unable to, or does not, use NBN Co’s infrastructure, it may need to provide its own infrastructure to supply voice services.”
The policy also stated the government would look into replicating, across all developers, the laws that force incorporated developers to offer “fibre-ready facilities” such as pits and pipes for communications when selling or leasing new lots.
The government is set to review the TIND policy in five years, but noted it would bring that forward “if warranted by changes in the market”.
“Telecommunications are a vital part of everyday life and people expect that when they move into a new development they will have ready access to modern services. The revised policy released today reflects the modern telco landscape and will promote a more efficient, competitive and sustainable marketplace in servicing new developments,” Communications Minister Paul Fletcher said.
“While core elements of the policy will continue, changes mean that NBN Co can better respond to growing competition.”
Last week the government added 17 companies to be SIPs to 325,000 premises in 1,592 areas around the country.
The new SIPs are: Advatel Wireless, CipherTel, CNTCorp, CommSol, Fibre Asset Management, Frontier Networks, Interphone, LBN Co, Lynham Networks, OMNIconnect, OPENetworks, OptiComm, PIPE Networks, Real World Networks, Reddenet, Telair Holdings, and TransACT.
Also on Tuesday, NBN claimed it could boost agriculture output by 20% each year, or AU$15.6 billion, thanks to involving artificial intelligence in decision making, the use of autonomous equipment, and embracing Internet of Things to provide real-time information on farm conditions.
The figures were from an AlphaBeta report commissioned by NBN, which claimed poor connectivity was costing farmers up to AU$5 a hectare.
The government expects to review this policy in five years’ time, but will do so earlier if warranted by changes in the market.
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Image: Cisco // Composition: ZDNet
Cisco warned on Saturday about two zero-day vulnerability impacting the Internetwork Operating System (IOS) that ships with its networking equipment.

The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2020-3566 and CVE-2020-3569, impact the Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol (DVMRP) feature that ships with the IOS XR version of the operating system.
This version of the OS is usually installed on carrier-grade and data center routers, according to the company’s website.
Cisco says the DVMRP feature contains a bug that allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to exhaust process memory and crash other processes running on the device. Cisco explains:
“These vulnerabilities are due to the incorrect handling of IGMP packets. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities by sending crafted IGMP traffic to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to immediately crash the IGMP process or cause memory exhaustion, resulting in other processes becoming unstable. These processes may include, but are not limited to, interior and exterior routing protocols.”
Exploitation attempts discovered last week
Cisco says that it discovered attackers exploiting this bug last week. The attacks were detected during a support case the company’s support team was called in to investigate.
“On Aug. 28, 2020, the Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) became aware of an attempted exploitation of this vulnerability in the wild,” Cisco said.
The company said its currently working on developing software updates for IOS XR. 
The patches are still a few days away. In the meantime, Cisco has provided several workarounds and mitigations for its customers in order to prevent that any exploitation fail — if they occur.
The Cisco security advisory also includes additional incident response instructions for companies to investigate their logs and see if they’ve been attacked using the two IOS zero-days.
It is unclear how attackers are using these bugs in the grand scheme of things. They may be using it to crash other processes on the router, such as security mechanisms, and gain access to the device. However, this is only a theory, and companies will need to thoroughly comb their logs after they spot any signs of CVE-2020-3566 and CVE-2020-3569 exploitation.
Article updated on September 2 with information on the second zero (CVE-2020-3569). More

Image: Macquarie Telecom
The day is getting increasingly closer for when Macquarie Telecom will gain more from sales of its hosting business than its telco arm.
For the full year to June 30, MacTel’s hosting business pulled in AU$130 million in revenue, an increase of 17.8% compared to last year, while its telco business posted AU$141 million in revenue, a 0.2% increase.
It was a much different story for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA), where hosting contributed AU$38.5 million, a jump of 19.6%, while the telecom arm went backwards as EBITDA shrank 6% to AU$18.7 million.
Over the past three years, hosting revenue has increased by 16.8% on average, and EBITDA by almost 30%. Across the same period, the telco has seen revenue average a decline of 0.5% and EBITDA drop by 1.9%.
Overall, Macquarie Telecom reported revenue of AU$266 million for the year, representing growth of 8%, while EBITDA increased by 9.7% to AU$57.2 million. This flowed through to AU$21.6 million in pre-tax profit and AU$15.3 million in net profit in pre-AASB16 accounting standard terms.
On the new standard, overall EBITDA increased by AU$8 million due to the exclusion of rent, but increases in depreciation and interest saw the company’s net profit come in AU$1.8 million lower at AU$13.5 million.
“The 2020 full year results have delivered six consecutive years of strong performance and EBITDA growth,” chair Peter James said.
“These results are evidence of our track record of delivery and investment which will provide a long runway of significant growth opportunities.”
Looking forward, the company warned its second half EBITDA in 2021 would be relatively flat compared to its first half, and it intends to spend up to AU$148 million in capital expenditure. Next year, its Macquarie Data Centres business will be reporting as its own segment.
In June, the company announced it would spend an initial AU$17 million to build a new data centre at its Canberra campus. The facility, IC5, will have an initial capacity of 1.5MW and is expected to be completed by December.
