AI Backlash, Mevo’s Collapse, Rural Connectivity, and Device Upgrades

Paul Spain:
Greetings and welcome to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain. And great to have Bill Bennett, tech and telecommunications journalist, back in the studio. How are you, Bill?

Bill Bennett:
I’m good, Paul.

Paul Spain:
Great to have you here. For those who may be new listeners and don’t know where you fit in, a little overview, Bill.

Bill Bennett:
Well, I’ve been writing about technology now for longer than a lot of you have been alive and these days it’s mainly about technology, telecommunications and so on. I would quite happily write about enterprise, but nothing seems to be there doesn’t seem much coverage of enterprises these days. And you’ll hear me on Radio New Zealand, you’ll see me occasionally on tv. I sometimes write about business for the Herald and I have my own website which is under my name.

Paul Spain:
Yes, yes, yep. And we’ll probably mention some one, one or two things from your website during the episode. Well, let’s jump in. Of course. Big thank you to our show partners, Spark, One New Zealand, 2degrees, Workday, Fortinet and Gorilla Technology. Really appreciate their support of the local tech and innovation ecosystems and for keeping the New Zealand Tech Podcast running. Also, just a quick mention, New Zealand High Tech gala awards dinner is this Friday. So really looking forward to that.

Paul Spain:
I believe it has sold out. Maybe there’s a wait list.

Bill Bennett:
It’s sold out.

Paul Spain:
Okay, yep, okay, yep, yep. But if you’re there, please have a look on the list and come and say hi, if you’re feeling sociable and you haven’t met me, I’ll be there. But it’s a very good event for sort of networking and, and meeting with people because there’s a list and you can just look somebody’s name up and find which table they’re at, which is always helpful. Well, let’s jump in. A lot going on locally as well as on the international front. So jumping into the local stories. Yeah, it was a bit sad to hear about Mevo going into liquidation. Now, Mevo were really, I think, you know, quite, quite an exciting approach to minimising or reducing the need to own a car or own as many cars through their car sharing offering, which, you know, I guess we’ve seen a number of these, you know, globally and, you know, we’ve had a handful of them here in New Zealand as well.

Paul Spain:
But they looked like they were going to be an offering that was going to sort of stick around for a while. They did a crowdfunding campaign that finished up in February and that was over subscribed. I think they were, or it was certainly over Their kind of base target, which I think the base target was sort of 2, 2.2 million and they raised 3.3. But then it was really, really just a month later that they went into voluntary administration March 1. And then, you know, we just found out on Friday that they’ve been placed into liquidation and creditors are owed $4.3 million. So, yeah, really, really, really, really sad to hear that. And especially for those that invested in the business, especially the crowdfunding campaign, because those campaigns are, you know, it’s a retail, retail funding and you know, there’ll be, you know, a whole bunch of, you know, folks who are not necessarily deep investment experts, but mums and dads investors. Yeah, they’ve gone in and chipped something in and thought this is, this is a good thing for New Zealand.

Paul Spain:
Mevo, of course, had lent pretty hard into electric vehicles with Tesla and BYD vehicles, which really resonated for a lot of people. But ultimately that became part of their downfall because that really pressured things from a capital perspective. And their final, you know, pivot was they were going to move to, you know, much lower cost vehicles. And they, you know, they, they recognized that they could, you know, potentially, you know, spend half or less than what they were spending on lower cost cars. And you know, for people just to be able to get around the place, you know, that’s often just fine.

Bill Bennett:
I guess if they sell the cars off, they should be able to get a lot of that money back. It’s not like, you know, some businesses collapse and there’s no assets to sell, but.

Paul Spain:
Well, I think they were under lease arrangements. Part of the challenge was that they got into difficulty with a provider and the owner of a lot of the vehicles. So their fleet was rapidly downsizing as well. And you know, they had been asked to put in, I think it was a 500k figure that was due probably going back a few months now. And it wasn’t very clear exactly what happened to that arrangement and whether they ultimately stepped up to that or not.

Bill Bennett:
I was gonna ask you if it was the model or the company, but it sounds like it’s the company, not the model.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I mean, it is an interesting one because these things haven’t universally worked internationally and you know, we are a smaller market in New Zealand as well. That doesn’t, yeah, that doesn’t necessarily help. But look, I think we can’t just sort of sit back and let you know all the new business models and innovations happen in other parts of the world. It’s good to see them happen. Here, but it’s not always going to actually work out or be a fit for the New Zealand market. And.

Bill Bennett:
Well, look, the thing, here’s the thing, right? Uber was a success and has been a success purely because it had $50 billion worth of venture capital to burn through in the early stages. And that gave it huge amount of scope for making mistakes in those first few years. There’s always a recovery. I guess if Mevo had $50 billion worth of venture capital to burn through, they’d still be around today.

Paul Spain:
And yeah, look, I remember one of the companies that they touted, I went up to a Ford event in Silicon Valley going back a good few years now, and I think Ford had partnered with this particular company. I’m trying to remember, was it called Getaround? Might have been the one. Or is that a, or is that a local New Zealand one? I might, I can’t remember. I have to have to get around. Yeah. Peer to peer car sharing launched in 2011. So, you know, these things have, or maybe even earlier, you know, been around for a fair number of years. And yeah, they certainly haven’t, you know, they haven’t all, you know, worked out.

