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The Asset Owners Disclosure Project (AODP) asked the world’s thousand largest asset owners what they were doing to guard against the possibility that their investments in fossil fuels could, in future, become worthless.
Together, the owners manage more than US$70 trillion of funds. The Project found that only 27 of the 460 investment funds replying to its request are currently addressing climate risk at what it considers a responsible level.
Only five of the 460 achieved the AODP’s top AAA, with an additional 29 rated A or above. Only these groups, says the Project, “will survive a carbon crash in any kind of good shape”. . Of the 1,000 asset owners approached, 80% are either D rated (abysmal) or X rated (doing nothing). A further 540 funds did not disclose sufficient information to allow a rating.
“A majority of the world’s investment industry are clearly acting contrary to the interests of those whose money they represent – this is an outrageous situation” says Sharan Burrow, an AODP board member and general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation.
“It must be remembered that much of the money being held by these organisations is the product of workers’ lifelong savings.”
The survey looked at several categories of investment behaviour, including transparency, risk management and low carbon investment. Asset owners examined came from 63 countries, in all regions of the world.
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While the use of geothermal energy and recycled materials would normally be starting points for Gizmag's look at a new holiday destination like the ION Adventure Hotel, there's one element here that stands well above the pack – location. The hotel is nestled amidst the diverse Icelandic landscapes in the heart of the Mt. Hengill region, offering guests the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the spectacular aurora borealis or midnight sun, depending on which time of the year it is.
The ION Adventure Hotel opened its doors earlier this year and was built with the environment in mind.
"The fact that we are in a water protected area and the nature around the hotel is so rich we wanted to connect the hotel with the nature rather than have it stand out from the nature," ION's Assistant Hotel Manager, Katrín Ósk Sigurgeirsdóttir tells Gizmag.
Local hot springs provide the hotel with geothermal energy and hot water, local wood such as driftwood was used to furnish most of the building's interior and all of the beds, lounges and chairs were built from recycled materials. Corrugated cardboard was used to make many of the hotel's lamp shades and recycled rubber was used for the restroom basins.
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While many existing oil and gas reserves in other parts of the world are facing steep decline, the Arctic is thought to possess vast untapped reservoirs. Approximately 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil deposits and 30 percent of its natural gas reserves are above the Arctic Circle, according to the United States Geological Survey. Eager to tap into this largess, Russia and its Arctic neighbors — Canada, Norway, the United States, Iceland and Denmark (by virtue of its authority over Greenland) — have encouraged energy companies to drill in the region.
For Russia, which recently seized a Greenpeace ship and is prosecuting 30 of the group’s activists for attempting to scale an oil platform, the temptation to exploit the Arctic Ocean is especially powerful. Russia’s economy is heavily dependent on exports of oil and gas, and the government relies on these sales for much of its income. Until recently, the Russians could draw on reservoirs in western Siberia to satisfy their needs, but now, with many of these fields in decline, they are counting on Arctic supplies to maintain current production levels. “Our first and main task is to turn the Arctic into Russia’s resource base of the 21st century,” Dmitri A. Medvedev, then the president, declared in 2008.
The Russians have explored drilling options in several offshore areas of the Arctic. In the Pechora Sea, above northwestern Siberia, the Russian energy giant Gazprom has installed its Prirazlomnaya platform — the one protesting Greenpeace activists attempted to board. Further east, in the Kara Sea, the state-owned Rosneft is collaborating with ExxonMobil to develop promising deposits; Rosneft has also teamed up with Statoil of Norway and Eni of Italy to investigate prospects in the Barents Sea.
But Russia is hardly alone in seeking to exploit the Arctic. Norway, like Russia, derives considerable income from gas and oil exports and is under pressure to develop reserves in the Barents Sea to compensate for the decline of its existing fields in the North and Norwegian Seas. Other areas of the Arctic are also being eyed for development. Cairn Energy of Edinburgh has sunk exploratory wells in waters off Greenland, for example, while Royal Dutch Shell is attempting to develop fields off Alaska.
