FTTC below 5Mbps?

Hi all,

I've been waiting for nearly 2 years for BT to make a change to their minimum threshold for FTTC products.

Exchange is NIAL and this is what the wholesale checker states:

Your exchange is ADSL enabled, and our initial test on your line indicates that your line should be able to have an ADSL broadband service that provides a fixed line speed up to 2Mbps.

Our test also indicates that your line currently supports an estimated ADSL Max broadband line speed of 3Mbps; typically the line speed would range between 2Mbps and 4Mbps.

I currently receive around 6976Kbps downstream sync speeds with Fast Path enabled. I believe it reached just barely the maximum 8Mbps whenever interleaving was enabled.

My entire exchanges cabinets have all been enabled. I'm on cabinet P1 which is around 2 miles away. The exchange is just around 20 metres up the road from this cabinet (pretty stupid for people long distances away).

Anyway - I know that my maximum synchronisation speed is 8Mbps at the moment, and that if my attenuation is 35, I could receive speeds of around 10Mbps. This would greatly help as my business is struggling to cope with the bandwidth at the moment.

My question is - when & will I ever be able to FTTC regardless of the speeds predicted? Thanks all for your help.

Jack

What benefits would FTTC give you over and above your current service? Very little, cutting line length by maybe 50m on a 3.2km line will have negligible effect and could see a lowering of speeds.

Wouldn't taking away the 8Mbps limit open the possibilities up for just even a little here? / ADSL2 speeds?

What other alternatives could there be in the future?

That is defined by the exchange equipment - if te exchange has ADSL2 then fine but if it has old ADSL max then there is very little that can be achieved.

That is defined by the exchange equipment - if te exchange has ADSL2 then fine but if it has old ADSL max then there is very little that can be achieved.

I read the question as "Given my exchange only has ADSL would FTTC, and therefore VDSL2, at least give me ADSL2 speeds".

The answer AFAICS is "Probably" but there are some caveats.

First of all even if it did give you ADSL2 speeds at 3.2km you are very much in the territory that ADSL2 is likely to only give a small improvement and VDSL2 not much better than that.

I.e. you might find that FTTC sync speeds aren't really much better than ADSL.

Having said that the fact that FTTC is Ethernet frames on the wire would help your throughput a bit (say 10%).

I now find myself wondering what you're doing where going from 6.5Mbs^-1 to, say, 11-12Mbs^-1 would be a business making or breaking improvement. I went from 3Mbs^-1 to 40 and most of the time surfing is pretty much the same. Some page loads are noticeably faster but a lot of the delays are elsewhere in the network, heavily loaded servers or browsers burdened with javascript-heavy pages. Having FTTC won't change that.

There are other caveats as well. The FTTC VDSL implementation is not just a "superset" of ADSL2. Reaching out that far requires use of the "US0" band - i.e a small band of upstream frequencies low down the frequency scale in the same place as ADSL upstream. However US0 doesn't have to be used and if it isn't VDSL won't reach 3200m. At present I think it is used by OR but there's no guarantee that when they go to the 30MHz band-plan it will continue that way. There's also the spectral power management but TBH if your cab really is 20m from the exchange that won't be an issue.

In short I don't think FTTC will be the panacea you want.

Edited by mr_bean (Thu 15-Dec-11 22:09:33)

Hi mr-bean,

I think it's more the congestion of the network that slows everything down here - we've got over 5 switches & around 15 clients connected minimum (including IP phones, laptops, computers, servers, firewalls, VPNs & file servers connected to the internet).

The could also be around maximum 10 guests connected to the network at any one time.

I use QoS but it doesn't really help much when there's loads happening on the network.

Would there and what would be the future for getting higher broadband speeds? FTTP? I live in a pretty rural area and on a small exchange of around 2k people.

Cheers

From what I can understand you are on sub-15 FTTC product - 3.2km is a long line and therefore the speed you get is already pretty good - the change in bandplan when implemented will drive bandwidth increase up to 80mbps for customer close to a cabinet so I expect that you could also see a benefit in speed - eta for new band plan? Less than 6months hopefully.

Hi there, I'm not on a FTTC product at the moment - just on an ADSL Max Premium service.

Cheers

Jack

When you say 15 clients do you mean in your internal network or 15 external clients connecting in over the Internet?

Would there and what would be the future for getting higher broadband speeds? FTTP? I live in a pretty rural area and on a small exchange of around 2k people.

If you are in an FTTC area then, for the moment FTTP won't be available because it's an either/or thing from Openreach at present (an exchange is either FTTC or FTTP not both).

If you have a lot of external clients then you probably need more uplift in the upstream than downstream speeds.

You should look at a leased line or, if you can't afford one, look at bonding multiple ADSL lines to give you more speed.

3G is also a possibility but if you're already getting 6-7Mbs^-1 it probably isn't going to be much faster. It's also harder to run your own servers on the end of a 3G connection.

Lots of clients internally which are using the internet - we don't get much traffic in to our VPN.

Bonding 2 or more lines is probably the best bet.

Doesn't that cause mismatch with the transfer of packets? Don't they arrive in a different order?

If we were to talk about the next 5 years - would you expect the entire UK to be able to be able to receive some sort of fibre service? (FTTC/FTTP)?

In reply to a post by jdowning640:

Doesn't that cause mismatch with the transfer of packets? Don't they arrive in a different order?

TCP/IP can cope with that, at this kind of speed anyhow. Packets can be received in the wrong order with a normal dsl link.