Paul Spain:
Well, I mean, Uber. Yeah, you could delve into the Uber story because there’s, you know, some, I mean, some fascinating aspects to, you know, you know, following the rules and legislation or not following in a lot of cases. And yeah, they’re varying approaches and you know, of course, you know, they have certainly haven’t been universally successful around the world and you know, I think China ended up being, you know, one of their most challenging markets and now they’ve, you know, largely exited Asia. So, yeah, look, I think, you know, we need or we should encourage new innovative companies to start up and there’s varying ways in which that will happen. And sometimes it’s very much backed by traditional venture capital, other times it’s kind of inside companies. Obviously Spark with Spark Ventures, they’ve started up a bunch of things and, you know, some of that has worked and some of it hasn’t. Right.

Bill Bennett:
Some steps.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, you know, so, you know, there’s always a risk with these things, but probably some lessons in there around, yeah, your approach to investing in these sorts of things. It sounds like a bunch of people sort of, you know, burnt there in terms of that crowdfunding campaign with Mevo. And look, I hope what we ultimately hear is, you know, that they were completely sideswiped and that there was nothing untoward going on. But it does look a little odd that, you know, just a few short Weeks after they closed that crowdfunding campaign that they went into voluntary administration. On to next topic, we saw a report come out that was funded by our local telcos and our cell tower companies. So that’s Sparc 1 NZ 2 degrees 40 south and Connexa. Bill, you’ve written in detail about this on your blog at Billbennett Co NZ where you, you write a lot about telco. In fact I think you were saying to me before the show that your blog at Billbennett Co NZ now is purely telco and other tech topics you’re writing about on another site.

Paul Spain:
But maybe you can run us through the highlights of this report and the lens at which you’re sort of looking at at the situation, which I guess effectively we’re talking about a report that encourages future public funding into telecommunications to be much broader than say a focus on rolling out fibre to more of New Zealand’s population.

Bill Bennett:
Yeah, yeah, okay. So basically it was as I say, it was the local mobile industry. Collectively of course the tower companies used to be part of those three main telcos. They paid for a UK based analyst company to write their report. And the report as you say, basically says there should be a mix of technologies to reach rural New Zealanders. We’re talking here about the 13% of the population which isn’t on the fiber network.

Paul Spain:
That reaches 87%. 87% population homes and businesses around New Zealand now, right?

Bill Bennett:
Yeah, 87% on the network.

Paul Spain:
Originally the target was was it 80%?

Bill Bennett:
Was it 75?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, 75 second.

Bill Bennett:
But the extension took it up to 87 and there’s been a little bit of extra activity since then and there’s been some activity from some of the regional telcos as well with they’re building small fiber networks in what would be seen as rural areas, you know, that were off the, off the, off the

Paul Spain:
UFB map, smaller townships and so on.

Bill Bennett:
They would even amount to another 1% of the population. But potentially they could. And they could go beyond that. Potentially. Well look, the thing is that last year the infrastructure Commission produced a report saying basically that connecting more of those rural New Zealanders was a priority, a strategic priority for the nation. And they’re quite right. I mean it absolutely is. And at the time the discussion was that it can certainly go further than 87%.

Bill Bennett:
How much further is debatable. Chorus seems to think that they could get it up to about 95% and beyond 95%. The economics of connecting fiber start to peter out. It starts to become, you know, the cost of extra the extra distances involved and so on with fiber, because the cost of fiber tends to relate to the distances between connections.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, if you’ve got a whole lot of properties that are right next to each other, I mean, you know, ideal, what we’re sort of seeing around our cities in recent years, where we’re getting, you know, what was one residential property now has, you know, six, six or eight, you know, homes on it. That’s. That’s great bang for Buck.

Bill Bennett:
Yeah. And it costs. It’s a matter of hundreds of dollars to connect those to the network. When you start to have a driveway, which is, you know, 100 meters plus, or in some of these rural cases, you know, the driveways are way more than 100 meters, then it starts. The expense starts to rack up. And generally speaking, either wireless or satellite is seen as a better technology to deliver. Now, the thing about that report from Flint is that the telcos aren’t saying we want it to be wireless instead of fiber. They’re actually saying fiber where fiber is appropriate, wireless where wireless is appropriate.

Bill Bennett:
Which is. Which is a smart way of looking at it, because, you know, both are appropriate in their place and they’re complementary. But also, those telcos are our biggest retailers of fiber. I mean, the overwhelming majority of customers who are on the fiber network, their subscriptions are with Spark or 2 degrees or 1 New Zealand. And it works. The system works very well. But the thing is, they make a lot more margin from people that have got wireless broadband than fiber broadband, because basically when you have fibre, you’ve got a wholesaler and so someone else is clipping the ticket, whereas when they’ve got a fixed wireless broadband connection, it’s just one ticket, and so you get all the margin. So that’s the economics of it.

Bill Bennett:
But the thing that. The elephant in the room that’s not really covered very much in that report it’s mentioned, but it’s not covered in any depth, is that there’s a whole world of regional service providers.

Paul Spain:
The wireless Internet, we used to call

Bill Bennett:
them wireless, but they also.

