How NGA Expectations Have Changed

Page / Slide 8 of this BT Wholesale presentation is a real testament to just how much lower expectations are as far as Openreach's NGA deployment goes.

Yes, lots have FTTC available now but that slide shows how heavily the FTTP has been pared back, and the rest of the document gives away where a large part of the FTTP is - trials, a couple of greenfield sites and Cornwall's co-funded area. If the 40% figure mentioned is accurate 80,000 of the premises passed by Openreach are there, which would make the majority of the entire Openreach FTTP rollout subsidised. Quite a heavy drop from 10% of homes passed.

BT are making one hell of a case for full separation of Openreach given their reluctance to make long-term investments in infrastructure coinciding with their enthusiasm to spend huge amounts on short-term content deals.

Good to see the separation between Wholesale and Openreach though. That presentation is beyond comedy with the situation as it stands

Edited by deleted (Sun 02-Mar-14 16:56:45)

Amazing find Ignitionnet,
It's a shame we're relying on an incumbent telecom provider that seems to be fighting with "itself".

I'm puzzled.

That's a 2011 document and that page doesn't have timescales. We certainly haven't yet reached the final two stages. The 100Mbps includes vectored FTTC, and I would be surprised if the one before that wasn't based on the expectation of Profile 30a.

Ignitionnet

You are aware that this presentation was from late 2011 and thus is completely out of date.

It only gives the BTWolesale view which was/is based on the same info the rest of industry got/gets. This was based on Theory that has been proved to be incorrect over the ease and cost of doing FTTP ( especially in built up settings).

The FTTP in Cornwall never reached the 40% coverage level so didn't cover the number of premises, the cost of doing it has proved much greater than expected, this is prior to the two days work to enable each house where ducting was used was discovered!

In reply to a post by kitcat:

Ignitionnet

You are aware that this presentation was from late 2011 and thus is completely out of date.

Yes, hence the use of the word 'expectations' in the thread subject.

It is also true that many BDUK bids weren't settled until late last year so are running 18months later than expectations, so these haven't started any FTTP parts yet. These are likely to be late in the program in small ( overhead) locations. These are cheaper than ducted sites to provide and fit in where FTTC won't reach.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

I'm puzzled.

That's a 2011 document and that page doesn't have timescales. We certainly haven't yet reached the final two stages. The 100Mbps includes vectored FTTC, and I would be surprised if the one before that wasn't based on the expectation of Profile 30a.

I am somewhat puzzled by this response. Did you read the document, which incidentally is from 2012 not 2011?

The slide I specifically referred to actually says:

Changes to the access network frequency band-plan will allow us to deliver up to 80Mbps on FTTC

This explicitly refers to the expectation of profile 17a, which indeed had begun in late 2011 - notice absolutely nothing in the range 50-100Mb prior to the frequency plan change and the announcement of 80Mb with said changes? Zero increase in >100Mb either, this refers purely to 17a.

Prior to this band change I see about 10% coverage at >100Mb as part of the commercial deployment, another 10% added as part of BDUK. I appreciate I'm not privvy to all the statistics but I'm not entirely convinced either of these will be the case given the commercial deployment hasn't managed 1/10th of that figure.

Anyway you entirely miss the point of my post it seems, which was to show how expectations changed in 2 years from 10% >100Mb coverage, implying FTTP, by end of commercial deployment to what we've actually seen.

In reply to a post by kitcat:

It is also true that many BDUK bids weren't settled until late last year so are running 18months later than expectations, so these haven't started any FTTP parts yet. These are likely to be late in the program in small ( overhead) locations. These are cheaper than ducted sites to provide and fit in where FTTC won't reach.

Which is again irrelevant to that the expectation in early 2012 was that 10% of the UK would have access to >100Mb by the end of the commercial deployment via Openreach with BDUK's first round, increasing NGA coverage to 90%, increasing that to 20%.

Commercial FTTP coverage has ended up being less than 1/10th of that and the vast majority of BDUK has been FTTC, the slide implies BDUK delivering to 23% of the UK with 40% of that being FTTP as was planned in Cornwall.

I'm not sure what's so confusing about this. I merely posted showing how expectations have changed in the space of 2 years and noting that BT have veered towards increased content spend while spending less than planned on infrastructure. I've no idea why this is even remotely controversial.

