Chief Stipe

I'd expect better from you Curious as an academic although it was in the social sciences wasn't it. Why don't you put up the same graph relative to the total population in each country?

Yeah well that those numbers will probably not take me to any of the 3,000 people who are paid an average salary of $100,00 a year to work at MPI - will it? How many of that 3,000 have ridden a horse? I have no problem with taking action to suppress Covid-19 infection spread but some bureaucrat telling me how fast I can work a horse having an impact on that spread I just fail to understand. Australian racing is by comparison in full flight and the State of NSW just announced 7 new cases for yesterday. Go figure!

What legislation says that this is the case? What the hell do MPI or MBIE have to do with how fast a horse is ridden? What's more what the hell would they know about it?

I know this isn't "getting with the programme" but I doubt any Government department has the legal authority to restrict the speed at which you ride or drive a horse.

I know this isn't exactly about racing but.... I went grocery shopping this morning - second day in a row. Miss the social interaction and had a bunch of bananas sitting on top of my trolley - apparently that's a signal. ? My neighbour dropped off a whole lot of field mushrooms from his dairy farm so I needed cream for the sauce and soup. There were no eggs at all on the shelves - maybe that is a silent protest from the chickens who have had a lifetime of lockdown! Anyway I had this craving earlier in the week for brussel sprouts. Found them in the supermarket - $10.49 per kg!!!!! Dearer than Pork! The prepacked ones - were $15.11 per kg! Fresh pre-packed chicken is cheaper! That's about a $1 to put each sprout in a plastic bag.

I don't know about that but they'll only be filled to the brim because there won't be many left.

Another question that I can't fathom the answer to.... I can buy a fry pan and a chopping board online as an essential item from The Warehouse, Briscoes or K-mart but I can't buy a kitchen knife. Frying onions whole will be a new challenge.

To be even fairer isn't the Chairman of the Board and the CEO the same person at the moment?

So much for waiting for this new crowd to do the job. So much for waiting for a change in attitude. Same old same old.

Doesn't matter if it is one or two or more bits of fibre. Still nothing special about the fibre nor the circuit. I haven't argued about satellite transmission however if the sums are done you may well find a different answer. A permanent SDI circuit which has very very high bandwidth requirements and the SDI protocol does not have data compression would cost a significant amount a year. The point I'm labouring to make is there are far cheaper options that SDI that were serve the purpose of NZ racing and that is delivering races to the masses from ALL our tracks not just the elite. BTW it is the former that have been subsidising the latter. Tell me what do they do in Australia for their bush tracks that they broadcast?

I'm not so optimistic. A delayed onset of the flu season due to a very mild autumn so far, an interrupted vaccination programme due to the lockdown and the subsequent unavailability of primary care namely GP's. I return to school for children largely from vulnerable socioeconomic groups. Fingers crossed that a Covid-19 infection bounce doesn't coincide with the eventual emergence of the flu. Some of the things that have been said by the Govenrment and the MOH in the last few days are worrying.

Canterbury Jockey Club Riccarton Park Events Centre 165 Racecourse Road | PO Box 11137, Sockburn Christchurch 8443 | 03 336 0000 www.riccartonpark.co.nz Wednesday 22 April 2020 MEDIA RELEASE Al Basti Equiworld New Zealand Two Thousand Guineas® and Barneswood Farm New Zealand One Thousand Guineas® STATEMENT BY THE CANTERBURY JOCKEY CLUB (‘CJC’) The CJC acknowledges the release yesterday by NZTR regarding racing dates and the Group and Listed race programme for July to November 2020 including this extract concerning the Club: “We would like to acknowledge those Clubs which could be adversely impacted, including the Canterbury JC. While retaining their three-day NZ Cup Meeting it is proposed in the indicative calendar that the Guineas races could be transferred North for the 20/21 season only, depending on the NZTR Board’s assessment of the position in early July.” The CJC wishes to make the following comments in relation to the proposal that the Al Basti Equiworld New Zealand Two Thousand Guineas® and Barneswood Farm New Zealand One Thousand Guineas® be run elsewhere than Riccarton Park Racecourse in November 2020 and the interpretation by some that this is a ‘done deal’. The NZTR release clearly states that it is a PROPOSAL only at this stage and states also: Final decisions will not be made until July. That there is an assumption that travel, and attendance will be limited due to COVID-19 alert level restriction. All New Zealanders are aware that this is a changing situation which will likely be quite different in July, let alone November, to what it is today. The Guineas Races COULD be transferred, not will be transferred. And if that situation were to arise that it will be for 2020 only. The CJC will be working closely with NZTR as we have to date. As the situation with the Alert levels unfolds the CJC will be making every endeavour to ensure that the Al Basti Equiworld New Zealand Two Thousand Guineas® and Barneswood Farm New Zealand One Thousand Guineas® can be run as they have since 1973 at their home, Riccarton Park Racecourse. The CJC acknowledges that racing, like all New Zealand activities, is experiencing exceptionally difficult circumstances under the COVID-19 crisis and appreciates and supports the work being undertaken by NZTR to ensure that racing resumes as quickly and in as strong a form as possible. Wednesday 22 April 2020

