Australian Cybermalls News

PC Week, one of Australia's oldest weekly computing publications, has closed its doors. The colour glossy newspaper (which was modelled closely on the US-based Ziff-Davis publication of the same name) had been in continuous publication for more than 7 years and over the last 12 months had begun to carry regular Internet profiles as well as mainstream computer copy. However the last issue appeared on May 21st and shortly afterwards the company's Internet site was put off air. This leaves the market as the sole province of APN's Computer Week and IDG's Computerworld, PC Week's deadly rivals.

Melbourne company Sorento Communications plans to launch an Australian push service similar to Pointcast shortly. The new product - Sorento - will enter small scale beta testing soon. When complete, the company plans to offer Australian news, sport and weather as well as content supplied by domestic companies on its service. Sorento is unfazed by the fact that push technology will be included in the next versions of Netscape and Microsoft's browsers, reasoning that both are expected to focus on US content. Like Pointcast, the Sorento service will be delivered free of charge to subscribers with the company making its money from advertising.

Telstra will eliminate 2800 IT staff as a result of joining IBM and Lend Lease as a partner in Integrated Systems Solutions Corporation (ISSC), an outsourcing company that will take over responsibility for Telstra's network services. The 18-month deal will give Telstra a 26% stake in ISSC and staff will be relocated from one organisation to the other, greatly improving Telstra's balance sheet ahead of its $10 billion partial privatisation. Lend Lease will own 23% of ISSC and IBM will hold the remaining 51% The move makes ISSC equivalent in size to EDS and considerably larger than CSC, Andersen Consulting and Price Waterhouse in Australia, and is the latest in a long line of moves that Telstra has made over the last year in order to present as favourable a face to the stock market as possible.

Victorian power company United Energy has announced that it will trial voice and data transmission over power lines next year to see if Australia's electricity cables can be set up as an alternative to Telstra's telephone network. The technology to send analogue voice and data signals over power lines has existed since the 1950s, United says, but no-one has seriously investigated sending digital signals down the cables until now. United said that if its research trials are successful, power lines could achieve throughput rates of up to 34Mbps, eclipsing Telstra's recent cable offering of 10Mbps and opening up an alternative network to competing carriers. Since power cables are more widely dispersed than pay-TV cables, the move would also make cable-like speeds widely accessible to consumers outside major urban centres.

The monopoly over the issuing of Australian .COM domains will be broken on July 1st when telecommunications deregulation comes into force in the domestic market. A new body - the Australian Domain Name Administration (ADNA), set up by the Internet Industry Association of Australia (INTIAA) - will be incorporated on June 18th. Its first task will be to address problems associated with the current lack of competition in the com.au domain area after last October's sudden hand-over of the monopoly to Melbourne IT. While players in ADNA are not critical of the way MelbourneIT has handled the monopoly over the last six months, the move reflects a general feeling amongst INTIAA members that a lack of competition in the marketplace is an inherently unhealthy thing and that Australian commercial organisations will be better served by a more free-market approach. In the meantime, more than 2300 .COM.AU domains are set to be removed from DNS registries later this year because their owners are unable to be contacted to re-effect registration. The list is currently published on MelbourneIT's site.

Australian Cybermalls' upgrade from a T1 to a T3 line is now complete, several weeks after we first announced the move. Our new T3 line should deliver a speed improvement of anywhere between 30% and 300% to all of our visitors and make our site much more readily accessible to everyone, no matter where you live on the planet or the speed of your dial-up connection. Final delegation of our domain to its new IP address occurred yesterday afternoon and (as things turned out) we were only partially off air for brief periods over a 12-hour interval as final adjustments and testing were carried out, rather than the 24 to 48 hours we'd initially expected. There aren't many line speeds higher than T3 currently available so we expect this will be our last bandwidth upgrade for some time.

Oracle - the second-largest software company in the world next to Microsoft - has bought into Netscape's Navio Communications project, fuelling speculation that the company may ultimately buy out Netscape in its entirety (though both companies deny this). The alliance is intended to compete directly against Microsoft's recent initiatives in the Internet marketplace, including Microsoft's purchase of WebTV last month for $US425 million. Navio, which was announced last August, is Netscape's project to develop Internet connectivity for a range of common household appliances, TVs and handheld computers and Oracle is expected to make use of the technology to connect network computers to the Internet.

According to a study by Forrester Research, Australia is lagging behind the US and Japan in developing electronic commerce and is in danger of being left behind unless the country significantly lifts its game in the next few years. It a report that analysed 45 countries around the world, Forrester found that Australia, Italy, France, South Korea and Spain are all potentially lucrative markets that are in danger of being outflanked as global electronic commerce gathers pace. The report ranked the USA as the world leader in the area, closely followed by Japan, Canada, the UK and Germany. Other rapidly emerging countries include Singapore, The Netherlands, Belgium, Hong Kong, New Zealand and the Scandinavian countries.