Paul Spain:
Wisps, right?

Bill Bennett:
Yeah, yeah, wisps. But not even. I mean. And for a while, there was a lot of sort of stringing poles along valleys and putting towers on hilltops in rural areas, and it was all about wireless Internet, fixed wireless. But those companies, generally, those companies will sell you fiber. If you’ve got fiber to your home, that’s it, they’ll sell other services. Some of them have got arrangements with satellite companies to sell satellite services too, so that they’re more regional. In their focus, it’s the regional thing which is more important now than the technology.

Bill Bennett:
Because as this report says, it’s not so much about the technology, it’s about getting everyone connected. And I think that they tend to be closer to their customers and they tend to be more geared into the regional challenges. It’s quite easy for someone sitting in a regional small town to bump into people in the local supermarket and get a picture of what’s really going on, whereas someone who’s sitting in a nice corporate town in the middle of Auckland might not necessarily see that. So there’s an argument for those, some arguments in favor of those rural service providers and they do a very good job.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I think it’s been a really important part of the market and I think it’s always important to have. Have competition. Obviously, the ability for a little small service provider to compete with a big national one will vary in terms of how much of the market that they can pick up. Right. They’re not going to have a big budget to promote themselves.

Bill Bennett:
Some of them can pretty much name all their customers as well. They’re that small. But the other thing is that some of them have had some government funding over the years, particularly when there was some provincial growth fund money that was handed out during the previous. The Labour government, when Shane Jones was. When New Zealand first were in a partnership with the government and they handed out this rural growth fund money, provincial growth fund money. But in general, the wisps don’t get much of a subsidy or don’t get much government money. They’re doing it on their own. So it’s very much sort of the sharp end of free enterprise in their world.

Bill Bennett:
And like I say, the report is, it’s sensible, it’s not, it’s balanced. They say that in some cases fiber is the right technology, in other cases wireless isn’t. And it’s really a plea to share the money out if there is any money. But at the moment, there isn’t any government money being talked about for these projects at the moment, though, that could change. But if there is money, then these telcos would like some of that, please. Thank you. The real question is, can we get that last 13% connected? Well, the truth is, most of that last 13% is connected one way or another. Even if it’s just Starlink, they have options, but there are better options.

Bill Bennett:
And Starlink’s a bit. There are some issues with Starlink. I mean, in the last few days, Starlink hiked its prices again. It’d been dropping its prices over the years to compete. And I think last week it just put its prices up again, which is probably because there’s the IPO coming up and it’s got, you know, it’ll make the books look better if the prices are higher. But. And of course the satellite thing will get competitive when Amazon comes online, which is possibly later this year. So there’s lots going on in rural, but this is really a plea from the.

Bill Bennett:
The mobile companies to get a share of it. And the curious thing about it is that the mobile companies are very active in rural connectivity with the Rural Connectivity Group, because the Rural Connectivity Group, of course, is a joint venture between these three companies. So they could have gone into this project, they could have gone into this fiber, this challenging strategy, government strategy thing with wearing their Rural Connectivity Group hat, but they didn’t. They went in separately as the. The mobile providers, which tells you something about what they’re playing with, what they, what they’re up to there.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, look, I, I think there’s. There’s a lot to be said around the benefit we have as a country from having rolled out the fiber, the, you know, the original Ultra Fast Fast Broadband initiative. And then, yeah, there’ve been these varying projects, you know, since the rural broadband initiative, RBI2, you know, et cetera, et cetera. All of these things have helped give us coverage in New Zealand. And the satellite connectivity, obviously, is part of that mix, in addition to what’s actually kind of really happened locally. I was, you know, I was a little bit sort of surprised to, you know, to see, you know, this report because I hadn’t clicked that there, you know, there was likely to be a lot of consideration given to rolling out more fibre to New Zealand. It seemed like we’ve kind of hit that sweet spot. But there was a bit of a push some months ago, you were mentioning to me that was sort of suggesting that we should look at going further with fibre.

Bill Bennett:
Well, and the other thing is that just about every other. Well, no, not just about every other country in the world, because lots of countries haven’t. But pretty much all the countries which we like to compare ourselves with have started to go further. So the European Union has a goal of, I think, of getting everyone on fiber by 2030. Now, when they say everyone, they don’t mean 100%, but they do mean something like, you know, 97, 98, 99% of Europe will be. Will have a fiber connection by 2030 and they look to be on track to getting there. I mean, we’re not saying you know, we’re not saying 100%, but we’re saying very high 90s percentage coverage. That’s, you know, I mean, obviously Singapore’s a city, so it’s a bit of an unusual.

Bill Bennett:
We shouldn’t really be comparing ourselves to Singapore. I mean, connecting up, you know, the HAAS past is not the same as connecting up the deepest, furthest reaches of Singapore.

Paul Spain:
No, no, I mean to get to 100% of Singapore, it’s like getting 100% of non rural, you know, Auckland. Right. And you know, the apartment, you know, most people living in apartments, the very, very large majority of the population. So. Yeah, but yeah, I was just, I was looking at some, some, yeah, some of the data online and there’s certainly some, you know, some countries that have gone a chunk, you know, further, further than, you know, New Zealand. Spain was one that I saw. You mentioned that to me before the show.

