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iPhone update leaves users furious due to battery drain issue

APPLE users have claimed the latest version of the iPhone operating system has played havoc with the battery in their device.

On the tech giant’s support firm, users have claimed the battery indicator hits 30 per cent before slumping to zero and shutting down the phone.

The disgruntled Apple lovers claim they were clobbered after downloading iOS 10.1.

One user wrote: “ It jumps from 30 per cent charge to 1 per cent in a few seconds then shuts down.

“As soon as it reboots after connecting to a charger it show 30 per cent charge.

“When I unplug it right away it still shows 30 per cent and runs like nothing happened for a good few hours.

“So it goes from zero charge to 30 per cent in the time it takes to reboot? Strange.”

He also suffered problems when starting his phone up in the morning.

“Shutting the phone down at night with a good 80 per cent charge, it won’t reboot in the morning due to no battery charge.

“I plug it in and its back to 30 per cent in a few seconds.”

Another user said he was suffering from an “identical issue after upgrading to 10.1.1.”

It is not known how many people are affected by the problem and whether it is isolated or widespread.

Meanwhile a number of disgruntled Apple customers have taken to Twitter to bemoan the issue.

“I can now watch my battery literally drain as I read a text,” complained one social media user.

By: Jasper Hamill, The Sun

Posted On: http://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/mobile-phones/iphone-update-leaves-users-furious-due-to-battery-drain-issue/news-story/f13e2c3cdc1b9e40b6b9daaeb33dc65a

 

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Australian cricket looks to tech for competitive edge with new Microsoft deal

Australia’s cricketers will soon get a much-needed tech-led competitive advantage after Cricket Australia signed a deal with Microsoft to become the first cricketing nation to use its new team and player performance platform to assess everything from form and fitness to strategy and team selection.

The deal will be sealed on Tuesday as Microsoft’s cricket-loving chief executive Satya Nadella makes the Melbourne Cricket Ground one of his first ports of call on his maiden visit to Australia since taking the reins at the tech giant in 2014.

The new platform will be trialled throughout the summer by coaching and support staff on the Test and state teams, using the latest in machine learning and predictive analytics technology to make practical use of the mountains of player data being tracked on performances and their level of preparedness for big matches.

While cricket fans have become accustomed to seeing players and coaches sitting on the balcony outside the pavilion looking at tablets and laptops, Cricket Australia’s technology head Michael Osborne said the new system was a lot more sophisticated than anything that has been previously used in terms of giving relevant context to data.

Mr Osborne said high-performance coaching teams led by Pat Howard had collected huge amounts of data in recent years on the players, their wellness, training and match workloads and ball-by-ball statistics, but the new platform was pulling the myriad sources together and presenting it in ways that would inform key decision-making.

“Our sports science guys have been doing some very interesting things trying to understand probability of injury, and things like that. But what we’re finding is, for a lot of our frontline coaching staff, there’s almost too much data, and to get in and understand what the data is saying is a daunting task,” Mr Osborne said.

“The new platform takes this vast amount of data, provides an environment for our sports science folks to explore that data and find insights in it, and then provides a very elegant dashboard that will surface the trends and the information that will be impactful to the coaches.”

Dashboard warns ‘slow down’

In a demonstration of the new platform to Fairfax Media, Mr Osborne showed how a coach and selectors could track the squad of available players, and get real-time information on their fitness levels, as well as recent and historical performances.

Elite players have already become accustomed to providing daily updates through a mobile app on areas including how they slept the night before, and their general health. All of this data will now be drawn into the new platform, alongside performance metrics from Catapult Sports player tracking technology and ball-by-ball match data from Opta.

By monitoring the workload of players in recent games, coaches will have a meaningful, up-to-the-minute ranking of how ready a player is to perform in a match.

The Australian Test side has had particular problems in recent years with fast bowlers breaking down and missing games through injuries, most recently Peter Siddle, who is sitting out the Second Test against South Africa.

