The state of Broadband in developing countries

Australia is a mixed bag at Broadband. In some ways we resemble the US, and in no way do we resemble the Japan style FTTN networks (yet). But the infrastructure is starting to be there. What sucks is that sometimes to get the 30 Mbps connections you have to pay quite a bit for it (AUD$90/bundled per month for 25GB, Bigpond Cable). Yes I’m only with Bigpond cable as no ADSL service exists in my area that comes close to that speed. Damn counted uploads and data shaping.

But at least unlike some countries, we do seem to have decent peering links to EU and the US. I have actually achieved 3 MBytes/sec (24Mbps) transfer on a regional transfer and about 1MBytes/sec (8Mbps) using international servers.

Why do I mention this? I just watched Walt Mossberg talk about the bad state of Broadband and the lack of integration of the online world with big TVs (watch below, 8 mins).

Lastly Australia gets, as no doubt does the rest of the world, a time lag factor of everything latest and greatest. No iPhone yet, no iTMS TV/Movie store, no local Amazon style service (some come close), up to 1 year delay on airing TV series (though it is improving recently); and so on.

The tyranny of distance, and small population on a great land mass, is at play.

Oh yes, and the iPhone rumour gets another bump - woot 3G iPhone in June, well in the US. No doubt another 6 months will pass before Australia gets it. Lets hope it is not locked to Telstra. I don’t want to have to pay for my 3G data on top of the expensive plan AND the phone. I want it bundled, and not a pitiful 5 Megabytes worth. I have a $500 cap on Vodafone for now, including all my 3G data usage at $1 per 5 mins (part of the $500 cap).

If the iPhone ends up locked to Telstra, I’ll be singing Elvis.

Storms and Power outages

We’ve had some stong winds in Melbourne yesterday. Up to 130 kph!
These winds were good enough to cause a 24 hour extended power outage in my area, meaning my provider had upstream outages and the internet connection was down. Add that to the errant html comment in my last post which made the whole page commented out.
All resolved now. Now what else do I have to debug that is technical?

Mailing attachments from the Solaris Shell

I needed a quick way to send some files from the command line when logged into a Solaris server via ssh.
This assumes the server is already configured to deliver your smtp mail. I also used mailx for the sending client.
Here is how I did it, for your geeky reference.

First write your message:
cat << EOF > /tmp/mailmsg
Hi this is a message
And this is the second line
EOF

Then populate your recipient list, comma delimited as per the mailx(1) man page:
cat << EOF > /tmp/mailrecipients
john.doe@nodomain.com.it,jack.black@someplace.co.za
EOF

. You need to uuencode your binary attachments, and you can send as many as you need.
(cat /tmp/mailmsg ; uuencode /path/to/file.txt file.txt ; uuencode /location/of/otherfile otherfile) | mailx -s 'Subject' -r myemail@some.place.mx `cat /tmp/mailrecipients`

You need to specify each file name twice, once for source file to encode, and once for the encoded file name; as per the uuencode(1C) man page. If you are sending from some local account on the server, the -r switch allows you to specify an alternate return address for the recipients (in other words your normal email address).

PS: watch for the quotes and backticks. Dont mix them up!

Hope this helps you out someday.