A bit further down these are pretty funny highlights too...

Regarding FTTP coverage:

Yes, it is concentrated, and likely to be less than 25%.

On data consumption:

By 2015, the average family might require 40-55Mbps; young single adults between 20-35Mbps

It's very interesting that 19Mbps is now presumed to be adequate well beyond 2015, towards 2020 and as was noted FTTP coverage looks likely to be less than 2.5% of the UK.

The PDF is an interesting snapshot into where Openreach's largest customer thought things were going and how wrong they've been.

Don't panic I follow what you are saying.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/factsheet/

We adjusted our 2015 a short while ago to reflect the expectation changes
e.g. http://www.thinkbroadband.com/images/factsheet/q4-20...

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/images/factsheet/q1-20...

Probably needs adjusting again and can be a little more accurate on the Virgin Media figures, which we have over time also reigned back.

The BT Wholesale forums are a good source of information and make it easier to ask the right questions on roll-out of BT.

I don't think the time/money issues from BT FTTP roll-out is unique to BT either, B4rn has if the figures mentioned being behind its original roll-out projections.

For those that hold to the FTTH/P or nothing rule, then
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/andrew-ferguson/fibr...

is worth a read, showing what can happen elsewhere once you get beyond the glossy headlines and conferences.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Don't panic I follow what you are saying.

*Phew* I was beginning to think I was going somewhat mad. I thought a PDF from BTWholesale would be the most poignant example of the change.

Devils advocate

Maybe the FTTP did not sell in the volumes they expected, i.e. the techies said everyone will love it because of the speed, then BT discovered at the retail level hardly anyone bothered with anything more than the 40/10 product.

Its best to remember most of us commenting on FTTP speed/availability are outside the demographic of normal broadband buyer. Or put more bluntly, I've not upgraded my own Sky ADSL2+ to FTTC yet, because it can handle HD streaming and is fast enough as a backup line to primary FTTC.

Only thing I've not done with FTTC so far is stream YouTube 4k without buffering, but then I only get 20 Mbps due to line length.

I think this is actually the problem, when "Up To" products were introduced this actually makes the whole nga project as vague as can be.
If things were categorised differently.
Say the UK was put into bands, kind of how they did the leaked pcp spreadsheets.
So say 50% can get 60+Mbps, 15% 30-60Mbps, 20% 10-30Mbps, 10% between 2 and 10Mbps and 5% chuff all squared.
Or even in tighter bands than that,I even suspect there are calculations done within BTo which more than likely paint a very poor picture of the general copper network condition.
But with fttc sold as the solution for nearly every problem, to fully admit it's failings in practical terms within the existing bt infrastructure would have some serious consequences (especially bduk related)

Edited by deleted (Sun 02-Mar-14 20:50:14)

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

By 2015, the average family might require 40-55Mbps; young single adults between 20-35Mbps

Seems reasonable to me. A little high, perhaps, for a single adult.

that sheet was in internal decisioning sheet and not a statement of fact - one uhopt is FTTC is cheaper to devloepr that FTTP so that makes more exchnages commerical than they woud have been - there are a number of FTTC exchange that made the cut doe to lesss FTTP

ok I admit I havent read it yet, so to confirm BT are pushing for openreach to be fully seperated?

That means they are seeing it as a burden? I guess with the possible cost of future FTTP rollouts and a weak state of the copper local loop been highlighted with the large drops of speeds people are seeing with FTTC?

The Oklahoma costs appear to be pretty much in line with figures reported elsewhere for FTTH installations in rural parts of the US. There is a lot of useful information on the roll-out of FIOS (fibre) services in the US and Canada that can be garnered from the reports and analysis published on:

http://www.dslprime.com/home

One important point, that is often neglected in the UK, is that US phone companies have extended the areas served by ADSL 2+ and increased speeds to 40+ Mbps by a combination of repeaters and other upgrades. While they are not working to NGA type targets, they operate under strong regulatory incentives to extend the life of their copper loops as much as possible rather than to lay new fibre. The payback period for such upgrades is much shorter than the anticipated periods required to recover the cost of investment in fibre.

The charges for use of the Google system in Kansas City (up to $70 pcm) are far higher than most UK households would pay - especially bearing in mind that the relevant sales tax is much lower than 20% VAT.