Doesn't that cause mismatch with the transfer of packets? Don't they arrive in a different order?

Networks do that anyway - TCP re-orders the packets behind the scenes.

If we were to talk about the next 5 years - would you expect the entire UK to be able to be able to receive some sort of fibre service? (FTTC/FTTP)?

Not the entire UK if only because there will always be some corners where it isn't feasible to supply DSL of any form.

In reply to a post by jdowning640:

If we were to talk about the next 5 years - would you expect the entire UK to be able to be able to receive some sort of fibre service? (FTTC/FTTP)?

BT's current plans are due to complete around 2014, and that is only for 66% of the country (population). I suspect that those plans leave out 4 categories: Some of the "exchange-direct" lines that don't go via a cabinet (some will get FTTP though), the marginal (profit) cabinets in converted areas, the marginal exchanges, and the hopeless exchanges.

BT would take the BDUK funding, and use that to get to 90% of the country (population). I guess they would cover more of the marginal cabinets & exchanges, but still not cover either the exchange-direct lines or the hopeless exchanges.

Those exhange-direct lines that don't get FTTP and are close to the exchange wil be able to use bonded ADSL to get superfast speeds. The direct lines that are really long might needed a bonded solution just to get the 2Mbps minimum.

That leaves the hopeless exchanges - where different technology might be needed. Mobile (perhaps using some freed-up TV frequencies) or Satellite seems the most obvious.

What about long lines connected to cabinets?

Thanks

Jack

As it stands, BT won't be helping them much: The rollout has only ever included fibre cabinets next to existing cabinets, and the subsequent long line won't be activated at speeds below 5 Mbps.

The only real way to help the long lines is to install a further cabinet further out in the network - reducing the length of the long lines but, almost by definition, there won't be enough customers to make it economically viable.

However, BT's results included a little section that showed their improvements in installation of FTTC - and one element was a "smaller" FTTC cabinet. They don't say where these are to be deployed, but I guess there are two options: by the side of existing, but small, cabinets. Or by the side of new cabinets that have been placed further out in the network.

The only problem with *either* option is that BT are still following plan A for the rollout. They don't seem to be willing to reconsider any area for "infill" purposes for at least another couple of years.

However, BT's results included a little section that showed their improvements in installation of FTTC - and one element was a "smaller" FTTC cabinet.

The 'smaller' cabinets are already out there, the Huawei 96 and ECI. They are now installed instead of the larger originals (Huawei 288), the most obvious reason being less impact, street furniture wise, and most likely, cheaper to install. So they are being used exactly where you'd expect, next to an existing street cabinet.

Yeah - at the moment my cabinet is the original model (the bigger one) but there are a few of them in other exchanges a few miles away that I've seen around.

Wouldn't it be a problem rerouting all the houses/businesses cables in this area to a new cabinet if they did decide to do this?

Cheers for all your help guys

Jack

The FTTC cabinets will pretty much always be close to an existing cabinet.

One eventual infil option will be for very small (possibly in chamber under pavement) VDSL kit, BT has used this in trials are Martlesham Heath.

The priority has generally being on getting the easy to connect cabinets connected to hit their 2/3rds target. UK has some 85,000 street cabinets to give you some idea of the scale of work.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

The 'smaller' cabinets are already out there, the Huawei 96 and ECI. They are now installed instead of the larger originals (Huawei 288), the most obvious reason being less impact, street furniture wise, and most likely, cheaper to install. So they are being used exactly where you'd expect, next to an existing street cabinet.

The picture I saw looked a lot smaller than even the currently-deployed Huawei 96 & ECI cabinets that I've seen around (or photos of).

Take a look at page 13 of The BT Q2 results slides, and tell me if that looks like something already out there. Granted this photo isn't clothed in a cabinet.

Certainly I've seen some telecom vendors with equipment aimed at as few as 6-10 properties. Whether BT will ever go that small is another matter...

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

The FTTC cabinets will pretty much always be close to an existing cabinet.

One eventual infil option will be for very small (possibly in chamber under pavement) VDSL kit, BT has used this in trials are Martlesham Heath.

The priority has generally being on getting the easy to connect cabinets connected to hit their 2/3rds target. UK has some 85,000 street cabinets to give you some idea of the scale of work.

so business case out the window, ease of work top of list?

Where easy to connect includes some degree of cost/hours of work, which all form a business case.

Remember the pressure is on to finish the roll-out early now, so if a council is difficult over location of cabs then BT may simply move on.

Also explains the delays for some areas, ie. limited number of teams doing the work, and a delay of just a two days will knock on down the schedule, or lead to some cabs being abandoned. The reason some people see a cabinet installed, but not going active is that different teams do different parts of the jobs, and some may be having more snags than others.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Also explains the delays for some areas, ie. limited number of teams doing the work, and a delay of just a two days will knock on down the schedule, or lead to some cabs being abandoned. The reason some people see a cabinet installed, but not going active is that different teams do different parts of the jobs, and some may be having more snags than others.

And where a team out in the field has to move on because of a snag, there is extra work generated on another team - the one in the office that makes the plans, and books the roadworks slots. If that team is also busy & pressured, then it can be hard to find time to rejig all the surrounding plans.

If BT are still ramping up the pool of engineers who perform this work, then the planning work will become ever more stretched.

I still think the beaurocracy behind roadworks fails us here - because any one small snag is pretty much guaranteed to trigger a month delay to a cabinet. That, in turn, forces planners to have to rejig plans in a month+ rather than just delay today, and then work on catching up.