The problems that have afflicted Australian Cybermalls over the last few days are not unique. A number of reports have surfaced which show that a very large number of Australian ISPs have also had part (or all) of their services severely disrupted during the last week as well. These include Telstra Big Pond (which has suffered major outages over the last 10 days, including complete meltdowns on May 10th and 16th); Ozemail (which has had email deliveries disrupted for a week); Global Info Links (similar problems); PowerUp Internet (email and web access outages) and MSN, where email and access difficulties have also been reported. At least part of the outage problems afflicting Australian ISPs have been blamed on Telstra, which has been upgrading the trans-Pacific links that connect the Australian leg of the Internet to the rest of the world since March this year.

As regular visitors discovered over the weekend, Australian Cybermalls did not go off air for 48 hours as we'd expected. Our hosts, wishing to minimise any possible disruption, were able to effect a last-minute change to their servers to ensure that we will still be available to you until our Australian domain name delegation is effected (a process that should now occur late on Wednesday, May 21st). All the same, our server was hit by severe intermittent outages over the last 24 hours and may have been unavailable to every second visitor during that time. Once again, we'd like to apologise if you've faced any difficulties accessing us over the last few days. These changes are necessary to provide you with a much better site and we hope to have all difficulties resolved shortly. In the meantime, thankyou for your patience and understanding.

Contrary to our earlier announcement on Monday, Australian Cybermalls is likely to be off air for as long as 48 hours over the coming weekend. However we hope to resume operations no later than Monday night Australian time (Sunday night, US time). As outlined in our earlier story, our nameservers are currently being altered as part of continual improvements to our site and our IP addresses will also alter as part of this changeover. Because the change will occur on a Saturday in Australia (when the domain delegation authorities take a deserved weekend break) the final delegation to our new servers won't occur until Monday evening, barring any unexpected technical difficulty. We apologise in advance to any visitors who may be temporarily inconvenienced by this but the end result of this process should be a faster and much more smooth-flowing site. Have a good weekend!

According to a recent study by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recent improvements to the HTTP protocol, portable network graphics (PNG) and cascading style sheets (CSS) are poised to cut page download waiting times by up to 400% and reduce Internet traffic globally by as much as 50%, leading to a significantly leaner, faster Internet in the very near future. The most dramatic speed improvements are expected to come from the widespread adoption of the HTTP 1.1 protocol, which will send much larger packets between sites and will use a technique called pipelining which will allow sites to send out streams of packets without waiting for an acknowledgement that each packet has been received. PNG is a new image formatting language which speeds up onscreen rendering and delivers higher quality images, whilst CSSs reduce the need to repeatedly broadcast formatting information as users move from page to page within a site. Most of these innovations are expected to be in widespread use within the next 12 months.

The Iridium Network - an ambitious proposal to belt the Earth with a string of low-orbit communications satellites - has officially begun with the launch and deployment of the first 5 satellites aboard a McDonnell Douglas Delta II rocket last week. The Iridium Network proposes to ultimately build and deploy 66 low-orbit satellites to provide high-speed global voice, data, fax and paging services from early 1998. Amongst many other benefits, this would allow seamless high-speed global Internet communications in many places currently hampered by a lack of adequate infrastructure (such as rural and outback areas of Australia). The next five satellites are expect to be in orbit within a few months.

Less than a month after Microsoft's purchase of WebTV Networks, consumer interest in the product appears to have fizzled. According to a survey of 77 retail outlets selling WebTV boxes by Computer Retail Week in the USA, retailers are struggling to achieve sales after an initial flurry of interest when the product was first launched. WebTV boxes (which sit atop a TV and allow users to surf the Net via a TV screen) are primarily aimed at people who have an interest in the Net but do not have a PC in the home. However, critics of the product argue that most people who do want Net access are likely to already possess a PC and that Internet surfing is essentially a one-to-one experience, unlike television viewing which is frequently a group experience.

Australian Cybermalls will be moving to new servers on Friday, May 16th. Our IP and nameserver addresses will be changing and because we have an Australian domain and need to rely on the services of the MelbourneIT registry to effect these changes we may be off air for a short time at the end of this week as the change is implemented. With good luck, this should be no more than hour. We apologise in advance to anyone who might be inconvenienced by the move, which is part of the continual process of improvements made to our site. If you have linked to any of our IP addresses in the past (and they've altered twice in the last 90 days) these links will be invalidated once again by the move. Please link to our URL addresses instead.