The other side of this picture is that the US has a much more active wireless ISP sector that fills in the gaps between phone or cable company coverage. And if anyone thinks that BT is uniquely unpopular, they should look at the responses to the performance of companies such as Qwest in thinly populated states which it serves. Because of its financial structure Qwest is largely run to generate cash to pay off debt and is notorious for under-investment in its network. Similarly, Verizon has sold off its telephone networks in small rural states to focus on a smaller number of major markets.

Well that area of Oklahoma has never seen ADSL2+ range extenders, was distinctly ADSL type speeds

Google Fiber until they release some take-up figures is for me treated with the same respect as CityFibre and Bournemouth. Looking at Google Fiber with the same scrutiny we use on BT figures, the coverage does not justify the excitement unless you are happy to move home into a fiberhood.

The PDF was presented to BT Wholesale's customers in January 2012.

The expectation was that it would be economical to both deploy NGA to 2/3rds of the UK's homes and businesses and that 10% of homes and businesses would be passed by FTTP.

Guess it goes to show how much more expensive the enterprise has been than expected if FTTP had to be pared back so severely to provide the originally planned level of coverage, though it does seem a bit strange that even with all this additional expense it is to be completed a financial year early, some stragglers excepted.

Edited by deleted (Mon 03-Mar-14 13:19:47)

I guess my post is rubbish, read it now and I think I misunderstood the first post.

Though there are claims that BT has underspent on its commercial roll-out and thus can afford more FTTP if it wanted to.

Whether that is a guess, back of envelope or someone who has seen the BT books I have no idea.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Though there are claims that BT has underspent on its commercial roll-out and thus can afford more FTTP if it wanted to.

Whether that is a guess, back of envelope or someone who has seen the BT books I have no idea.

I believe that one comes down to whether the 2.5bln includes ongoing OpEx or not. While the announcements and PR implied that it was the costs of network construction the reality may be different.

What BT can and can't afford given the amount spent on content is debatable.

BT need to catch up on Virgin Media 152Meg

Fastest Virgin Media: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3345292779
Slowest Plusnet FTTC: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3345297673

But, FTTC still the best on upload thought!

Edited by adslmax (Mon 03-Mar-14 16:27:46)

Why?

I know some love to chase the dragon that is the fastest line, but the majority seem happy to pay less and get speeds that can cope with 2 x HD streams at the same time.

BT isn't competition these days! And never is.

And that is the problem from where I sit, trying to figure out the facts from the non-facts, and while some moan about weasel words from BT there is just as much coming from the others with mis-information.

I really wish BT would NOT take on some of the extension work for 2015 to 2017 and give the others a chance to show what they can do, rather than what they say they can do. In fact BT would have had an easier life if it had not won all the BDUK contracts.

You forget how low the vm coverage is and no real expansion plans afaik.
At least bt are trying to get faster broadband to most of the UK.

Edited by deleted (Mon 03-Mar-14 21:10:34)

BT offers faster speeds than Virgin - but to a smaller (but increasing) number of houses.

There is no need for anything above 80/20 domestically, unless you can tell me otherwise....

In reply to a post by AndyHCZ:

There is no need for anything above 80/20 domestically

Define "need"...

Don't worry, I understood it too - though had a hard time finding mention of "the 40% figure" that you mentioned in the OP. It was a long way from page 8!

Over the past few years, I've hoovered up a lot of information about the FTTC and FTTP rollouts, and a fair percentage has come from finding gems in these BT "product surgery" and ISP Forum presentations and the like.

While I note the same shift in expectation level, that FTTP has indeed reduced significantly, I also note that a *lot* of the coming-soon and future-exchange lists seem to have some amount of FTTP included. It seems to be a lot more than the original commercial exchanges.

Whether that is a deliberate choice, to include lines that are too far from cabinets, or because the rural areas tend to have more pole-fed lines, who knows?

Ok - put another way.

What service or software has a requirement of more than 80/20Mb for domestic users?

In reply to a post by AndyHCZ:

Ok - put another way.

What service or software has a requirement of more than 80/20Mb for domestic users?

With the manner in which we're being encouraged to use cloud services increasingly while there is no requirement for higher bandwidth we are getting to the stage where, for those taking advantage of such services, the bandwidth you have at home directly influences how responsive many tasks can feel.

