NBN: To Wireless or Not To Wireless?

I’ve been following the debate on the NBN for several years now. While the debate over whether to go with the optic fibre service currently being planned and deployed by the Labor Government or to scrap it and implement a cheaper(?) wireless based service proposed by the Liberal Party is the hot issue, there’s never been much debate that I’ve found on the reliability of a wireless network.

I had a 3G wireless broadband service at home at the foot of the Dandenong Ranges, 30km as the crow flies from the Melbourne CBD. I got tired of its unreliability and switched to a fixed line service over a year ago.

It must be noted that a proposed national wireless broadband service wouldn’t run (I hope / expect) on 3G so hopefully reliability would be better.

But for me, here’s the clincher – the 3G service claimed a bandwidth of 3.6Gbps. At home, testing against speedtest.net, on a clear day I could get 330kbps. When the weather was bad, I was recording 180kbps or so – sub-broadband speeds. The government says “broadband” begins at 256kbps.

So the most basic wireless fact that every UHF and HF radio operator knows (and the politicians and commentators are forgetting) is that radio performance is heavily affected by the amount of atmospheric moisture. “Next gen” wireless can’t deny physics.

A wireless NBN is a joke.

Mono project IP in trouble?

This article appeared in my RSS reader today.

The global Mono project team has been laid off. Miguel De Icaza and his team have formed a new company (Xamarin) to continue development.

The problem for them is that their non-open source offerings - MonoTouch (Mono for iPhone / iPad) and MonoDroid (Mono for Android) (no mention of MonoMac) are owned by Novell's new owner, Attachmate. Attachmate obviously just wants whatever of Novell's assets it can get.

So there are a few questions.

Firstly, if MonoTouch and MonoDroid were the money making parts of the Mono Project and Xamarin can't own them, how are they going to continue to exist? Can they get sufficient work doing Mono consulting?

Secondly, what intellectual property risks are they running by trying to engineer replacements? These guys built the original products. Are Attachmate going to take legal action claiming ownership over their own personal knowledge? This is a possibility as they (Attachmate) could claim that they went to work for a competitor, building a competing product using intellectual property owned by Novell. How might this play out? How might a court separate the intellectual property owned by a company from the knowledge held by a group of developers (as individuals or collectively)?