Playing the numbers game

By PETER SINCLAIR

Last year's internet was a numbers game - how many people were hitching up to it, how many visited which site, how much did they spend, how many billions of dollars was the whole vast, nebulous enterprise worth.

But think of a number on the web and someone will be quick to contradict or amend it, for even in a statistical age guesstimation remains the yardstick of cyberspace. The answer to any question is generally a vague "heaps."

How many New Zealanders were "on the net" in 99? How long is a piece of string? The best surmise came from Jupiter Communications www.jup.com, which estimated that 400,000 premises were hooked up, involving just under a million users.

They forecast an increase this year to 500,000 premises and just over a million people - slower growth than the crazy, upward spiral of the past few years, but steady nonetheless.

But certain numbers last year did not stack up - specifically, the digits 0867.

Their introduction was widely seen, in spite of Telecom's disclaimers, as a device to bypass the Kiwi Share provisions of its agreement with the Government, with the added bonus of shafting its rival Clear.

The resulting outcry had at least one upside: it brought the internet into sudden sharp focus for the unwired bureaucrat.

Tim Berners-Lee, the "Father of the Net," has been quoted as saying that net access should be one of life's givens, a natural right like oxygen or water.

The 0867 protest - a resolution of which has had to await this year and a new, less Telecom-friendly Administration - was founded on his vision of the net, which is becoming the general world view.

Clear quickly offered to pick up the $2-an-hour Telecom tab for its subscribers.

The traditional freeness of cyberspace even began to extend to internet service providers.

Local providers like Ihug and Voyager moved strongly into the telecommunications business with cheap internet phone-calls; and following the lead of overseas providers like Britain's Freeserve and NetZero in the US, local firm Global Computers came up with a "free" variant on its GNET service provider www.gnet.co.nz. Here the numbers did not really add up because of a hefty "security deposit," but Global plans to relaunch the idea in March.

Providers who did not feel like going all the way on freeness at least began packaging better and cheaper "flat-rate" deals in the middle of the year, confirming a trend established very early and successfully in this country by the Wood dynasty of Ihug - this in parallel to the wider uptake of fast satellite access and the introduction of highspeed ADSL by Telecom.

Here the numbers pouring down the pipe suddenly changed from kilobytes to megabytes, with a promise of even speedier technologies to come.

"The net at warp-speed" became a welcome cliche.

The numbers did not stack up for Barry Colman, of National Business Review, either. In spite of the apparent success of his online NBR business model, which had made money from day one, Colman unaccountably canned it at a time of blazingly successful overseas floats, citing insufficient profits.

Later in the year, he announced a bid to relaunch himself as a bandwidth baron with a wireless network designed to compete with more established local players. Time will tell whether profitability in this branch of IT meets his exacting standards.

Last year, even music on the net turned into a number - MP3. In the absence of a local quota on our radio stations, New Zealand groups seized on the chance of making their work available to a wider public, and by year's end many small local sites had sprung up to make it available in the compression format which was rocking (so to speak) the global music industry. Local music police began to have their work cut out.

Some numbers were more sinister, as in W97M, the official name of a new class of e-mail virus nicknamed "Melissa."

She terrorised the inboxes of the world from March, spawning an evil sisterhood which continues to proliferate into the new millennium, wreaking havoc on unprotected computers. Last year was the year the virus threat became real for millions of surfers, and "it won't happen to me" was no longer sufficient protection.

As in the rest of the world, New Zealand e-commerce made gains but hardly achieved the spectacular numbers we read of overseas.

The difficulty seemed to lie in mindset as much as anything else - why shop at the corner dairy when you can visit the great, gaudy supermarket of the world on the internet?

Lacking economies of scale, and with only cheaper freight-rates to encourage local webshopping, it may prove tough for even (or especially) the most ambitious local e-tailer, as Flying Pig discovered when it failed to get off to a flying start towards the end of the year.

It may turn out, on the net as in the markets of the world, that the niche is our natural habitat when the numbers are not in our favour.