Companies are actively advertising the cloud to domestic users, alongside online backup services and the like.

4K streaming is nearly upon us. While this will have an ABR around the 15-20Mb mark trials have shown bursts of 50Mb. The parents downstairs watching a very busy scene on a move, say a car chase, which by its nature will be very high bit rate, alongside whatever the kids are doing has the potential to stress the average FTTC connection.

Remember that while FTTC is sold at 80/20 or more exactly usually 76/19 due to distance from cabinet the median speed is somewhat lower. The Think Broadband Blog indicated a median speed of what looks like 53-54Mb/s. Take about 50Mb from that for the busy 4K stream downstairs you don't leave much for anyone else in the household. If mum isn't really paying attention to the action movie, which will inevitably feature Dwayne Johnson, but is doing other things, alongside the 2 kids browsing, Skyping, streaming, downloading, dad may find that part way through his movie he sees the dreaded buffering.

This is not an unlikely scenario. We should also be mindful to avoid discussing what 80Mb/20Mb can do, but instead to discuss what VDSL 2 can do in the current version of the technology. Until they actually JFDI vectoring is vapourware, and there is no guarantee Openreach will deploy vectoring, after all they were just over 2 years ago forecasting 10-20% of us to have access to >100Mb through them by now.

The presentation I started the thread with has a few interesting bits about this. Slide 21 estimates the average family might require 40-55Mb, in which case a substantial proportion of these average families would be SooL as their VDSL 2 is incapable of 40Mb. It is, it seems, over the top with its estimates of bandwidth requirements however it is spot on in that concurrency is the killer application.

In other news on that presentation slide 19 has a funny section:

Virgin � very much in the press, very public �speed war� materialising

Ya. Never happened, never going to. BT don't want to spend the money on pair bonding, it may harm other more profitable businesses and have never had any interest in competing with Virgin Media on raw speed.

Vectored, line bonded VDSL 2 would bring 100Mb to the majority but would cost money in terms of CPE, line cards and additional cabinets.

Vectored, line bonded VDSL 2 would bring 100Mb to the majority but would cost money in terms of CPE, line cards and additional cabinets.

In the foreseeable future I don't see mass take-up of that unless it's a fully out-of-the-box packaged product at under £40pm plus line rentals.

Even at well under that, take up would be low.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

4K streaming is nearly upon us.

Yeah, they keep saying that about nuclear fusion

Seriously though I'm not sure take up of 4k anything will be very high. The desire for HD is/was more about marketing hype for a lot of people. It's sad how many people are sitting too far from their TV to benefit and perhaps indicative of that that a lot of people I know can't be bothered to go and find the HD version of a channel. Sky tried to address that by swapping the HD/SD channel numbers ( http://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2010/12/09/sky-to-swa... ). And of course some people still only have 'HD Ready' sets. Frankly I'm just not sure people really care - plenty of people are obviously happy watching TV on iPads and the like.

I suppose there could be large droves sucke(re)d into buying 4K capable TVs but I have my doubts. That kind of person is probably only just recovering from being sucke(re)d into buying a 3D set. So I'm with others on this one. I think FTTC will be fine at least until the end of the decade. Quite possibly beyond that.

Another factor to consider is the relatively poor take up of high speed services. It's still a minority of connections and Virgin has twice now pushed people onto faster services presumably because so few people are actually choosing to upgrade.

But of course there's no way to know for sure and such predictions are usually wrong

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Vectored, line bonded VDSL 2 would bring 100Mb to the majority but would cost money in terms of CPE, line cards and additional cabinets.

In the foreseeable future I don't see mass take-up of that unless it's a fully out-of-the-box packaged product at under £40pm plus line rentals.

Even at well under that, take up would be low.

The whole point of the line bonding is that it would be out-of-the-box and invisible to the end user. There is no need for it to include 2 full line rentals and it shouldn't, as it only needs 2 x d-sides.

The main issues are regulatory, financial and commercial. Technically it's not only feasible but has been done all over the place; AT&T have millions of pair-bonded VDSL 2 lines in operation.

It can be used not only to deliver higher speeds to those close to cabinets but as a speed enabler for those further away. For me pair-bonding for a set monthly fee reflecting VDSL 2 port cost and d-side cost would be feasible, with any new bandwidth levels above 80/20 product charged as new tiers.