SDI is just a video protocol. At the end of the day it still traverses the same fibre network as any other protocol. You still connect into the same fibre termination device. I won't bore you with details on network transport protocols. I concede if they use SDI then they might need something larger than Suzuki Swift - maybe a Great China panel van. However SDI is costly and largely proprietary in its implementation. No wonder RITA is broke. It also raises questions about the deal they did with that outfit owned by Windsor Park and what's his name Randall. SDI is great if you want to deliver HD TV but how many of the target market have the right TV to view it in HD and how many of that market have good enough eyesight to tell the difference. The point is there are other cheaper and equally effective technologies to do live broadcasts from anywhere in the country rather than a select few racetracks. Finally when you say "dedicated circuit" don't think that it is something special like physically a single piece of fibre of from Te Rapa to the studio. It isn't. It is defined logically by software that dedicates a certain level of bandwidth availability at a committed information rate i.e. it guarantees that you will get the bandwidth you require. BUT you still use the same fibre infrastructure and the Telco makes more money by selling that bandwidth many times over to others when you are not using it.

Do you think this Government has got it right by saying "Children don't transmit Covid-19 to Adults"? So we can send kids from poor families back to school to be baby sat?

Maybe MPI should stick to slaughtering dairy cows and trying to eradicate Mycoplasma bovis which I might add is a waste of money and taking a long long time. Instead of telling us how to ride horses!

No disrespect to the what you are posting guys but can we veer back to the subject.

There is only one part of that frame of equipment that needs to be permanent. Here are some pictures: This is what they call an FTTH - Fibre To The Home which is a little bit of a misnomer as it is essentially a Fibre Termination Unit and comes in variety of flavours depending on the installation (FTTX). They are the cheapest part of a fibre network. They ALL do essentially the same thing terminating the yellow cable (the fibre) into a connector that a splitter device can connect into. Which in the home is a mini router which enables a connection to Wi-Fi or ethernet cable. For a business it would be a router that can vary in size from 8 ports to as many as 58 ports. A 58 port router is about the size of a pizza box. The FTTH is not much bigger than the size of my hand. The FTTH costs $3. The second picture is of a more sophisticated FTTX. It splits the incoming fibre into multiple fibre connections which enables direct fibre connectivity to multiple devices. Costs about $90. Not really necessary for our racetrack installations. This unit is about the size of your average hard copy novel. Now the rest of the equipment is moveable. So all the lights you see flashing 24/7 at Te Rapa can be installed in a moveable unit as at the end of the day all the pieces of equipment aggregate to one or maybe two pieces of fibre. Why have they chosen to make it permanent at Te Rapa? Well it is in the vendors interests for a start. It earns them more money. For every location that they install this they sell you more and more kit (equipment). They charge you maintenance fees, they hook in a high level Service Level Agreement (SLA), they charge you for each MAC's (Moves, Adds, Changes) and on and on and on. Oh and don't forget they charge you 24/7 for the top of the line network connection whether you use it or not. I hope Te Rapa are using that connection for their normal business and paying for it. The in house IT team love it because they can be lazy - if something goes wrong they can ring up the vendor and log a fault. "Yes boss we are onto it - we have logged a Priority One fault with Spark." The only piece of equipment that needs to stay there is the FTTH(x). The rest of the kit could be put in a Suzuki Swift and all you would need is a couple of cables from the FTTH and a couple more to the broadcast van and a power lead. Done and dusted! How do I know this? Because I've done it. Setting up a pop-up store - plug and sell. In actual fact the technology is here now to not even need the permanent fibre connection. How do you think they stream live high definition video from the America's Cup boats to your TV screen? The cameras are not connected to satellites I assure you. Or the high definition drone vision? Sorry but only the military can afford satellite connected drones. With the pop-up store configuration we did that 3 years ago. Even then there was technology to enable the use of 4G wireless connectivity. As for Waikato Stadium or Eden Park - well their business model can probably justify a dedicated circuit. Eden Park for example has 41 full time employees and they have other on site activities during the year that would justify the cost. I appreciate what your cousin has told you. As most BOAYer's would confirm I don't normally talk about what I've done in life as I'm quite private about that. In that respect it has been posted on other forums that I've never been very involved in racing. I haven't bothered to defend that. But with this issue that we are debating now...well it has touched a sore point, scratched a festering scab. I've worked in IT for 33 years. At one stage I worked for Telecom (Spark) and had a $90m dollar budget. I was responsible for ensuring capacity and implementation of innovation in New Zealand's data network at a time when 90% of NZ's data traversed the Telecom network. I'm maybe viewed as too old in the industry now but in terms of innovation and using new technology I'd back myself to go head to head with any young buck. Not only that I've walked the walk. For me technology has been a passion and an innate skill that I discovered by chance. My career started out in Horticultural Science. Another passion in life has been horse racing - it started with harness and latterly thoroughbreds. When I see the BS that is being spouted to justify what I see as a hidden agenda I really get wound up. So excuse me Bill. PS: RITA give me a call. Happy to consult and sort your IT out.