Bill Bennett:
Spain is talking about getting to. Again, they say 100, but they don’t mean every single person. They mean 97, 98, 99% of the population will be in Spain probably before 2030.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see if they do. I think that probably some interesting differences with Spain is that they’ve got, they’ve got a bigger land mass. New Zealand, roughly twice I think the land mass, but ten times the population. So, you know, I remember having driven through Spain, you know, they’re, you know, you’re in a, in, in one little village and you drive to the next. It’s, you know, they’re not very, they’re not very sort of, you know, spread out.

Bill Bennett:
I grew up in the uk, which has a similar problem. Right. I would say that you, you’d be pub pressed to be anywhere in the UK. You’re not 10 minutes drive from a pub. So. Yeah, that’s true. But look, Spain does have some fairly remote places though. They have some islands out in the Atlantic.

Bill Bennett:
There’s parts of Spain you get into

Paul Spain:
the like of the Canaries and so on, what their fiber connections are like.

Bill Bennett:
Yeah, well, getting to get into places like Pyrenees and so on. There’s some remote parts of Spain and so it’s not that different. I mean it’s, it’s closer to us than Singapore.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I just looked up Canary Islands. Apparently fiber to the home coverage reaching nearly 93% of homes. So yeah, it is fascinating to have a look.

Bill Bennett:
So if the Canary Islands can do it, why can’t we?

Paul Spain:
Well, yeah, I think there are probably a range of differences. I mean, look, I think the approach of pick what’s the right technology, you know, in each case, rather than just go, well, let’s do fibre. Look, personally, I think, look, fibre is the gold standard. It’s super reliable, it’s, you know, it’s awesome. But actually, you do get fibre, you know, outages. There is something to be said for making sure we’ve got other types of connectivity. And as you highlighted earlier, you know, when homes are all stacked up close to each other, it’s actually reasonably good value to get it out there. But when homes are long distances apart, long driveways, all those sort of things, it’s probably never gonna make too much sense economically.

Bill Bennett:
And it would be. I mean, for example, there are farms where they’re like two or three kilometers from the main road. To get. Could be even more. And that’s just not practical. But the farmer. I mean, a farmer could dig a trench perhaps, but. But much easier for there to be a tower down in the, you know, the valley and just beam it up.

Paul Spain:
Well, 5G connectivity’s got pretty good, right, you know, as has, you know, satellite connectivity.

Bill Bennett:
Well, yeah, like I say, there are issues there. But the, the other thing is, the other thing we should mention, though, is that those rural towers, the best ones, most of them, where it’s possible, are actually connected by fiber anyway. So if you, if you’re dry, if you’re building a fiber link out to a tower somewhere, then it’s not, it’s not a lot harder to build a fiber link from that tower to the neighboring houses.

Paul Spain:
I’m not sure about that.

Bill Bennett:
No, no, it’s not.

Paul Spain:
I don’t think they’ve structured it.

Bill Bennett:
It’s not always the case.

Paul Spain:
But in theory, yeah, in theory, yeah.

Bill Bennett:
And so what I’m saying is, is that realistically we should be getting fiber up higher than 87%. We should be encouraging and helping the regional companies to build their fiber networks. That’s a great initiative. If there is government money going into this, then some of that government money should be able to go to the mobile phone companies so that they can get fixed wireless broadband to places where that’s the appropriate technology. Basically, everyone’s a winner.

Paul Spain:
Good to hear your thoughts on that, Bill. We’ll keep moving. One thing I did want to mention, our mobile networks, actually, in the past few months, we have had a few outages and we haven’t really talked much about outages recently, but it sort of stood out and surprised me when I stepped back and thought about the outages that we’ve had recently because our Mobile networks and our connectivity through our New Zealand telcos has largely been very, very good in recent years. And they’ve been, I think, continuing to invest in. How do we just tweak up that reliability a little bit further? And in fact, we had news through from SPARC and their tower partner Connexa, on work that they’re doing to upgrade cell towers at the moment with extended battery capacity, supported by government funding, which, you know, is a positive thing to increase the resiliency. We know when we’ve had some major weather events over the last couple of years, the cellular networks have often stood up really, really well. But where there have been challenges, extra investment has gone into, you know, things like better generators, battery backup, start getting

Bill Bennett:
a generator to site if the bridge is out.

Paul Spain:
Oh, yes, yeah. But also link UPS to satellites. So if the fibre that connects the cell site is down, an ability then for that cell site to run off satellite to still deliver connectivity. So a lot of that stuff going on. But the outages, I just put together a short list. We had March 18, 2 degrees had a nationwide outage impacting parts of their network. That was resolved, you know, within, I think, some hours. May 1, there was a reasonably large outage impacting 1 New Zealand and 2 degrees.

Paul Spain:
And that led to some intermittent sort of issues across, you know, parts of the network. I think Lower north island, sort of south there. It was one NZ that I heard about when that happened. But it was mentioned that 2 degrees also had some impact there. Not spark on that one. We’re recording this on the 19th of May yesterday, one NZ had an outage. Yeah. That disrupted mobile networks.