Once completed, the full Canberra campus comprising of IC4 and IC5 will have a total capacity of 4MW, with the option to expand further if additional capacity is required.
“The IC5 Bunker development will provide our government customers with additional cybersecurity and cloud capacity. We anticipate strong growth given our experience in delivering to the government sector leveraging our strict security certifications and the breadth of our sovereign service offering,” MacTel CEO David Tudehope said on Thursday.
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Spark New Zealand reported a solid 2.5% increase in revenue to NZ$3.62 billion and a 4.4% jump in net profit to NZ$427 million for the full year to June 30, but the telco was less enthusiastic about its prospects for the coming twelve months.
“We are now entering a more challenging period as a country, and we expect the impact of COVID-19 to be more material in FY21,” Spark chair Justine Smyth said.
“The recent return to alert level three in Auckland and alert level two more broadly has reminded us that this challenge is not behind us, and we moved quickly to lift broadband data caps for our customers once again. We know it is vital for New Zealand that we continue to invest in smart infrastructure during this time, and we are focusing our FY21 capital expenditure on supporting New Zealand’s economic recovery, including through the rollout of 5G and investment in rural connectivity.”
The telco said its results came on the back of a strong first half, and the completion of its three-year plan to move from a telco into an “end-to-end digital services company”.
Using its measurement of earnings before finance income and expense, income tax, depreciation, amortisation, and net investment income (EBITDAI), the company reported NZ$1.1 billion, a 2.1% improvement on last year.
“Agile ways-of-working have improved our speed to market and customer focus, and we have seen a significant increase in both customer and people engagement during this time,” Smyth added.
“Our sustained network investment has underpinned our ability to innovate and grow and provided secure connectivity for our country during COVID-19.”
Of its NZ$3.62 billion in revenue, mobile contributed NZ$1.3 billion, broadband added NZ$680 million, cloud and security services reported NZ$443 million, and voice services recorded just over NZ$390 million in revenue.
With mobile, the telco said it now had 2.5 million customers and an average revenue per user (ARPU) each month of NZ$28.27, which amounted to a 2.5% increase. Of that number, the number of prepaid customers declined 5.8% to 1.16 million with ARPU gaining 6.8% to be NZ$13.33 a month. For postpaid, customers were up 6.3% to 1.33 million while ARPU dropped 1.5% to NZ$42 a month.
Looking at mobile in revenue terms, the consumer business increased sales by 1.1% to NZ$862 million and business revenue grew 1.8% to NZ$391 million. For broadband customers, Spark saw a quarter of copper connections disappear over the year to sit at 186,000, while fibre connections increased 20% to 367,000, and wireless connections grew by 11% to 156,000.
Looking ahead, the telco expects to report EBITDAI between NZ$1.09 billion and NZ$1.13 billion.
Spark will release its next three-year plan on September 16.
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The NSW bushfire inquiry final report has underscored a need to equip firefighters with more advanced technology, such as drones, remote sensors, data science, and artificial intelligence (AI), to help them better understand, model, and predict bushfire behaviour, and respond more quickly.
“While noting that the 2019-20 fires were unlike anything seen in NSW before, the inquiry also notes that modern day technology and research advances have made us more capable of responding to them than at any time before,” the report stated.
“But we need to push our technological and our research capabilities much harder so that we can make massive improvements in fire and fire risk interpretation and response.”
The final report [PDF] is the result of an independent inquiry that examined the causes, preparation, and response to the state’s devastating 2019-20 bushfires.
A total of 76 recommendations were made and the state government have accepted them all.
“The NSW government has worked in lock-step with the RFS (Rural Fire Service) and Resilience NSW to ensure the state is as prepared as it can be to face the next fire season, but the learnings from this Inquiry will help us further improve our preparedness and response,” NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said.
“The NSW government has already delivered more than AU$45 million in additional funding, announced in May, to fast-track hazard reduction and deliver upgrades to our firefighting capability.
“This was a terrible bushfire season and we will look at all the steps we can take, especially in relation to helping people protect their property.”
Alongside introducing new technologies, the report recommended establishing a spatial technology acceleration program. It believes the program can help “maximise the information available from the various remote sensing technologies currently in use and to plan for inclusion of new remote sensing systems that can sense precisely and rapidly through heavy smoke, cloud, fog, and dust”.
See also: Team Australia: CSIRO’s multimillion-dollar post-coronavirus plan
The report added as part of the acceleration program, government should support the deployment of remote sensing and picture processing technologies to monitor and audit how well asset protection zones are being maintained, especially around towns.
“The challenges of the 2019-20 season also present the state with a unique opportunity — to harness our significant research and technology strengths to become a world leader of bushfire research, including technology development and commercialisation, with a particular focus on extreme bushfire behaviour,” the report said.
In addition, the report highlighted how there is an opportunity to establish NSW as a “major world centre” for bushfire research, technology development, and commercialisation. Part of that would involve creating a bushfire technology fund to assist with the rapid development of technologies and services that can “sense, fight, mop up after, and protect from bushfires”.