This approach would both increase >24/30Mb coverage and make 120Mb/30Mb or even 150Mb/40Mb services feasible.

Whether there is the will of course to seek the necessary regulatory approval and deliver such a product is a very different question, but there is no reason why the customer's bill should say anything other than:

Line rental
120Mb/30Mb FTTC+

Or

Line rental
80Mb/20Mb FTTC+

You get the idea, the + indicating speed boosted via bonding.

Could even charge, if feeling fancy, as:

Line rental
Broadband speed boost
80/20Mb Broadband

Would some people complain about being charged more for the same speed as those close? Perhaps, but no-one's forcing them to take it, their call.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

Another factor to consider is the relatively poor take up of high speed services. It's still a minority of connections and Virgin has twice now pushed people onto faster services presumably because so few people are actually choosing to upgrade.

The majority of VM's sales over the past year have been 60Mb+. They and other cable companies have a long history of uplifting tiers, nothing to do with take up.

Given that broadcasters are happy with satellite transmission not supporting a burst system to cope with highly complex scenes, i.e. explosions and falling snow/glitter are the scenes to avoid if you want a film to look good on even HD TV these days.

Thus I doubt they are going to really worry too much about the encoding being variable enough to go from 20 Mbps to 50 Mbps for the 2 second effect shot.

Also live TV over satellite feeds often has a 25 Mbps limit

4K will drive more needs, but I don't see any commercial service pushing anything en-masse beyond 25 Mbps, and that is a Europe wide statement. Google Fiber might do it different just because they can on their FTTP network

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Given that broadcasters are happy with satellite transmission not supporting a burst system to cope with highly complex scenes, i.e. explosions and falling snow/glitter are the scenes to avoid if you want a film to look good on even HD TV these days.

The BBC channels use stat-muxing I think but I think that was more about the lack of capacity on the old satellite. Cost may also have been a factor. So in general I agree that I don't see broadcasters bothering and that's probably another nail in the 4k coffin.

My guess is a wait and see how popular Netflix 4K content is.

Main stream broadcasters are only just doing 4K recordings let alone transmissions and the 'failure' of 3D will mean they are wary of expensive changes to the production chain. Working with 4K means edit suite upgrades, longer times to render final edit etc

The film world is slightly different

But that is the problem with all the "Up To" based products.
Fixed pricing regardless of attainable speed isn't a great way of doing it from a "consumer" point of view.
Obviously there are factors from the technical side of things which prefer this pricing policy due to common components costing the same regardless of attainable speed.
It's kind of like two people paying for a car each, one can do 50mph and the other 70mph, but both paying the same amount.
In lots of other occasions, people just wouldn't accept this arrangement.
I know this is an over simplification
cheers,
flipdee

You could more likely compare it to a mobile network where I pay for 3G but actually usually get EDGE or GPRS and even when I get 3G it is slow.

That's a better comparison but I was trying to steer clear of the data/coverage based arguments and more along the lines of something non technical people could think about.
The trouble is when I'm dealing with people who don't understands the limitations of the infrastructureand get their head round the fact they pay more than their neighbour for less service.
Anyway.

In reply to a post by ian72:

You could more likely compare it to a mobile network where I pay for 3G but actually usually get EDGE or GPRS and even when I get 3G it is slow.

But at least with a mobile network, the assumption is you will move around and be "mobile"

Or you can hang out the bedroom window just to get that extra bar.

Don't be ridiculous. No IPTV system uses VBR like you say it does. Netflix et al give you a solid 15mbit/sec or whatever and that's it.

I'm getting a bit sick of these ideas that the 'average home' which involves 15 people watching 4K TV while backing up a few TB to Amazon Web Services.

The fact is I struggle to tell the difference day to day between:

3mbit/sec ADSL which I use sometimes when I'm back up north
3G
4G LTE
60meg VM
80/20 FTTC
and gigabit ethernet on a corporate network.

If anything, VM is actually by far the worst due to the congestion at peak times (same with 3G to a certain extent).

3mbit/sec is pushing what is reasonable these days, but you can still watch iplayer and netflix in HD. Yes, if someone else is using the network, itll drop down to SD on netflix. Not the end of the world.