For all of its promise, however, the Arctic is not likely to surrender its resources easily. Sea ice covers much of the area in winter, and storms pose a constant danger. Global warming is likely to reduce the extent of sea ice in the summer and fall, permitting extended drilling operations, but it could also produce unruly weather and other perils. Adding another layer of risk, many of the boundary lines in the Arctic remain to be fully demarcated, and various Arctic powers have threatened to use military force in the event that one or another intrudes on what they view as their sovereign territory.
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We recently wrote about the ridiculous performance put on by the UK Parliament in quizzing the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, concerning the legality of reporting on the Snowden leaks. Now, it appears that the same committee sought to hold a hearing with the head of the British MI5 intelligence agency, Andrew Parker, in order to see if he could back up the claims that the Guardian's reporting had put UK citizens in danger. However, that's not happening. UK officials won't let Parker testify in front of the same committee. Why? Because.
The home secretary, Theresa May, told the home affairs committee chairman, Keith Vaz, that she had rejected the request for the spy chief to give evidence because his appearance would "duplicate" the existing oversight provided by the prime ministerially appointed intelligence and security committee.
And, indeed, it is true that the intelligence and security committee held a hearing on the topic not so long ago -- but, like the Congressional counterparts, it was almost entirely softballs allowing them to spew rhetoric, rather than answer serious questions concerning the intelligence community.
Even worse, it appears that the UK leadership is working extra hard to keep trying to pass a hot potato to make sure no one has to testify on this particular issue:
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The blogging platform WordPress.com has taken the unusual — and welcome — step of going to court to defend its users against bogus copyright claims aimed at silencing their speech on the platform. Automattic, WordPress’s parent company, has joined two separate lawsuits that seek to hold the would-be censors of legitimate lawful speech accountable for their attempts.
One of the targeted bloggers, Oliver Hotham, is a U.K. student journalist who wrote about a group called Straight Pride UK. That group issued a press statement explaining its concerns about the “homosexual agenda” and holding up Vladimir Putin as symbol of straight pride. When Hotham’s article quoting that press statement started to get attention, he was slapped with a takedown notice and told his quotes constituted copyright infringement.
The other case involved a website called “Retraction Watch,” run by two noted science journalists. The site tracks instances of published scientific papers being criticized or retracted, for reasons ranging from honest error to falsified data, and covering some controversial situations that may be embarrassing for the scientists involved.
Several of these articles focused on one researcher, Anil Potti, who has been the subject of significant scrutiny for his academic practices. A self-described news site, apparently created after most of these stories had already been posted, republished these particular accounts and then sent WordPress a takedown notice alleging infringement.
WordPress says it gets hundreds of takedown notices for user content, and can’t always identify which ones are abusive. As is typical of many platforms, in each of these cases it initially complied with the takedown requests and the content came down. The unusual part is what happened next: WordPress filed these two suits for damages on behalf of the targeted bloggers.
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At a media event in Detroit, Ford Motor Company gave the automotive world a glimpse of its newest research vehicle, a tricked out Fusion Hybrid designed to test out new autonomous driving technologies. The car looks like your typical 2014 Fusion until you glance at the roof. It’s equipped with four whirling cylinders, emitting constant beams of imperceptible laser light in all directions.
The system is called Lidar (a portmanteau of “light” and “radar”) and we’ve become accustomed to seeing much larger versions of these rigs on Google mapping vehicles tooling around our cities. Ford is using the Lidar system in combination with 360-degree cameras to help its Fusion “see,” creating a visual and topographical representation of the world around it.
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A growing number of industries are trying to reduce or at least curtail carbon footprints and energy use. Emissions standards have been set for the automotive, construction, and even telecommunications industries. Yet the internet’s carbon footprint is growing out of control: a whopping 830 million tons of CO2 annually, which is bigger than that of the entire aviation industry. That amount is set to double by 2020.
It is time for web designers to join the cause.
Right now, at least 332 million tons of CO2—40 percent of the internet’s total footprint—falls at least partially under the responsibility of people who make the web. It needn’t be that large, but with our rotating carousels, high-res images, and more, we have been designing increasingly energy-demanding websites for years, creating monstrous HUMVEE sites where we could be just as well served by slender hybrids or, better yet, bicycles.