The new dashboard is expected to give advanced warning about when a player is passing their limits and needs to be rested.

The technology teams have been working with coaches, including a three-day session recently at the National Cricket Centre in Brisbane, to get insights into what data coaches would like to have, and are working on ways to demonstrate which players perform best in different venues, based on historical data, current form and variables such as weather and pitch conditions.

This theoretically gives a scientific algorithm, which could statistically say which players should be picked for each match.

‘We will always need human selectors’

In a sport that values the knowledge and instincts of it captains and coaches, Mr Osborne concedes that some will be more willing than others to listen to the wisdom of a computer system. He said it will work best as a support, rather than a replacement for human insight.

“I think we will always need human selectors, we’ll always need people to make those judgment calls,” Mr Osborne said.

“I don’t think the artificial intelligence will get to the point, or I don’t think we’d want it to get to the point, where it’s selecting our national team for us.

“To me, it’s about helping improve the conversation so that when people are making these decisions, they have all of the information and the key data points right there at their fingertips.”

The team and player performance platform is the most publicly visible aspect of a broader digital transformation under way within Cricket Australia, which also incorporates improved systems for administering cricket clubs down to the grassroots of local sides, and increased online coverage of matches online through CA’s website and app.

Mr Osborne and CA’s digital head Finn Bradshaw are also working on other areas such as investigating how the coaching dashboard data can be utilised in virtual and augmented reality applications for training.

The applications being used will all run on Microsoft’s Azure cloud using its machine learning capabilities. CA is also standardising the vast array of about 24 different notebooks used by staff on to Surface devices.

Microsoft Azure chief technology officer Mark Russinovich said the tech company would learn a lot from its dealings with Cricket Australia, and would be able to apply its lessons to other sport codes and teams.

While Australia is the first cricket team to get on board Microsoft’s platform, it has been adopted by Portuguese football club Benfica and a number of other early test cases in the US.

“We’re working with Cricket Australia to understand what kind of machine learning algorithms can be brought to bear to give coaches better guidance or input into the decisions they’re making about which players they put on the pitch and which ones should maybe take a rest and how they stack up against other players in the match,” Mr Russinovich said.

“This is early greenfields ideas, with not a lot of past experience to point to or playbooks to pull off the shelf … but it is powerful stuff when a system can look at data on a match in progress and marry that to historical data where Azure machine learning can get insights out of that data that humans just can’t get.”

By: Paul Smith

Posted On: http://www.afr.com/technology/australian-cricket-looks-to-tech-for-competitive-edge-with-new-microsoft-deal-20161111-gsn882

 

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Data deluge obscuring real cyber threats warns SAS

Australian businesses are drowning in a deluge of cyber security data, causing genuine threats to get lost in a sea of false positives, a top executive at multibillion-dollar business intelligence, analytics and data management firm SAS has warned.

In Melbourne last week to visit Australian clients, SAS cyber security vice-president Stewart Bradley said his company had joined the pantheon of vendors selling security services, as it believed greater use of analytics was required to analyse the unfathomable amount of threat data being generated.

“Organisations have largely tackled the security challenge through many different solutions that solve only small fractions of the problems they face,” Mr Bradley said.

“They have created a patchwork quilt of solutions … now they’re trying to get a better understanding of where their greatest risks are, and need a holistic view.”

Mr Bradley has spearheaded the growth of SAS’ cyber security division since it launched its first cyber security software suite in November last year.

SAS is one of the world’s largest private software firms and dedicates about a quarter of its $4.1 billion of revenue to research and development. It is poised to start offering its cyber security technology in Australia for the first time at the end of the year.

Its technology works by analysing how a machine should behave, thereby more accurately detecting significant security threats, even when the attack uses new security flaws or methods.

SAS will be targeting its Australian financial services clients, including the big banks, which already use SAS’ fraud detection software.

