Networking

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.
Related Coverage More

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.
More from NZ More

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.
Related Coverage More

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.
Related Coverage More

Image: Matthew Thomas
In an effort to detect whether a network will hijack DNS queries, Google’s Chrome browser and its Chromium-based brethren randomly conjures up three domain names between 7 and 15 characters to test, and if the response of two domains returns the same IP, the browser believes the network is capturing and redirecting nonexistent domain requests.
This test is completed on startup, and whenever a device’s IP or DNS settings change.
Due to the way DNS servers will pass locally unknown domain queries up to more authoritative name servers, the random domains used by Chrome find their way up to the root DNS servers, and according to Verisign principal engineer at CSO applied research division Matthew Thomas, those queries make up half of all queries to the root servers.
Data presented by Thomas showed that as Chrome’s market share increased after the feature was introduced in 2010, queries matching the pattern used by Chrome similarly increased.
“In the 10-plus years since the feature was added, we now find that half of the DNS root server traffic is very likely due to Chromium’s probes,” Thomas said in an APNIC blog post. “That equates to about 60 billion queries to the root server system on a typical day.”
Thomas added that half the DNS traffic of the root servers is being used to support a single browser function, and with DNS interception being “certainly the exception rather than the norm”, the traffic would be a distributed denial of service attack in any other scenario.
Earlier in the month, Sans Institute dean of research Johannes Ullrich looked into how many of the world’s 2.7 million authoritative name servers it would take to disable 80% of the internet.
“It only takes 2,302 name servers or about 0.084%!” Ullrich wrote.
“0.35% of name servers are responsible for 90% of all domain names.”
Ullrich found GoDaddy was responsible for 94.5 million records, Google Domains had 20 million, the trio of dns.com, hichina, and IONOS had 15.6 million each, while Cloudflare had 13.8 million records.
“Using a cloud-based DNS service is simple and often more reliable than running your name server. But this large concentration of name services with few entities increases the risk to the infrastructure substantially,” he said.
To lower the risk of a provider outage making parts of the internet inaccessible, Ullrich said people should run secondary name servers in-house, and make sure to use more than one DNS provider.
Telstra provided an example of how a DNS failure can appear as an internet outage to users, in this case, the telco successfully performed a denial of service attack on itself.
“The massive messaging storm that presented as a denial of service cyber attack has been investigated by our security teams and we now believe that it was not malicious, but a Domain Name Server issue,” the telco said at the start of the month.
Last month, Cloudflare provided a similar example on a much bigger scale.
Related Coverage More

There has been a significant increase in online access to financial offerings and government services in Brazil among low-income citizens, according to a study on the role of the Internet during the Covid-19 outbreak.
The study carried out by Cetic.br, research arm of the Brazilian Network Information Center (NIC.br) suggests that Internet access through all devices has gone up significantly and online traffic in Brazil has reached record levels in the last five months, peaking at 13,5 Tbps.
Considering the Brazilian socioeconomic class system ranging from the elite (class A), the upper-middle class (class B), the lower middle class (class C), the working-class poor (class D) and the extremely poor and unemployed (class E), the study has found an increase in Internet access among the classes D and E. This was mostly driven by e-commerce, entertainment, education and digital access to government services.
According to the Cetic.br report on Internet access during the health emergency crisis in Brazil, the percentage of individuals shopping online has gone from 37% to 64% among the class C, while the percentage has gone from 18% to 44% among the classes D and E. Conversely, online shopping among wealthier Brazilians has gone from 63% to 83%.
There was also a threefold increase in the percentage of Brazilians that order food via delivery apps, according to the study, from 15% to 44% over the last five months.
When it comes to online entertainment, which was already pervasive among richer Brazilians, the percentage of individuals paying for streaming services such as Netflix has gone up from 29% to 41% among the class C and it has gone from 11% to 32% among the classes D and E. Consumption of movies and series online has gone from 50% to 53% among Brazilians on higher incomes.

The percentage of Brazilians using music streaming services during the pandemic has gone from 8% to 14%. Among the classes D and E, it has gone from 4% to 8%. Music streaming has gone from 16% to 26% among the classes A and B.
Another important driver that has been boosting Internet access among the poor is access to services such as the government’s relief scheme. The program is being delivered mostly through digital means, with mobile operators enabling access to the service for free. According to Cetic.br, data on that particular project will be provided in an upcoming study.
Brazil has been accelerating public service digitization during the pandemic. A recent United Nations report has positioned Brazil as one of the fast-movers in digital government globally.
In addition, the Cetic.br study noted that companies have ramped up the use of online communications to talk to their audiences, with instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp playing a key role to enable sales. According to the study, the percentage of businesses that use such tools has gone up from 26% to 46% during the pandemic.
Despite that apparent progress, digital exclusion is still a reality for many Brazilians. A recent study carried out by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) has found that 71% of Brazilian households currently have access to the Internet. However, more than 20 million households are digitally excluded.
The issue of lack of connectivity is particularly noticeable in households in the poorest areas of the country: 35% of homes in the Northeast region of Brazil don’t use the web, and this is also a reality for 45% of Brazilian families on minimum wage. More