Visitors to Lifetime Photography's site in Australian Cybermalls have been accidentally locked out for the last four days due to a programming oversight. Anyone attempting to access Lifetime Photography with either Netscape Navigator or one of the more recent versions of Internet Explorer has been asked to enter a username and password to gain access to the directory. The error occurred when modifications were being made to our server and was accidentally overlooked for 96 hours. We have now corrected the error and we'd like to apologise to anyone who was inconvenienced by this oversight. Our QA procedures have been amended to prevent a recurrence in the future.

Several months after putting Internet censorship into the "too hard" basket, a Senate select committee has suggested bringing the Australian arm of the Internet under the same regulatory restrictions as TV and radio stations. The Senate's Committee on Community Standards' Inquiry Into Computer Online Services, which is currently conducting hearings in Canberra, has already received strong objections to the proposal from the Australian Computer Society and the West Australian Internet Association, both of whom have cautioned against "unworkable" legislation. However, it is believed that the Committee is likely to recommend that all domestic ISPs be be made to adhere to an industry code of conduct very similar to that imposed on other electronic broadcasters when the hearings are concluded. The code, however, would be voluntary.

Less than six weeks after pleading before the Senate that the growth of the Internet threatened to seriously degrade the performance of the public telephone network (PSTN) unless it were given the ability to charge for timed calls, Telstra Research Laboratories (TRL) have announced a new line of Net-enabled multimedia pay phones which will make use of the Net for voice and data calls and allow users to send and receive emails and faxes directly through public phone kiosks by seamlessly integrating the PSTN and the Internet together. The new i-Kiosks, which will be on display at Sydney's ATUG '97 conference later this month, are being developed at breakneck speed and could be available as early as the end of this year. TRL have also developed other technologies to make use of the Net via the PSTN which they believe will have significant export potential, as well as great use within Australia.

After months of delays and false starts, Telstra have announced that they will begin rolling out their cable modem broadband Internet service to 1 million households in Sydney and Melbourne almost immediately in one of the biggest broadband installations in the world. The new service, which will cost $595 for a modem and around $70 to $100 per month for usage, will allow Net surfing at speeds up to 100 times faster than a 28.8K dial-up service. Other state capitals will be offered cable modem facilities later in the year. The move, however, has angered ISPs who claim that Telstra is using its dominant position in the market to grab the lion's share of "power users" who are most likely to be attracted to the service before they are allowed to offer it as well, and propose to take the matter to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

According to MacWeek founder and industry guru Michael Tchong, the Internet passed two milestones in April: 50 million users and more than 1 million web sites. Speaking at the opening of Web Advertising '97 in Monterey, California, Mr Tchong also said that at least 15% of Internet users have now purchased something off the Net and that consumer fears over the security of Internet commerce appear to be abating. Meanwhile, market research firm IDC, speaking in Sydney at their annual IDC Directions 97 conference last week - said that they estimated that the true size of the Internet was closer to 27 million users in 1996 and is closer to 40 million than 50 million right now. However, IDC also said that they expect that the value of Internet commerce (an estimated $61 million in 1996) will balloon to $1.3 billion by 2001.

Intel will unveil the first of its new ultra-fast Pentium II chips on May 7th, putting the first nail into the coffin of superseded 486 machines and also marking the end of the Pentium Pro line (which industry commentators have regarded as a "brain dead" chip without a clearly-defined upgrade path). The first of the new Pentium II chips will run at 233MHz to 266MHz and will feature Intel's new cartridge-based design aimed at making future chip upgrades easier to carry out. It's expected that speeds will increase by around 30MHz every 3 months after the initial launch and that prices will drop accordingly as Intel rolls out progressively faster and faster models. By mid-1998 Intel expects that most new Pentium II PCs will run at between 350MHz and 400MHz.

The number of sites on the Australian Internet surged last month according to our monthly Australian Internet Growth Index, which has been measuring the growth of Australian sites for the last 15 months. The surge follows a relatively flat period in March, perhaps reflecting that many sites now have a development lead time of several months before they're launched. Sydney - gearing up in readiness for the 2000 Olympics - now accounts for roughly 30% of all Australian sites, followed by Melbourne (23%) and Brisbane (10%). The May 1st figures (with April 1st figures in brackets) are:

Australian Internet Growth Index April 1997
(Figures Show Estimated Sites)

Brisbane - 3,237 (2,542)
Sydney - 9,601 (7,678)
Melbourne - 7,486 (5,996)
Adelaide - 2,946 (2,338)

Perth - 2,917 (2,209)
Hobart - 1,206 (981)
Canberra - 2,616 (1,905)
Darwin - 2,314 (1,785)

During April 1997 Australian Cybermalls displayed 52,858 storefronts to an average of 1,762 visitors every day - roughly one visitor every 50 seconds. This represented a traffic increase of 60% over March 1997 when we displayed 34,087 storefronts to an average of 1,099 visitors per day.