Converging threats

Mr Bradley said that in the past five years the threat to banks had transformed from one where individuals’ accounts were being fraudulently taken over, to mass compromises of user information and the sale of that on the dark web.

“The ecosystem of fraud and cyber has converged over the last five years. Now we’re seeing cyber events … where the ultimate monetisation of the breach is fraud,” he said.

“One of the biggest issues is that the environment is changing so rapidly from an attack perspective. All organisations are struggling to keep up … and the proliferation of bring-your-own-devices and the internet of things is eliminating the perimeter that was around organisations.”

Already the big four banks are said to be spending up to $100 million on cyber security measures each year and late last year Commonwealth Bank of Australia director Harrison Young said there was “approximately no chance that banks or even armies could keep hackers out of their systems”.

Mr Bradley said businesses would always be behind the cyber criminals, but by changing the approach to detecting cyber criminals to one that was less reliant on humans and more driven by computer analytics, it was possible to minimise their head start.

“We’ll always be in a situation where we’re trying to keep up with the cyber criminals. That’s the reality of the game we’re playing,” he said.

“Historically the protection of an organisation’s corporate assets has been focused on building a thicker and wider moat, but that’s no longer valid with the connectedness we have through the internet of things. It is shifting what organisations are doing from protection, to detection and response.”

Sector consolidation

The cyber security sector has become a hot spot for investors in recent times, leading to the creation of numerous players in the space.

Mr Bradley said that in 2015 more than 125 new cyber security vendors entered the market, and he tipped a consolidation of the sector.

“When the older players in the market are developing enterprise security platforms that allow integration across an organisation’s ecosystem, that’s what will drive vendor consolidation,” he said.

“Our role is to be the analytics fabric that can support the integrated security platforms to be able to make sense of the data that is being shared.”

By: Yolanda Redrup

Posted On: http://www.afr.com/technology/web/security/data-deluge-obscuring-real-cyber-threats-warns-sas-20161108-gskham

 

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PayPal users can now use their voice to send cash via Siri

PayPal users can now send money to friends and family using just their voice, after the payment service announced it was to integrate into Apple’s Siri.

Siri is the voice-based virtual assistant embedded into the iPhone, and can be used to set reminders, answer questions and help with tasks.

From Thursday, PayPal said users running iOS 10 on their iPhone will be able to use commands such as “Hey Siri, send John STG25 using PayPal” to transfer money as an alternative to using the official app.

Apple’s software uses voice recognition so only the known owner of the device can use the voice commands.

PayPal’s Meron Colbeci said consumers in 30 countries would be able to use the new service.

“Sending and receiving money from friends and family has long been one of the most popular activities on PayPal. In fact, last year we did $US41 billion in peer-to-peer (P2P) volume across PayPal, Venmo and Xoom,” he said.

“And, with the holidays around the corner, PayPal predicts more than 17 million P2P transactions in the month of December alone.

“With so many P2P transactions happening during such a busy season, we’re excited to give our users an early holiday present: starting November 10, Siri will be integrated with PayPal. For iPhone and iPad users running iOS 10, making a payment has never been easier – PayPal users can now send and request money via a voice command with Siri.”

The use of voice-based assistants is a growing trend in technology, with both Amazon and Google having recently launched speaker hubs which use voice commands to control other smart, connected appliances around the home, while Microsoft also has its own assistant, called Cortana, built into Windows 10.

Posted On: http://www.afr.com/technology/paypal-users-can-now-use-their-voice-to-send-cash-via-siri-20161110-gsmuvh

 

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Some IT pros say Apple’s new MacBook Pro is just ‘really disappointing’

When Apple unveiled its new MacBook Pro laptops at a media event last month, Adam Leventhal, a software engineer, was eager to learn about them.

Yet by the time he finished watching a live stream of the event, Leventhal, who has owned only Mac computers for the last 30 years, was turned off. “With this one I was really disappointed,” he said.

