Amid claims from RSPs that NBN’s CVC pricing is too expensive to offer consumers 1Gbps services, Launtel has switched on gigabit speeds for Launceston businesses for approximately AU$1,000 per month.
Launceston retail service provider (RSP) Launtel has announced the launch of its gigabit-speed fibre broadband across National Broadband Network (NBN) fibre-to-the-premises business connections on Tuesday.
Calling Launceston “Australia’s first gigabit city”, Launtel said 100 percent of business premises in the city now have access to 1Gbps FttP connections at “commercially viable rates” under its Blue Ocean plans.
Launtel told ZDNet the pricing will be “approximately AU$1,000 per month” for 1Gbps speeds, with the RSP also bundling 10 unlimited calling VoIP phone lines into its offering.
According to Launtel CEO Damian Ivereigh, this is in comparison to gigabit-speed fibre plans in Sydney or Melbourne, which would “easily cost AU$2,000/month”.
“We put a lot of consideration into the price, and we decided that it was important to price it at a level such that we could definitely buy enough connectivity to the NBN and back to the main internet where we knew it would perform really well, ” Ivereigh said.
“We believe it’s still good value, based on the productivity increases that medium to large businesses will see from the increased performance of their internet.”
Some RSPs have claimed that NBN’s pricing structure is to blame for not being able to offer 1Gbps services to customers at an economically viable option, although NBN CEO Bill Morrow last week denied this .
Being able to offer such speeds could lead to more jobs and wage growth in Tasmania, Ivereigh said, citing the gigabit city Chattanooga .
FttP is currently the only network technology able to offer 1Gbps speeds, with FttP already in the process of being rolled out in Launceston and Hobart under Labor’s original full-fibre NBN plan prior to the multi-technology mix switch under the Coalition government at the end of 2013.
The remainder of Tasmania was subsequently shifted by the Coalition over to slower-speed satellite and fixed-wireless connections; however, the fallout from this saw both major parties campaign on fibre connectivity for Western Tasmania in the lead-up to last year’s federal election.
In June, Communications Minister Mitch Fifield announced that the Coalition would spend AU$18.5 million on replacing satellite coverage for over 2,700 premises in Tasmania with fibre to the node (FttN) in Queenstown, Rosebery, and Zeehan, and fixed-wireless for Strahan in mid-2017; while Labor’s NBN policy said the West Coast of Tasmania would receive a AU$29 million “fibre link” .
Independent Tasmanian candidate Jacqui Lambie had similarly said Tasmania would become a “Gig State” under JLN leadership.
“The JLN supports fibre to the premises rolled out to every residential and business premise, much like the Gig City, Chattanooga, Tennessee, ” Lambie told ZDNet last year.
“This is the vision I have for Tasmania: To become the Gig State … I want to see no latency, thus encouraging greater investment, entrepreneurship, and advanced technology.”
Fifield had also previously said there is a ” fibre option ” for those living in Tasmania thanks to NBN’s technology choice program, which offers Australians a pure fibre alternative if they pay an application fee, a field quote fee, and then the cost of installing the fibre, which NBN said could average AU$4,300 per premises.
“In north-west Tasmania, local calls for fixed-line broadband are already being considered through NBN’s existing technology choice policy, ” Fifield argued last year.
One Tasmanian council did consider the option last year; however, it then declined to upgrade two regions from FttN to FttP due to the cost, adding it would also be requesting a refund on the AU$10,000 fee it was charged by NBN for the analysis.
NBN’s estimate for the Tasmanian council had said that between AU$2.75 million and AU$3.3 million would be needed to upgrade the Westbury and Hagley region, and that it would cost AU$2.2 million to AU$2.75 million to upgrade Hadspen and Traveller’s Rest.
As well as making use of NBN’s Tasmanian fibre connections, Launtel will also utilise TasmaNet’s network — which earlier this week said it is additionally rolling out an Internet of Things (IoT) network across 95 percent of the Tasmanian population by the end of the year in partnership with Thinxtra.
TasmaNet’s IoT network will be rolled out across up to 55 of its towers by the third quarter of 2017, with the telco also supplying access to its Tasmanian network, backhaul, engineers, and Hobart datacentre.
The network will enable the use of smart metering, temperature probes, and GPS trackers for such use cases as agricultural and utilities.
Telecommunications provider Telstra has also been working with networking giant Ericsson to deploy a Cat M1 IoT network across the country, with one trial under way to collect data from sensors at Pooley Wines in regional Tasmania, including leaf wetness, soil moisture and temperature, rainfall, solar radiation, and wind speed and direction.