Paul Spain:
And then just going online with Spark today to look up. I was just curious how they’ve been. And they mentioned they’ve got an outage impacting the Buller district in terms of Internet connectivity there. That’s been going on for. Well, when I looked, it had been going on for a couple of hours or so. So, yeah, none of these things are 100%. 100% of the time, right? Yeah.

Bill Bennett:
Look, I think there’s a couple of things to say in defense of the companies here, is that the first one is that these outages which we’ve been seeing, they tend to be quite limited in their scope, so it’s not affecting everyone. And the other thing is they tend to be very limited in terms of how long things are offline. So, I mean, if we go back, if we go back a number of years, there were times when networks were offline for longer and more people were affected. So There seemed to be more. We seem to have had a spate of incidents in the last few weeks, but none of them have been major or really troublesome. And so I think, I feel it’s largely under control. But it could just be pure statistics, statistical chance that there’s been a few recently. You know, it’s like buses all coming at once and so on.

Paul Spain:
Well, I mean, the thing is we know they’re continually investing in these networks, right. They do not stop and they’ve probably got the best data on their networks ever when we hear about. And they’re much better at prep those sites of things.

Bill Bennett:
Well, so that, so it’s quite common now for them for the systems to flag up a warning. This tower needs attention now because it’s, it’s running, but it might not be and so on. So that’s, that’s good too.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So even though we’ve seen, yeah, we’ve seen, you know, more than we’ve probably traditionally seen in the last few weeks, I guess the expectation is that, you know, that that will, that will, that will sort of smooth off and you know, we’re not, not likely to see, see that sort of activity on an ongoing basis.

Bill Bennett:
The other thing I think that we haven’t really talked about is that there’s, I’m not going to say that there’s been any sabotage with these outages. I don’t think there have. But I don’t think the tower saboteurs and that kind of nonsense. I don’t think that’s entirely gone away. I think, I would imagine there’s some of that still ongoing. I don’t think there aren’t many people out there now who still think that 5G gives you illnesses or whatever. But there’s, you know, there’s probably a few wouldn’t. Yeah, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that there’s some of that still out there.

Paul Spain:
Also on the new in the news locally was, you know, this is an area I’ve been very curious about is hydrogen powered hydrogen fueled vehicles on the road. And we now see there’s close to a dozen hydrogen fueled trucks through a partnership of Haringa and TR Group. Now this has been sort of reasonably, you know, slow moving. We’ve been, you know, certainly hearing about hydrogen, you know, as a way of fueling vehicles for a long time. But, you know, it’s good to see that there’s some progress on that front. And yeah, it’s happening in New Zealand. I think one of the challenges with hydrogen is, you know, Storing it and distributing it and actually making that work in vehicles. And I think there was the classic case of someone in Christchurch that bought a new hydrogen fueled vehicle, but wasn’t able to actually, you know, refill their vehicle and actually use it because the infrastructure wasn’t there.

Bill Bennett:
Right, that’s exactly what I was about to say, is that the, the thing is, it’s all grand, but do we need infrastructure for yet another technology where we have infrastructure for fossil fuels? We have infrastructure, it’s beginning to develop in a meaningful way around the country. For electric vehicles, a third set of infrastructure seems to be a big expense, which I’m not saying that it’s not worth doing. I’m saying that, you know, we need to think about whether a third infrastructure is required. I would imagine that these people that are trialing hydrogen trucks have got that fixed. I mean, they’ve obviously got some way to get, to make sure that their trucks don’t run out of fuel. But if we’re gonna, if we’re going to commit to that nationwide, well, you know, maybe we should see what happens with electricity first. Electric cars first.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, look, I mean, there’s a fair bit to probably, you know, delve into the pros and cons of this approach. And look, it’s coming about in part because there has been government funding to support it, you know, rather than it being something that’s purely been, you know, a commercial endeavour. But, you know, this is part of trying new things and working out what’s going to be the right fit, you know, for New Zealand in the longer term.

Bill Bennett:
And, you know, I think hydrogen’s value is that it’s a better option for getting a lot of power to a truck compared with the battery technology. I mean, if you’re carrying, if you need a truck which has got a lot of traction, you need quite big batteries, which is obviously adding to the weight of the truck. And it’s circular, whereas I think hydrogen is more efficient that way. But it’s great that we’re trying this stuff.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And look, lot quicker, you know, I believe, to refuel a hydrogen vehicle than to charge, you know, charge up a big truck. Cause we don’t have that sort of infrastructure in New Zealand at the moment. But, you know, that is a fast evolving space. And you know, of course we know, you know, in China they’ve been demonstrating very fast charging of electric cars. And so, you know, as this technology evolves, you know, give it, give it a period of years and the fleets will, will look quite different whether we’ve actually you know, flipped over from, you know, a fossil fuel world of petrol and diesel to a range of electric type options, you know, including the hydrogen fuel cell type trucks. I’m not sure how that plays out.