For a new laptop, the MacBook Pro has been divisive. That may partly be because the model, which has long been used by creative professionals and coders, has stayed largely the same since 2012. So this time, when Apple introduced some fairly radical changes, emotions among some longtime Mac customers ran high.

In their latest incarnation, MacBook Pros have only one type of connection port, as opposed to the several types they had before. That will require people to buy adapters to plug in devices that use different types of connectors. On the keyboard, Apple also replaced the top row of physical keys, including the Escape key, with a virtual touch strip called the Touch Bar.

The benefits? The new laptops are faster, much thinner and lighter than the previous generation, and they have about 10 hours of battery life. The Touch Bar’s virtual buttons transform depending on the app you are using, unlocking the potential for software makers to create custom shortcuts.

I tested the new MacBook Pros which cost $US1500 ($1988) to $US2800, depending on the model while gathering reactions to the new computers from engineers and information technology professionals over two weeks. I concluded that while the new laptops are capable enough for many professionals, there is no need to rush to buy one.

Highlights and lowlights

USB-C: Stock Up on Adapters

With the new laptops, Apple has gone all in on USB-C, the next-generation USB port. This small, oval-shaped connection is expected to replace the bulkier, rectangular port known as USB-A on many computing devices and accessories in the next few years.

In my tests, having only USB-C on the MacBook Pros was the biggest change. The previous MacBook Pros included USB-A and some other types of ports, including HDMI, for connecting devices like printers and monitors. Now the USB-C ports will be the only way to hook up just about everything, including power chargers, external screens and photo-card readers, to the laptop. The entry-level MacBook Pro has two USB-C ports, and the higher-end models include four.

What this means in the near term is that you may have to buy adapters to plug in devices with different connectors. Annoyingly, that includes the iPhone power cable, which has a USB-A connector. So to charge an iPhone on a new MacBook Pro, for example, you have to hook up the cable to a dongle that connects USB-A and USB-C devices.

The transition to USB-C might be a headache, but it is easily resolved by picking up some inexpensive adapters. I bought mine from Monoprice.

Touch Bar: A Blank Slate

With the Touch Bar, Apple intended to replace some outdated keys with a versatile strip that adapts to the apps you are using. Apple also built a fingerprint sensor into the Touch Bar.

The Touch Bar is a breeze to get the hang of, but I didn’t find it helpful in streamlining tasks. If you open the Photos app, for example, the Touch Bar displays thumbnails of photos in your library, and you can tap one to select a photo to edit. That’s neat, but why not just select the photo on your laptop screen? When using the Safari browser, you can use the Touch Bar to select a different browser tab but using keyboard shortcuts (Command+1 to choose the first tab, for instance) is quicker.

The Escape key also exists as a virtual button on the Touch Bar. I didn’t mind that because I rarely use this key, but the design decision made Leventhal, the software engineer, wince. He said the physical Escape key was crucial for coders, and not being able to press it seemed crippling.

Speed and Memory Limits

Many Apple loyalists have fixated on the memory constraints and underwhelming performance of the new MacBook Pros. The new models have a maximum of 16 gigabytes of RAM the same limit as the previous MacBook Pro and roughly the same processor speed as the last professional notebooks. But that’s not the full story.

The new notebooks are much faster in some ways than older models, while other parts are only slightly faster. In speed tests run with the app Geekbench 4, the 15-inch MacBook Pro’s computer processor was only 10 per cent to 17 per cent faster than the 15-inch model released in 2012. Yet the graphics processor, which is crucial for heavy computing tasks, in the new MacBook Pro is about twice as fast as the one in the older model, and the storage drives are much faster, too.

The RAM limit might irk users who need power. The more RAM you have, the more applications you can open and the more quickly your computer can juggle them. The problem, in theory, is that in a few years if your future apps hog more memory, you won’t be able to add more memory to MacBook Pros because the most they can hold is 16 gigabytes.

Wait for the Early Adopters

Professional Mac users are too divided on the MacBook Pro for me to make a blanket recommendation.