Sentiment rank: 1.9

© Source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/launceston-rsp-launches-1gbps-nbn-for-au1000/
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When Snap went public in early March, it opened up the floodgates after what had been a stagnant period for tech IPOs. The warm investor reception for the..
When Snap went public in early March, it opened up the floodgates after what had been a stagnant period for tech IPOs. The warm investor reception for the Snapchat parent helped pave the way for MuleSoft, Alteryx, Elevate, Okta, Netshoes, Yext, Cloudera and Carvana, which all debuted in March or April.
But then in May we only had Appian. And June isn’ t expected to be a strong month either.
Considering the Nasdaq and S&P are at record highs and the latest batch of IPOs performed pretty well, every late-staged venture company that’s ready should be trying to go public right now. So where are they?
Experts say that more are coming, but it might not be the blockbuster year that some were hoping for.
“We will see a few, but I believe the predictions of a very robust first half of the year will prove to have been way too optimistic, ” said Lise Buyer, an IPO consultant and partner at Class V Group. “The combination of plenty of cash in the bank and a disconnect between last year’s private and comparable public valuations will, in my opinion, keep the market plodding, but not galloping along.”
She’s referring to all the money thrown at “unicorns” over the past few years. While some investors have been more cautious over the last year or so, many of these late-stage startups still have enough runway to stay private for now.
Some companies are also dreading the possibility of a “down round IPO, ” where there’s a disconnect between the public market cap and the pre-IPO valuation. Early investors and employees still make money in this scenario, but the investors and employees who came along later can get burned. The stigma of losing people money can be hard to recover from.
But others in the IPO community remain hopeful that 2017 will finish strong.
We talked all about this on our TechCrunch’s “Equity” podcast this week (IPOs are a regular theme on the show) . Rick Kline, a partner at Goodwin Procter, who has worked on recent IPOs including Okta and Snap, said that “t here’s still a nice pipeline of companies that will come out.”
He said that part of the reason for the pause is that some of the upcoming IPOs weren’ t expecting the window to open yet. “Anybody who saw the really good performance in Q1 or April, wouldn’ t be able to access the market in May, ” because it takes a few months to get ready.
Kline said he expects a few in June and then “ September, October is when you should look for the biggest bump in IPO activity.”
Bob McCooey, senior vice president of Nasdaq’s Listing Services, is also expecting the fall to be a great time. “ This post-Labor Day to Thanksgiving window could be one of the busiest that I’ ve seen in the decade that I’ ve been here.” He said he’s been getting a “significant amount of inbound phone calls.”
He believes, “the window is now fully open.”

Sentiment rank: 1.3

© Source: https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/29/where-are-the-rest-of-the-tech-ipos/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29
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Third annual report educates security awareness professionals on how time, the right talent, and good communications make for the best, most effective programs.
SANS Institute has released its 2017 Security Awareness Report, a community-driven study with more than 1,000 security awareness professionals across 58 contributing countries.
Security awareness itself has become an increasingly relevant topic for both emerging and mature organizations, given that having a truly skilled professional in the role has become a “must have” versus optional.
SANS’ study was designed from a vendor-neutral perspective, to help organizations identify how successful awareness programs are operating, and the challenge of fledgling awareness programs.
ZDNet has covered the trend of security awareness in the past, with a significant focus on the right type of talent (more technical versus nontechnical) to make security awareness programs work — and the SANS study shows this to be true, according to those surveyed.
“An overwhelming majority of awareness professionals come from technical background. 80 percent in fact. Less than 8 percent have a soft skills background such communications, marketing, training or human resources, ” said the report. “Those with a technical background have an advantage because they possess a strong understanding of the technical and human risks.”
The report goes onto say that security awareness professionals with more technical backgrounds are more keen to recognizing behaviors that might bring risk, however, at times communications training is critical given that human interaction soft skills make changing risky employee behavior. They know what behaviors are the most effective in managing those risks. Often however, the challenge is that these same individuals often lack the skills or training to effectively communicate those risks and engage employees in a manner that effectively changes behavior.
The two primary findings of the report are focused on just these things: proper staffing and communication. The latter is the number one challenge called out by the survey participants, and the second is resources, in the sense that there is not enough time to do what their teams need to take on to better secure the organization. This is sometimes driven by budget, sometimes by finding the right talent.
SANS describes the communications challenge as the ability to effectively communicate and engage employees and, almost more important, the ability to effectively communicate to and demonstrate value to leadership. If you run tight security programs but cannot effectively, and with respected authority, communicate them to impact the right actions, then your program is more security than awareness, and that can put an organization at risk.
The study recommends the following for addressing communications:
Regarding the resource challenge, SANS defines this as a combined effort people who contribute to an awareness program, measured as total number of full-time employees, stated the report.
“Far too many organizations view awareness as a part-time job, crippling their awareness team’s ability to effectively get things done, ” the report said.
SANS findings show the minimum number of full-time employees required to change behavior at an organizational level was 1.4 for midsize organizations (1.28 for organizations under 500 people) , with the most successful programs having 2.6 full-time awareness professionals.
The study also offered recommendations for addressing time and resources:
According to SANS, if there isn’t enough time and people resource to do the job, no amount of monetary investment will help ensure a successful awareness program.
The study concludes by astutely saying that “security awareness is hard” but urges readers, especially those in a management or influence position for these programs, to follow the guidance gleaned from the 1,000 global professionals.
“Without [time and communication] , it’ll be difficult to get legs to your program and successfully protect your organization and the people within it.”
The study also reported what it called a “surprise finding, ” stating that women are twice as likely as men to be dedicated full-time to security awareness given their ability to more naturally consider emotional intelligence and root behaviors that dictate employee behaviors — including security.

Sentiment rank: 1.7

© Source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/sans-security-awareness-study-reveals-technical-communication-skills-and-proper-resourcing-critical/
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