I think it is very telling that one of the leaked BT slides showed that average usage on FTTC was 200kbit/sec averaged out.

It's a total fact that bandwidth usage growth on the internet is slowing down significantly and has been for a while. It's not the late 90s anymore where the demands seem impossible to meet.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

My guess is a wait and see how popular Netflix 4K content is.

I don't think we need to wait for 4K streaming to show online.

Isn't the question answered by looking at the slow takeup of Bluray compared with the ongoing popularity of DVD, and their relative prices? People don't mind the higher quality (though plenty can't tell the difference or sit too far away to benefit), but they don't want to pay more for it, and certainly don't want to pay *again*!

It took over a decade to go widescreen, and a similar time to go HD. Bluray has been around, what, 7-8 years now? I saw a recent projection that Bluray discs will go from 17% of the market now to 35% in 5 years. One-third bluray, 13 years after introduction?

If people don't already feel the need for HD content that is sitting on supermarket shelves, and matches the HD screen that many have, what real hope is there for 4K content in the next decade?

Adding to your point, I can't believe how slow HD uptake has been, both in broadcast media and online.

I'm sure if you were to take a guess, back in 2005/6 when HD was picking up momentum, what percentage of content today would be watched in HD, I bet most people would have said all of it. But as you explained that's not the case at all.

Personally I don't understand it. I don't think I could ever bring myself to watch content in SD that's available in HD. It looks awful!

Yet somehow I'm in the minority!

Maybe the broadcasters are to blame? Freeview HD is still relatively recent, and BBC channels other than One and Two only went HD in the last few months.

Anyway, I digress...

Connectivity related user habits are no longer static.
I have experience of situations where several different "houses" internet use has adapted to the speed available.
At low speed <2Mbps a couple of connections went from barely 10Gb per month to over 10Gb per day and climbing when upgraded to 50+Mbps.
I agree that we may all never saturate the speed available 24/7 but why shouldn't someone opt for say 80Mbps over 40Mbps so when they do use it they benefit.
In an ideal world the bearer would be 1Gbps with either burstable speeds or tiered speeds up to maximum.
It's hard to justify making do with something just because it seems good enough right now.
We'll possibly look back at fttc in ten years time and laugh.

I have to agree, I've had HD TVs since early 2007 and as soon as HD transmissions became available on Freesat I've made full use of them, I find SD looks awful now. The wife always used to say she couldn't tell the difference between SD and HD, don't know why. What I am hoping is that 4k Tvs use 10 bit colour, as what I do hate is the colour banding issues which I believe is because the TV uses 8 bit colour

Edited by R0NSKI (Wed 05-Mar-14 07:13:09)

In reply to a post by Brookzy:

Adding to your point, I can't believe how slow HD uptake has been, both in broadcast media and online.

In broadcasting availability has been an issue for many. People with Sky have had access to a lot if they chose to pay. I do and for the last 18 months, if not two years everything I've watched has been in HD. But other platforms aren't as good (has VM caught up yet?). Certainly if you're too sensible to pay to watch TV your choice of HD channels is limited.

In reply to a post by R0NSKI:

What I am hoping is that 4k Tvs use 10 bit colour, as what I do hate is the colour banding issues which I believe is because the TV uses 8 bit colour

Yes, that would be nice. The other day on the train watching the sunrise I was a bit disconcerted to see banding in the sky. Then I realised it was an after image from the book I was reading and my brain had decided that colour banding was the cause. :-/

not sure how you cant tell the difference to 3G, I think your post is stretching credibility somewhat

using 3G even light pages are significantly slower due to the proxying and extra latency effects.

Do you think there were people who thought, why'd I need a colour tv, sure black and white is just grand.
Crazy thing is, there probably was, I think you can still get a black and white only tv license.

In reply to a post by flipdee:

Do you think there were people who thought, why'd I need a colour tv, sure black and white is just grand.
Crazy thing is, there probably was, I think you can still get a black and white only tv license.

Of course - but in a sense that just helps prove our point. Colour TV took several years to become dominant. Over a decade, possibly two decades. It seems to me that you're just proving that changes in TV standards typically take a decade or more to become mainstream.

Colour TV - At least a decade.
Wide screen - Nearly a decade.
HD - Nearly a decade.
Bluray - At least a decade.