One thing is sure: For casual users or anyone buying their first laptop, who may just want a computer for web browsing and lightweight apps, the MacBook Pro is overkill. A Chromebook, like the $US430 Chromebook 13 from Dell, or the $US1,000 MacBook Air, Apple’s least expensive notebook computer, are slower and have lower-resolution screens, but they are powerful enough for your needs.

The new MacBook Pros are probably powerful enough for most professionals.But if you consider yourself a power user and are skeptical about the MacBook Pro, you might wait to see whether the initial concerns are borne out after early adopters start using their machines. Plenty have already bought them: Apple said early orders for the new MacBook Pro have been stronger than for past professional notebooks.

On the plus side, these notebooks are fast, with high-resolution screens and responsive keyboards. But the Touch Bar so far feels gimmicky, and not many devices or accessories come with USB-C connectors yet.

The MacBook Pros are also expensive, and some users may end up spending thousands of dollars above the retail price for add-ons like extra storage.

So if you aren’t ready to make the jump to USB-C and you don’t want to spend a big chunk of your savings, it’s reasonable to wait for the new Apple notebooks to realize their potential or drop in price.

By: Brian Chen, The New York Times

Posted On: http://www.afr.com/technology/technology-companies/apple/some-it-pros-say-apples-new-macbook-pro-is-just-really-disappointing-20161114-gspabd

 

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Apple Releases Portrait Mode for iPhone 7 Plus

Apple releases Portrait mode for iPhone 7 Plus that gives shallow depth of field feature like a DSLR

FORGET about grabbing that clunky DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera. Your iPhone 7 Plus today has just become a much better camera.

Apple has finally launched the Portrait feature that was the highlight of the iPhone 7 announcement last month.

Through software trickery, the Portrait feature recognises the subject in a photo and isolates that by blurring objects that are in the distance.

Although it’s called Portrait mode, you don’t need to be shooting pictures of people to get it to work.

Today we tested it at our desk using a roll of sticky tape, and we now have an arty picture of the sticky tape with the rest of the office blurred in the background.

When you take a picture with Portrait mode, you get two versions of the photo in your camera roll. One has the photo with the depth-of-field effect applied, the other is just a straight out of the lens shot.

REVIEW: Why the iPhone 7 Plus is the phone you really want

There are a couple of catches when using the Portrait mode.

For one, you need the iPhone 7 Plus with the dual lens cameras — it won’t work with the iPhone 7 or any other iPhone. This is a feature that is unique to the 7 Plus phone model and not a part of the general iOS 10 software because it requires the two lenses in the largest iPhone to detect the distance of objects.

When you go to Portrait mode, it automatically switches to the 2x lens. It then tells you if you are too close to the subject with the words “move farther away” appearing on the screen until it’s happy with the distance between you and the subject. The feature will not work in low light.

The feature, although released today, is still in beta. That means Apple will continue to improve it although given it is now part of the latest iOS 10 release Apple considers it stable enough for wide public use.

This is not true depth of field that you get with a wide aperture on a DSLR camera and the software, although very clever, is not perfect.

With our photo of the roll of sticky tape, the soft focus effect was applied to the inside of the roll which, if we had taken the photo with a DSLR, should have been as sharp as the rest of the roll.

To use the feature with your iPhone 7 Plus today, first go to Settings and download the latest software update.

Portrait mode then appears in your camera between the Photo and Square modes.

By: Rod Chester, News Corp Australia Network

Posted On: http://www.news.com.au/technology/apple-releases-portrait-mode-for-iphone-7-plus-that-gives-shallow-depth-of-field-feature-like-a-dslr/news-story/934a4ae5d06d01ee852b982c41567a31

 

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NBN achieves ‘lightning fast’ speeds in promising lab trial of XG.FAST technology

EMERGING technology that promises to dramatically increase internet speeds over copper wires has been successfully trialled in the lab by the National Broadband Network (NBN), the company said.