The good news is that we have several methods for fixing obese websites and simultaneously attacking our industry’s carbon footprint—methods that conveniently dovetail with good business practice: mobile-ready design demands a thoughtful and efficient approach to page design, and increasingly sophisticated web ROI metrics are already driving businesses to pursue faster and lighter sites.
Before getting into the nitty-gritty, let’s first look at how to estimate a website’s footprint.
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Scientists in Australia have reported the discovery of huge freshwater reserves preserved in aquifers under the world's oceans. The water has remained shielded from seawater thanks to the accumulation of a protective layer of sediment and clay. And it’s not a local phenomenon. Such reserves are to be found under continental shelves off Australia, China, North America and South Africa.
The discovery was made by researchers at the National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training (NCGRT) and the School of the Environment at Flinders University. The scientists estimate there is around half a million cubic kilometers of what they describe as “low salinity” water, which means it could be processed into fresh, potable water economically.
The reserves formed when ocean levels were lower and rainwater made its way into the ground in land areas that were not covered until the ice caps melted 20,000 years ago, causing sea levels to rise.
"The volume of this water resource is a hundred times greater than the amount we’ve extracted from the Earth’s sub-surface in the past century since 1900," says study lead author Dr. Vincent Post. "Our research shows that fresh and brackish aquifers below the seabed are actually quite a common phenomenon."
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If you are visiting this page the chances are that you are not a human, at least according to research.
A study by Incapsula suggests 61.5% of all website traffic is now generated by bots. The security firm said that was a 21% rise on last year's figure of 51%.
Some of these automated software tools are malicious - stealing data or posting ads for scams in comment sections.
But the firm said the biggest growth in traffic was for "good" bots.
These are tools used by search engines to crawl websites in order to index their content, by analytics companies to provide feedback about how a site is performing, and by others to carry out other specific tasks - such as helping the Internet Archive preserve content before it is deleted.
To generate its report, Incapsula said it observed 1.45 billion bot visits over a 90 day period.
The information was sourced from 20,000 sites operated by its clients.
Dr Ian Brown, associate director at Oxford University's Cyber Security Centre - which was not involved in the study - said the figures were useful as an indication of the growth in non-human traffic, even if they were not accurate to the nearest decimal place.
"Their own customers may or may not be representative of the wider web," he told the BBC.
"There will also be some unavoidable fuzziness in their data, given that they are trying to measure malicious website visits where by definition the visitors are trying to disguise their origin."
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Is Bitcoin about to enter the mainstream? It sure looks that way after high profile investors plowed $25 million into Coinbase, a start-up that provides Bitcoin-related services to more than 600,000 people and to a growing list of well-known merchants.
Yet Coinbase’s boast that Bitcoin is at a “tipping point”‘ may be premature. The currency still has a lot to prove, especially when it comes to showing that Bitcoin can ever catch on as an everyday payment mechanism. Here’s an overview of what recent big investments really mean, and what it will take for Bitcoin to stick around for good.
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You may think the prospect of climate change is alarming, a call to action to slow down our emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
You’re almost certainly right. But some scientists are now suggesting you should be much more concerned than you are, because they think we may be seriously underestimating the problem.
The Geological Society of London (GSL) says the sensitivity of the Earth’s climate to CO2 could be double earlier estimates. The Society has published an addition to a report by a GSL working party in 2010, which was entitled Climate change: Evidence from the Geological Record.
The addition says many climate models typically look at short term, rapid factors when calculating the Earth’s climate sensitivity, which is defined as the average global temperature increase brought about by a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Scientists agree that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels could result in temperature increases of between 1.5 and 4.5°C, caused by rapid changes such as snow and ice melt, and the behaviour of clouds and water vapour.
But what the GSL now says is that geological evidence from palaeoclimatology (studies of past climate change) suggests that if longer-term factors are taken into account, such as the decay of large ice sheets, the Earth’s sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 could itself be double that predicted by most climate models.
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Russia’s State Radio Frequency Commission (SRFC) has formally approved the use of 1710MHz-1785MHz and 1805MHz-1880MHz spectrum for 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) use, bringing to an end a lengthy period of speculation over the frequency band. In addition, the watchdog has authorised the use of 890MHz-915MHz and 935MHz-960MHz spectrum blocks for the development of 3G services.