Bill Bennett:
Well, I think when it comes to decarbonizing transport, I think what we’re seeing up to a point, the likes of President Trump and Iran are making that decision for us. It’s actually if you hadn’t been thinking about electric vehicles before, you certainly are thinking about them.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, and we’ve seen that in the price of secondhand EVs in New Zealand and the sales going up of electric vehicles. All right, now onto I guess more international, more global topics. Fair bit going on. Couple I wanted to tap in on Chrome silently installing a four gig local, you know, locally based LLM on your computer, you know, an AI large language model, without necessarily getting a, you know, an okay from, you know, from users to, you know, both to, you know, put that on your drive, but also for the AI to operate on your device. Do you see any issues with that or is this just the, the nature of look, software keeps upgrading and this is part of the world we’re in, that your local devices is going to do some AI?

Bill Bennett:
No, there’s horrific issues with that because you shouldn’t need to upgrade your computer just because Google’s decided to stuff Chrome with extra features. It’s actually an argument not to have Chrome not to use Chrome and it’s a clear argument to that. The thing is, is that it is. I was looking at something a while ago which is, which sounds unrelated but bear me out on this, right? When I back in the 90s, I was the editor of the Australian Net Guide in Over on the other side of the Tasman and we looked at this, we had a story about how big web pages were getting. This is like in the late 90s and people were complaining that web pages were getting up to 30 kilobytes. It was like, you know, shocking. And would we be able to cope with, you know, perhaps they could go to 100 kilobytes. Well, you know, not so long ago I looked at a newspaper website.

Bill Bennett:
I think it, I don’t think it was the Herald, I think it was an overseas newspaper, but we were talking about 80 megabytes of page being downloaded and it’s, I mean obviously this is sort of tech progress and this happens and so on, but generally, I mean, and here’s the thing, right? When you get an 80 megabyte web page for a newspaper site that’s not the text that you’re reading on the page. It’s not even like perhaps the images and so on it goes, it’s about advertising, it’s about making money out of your reading their newspaper and so on. And of that, you know, of Those megabytes, probably 90% of that is about making money off you and so on. But it’s, but the cost of that is okay, there’s no real cost with, with downloading that much on a web page. Except that you, except that you may need to upgrade your computers to be able to be able to read that web page. You know, you need a more powerful

Paul Spain:
connection, et cetera, et cetera.

Bill Bennett:
Yeah. And you can’t, you can’t sort of recycle that 15 year old computer that’s in the basement, just read news anymore because it doesn’t work because it can’t cope with pages that size. That’s something like that going on here where they’re just pushing more and more of this processing out to us on the edge of the network. And you’ve heard all the stories about data centers requiring power and water and so on. Well, pretty soon your home data center is going to require power and water so that Google can run its AI.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I guess when you, when you think about, you know, Chrome will be on, you know, however many billion devices,

Bill Bennett:
it’s probably on more than half.

Paul Spain:
And so you know, if that’s getting pushed out everywhere and then that’s impacting. Yeah, your power draw, your cpu, gpu, NPU loads, you know, even if it’s

Bill Bennett:
only a tiny amount per person, it’s a billion people with a tiny amount soon match up to something. Yeah, so, so, but also it’s the arrogance of them to just dump that stuff on you, which is incredibly arrogant act. I mean it would help if they said, would you like to download this 4 gig large language model? How many people choose to do so? If it was an optional.

Paul Spain:
Well, this is interesting because everything seems to have an AI element to it. So if you get an iPhone update, you’ve got, you know, Windows 11, you know, etc. This is, this is kind of what we’re dealing with. And I guess there’s a level to which it just gets normalized. But the question is, do, do the benefits outweigh, you know, the downsides in every case? And should we as society be always having the latest technology sort of, you know, pushed upon us or should we actually be able to make that choice and say actually I don’t, I don’t want this.

Bill Bennett:
Well, and you say should the benefits. But whose benefits? Because benefits are not necessary. It’s like when you have a webpage with 80 megabytes of data, which is mainly about advertising. It’s not you, the reader, who’s benefiting from that. You know, it’s absolutely not Paul Spain benefit from. It’s Coca Cola or whoever’s trying to sell stuff to him that’s benefiting from it. And it’s the same thing with this. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s not you who benefits from having that, that piece of code on your machine.

Bill Bennett:
And you know, do you remember years ago that you could load up your screen so that when your screensaver was on, it would do work for SETI for searching for extraterrestrial life or.

Paul Spain:
That’s right.

Bill Bennett:
Or whatever. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
You, you were choosing to give away some of your processing power, your computing power for that.

Bill Bennett:
Cause, I mean, I’m sure people would happily do that. But do you really want to have Google’s AI on your browser? Well, like I say, when Apple introduced, gave people the ability to choose whether they would have privacy invasion from things like Facebook apps and so on. Overwhelming majority of people chose not to have it. So I think if you were given the choice, you would choose not to have this. The problem is that they’re all at it.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Well, that takes us onto Google’s Chromebook successor, the Google Book, which I would

Bill Bennett:
imagine probably also loads a large language model.

Paul Spain:
Well, this is the interesting thing. It’s being referred to as an AI native laptop. It combines the capabilities of Android and the Chrome os, which we’re used to from Chromebooks, but built very much around Gemini, which is their AI model. And I saw it noted the move aims to redefine computing with intelligence at the core, positioning a Google Book as a premium successor to Chromebooks and a strategic response to competing ecosystems, which might just be the MacBook Neo. Cause you’re coming in at somewhat similar price points, but it’s very much around creating a device where AI is operating all the time.