“This will improve our ability to understand, model, and predict the likelihood of extreme fire behaviour in the landscape and enable targeting of firefighting resources to areas where fires are likely to become most damaging,” the report said.
The inquiry also examined the communication problems that communities faced during the 2019-20 bushfires. It uncovered, based on findings by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, that most telecommunication outages were due to power failures rather than direct fire damage to communication assets.
As a result, the inquiry has pressed for Australian governments to revise the regulatory framework around giving government authorities access to information about all private and public critical infrastructures. 
It noted these changes could possibly include compelling owners of critical assets, such as telecommunication providers, to provide annually updated metadata so that government authorities can plan, prepare, and respond to bushfires. The suggested metadata would include information about location, ownership, access, details of service, and infrastructure supports, and fire treatments of building and surrounding zones.
The inquiry also wants to see Australian governments and relevant power and telecommunications regulators and market bodies work together to ensure there are sufficient redundancy options available to supply power to essential communication infrastructure or other alternative telecommunication infrastructure, as well as ensure that telecommunication and electricity providers have a bushfire risk management plan that details information about maintenance and road access.
The release of the report comes a day after the state government announced it would investigate how AI, combined with data from satellites and local sensor networks, could be used to help speed up bushfire detection and predict fire behaviour.
The research will be part of the 2020 Bushfire Data Quest, a week-long online sprint event that will see participation from universities, research institutes, philanthropy, and technology companies.
The challenge is being carried out in partnership with the Minderoo Foundation wildlife and disaster resilience program, which aims to deliver a plan on how Australia and the rest of the world can prevent, mitigate, and defeat bushfires.
Meanwhile, in a separate report [PDF] released last week, the NSW Productivity Commissioner put forward a draft recommendation for the state government to work with regulators such as the Commonwealth Civil Aviation Safety Authority to enable industries to easily use drones, beginning with the agriculture sector.
“The NSW government should work with the Commonwealth Government (as the regulator) to revise regulatory controls or provide a targeted exemption to let NSW farmers use drones more easily. CASA could then help put that in place as it has done with drone delivery systems in Canberra and Queensland,” the Productivity Commission outlined in the Green Paper.
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New Zealand broadband wholesaler Chorus recorded relatively even numbers in a year where coronavirus took hold.
In the year to June 30, the company reported revenue was down 1% to NZ$959 million, earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) grew 2% to NZ$648 million, and net profit was reported down 2% to NZ$52 million.
Breaking down revenue by access technology, its fibre broadband segment grew 34% to NZ$393 million, while copper revenue dropped 21% to NZ$369 million. Field services revenue fell NZ$9 million to NZ$65 million due largely to the pandemic, the company said.
“We chose to provide NZ$5 million in financial support to our service companies and their subcontractors. This assisted them with the impact of reduced levels of work and helped retain the workforce for a rapid resumption of activity as alert levels relaxed,” Chorus CEO JB Rousselot said.
“We also agreed a relief fund of NZ$2 million, which we made available to retailers to help address the expected increase in bad debts for consumers and small businesses unable to pay their bills during lockdown.”
Chorus said it had completed 167,000 fibre installations throughout the year and the number of 1Gbps connections almost doubled from 58,000 to 115,000. Across its UFB footprint, the company now has 1.2 million customers able to connect, an increase of 100,000, with 931,000 premises passed in total, meaning the network is 88% complete.
In total, Chorus has 740,000 mass market fibre customers, 11,000 with fibre premium connections, and 466,000 customers still on copper.
The cost of UFB2 was boosted by NZ$43 million on the bottom end of its new NZ$548 million to NZ$568 million range, due to extending the footprint by 1,000 premises and increasing use of underground build versus aerial drops. UFB2 is almost at the halfway mark while the UFB1 build was completed during the fiscal year.
“We remain focused on connecting more New Zealanders to fibre,” Rousselot said.
“We’re seeing something of a fixed-line renaissance as consumers place even greater value on the reliability and unlimited capacity of fibre relative to other broadband technologies.”
Rousselot added switching off New Zealand’s copper network would not happen overnight, and would be on a “street-by-street basis” where fibre is available. The New Zealand Commerce Commission has proposed that Chorus give six months’ notice of when it intends to decommission the copper in an area.
Over the year, Chorus reduced its staff numbers by 5%, and was able to lower its network maintenance costs by NZ$9 million to NZ$64 million due to fibre uptake, lockdown restrictions, and drought conditions in the upper North Island resulting in lower copper faults.
The introduction of Wi-Fi 6, Rousselot said, was interesting and the company had created a 50Mbps symmetrical plan for urban infrastructure connection at NZ$55 a month.
“Internationally this is considered a potential alternative to 5G in enterprise and other private environments (like airports or stadiums) where cost effective capacity and support for a large number of devices is important,” the CEO said.
“We’re starting to see interest from local government organisations for ‘smart location’ connectivity, like CCTV cameras, traffic lights and digital advertising sites. Often these will be switching from existing copper or mobile connections, taking advantage of fibre’s higher and more consistent bandwidth.”
For the coming year, the company expects EBITDA to be between NZ$640 million and NZ$660 million, with the wholesaler to spend between NZ$630 million and NZ$670 million in capital expenditure.
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