As part of the authorisation, all holders of spectrum below the 2200MHz threshold will be required to provide services to Russian settlements with more than 1,000 residents, while carriers in possession of 2200MHz-3000MHz frequencies will be obliged to cover areas that are home to more than 10,000 citizens.
Minister of Communications Nikolai Nikiforov said that the decision ‘solves an important social problem’ and will improve the standard of communications services available across Russia.
I had heard about mesh networking before I arrived in Somaliland, but had never been in the position to actually build a mesh network. When I accepted the position as ICT instructor at Abaarso School of Science and Technology in Abaarso, Somaliland, I figured this may be my chance. I knew that the Open Technology Institute (OTI) had been developing a mesh firmware called Commotion, suitable for remote locations. Upon arriving in Somaliland I decided that building a mesh network using Commotion would be one of my top priorities.
It seemed like building a mesh network could be a difficult process. I experimented in the past with other firmware on a variety of routers, but found the configuration to be too time-consuming and difficult to set up.
I knew Commotion ran on Ubiquti hardware, designed for rough outdoor environments like Somaliland. Unfortunately, finding Ubiquti routers in Somaliland -- for that matter, getting anything into Somaliland -- is no easy task.
Somaliland is an independent autonomous region of Somalia, and is an area that is safe compared to the southern regions of Somalia. While not internationally recognized as a country, Somaliland has its own currency, government, and military.
The analogy I like to use when it comes to traveling to Somaliland is no different than that of getting to Hogwarts. Instead of running head first into an imaginary platform at the train station, you have to land in Dubai, catch a flight that leaves only once a week and then travel across a desert on one of the worst-built roads you can imagine.
While back in the US this past summer I contacted OTI and found that they would be able to provide me with the proper equipment to run and set up a mesh network using Commotion. I was so excited about the possibility of actually getting all of the equipment into Somaliland that I carefully packed everything into my carry-on.
Before I go any further, I should explain my level of experience with building networks. My only experience with networking had been taking a class at a community college in San Francisco and spending the last year troubleshooting our Internet problems at school. However, Commotion is built in such a way that little if any advanced configuration is necessary to set up a mesh network.
I first began building my network by identifying where I wanted access points on campus and mapping out distances between each spot. Having a good line of sight between each node was extremely important. Luckily we have a lot of high guard and water towers on campus so placing nodes was not an issue.
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Shipping containers have been used to revolutionize housing, and have also given rise to wacky ideas like an extreme sports theme park. Thanks to a new concept dubbed SOAK, we can add sustainable bathhouse to the growing list of potential uses for the durable metal boxes.
The main premise behind SOAK is that it aims to remove some of the guilt which may result from being a regular visitor to resource-heavy spas or bathhouses, by using renewable energy sources and recycled shipping containers.
SOAK looks like it will be pretty well stocked in bathing facilities, with a couple of cold plunge buckets, a shower, and a solarium. It's not clear what the capacity would be (presumably not very high), but a small physical footprint would also make sustainable energy more practicable.
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The new energy law allows private oil and gas companies to drill for oil and gas with the state-run firm Pemex in exchange for a share of the profits.
It has been approved by the Chamber of Deputies a day after being passed by the upper house, the Senate.
Opposition lawmakers protested vigorously against the bill. The Chamber of Deputies voted 354 to 134 to give general approval to the bill.
President Enrique Pena Nieto says private investment is needed to modernise the energy sector.
"The energy reform is a fundamental transformation, which will enable Mexico to strengthen its sovereignty and energy security," Mr Pena Nieto posted on his Twitter account after the vote.
He said the new legislation "will also boost economic growth and the creation of new jobs" in the country.
Private firms will be allowed for the first time since 1938, when the sector was nationalised, to explore and extract oil and gas with state-run firm Pemex - and take a share of the profits.
The opposition said the new legislation would damage the national interests of Mexico.
The were scuffles during the long debate in the lower house of the Mexican Congress.
Landy Berzunza of the governing PRI party was taken to hospital with a scratched retina after an altercation with opposition MP Karen Quiroga.
Throughout the debate members of the opposition Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) tried to disrupt the proceedings to prevent the passage of the bill.
Some occupied the podium in the main chamber.