NBN co has concluded its trials of high-bandwidth technology known as XG.FAST which commenced last month, claiming to have achieved “lightning fast” peak aggregate speed of 8Gbps over 30m of twisted-pair copper, it said in a statement Tuesday.

The mandated minimum speeds to be provided under the NBN is 25Mbps. According to the latest Akamai State of the Internet Report the average Australian broadband speed currently comes in at 8.5Mbps. As NBN co points out, the XG.FAST trials provide speeds which are 900 times faster than the current national average.

The NBN also said it achieved peak average speeds of 5Gbps over a 70m copper line.

A number of technologists and media commentators have lamented the NBN’s commitment to using Telstra’s ageing copper network (which will eventually need to be replaced) to help build much of the giant infrastructure project, but the company is keen to prove there is plenty of life left in copper with new technology allowing for greater performance.

“Although XG.FAST is still in its very early stages of development the lab trials we have conducted demonstrates the huge potential that the technology offers,” NBN’s chief technology officer Dennis Steiger said in a statement.

“XG.FAST gives us the potential ability to deliver multi-gigabit speeds over copper lines — virtually on a par with what is currently available on Fibre-to-the-Premises — but at a lower cost and time to deploy.

“While our core goal remains to connect eight million premises to the NBN by 2020 we are keeping a close eye on new technologies like XG.FAST to ensure we can meet the future bandwidth demands of Australian broadband users,” he said.

The lab trials were conducted at the NBN headquarters in northern Sydney in conjunction with vendor Nokia.

NBN co is the third operator in the global market to trial the technology, after the UK’s BT last year and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom in February.

SO WHAT IS XG. FAST?

Simply put XG.FAST is the next version of a Nokia-owned technology known as G.Fast which provides a way to send information across the end of a digital subscriber line (DSL) with much greater speeds.

G.Fast is seen by some as the answer to the copper versus fibre debate because it allows copper to be given fibre-like abilities, and is rolled out over the final 30 to 100m of copper wiring.

Chief executive Bill Morrow has always maintained the building of the NBN has been about getting the network to Australians as quickly as possible while ensuring a clear path to upgrade its potential.

During a site trip outside of Brisbane in March, Mr Morrow told news.com.au that with the emergence of new “techniques that are further advanced, that further reduce the cost … then we’ll push the fibre down the street to give people what they need, when they need it.”

The trial of XG.FAST technology is about ensuring he is able to make good on that promise.

The company recently announced it will abandon much of Optus’ cable TV network and instead opt to roll out fibre-to-the-distribution-point (FttDP) for an extra 700,000 premises, meaning fibre will be run closer to the final connection at the home.

While the rollout of XG.FAST in the field is still many years away, such FttDP connections could be the ideal place to start introducing the technology, and ultimately provide Australians with the broadband capabilities we will desperately require in the future.

By: Nick Whingham

Posted On: http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/nbn/nbn-achieves-lightning-fast-speeds-in-promising-lab-trial-of-xgfast-technology/news-story/5db03b8b3581b956322af638574a1652

 

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Here’s How to Keep Your Computer Safe and Secure

I’m sure you’re aware there are hackers and viruses out there looking to wreak havoc and steal your hard-earned money, sensitive data and personal identity. But please don’t let this scare you away from using computers and technology.

Arming yourself with some knowledge and putting some proactive and defensive tools in place can go a long way. So here I share a few ways you can keep your computer safer and more secure.

Don’t call any phone number your computer tells you to.

A common method scammers use to reel you in is to display fake virus alerts on your computer and say you need to call in order to get your computer cleaned, or you need to download or buy some software that can fix it. These are completely false. I know these scammers are good at sounding convincing, but don’t listen to them.

Ignore phone calls out of the blue about your computer.

Another method scammers use to reel in victims is to cold call random people, say they have computer problems, and offer help or point you to someone who can help. Don’t trust anyone who calls out of the blue about your computer, even if they say they’re from Microsoft or some other big organisation. Legitimate companies don’t cold call people like that.