Bill Bennett:
Well, okay, at this point, if we were, if we were doing this live in front of an audience, I’d ask the audience, now, how many of you got Chromebook right. And how many hands do you think would go up? Paul? Not many. Not many. No. No. Chromebooks are huge in American schools and they’re huge. They’re huge in some niche markets, but

Paul Spain:
they’ve fair few in New Zealand schools.

Bill Bennett:
Yeah, yeah. There are some in schools here as well, but you know, I don’t think there are very few people who choose to buy a Chromebook. Right. So I think there’s going to be very few people who choose to buy a Google Book. And there’ll be some, but there won’t be, there won’t be very many. And again, I think they’re probably. Look, you can’t buy a laptop today without AI being somewhere in there. You can’t buy a smartphone.

Bill Bennett:
You can buy it, you can go and buy a dumb phone. And in fact, increasing numbers of people apparently are buying dumb phones to get away from all this. But it does seem to be some kind of. It does seem to. There are times when you get the impression that AI is being rammed down your throat. It’s not necessarily, I mean, there, there are benefits. Yeah, sure, there’s, there’s some good things to it, but it does seem to me that we, we’ve not really, we don’t have much choice in this. You know, we’re going to have it whether we want it or not, like it or not.

Paul Spain:
And. Well, it’s interesting you say that because we’ve been reading and TechCrunch have got an article on this about an AI backlash at university graduation speeches in the US yeah. Where speeches that are referencing artificial intelligence, in some cases facing huge backlashes and folks being booed by the graduating students when AI gets a mention. And look, sometimes there might be some other reasons why that particular person is getting booed, but it does seem to be, there’s quite a bit a connection with references to AI. And look, you can understand it from a student’s perspective. If you’ve spent years going through the university system, you’re about to graduate and then somebody’s touting to you AI and you’re out there trying to get a job and you realize that a lot of the entry level positions, the companies that had those entry level positions previously, are deciding actually AI can do the entry level work and that in some cases it’s going to be actually pretty hard to get into the workforce.

Bill Bennett:
Yeah. And if you don’t have entry level jobs, you don’t have people growing up to do the next level jobs or the top level jobs. So, yeah, it’s an issue. Look, I think that we are only just starting to scratch the surface of the AI backlash and I think it will possibly become a political issue. I think it’s going to be a political issue at our coming election. Although I did hear the finance minister this morning talking about getting rid of public servants and maybe we could replace them with AI. And I was thinking, okay, well maybe we will see more of a backlash here sooner rather than later about AI. But like or not there is, there, there is a backlash of sorts coming.

Bill Bennett:
One way or another, there will be a backlash. I don’t think we’re going to end up in one of those sort of science fiction scenarios like June where they got rid of all, I think they got rid of all computers, didn’t they? In June.

Paul Spain:
Aren’t we already living in some science fiction?

Bill Bennett:
Yeah, I think we are some dystopian science fiction. But anyway, the thing is, is I don’t think we’re going to go that far, but I do think that there will be a backlash and I think that we’re only just seeing the first rumblings of that. You heard it here folks first.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re certainly in interesting, interesting times with some of these sorts of, some of these sorts of topics. I guess. You know, Apple have been, have done varying things to differentiate themselves by leaning a little bit more into privacy than say Google. And that certainly has helped build confidence in Apple for some. But I saw that they looking to auto delete AI type chats with Siri and so an option that set it to say 30 days old that, that will just auto delete. So you’re not kind of letting the AI, the large language models tap into all of your data from all of history. Now there’ll be options there I believe to sort of 30 days a year or forever so you can give it that enduring access.

Paul Spain:
But it is designed I would think to give people just a little bit more comfort that they’re not taking or storing all your, all your data.

Bill Bennett:
Siri’s AI capabilities is pretty much rubbish. And I mean that’s, I mean it’s fair, I think it’s fair to say that it’s not fated as something which is wonderful. And I would imagine that amongst Apple users Siri AI is just about as popular as Chromebooks. Again I think it’s not a huge thing, but I think Apple could be doing something to correct that by doing these things for sure. That’s an interesting approach.

Paul Spain:
Interestingly, Apple and Google have partnered. So now we’re a time where Apple are differentiating themselves on privacy. But actually in the back end we’ll more and more be leveraging Google’s technology but in theory in a manner that gives people more confidence from a privacy perspective. So I guess we’ll see how that kind of plays out.

Bill Bennett:
I mean the thing is that it certainly looks on the surface, as though Apple missed the AI bus. But it could be that the bus is not the bus that people think it was. I mean, I saw a piece today in one of the financial papers overseas saying that the profitability of AI companies has been. The projections of profitability of AI companies has been pushed back further. So you know, maybe they dodged a bullet rather than miss the bus.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. And we haven’t even, we haven’t even put any time aside to talk about The Elon Musk vs OpenAI and Sam Altman there. But I’m not sure there’s actually a whole lot to cover on that one. It looks like it’s kind of been a technicality that that one has not really come to much. Lastly, we’re used to new computer processes sort of coming through on an annual cycle usually from Intel, AMD and others with their new processes coming through. It’s a normal part of, you know, a new release from Samsung such as the newest, newish, you know, this year’s S26 release, you know, Apple with their new phones and their laptops and you know, all of the laptop manufacturers each year, you know, they tend to be rolling out the new chips. Today we’ve seen the announcements sort of start flowing in from various companies such as HP who obviously partner with intel. Cause they’ve got intel chips inside a large percentage of their machines.