I didn't say it was exactly the same. What is the same is it is all data that traverses the same network. There isn't "special" fibre that goes from Riccarton to the Parnell. It is the same. What is different are the devices attached at either end. Now those devices at the track end are transported from track to track. Normally! If RITA is installing permanent network equipment at tracks other than just a NTU and maybe a cabinet then no wonder we are going broke.

Oh and BTW 98% of our schools have fibre optic cable connections and they don't operate 24/7!

"Could be transferred"? Why if the "three-day NZ Cup Meeting" is retained? Time to show you have some balls CJC!

What sort of connection do they have now? Why suddenly the difference? UFB has been installed everywhere particularly the main trunks. It is the final bit from our front gates to our homes that haven't been done. Be it your home or business connection they all traverse the same main trunk lines as it were. A large organisation such RITA will be on different Telco rates to the rest of us and quite different to small and medium sized businesses. Their main services are on 24/7 as they have moved their broadcasting options to digital as well as the terminal setups and online apps. They pay for a significant pipe to connect to the main fibre trunk 24/7 as well as backup. So adding 53 tracks to that cost would be minimal in the overall scheme of things. Using Waverley as your example the connection wouldn't have to be on 24/7 only for the days that they race or trial. To that end all that is required is a relocatable network terminating unit that connects to the same logical circuit. Then all that is required is some configuration done maybe 24 hours out from the meeting centrally from a computer to reconfigure that logical network. Easy peasy. I know it is because I've seen it done. The biggest constraint would be convincing the dinosaurs at Spark and your own IT department that it is simple. Theoretically fibre connects straight from the track to the studio but all the traffic still traverses a common network infrastructure. One single piece of fibred doesn't go from the track straight to HQ. Plus it isn't necessarily Spark/Koridia's infrastructure. The core backbone of the network is owned and installed by Chorus. Been like that for years. There are other main trunk fibre providers e.g. Transpower but they all at some stage have to traverse a common network. Perhaps there is less delay on fibre than satellite but it was fine for Waverly BEFORE Covid-19. What's changed? BTW what is the backup for the fibre for the racetracks that have it? Not been unknown for someone to put a digger through the fibre! Also local diversity is minimal if you are thinking about a backup fibre circuit. Again I know this because I implemented a new corporate WAN two years ago migrating from copper based technologies to fibre. It isn't more complex actually. You may have a different NTU (network terminating unit) at your location suited to faster bandwidth but they essentially are exactly the same in functional. The fibre connector is the same standard piece of kit. What also may be different to home is that at home we connect to a small router that is WiFi and ethernet connection capable. In a business we connect to a larger router that can connect more devices and handles faster bandwidth. You could use the same business kit at home - indeed I have to prove a point. Again Bill what would be the backup on site for a fibre network? I bet you that it is normally a Satellite. YEAH NA - at the end of the day the need for a fibre connection is red herring. I know exactly what is needed and what is happening. To tell you the truth when I read this sort of stuff I get really pissed off. The key in doing these things is having someone on the customer team that is passionate about the business, thinks outside the square, gets things done and is not blindsided by technical BS. Oh and doesn't mind upsetting some vendor staff. When we rolled out the UFB based corporate network there were two vendors involved - the telco and the data centre vendor (different comany's). In RITA's case unless they have outsourced entirely their IT which judging by their salary bill they haven't then they are only dealing with one vendor. I was told by the Telco that to shift all the circuits from old tech to new UFB would take 3 months or more. I found out the only real constraint was the physical connection i.e. the fibre from the road to my branch network cabinet. Once that was all sorted I asked to do the branch switch overs in one week - not 3 months. All hell broke out - escalations galore. But I stuck to my guns and made sure I talked to the people who really understood and who had the clout. You see once the physical connection is in place it is only the logical network connections that need to programmed and connected. With today's technology that takes 10 mins to do. We broke a Telco record and cut over 12 branches in one day. To transmit live video in 4k High Definition format you could get by with 100mb/s. (PS: For those of you considering buying an 8K Definition TV - the next generation - if you are over 50 you are wasting your time as your eyes probably couldn't discern the difference between 4k and 8k. Unless you wanted more than 100 inches of screen).

In any case what's wrong with how they used to do it?