Be cautious of remote computer support.

Not all remote computer support companies are out to steal your money or data, or infect you with viruses, but they may not have qualified technicians either. Even if you don’t think they’re scamming you, ask yourself why you trust them with your computer. Perhaps find a local computer support company with good reviews that you can also see face to face and learn to trust.

Use good antivirus and anti-malware.

Although no one single antivirus or anti-malware program can catch or fix all the viruses and malware out there, you should still use one that’s proven to be good. I suggest Bitdefender Internet Security (www.bitdefender.com) and Malwarebytes Antimalware (www.malwarebytes.com).

Don’t use unsolicited cleaners or boosters.

There are many PC cleaners and boosters out there, but many don’t help that much, and especially aren’t worth paying for. If you have these types of programs on your computer and you don’t remember installing them, I suggest not using them unless you’re certain they’re legitimate. If you’d like to check out a legitimate cleaner, try the free edition of Glary Utilities (www.glarysoft.com) or CCleaner (www.piriform.com).

Back up your important documents and photos.

Just in case your computer becomes infected or it crashes, I suggest backing up anything you don’t want to lose. Though we can sometimes recover files after an incident, sometimes it’s just not possible or feasible. Backing up to an external hard drive or flash drive is a start, but you might want to consider paying for online backup, like CrashPlan (www.crashplan.com), so your data is safe even if there’s a fire or other physical disaster.

Use content filtering if you have children around.

The internet has tons of useful information and then has tons of worthless information and inappropriate content as well. Children can even stumble upon this when they aren’t looking for it, so it’s a big idea to be proactive. Though content filtering can’t block all inappropriate content, it can certainly help. I suggest using OpenDNS (www.opendns.com) along with adult supervision.

Eric Geier is the owner of On Spot Techs, which provides on-site computer repair and IT services at homes and businesses in the Dayton area. This article first appeared in The Dayton Daily News.

The New York Times

By: Eric Geier

Posted on: http://www.afr.com/technology/web/security/heres-how-to-keep-your-computer-safe-and-secure-20160927-grpxp9

 

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NBN Co Revenue Jumps as National Broadband Network Users Rise

The company in charge of rolling out the national broadband network says it is well on track towards its long term goals after adding about 338,000 new homes and businesses to the system in the September quarter.

Most of the growth came on the back of a lift in the number of Fibre-to-the-Node (FTTN) connections.

The fast-to-implement technology, introduced in September 2015 despite criticism of its relative performance, is currently helping drive overall footprint expansion, NBN Co said.

The federal government-owned NBN reached 3.2 million premises by September 30.

Chief executive Bill Morrow said that number had now reached 3.4 million, representing nearly 30 per cent of the company’s overall 2020 target.

“This quarter’s result is further evidence that we are on track to achieve our long term targets,” he said over a conference call on Tuesday.

The corporation earned revenue of $181 million for the three months to September, more than double from a year ago, driven by a jump in active end- users.

Active users rose to 1.38 million at September-end, chief financial officer Stephen Rue said, compared to about 611,000 a year ago.

The user base rose more than 25 per cent in the three-month period, he said.

Average revenue per user – a key figure for the telecommunications industry – was steady at $43 a month over the year.

NBN incurred $1.48 billion in capital expenditure during the September quarter.

“We are adding more than 100,000 homes and businesses to NBN every month and I expect this number will only increase,” Mr Morrow said.

NBN said in September it would implement the new fibre-to-the-distribution-point (FTTdp) technology for 700,000 homes and businesses, as this would be cheaper than using the legacy Optus cable network.

About 400,000 of theses sites had been slated to get the more expensive HFC connections.

Posted on: http://www.afr.com/technology/web/nbn/nbn-co-revenue-jumps-as-national-broadband-network-users-rise-20161108-gskv3f

 

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