Others barricaded the chamber's entrances to prevent MPs from the PRI, PAN and Nueva Alianza parties, who backed the reform, from entering.
MP Antonio Garcia Conejo, from the PRD, stripped down to his underwear to show his rejection of the bill.
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CDMA operator China Telecom has been authorised to begin large scale 4G network trials in more than 40 cities, Marbridge Daily cites an unnamed industry source as saying. The rollout will initially target high-density areas such as shopping and business districts, parks and subways.
Whilst Telecom completed a tender earlier this year for 4G core network covering 31 provinces nationwide, its trials will concentrate on over 40 cities including Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing and Wuhan.
As previously noted by CommsUpdate, China Telecom is planning to invest CNY45.7 billion (USD7.45 billion) in 4G network construction next year.
In related news, French-US vendor Alcatel-Lucent has announced that it has been selected by Telecom to provide the cellco with Long Term Evolution (LTE) equipment for the its 4G trials. Under the deal Alca-Lu will supply Telecom with its lightRadio LTE Radio Access Network (RAN), providing 9,892 base stations.
Shutting down secure email services because of surveillance agency interference apparently isn't just a local phenomenon. Lavabit, Snowden's email provider, shut down earlier this year to prevent being forced by the NSA to sabotage its own encryption. Silent Circle, another secure email service, shut down only hours later. Silent Circle hadn't yet been pressured by the government, but obviously felt it was only a matter of time.
International Business Times is reporting a similar incident occurred in the UK earlier this year.
PrivateSky was shut down at the beginning of the year after introducing a web-based version in beta and for Outlook and had "tens of thousands of heavily active users".
Brian Spector, CEO of CertiVox, told IT Security Guru: "Towards the end of 2012, we heard from the National Technical Assistance Centre (NTAC), a division of GCHQ and a liaison with the Home Office, [that] they wanted the keys to decrypt the customer data. We did it before Lavabit and Silent Circle and it was before Snowden happened.
Even before the leaks made the Five Eyes' covert surveillance programs public, PrivateSky got an inside peek at the intelligence community's thirst for data. Unfortunately for Spector and his company, complying with GCHQ's request would mean destroying the security it promised to its customers.
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As the US applies more and more pressure to the other nations taking part in the secret TPP negotiations in an attempt to get them to accept its demands, one issue that is starting to be raised is the central one of benefits. Given the sacrifices the USTR is demanding from other countries in order to strike a deal, people in affected countries are rightly questioning what exactly they will get in return. The growing doubts about the value of TPP are presumably why at this late stage the USTR has just released a document touting its "economic benefits". There are two things worth noting about this.
First, that no evidence is offered to back up the big numbers being thrown around there, so we know nothing about the assumptions and methodology behind the figures. And secondly, as Burcu Kilic rightly points out, if the USTR wants people to consider the economic benefits, it should also produce a similar report on the economic damage that could result from TPP so that they can see whether on balance it is worth proceeding with the deal. Needless to say, such analyses are never conducted -- at least, not by governments.
Of course, predicting the economic effects of complex trade agreements that haven't even been concluded is nigh on impossible. But as an alternative, instead of trying to squint into the future, we can perhaps look back at what actually happened with previous free trade agreements. Techdirt has already written about two major deals, NAFTA and KORUS, both of which turned out to be disastrous for the US, but what about the others?
A small, bilateral FTA was signed between the US and Colombia just under a year ago. Recently, President Obama welcomed Colombia's President Santos to the White House, and referred to the trade deal as follows:
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Internet Monitor’s first annual report is a collection of essays that invite reflection and discussion of the past year’s notable events and trends in the digitally networked environment.
The report, intended for a general audience, invites reflection and discussion around some of the most fascinating developments and debates over the past year.
For more information about Internet Monitor, see thenetmonitor.org
Click headline to access hot links to the report--
A groundbreaking study by Harvard University's Harvard Forest and the Smithsonian Institution reveals that, if left unchecked, recent trends in the loss of forests to development will undermine significant land conservation gains in Massachusetts, jeopardize water quality, and limit the natural landscape's ability to protect against climate change.