Image: TPG Telecom
TPG Telecom — the renamed Vodafone Hutchinson Australia (VHA) that went on to swallow the former TPG in a merger — reported its first half results on Friday, and they require some history to effectively dissect.
Due to the timing of the merger, the accounts released to the ASX included four days of TPG Corporation — the new name of the former TPG — due to the merger being approved by the NSW Supreme Court on June 26. However, the merger implementation date was July 13 and it was at that time the company’s debt was restructured.
Consequently, the new TPG Telecom reported not only statutory results, but it also prepared pro forma results as though the old TPG had been part of it since the start of the half, as well as pulled out standalone results for the former Vodafone and TPG businesses.  
On a standalone basis, the former VHA reported a AU$210 million drop in revenue to AU$1.5 billion for the half. This flowed onto AU$546 million in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA), which was a decrease of AU$46 million on the corresponding period last year. This then led to AU$71 million in EBIT, but AU$188 million in financing costs undid all the prior good work to leave VHA with a net loss of AU$117 million, which was a AU$27 million reduction on the AU$144 million loss posted during the first half of 2019.
Three-quarters of the fall in revenue was pinned on a AU$157 million reduction in handset revenue for VHA.  
The company added that the decrease in EBITDA was partially due to a 200,000 reduction in prepaid mobile subscribers and a 62,000 decrease in postpaid mobile customers. Half of the prepaid reduction was due to the impact of coronavirus, the company said, with AU$38 million of the hit to EBITDA being ascribed to the pandemic.
TPG Telecom said it had seen an 80% reduction in roaming, as well as a 30% reduction of prepaid connections, and 20% reduction in postpaid connection due to COVID-19, and the impact is set to continue for the rest of the year. It added the pandemic has also hit the former Vodafone’s store footprint and call centres, as well as its costs related to bonus data and calls. The pandemic also saw the company suspend late payment fees and hold out on sending debt collectors.
When the numbers from VHA rolled up into TPG Telecom, the new entity recognised a AU$226 million deferred income tax credit, which left the new company with a post-tax profit of AU$83 million.
See also: Vodafone Australia and TPG merger: Everything you need to know
In the four days that the former TPG contributed to the above figure, it recorded AU$27 million in revenue, AU$9 million in EBITDA, and AU$4 million in net profit. The TPG Telecom figures also included AU$30 million in merger expenses.
Pretending that the two telcos have been together since the start of Vodafone’s fiscal year would have resulted in revenue being AU$2.7 billion on a pro forma basis, AU$918 million in EBITDA being posted, and theoretical net profit being AU$140 million.
Of the above numbers, the old TPG chipped in AU$1.25 billion of revenue, AU$391 million of EBITDA, and AU$138 million of the net profit.
Across the first half, Vodafone and the old TPG paid AU$204 million in spectrum payments.
In its last set of results as a standalone company, TPG reported a steady half to January 31.
Since the merger, TPG Telecom has upgraded 445 mobile sites and spectrum held by TPG Corporation has been integrated into Vodafone’s network. The company is also working on extending TPG fibre to 700 Vodafone mobile sites as it begins to shift MVNO customers with former TPG brands onto the Vodafone network directly.
“Customers began experiencing the benefits of the merger from day one, and over the past six weeks, we have delivered significant boosts to data speeds and performance for customers from these deployments,” former VHA and now TPG Telecom CEO Iñaki Berroeta said.
“By using our own mobile network, we’ll be able offer customers more inclusions for less, with new customers to receive 50 per cent off their plans for six months and existing migrating customers to receive two months’ free access.”
The company wants its 5G network to hit 85% population coverage by the end of next year, with Berroeta adding that the company has 1,200 sites in planning and is working on 5G standalone mode.
Related Coverage
Vodafone Australia and TPG merger: Everything you need to know
While labelled a merger of equals, in accounting terms, Vodafone is swallowing up TPG while simultaneously bringing a ton of baggage and discarding another ton on its current owners.
Vodafone Australia testing 700Mhz spectrum for 5G
Nokia equipment used in field test around Parramatta.
ACCC appeal about TPG prepayments dismissed at Federal Court
TPG ekes out another win against the Australian consumer watchdog.
Vodafone’s first 5G sites go live in Sydney’s west
The telco also vows that 5G international roaming is ‘coming soon’. More

Image: KT
The South Korea government will install an additional 10,000 free Wi-Fi access points in public areas by the end of the year, the Ministry of Science and ICT said.
By 2022, the ministry hopes to have installed 41,000 access in total at public areas such as transportation stations and community service centres nationwide.
Old Wi-Fi access points installed before 2014 — amounting to around 18,000 units — will also be swapped out for new ones, the government said.
South Korean telco KT has been given a budget of 18 billion won ($15 million) to handle the project.
The new access points will be based on the latest Wi-Fi 6 standard.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ministry explained that public Wi-Fi services have become essential for bridging digital divides and reducing household data costs.
The government added that an integrated monitoring centre has been set up to monitor all of the Wi-Fi access points across the country to inspect data traffic and maintain quality of service.
Last year, South Korea installed free Wi-Fi on 23,000 buses nationwide. 
Related Coverage More