Paul Spain:
And today their core Ultra Series 3 processors are announced inside a whole range of devices. So Panther Lake, Panther Lake is the codename for it, isn’t it? So those will be coming through. If you’re in a business and you’re thinking oh, when am I gonna get my new Panther Lake or Core Ultra 3 laptop? Usually what we see is the first models will come through in consumer devices, the enterprise or business class devices, they usually take a little bit longer to sort of cycle through. But certainly we will be seeing those in the market over, over the next little while. But yeah, probably the consumer ones virtually immediately, very, very soon. And then those business class devices look good to see this happening. I think some of the stats and the numbers that we see, and this is not just intel, it’s kind of most of the, the vendors, they tend to tout some incredible performance increases, 70% for this, 60% for that, huge improvements in battery life. But you do have to dig into the detail and in most cases if you look quite closely, if you’re going from the equivalent top last year’s generation to this year, we’re not seeing massive, massive leaps overall.

Paul Spain:
But it’s still really helpful.

Bill Bennett:
Well, two things, right. First is that Intel’s moved to a new technology base with this, which is in that sense it’s like when Apple first got moved to Apple Silicon. It’s a new technology base for the company. Second thing is that it’s not that long since people started talking about Intel’s obituary, is it? People are starting to write the company off and talk about it not surviving and I don’t think things are that much better now. I think they are better, but I don’t think they’re hugely better. I wouldn’t say this is the last roll of the dice for intel, but it’s an awful lot resting on this. Having said that, I’ve been looking at some recent HP laptops. They’re really pretty nice.

Bill Bennett:
I’m quite impressed.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, I mean I’ve been using a leap book and yeah, they’re making good quality, good quality kit now. The standard has certainly kept moving up. I think the latest Apple MacBooks performing pretty well and we’re seeing the same from HP and Lenovo and so on. Microsoft have still got a bit of the market share in New Zealand and around the world with their Surface laptops and, and the Surface Pros still seems to be reliability issues though with the Microsoft product.

Bill Bennett:
Strange thing about Surface and my word, we weren’t talking about this before we came on the show at all. But I see Surfaces everywhere when I go out to places to work and so on. But they’re numbers. If you look at the stats of what’s selling, they’re not huge. So I can only conclude the Surfaces are like really big with the tech community and not big and not at all big out there in the wild with everyone else.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I mean I have, you know, one of the, you know, ARM or Qualcomm based Surface laptops and look, it’s, it’s a, it’s a laptop that generally I get some occasional Odysseys with it, but generally, you know, performs well. It’s got great battery life, you know, better than the intel laptop. But the intel ones, you know, just keep getting, getting better as, as with amd.

Bill Bennett:
Well, there’s one thing about Intel Rich which I think is always going to hurt and that is they still haven’t got a fanless processor, you know, they don’t have. If I, I’ve got a, I recently bought a M4 Mac MacBook Air and it’s silent. I recently looked at a very nice, very nice Omnibook from HP and it was, it was great. But you could it was humming.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Bill Bennett:
And that’s, that’s quite a difference.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. I mean my impression is that there will be, you know, there will be fanless options, you know, available with these Series 3 processors. What we’ve seen in the past is, I mean it’s often been hard to deliver a fast laptop if you don’t have that kind of active, active cooling. If you go with passive cooling and fanless, then you’ve tended to end up with a much slower device. Right, yeah. And that’s certainly where the ARM based processes have been, you know, have been really good because they, you know, they just haven’t used so much power, haven’t heated up so much. So. Yeah, but I think that’s us for this week.

Paul Spain:
Bill. It’s been great to catch up, great to have your insights on the New Zealand tech podcast again.

Bill Bennett:
Well, thanks Paul.

Paul Spain:
Now, where should folks be looking for your content? Because as well as BillBennett Co NZ for the telco content, there’s the microblog site that you’ve got as well.

Bill Bennett:
It’s there as Bill Bennett’s reporter’s notebook and it’s where I put everything that’s not telco.

Paul Spain:
Right. So that’s BillBennett micro blog the moment was, I think where it came up when I looked for it.

Bill Bennett:
Yeah, yeah. No, you have to.

Paul Spain:
But you can Google it.

Bill Bennett:
Yeah, you can Google it. I still haven’t finished, I, I haven’t finished moving everything across yet. So buying a domain is the next job, I think.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. Oh, very, very good. Well, thanks again Bill. Thanks everyone for listening in and of course a big thank you to our show partners, Fortinet, Workday, One New Zealand, 2degrees, Spark and Gorilla Technology. Really appreciate their support for the show and we will be back again with more content. Some really interesting interviews as well across on the New Zealand Business Podcast. And there tends to be a number of sort of tech related interviews coming up on the New Zealand Business Podcast. So that one’s worth looking out for if you haven’t caught up on our latest episodes across there also.

Paul Spain:
Otherwise, and we will see you again next week for the next show. Thanks everyone. Thanks Bill.