The scientists researched and analyzed four plausible scenarios for what Massachusetts could look like in the future. The scenarios were developed by a group of forestry professionals, land-use planning and water policy experts, and conservation groups. The scenarios reflect contrasting patterns and intensities of land development, wood harvesting, conservation, and agriculture. The two-year study is unique in its forward-looking approach and its use of sophisticated computer models to conduct a detailed acre-by-acre analysis of the entire forested landscape of Massachusetts over 50 years.
"What we found is that land-use decisions have immediate and dramatic impacts on many of the forest benefits people depend on," said Jonathan Thompson, Senior Ecologist at Harvard Forest and lead author of the new study. This is the first time a study of this magnitude has been conducted for an entire state. Thompson goes on to say, "Massachusetts is an important place to study land-use because it is densely populated, heavily forested, and experiencing rapid change – much like the broader forested landscape of the eastern U.S. The results of the study show that sprawl, coupled with a permanent loss of forest cover in Massachusetts, create an urgent need to address land-use choices." Click headline to read more--
G.fast’s road toward bringing fiber-like speeds to existing copper-fed DSL networks took a step forward Wednesday as the International Telecommunications Union granted “first-stage” approval to the emerging standard.
That technology is embedded in a budding standard called G.fast, which was granted “first-stage approval” Wednesday by the International Telecommunications Union, which expects to finalize G.fast “as early as April 2014.”
ITU expects to finalize G.fast “as early as April 2014,” but this week’s first-stage stamp should give chipmakers, modem vendors and network gear suppliers the technical roadway necessary to develop G.fast products and present telcos with a platform that is designed to deliver aggregate capacity of 1 Gigabit per second that can be flexibly allocated to a telco’s downstream and upstream pathways.
“The core technology is pretty much set,” said Michael Weissman, vice president of marketing for Sckipio, a G.fast silicon startup that this week announced it had secured a $10 million investment from Gemini Israel Ventures, Genesis Partners, Amiti Capital, and Aviv Ventures. Sckipio, a company with about 25 employees, expects to have some initial G.fast product available in 2014. “We have trials scheduled,” Weissman said.
G.fast, which has also attracted interest from Broadcom, will flirt with 1-Gig speeds thanks to its use of a wider swath of spectrum. The standard calls for G.fast to handle bandwidth profiles of 106 MHz and just north of 200 MHz, comparing to the relatively paltry 17 MHz of bandwidth used for the 17a profile of VDSL. Because G.fast can operate in higher frequencies, it will aim to reduce crosstalk interference through the use of vectoring, a technique that is in widespread commercial deployment on DSL networks.
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Telecom giants in Europe and some in the U.S. want to build quick new fiber systems to deliver high-speed Internet and entertainment services into homes. But the only way to justify the billions in cost, they argue, is if rivals are prevented from having equal access the network and offering competing media services over the same pipes.
Swedish serial entrepreneur Jonas Birgersson, a scheduled speaker at Web Summit, is out to prove them wrong. He says his open model offers consumers low prices and freedom of choice — and it could work everywhere. He has already proved the model in Sweden and Brazil. And this summer the government of Israel agreed to adopt his technology nationwide, with rollout to key parts of the country envisioned within two to three years.
“Israel’s network could be a game changer,” says Blair Levin, who served as chief of staff under U.S. Federal Communication Commission Chairman Reed Hundt and later led the writing of the Obama Broadband plan. Once everyone in the start-up nation has access to one gigabit-per-second Internet access it will give Israel a competitive advantage, potentially spurring other countries to move more quickly, says Levin.
Both he and Birgersson will appear on a panel during Web Summit that is focused on building a gigabit future, which Informilo will moderate.
At issue is how to drive the next generation of wired Internet. “For several decades the Internet has piggybacked on infrastructure build in the 1800s (the telephone networks) and the 1980s (cable networks that were designed to act as loudspeakers with lots of data flowing out and little flowing in),” says Birgersson. “For the Internet to reach its full potential we have to move from a world where the Internet is an unwanted stepchild strapped to a tired horse to one in which an Internet-first designed network is powered by a rocket and everyone gets access to broadband at speeds of one gigabit per second.”
