NBN + UC = :D

jkruse — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:19:00 GMT

The recent National Broadband Network (NBN) announcement in Australia is the best piece of news I have heard in some time.

Fibre To The Home (FTTH) with speeds of 100Mbps is going to dramatically change how Australians work, play and socialise online. I haven’t heard yet if these speeds are symmetrical or asymmetrical (i.e. if uplink speeds are equivalent to downlink, or not), but I guess it may be too early in the process to know.

At home I have a Naked ADSL2+ connection from Internode (via an Optus DSLAM) which is great in theory, but in practice I only get about 4Mbps down and 384Kbps up.

I work from home a lot, and at the moment at least 10% of my time is spent video-conferencing with customers and workmates. With reductions in travel budgets this is likely to increase in the coming years.

384Kbps uplink is sufficient for CIF video in Office Communicator 2007, but now in R2 we support VGA and HD video which of course have greater bandwidth requirements. Currently I have to physically travel to the office in North Ryde to send VGA or HD video, which kind of defeats the concept of Unified Communications (collaborate from anywhere – work is something you do, not somewhere you go).

So this is why I’m excited about the NBN – faster uplink speeds will enable higher fidelity video-conferencing at home, which will provide more opportunities for remote collaboration, travel reductions, flexible meetings, and work/life balance.

Now if only they could get it up and running in < 8 years :)

Article: Email banter behind data explosion

jkruse — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:07:08 GMT

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/NewsStory.aspx?story=65986

FTFA....

Companies are failing to identify the real culprit behind a lack of storage space and the huge volumes of data being hoarded, according to a new report..
...
But consulting firm Detica believes that the real culprits of corporate data overload are employees chatting and sharing jokes and photos via email.
...
"Email is widely used for office banter, social chats and group discussions about after-work drinks, or to circulate large digital files with cartoon jokes, MP3 files or photographs."
Saunders explained that there may be nothing wrong with this in itself, but that the data can quickly mount up, especially if teams also email large project files such as PowerPoint presentations every time they make a small change.

This is one of the benefits of having a full UC stack including IM and document sharing - reduce conversational emails being stored on your Exchange server (because after all Exchange is probably using the most expensive storage in your network), and provide a more efficient system than email for collaborating on documents.

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Johann's Unified Communications : thoughts

NBN + UC = :D

Article: Email banter behind data explosion