While Europe was once a leader in the technologies that make up the backbone of the digital economy, many markets in Asia and North America now enjoy fiber access penetration that is up to 20 times higher and an LTE (long-term evolution) penetration that is as much as 35 times greater than that of Europe, says Luigi Gambardella, head of the European Telecom Network Operators association (ETNO), another scheduled speaker on the Web Summit panel. “This is true in markets which are larger but sometimes also smaller than the EU markets. Fast connectivity to the Internet is the foundation of a modern digital economy and a key enabler of innovation. Without it, Europe will fall behind on the world stage.”
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The Coalition government has massively revised its plan for the National Broadband Network, breaking a promise to complete the first stage by 2016, after a strategic review found cost blowouts and poor management.
Under the new Coalition plan, the NBN will be completed with a mix of technologies containing just 26% fibre to the home, will cost almost $12bn more to complete and will take four years longer than promised by the Coalition before the election.
The revision follows the results of a scathing strategic review of the current financial and construction position of the network by the Coalition-appointed management of NBN Co.
The communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said the Coalition’s election policy was based on the assumption that NBN Co would meet its own forecasts, but the review marked the end of “heroic forecasts”.
“Our [election] policy was written without access to experts and information within the NBN Co and we assumed they would be further ahead than they were,” Turnbull said.
Labor immediately released an NBN Co review given to the Coalition government on 20 September, which advised the Coalition would be unlikely to achieve its promised speed of 25Mbps due to various contractual and technological obligations faced by the network.
“It shows that Malcolm Turnbull’s second-rate network will not cut it,” Labor’s communications’ spokesman Jason Clare said.
However Turnbull ridiculed the review, saying the former management had not managed to get any forecasts right under Labor.
The Coalition has revised its own projected costs of the NBN from $29.5bn promised during the election campaign to $41bn, though the minister committed to limiting its equity investment in NBN Co to $29.5bn. The rest will be funded by debt.
The government has appointed a panel of experts to conduct an independent cost-benefit analysis of broadband and a review of the regulatory arrangements for the NBN. It will be chaired by former treasury secretary and businessman Michael Vertigan, with director of the Australian Industry Group Alison Deans, economist and NBN critic Henry Ergas and regulatory consultant, telecommunications expert and economist, Tony Shaw.
The panel has been established to provide independent advice on the economic and social costs and benefits of different broadband technologies.
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In 2017, the capital of Kazakhstan will look like the set of an utopian sci-fi movie, which seems appropriate considering this is the place from where the Soviet Union conquered space. A titanic new capital will rise by the old city, powered by sun and wind. Move over Dubai. Your cliché New York-wannabe skyline is the past. This is the real future.
After several months of debate, officials in Kazakhstan's capital city of Astana have chosen a final design for the massive site that will host the World EXPO 2017. The sprawling, wind- and sun-powered neighborhood was designed by Chicago architects Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, the designers of Kingdom Tower—the forthcoming world's tallest building in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
According to the chairman of the company that's heading up the EXPO 2017, Smith + Gill's design "will embody the five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution." If that phrase sounds familiar, that's because it's borrowed from Jeremy Rifkin, economist and author of the popular 2011 book The Third Industrial Revolution, which outlines a theory of a shared clean energy grid that will transform culture and production. The reference is intentional—Rifkin has become an important figure in planning the future of Astana, a massive new city on the steppe that was built with oil money after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Click headline to read more and view pix--
The French mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Virgin Mobile France has signed an agreement with mobile operator SFR to offer 4G services over its network, local news agency Les Echos reports. According to the article, the MVNO’s subscribers will be able to access SFR’s Long Term Evolution (LTE) network from next spring.
As previously reported by TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate, in September 2013 Virgin signed a similar leased agreement with Bouygues Telecom, with the service to be launched in the first half of 2014, due to the level of preparation required. Virgin’s CEO Pascal Rialland said: ‘The signing of this agreement with SFR for a second 4G network is great news for Virgin Mobile but also – and above all – for our customers who will benefit from high speed broadband communications over a wide area through very competitive offers.’
According to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database, as of November 2013 Bouygues Telecom’s LTE network offers coverage in 2,113 towns, while its rival SFR has extended its 4G footprint to 567 locations.
Virgin Mobile entered France in 2006 and claims to be the country’s largest MVNO by subscribers, with around 1.7 million users.
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