That's a pretty obvious historical precedent. If 4k is becoming available now there's no reason to expect it to dominate until 2025. And even then no-one is saying that FTTC can't handle it. Merely that some households might have a maxed-out connection. By the time that becomes an issue (if it ever does) FTTPoD will be everywhere so easily solved by people paying to upgrade.

As ever you could argue that it makes FTTC only a stop-gap solution but in IT terms a solution that lasts a decade is pretty damn' good. And FTTC isn't entirely wasted since it leads on to FTTPoD. Maybe it would be better if we followed Cyberdoyle's advice and went FTTP/B everywhere but do you think we'd have the same NGA coverage as we do now? I don't. FTTC seems to me to be a good strategy. It's giving the most people most of what they want for the lowest cost.

I can barely tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, in my eyes you have to either be right in front of the screen or have a huge screen to notice 4k.

So its not an equal argument really, as black and white to colour is plain as day, SD on a CRT looks pretty good but looks rubbish on a LCD as LCD's cant handle non native resolutions too well.

I am not sure 4k will take off the same way as HD has, better things that need doing is introducing things like OLED as too many HD tv's exist that have bad viewing angles, bad viewing angles is something very noticeable rather than the difference between 1080p and 4k.

I agree with you, however with those other technologies availability wasn't a primary issue at least in the long term.
Will a decade from first deployment of fttc see 100% "superfast" availability, I'm still not convinced.
I am of the opinion everything should be driven as much as possible otherwise service providers are content to provide mediocre service, just take some parts of America with fttp but 5Mbps service on top.
Crazy.

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

Don't be ridiculous. No IPTV system uses VBR like you say it does. Netflix et al give you a solid 15mbit/sec or whatever and that's it.

As far as I'm aware Netflix use both VBR and ABR, so they may encode one 10-second section at 2Mb/s then another at 10Mb/s leaving an average bitrate of 6Mb/s. Smoothing this out is part of what the buffering is for.

3mbit/sec is pushing what is reasonable these days, but you can still watch iplayer and netflix in HD. Yes, if someone else is using the network, itll drop down to SD on netflix. Not the end of the world.

Netflix SuperHD requires 5.8-7Mb. Indeed not, though watching 480p on a nice large smart TV isn't going to be a thrilling experience having just dropped down from SD.

I think it is very telling that one of the leaked BT slides showed that average usage on FTTC was 200kbit/sec averaged out.

It's twice that now, and that includes everyone who may be browsing or even doing nothing on their connection. It's simply taking the number of active sessions and dividing it by the total bandwidth consumption.

It's a total fact that bandwidth usage growth on the internet is slowing down significantly and has been for a while. It's not the late 90s anymore where the demands seem impossible to meet.

It's a total fact that that's not the case. Virgin Media have seen usage increase 10-fold in 7 years and increase by 50% in the past year. The demands are easier to meet because the technology to meet them is more abundant. The technology is there to meet them because the demand for that technology is there.

I was working on broadband networks for most of the early 2000s and the main driver for bandwidth was P2P. It's now streaming which demands high and consistent bandwidth.

LINX hits 2Tb at consumer peak hours across the public peering, this ignores that to places like Netflix, Akamai, etc, many are going to be using private peering, and still shows a 5-fold increase in traffic in the past 5 years from 400Gb to that 2Tb level. This rate of increase actually accelerated in 2013.

Sky / Virgin Media / Talk Talk / BT Wholesale all reported increased downstream congestion issues over the past year which have required some heavy duty upgrades to address. Ask any of them they'll tell you the same story why - Netflix.

You may also have wanted to look at the presentation some more rather than picking the bits you liked the look of.

Average household data consumption has grown 7 fold in the last 5 years; Ofcom forecast it will grow by a factor of 33 over the next 10 years

I wasn't aware of a huge increase in consumer bandwidth per user in the late 90s. At that time the Internet was still paid for per minute, most of the new usage was academic and business, and broadband was only just in its infancy in the UK.

25% of people use 75% of the bandwidth, it seems in your opinion because you don't require or apparently want that amount of bandwidth no-one does.

Incidentally I didn't raise the whole point about concurrent video usage, the presentation did.

I find your claim that you can't tell the difference day to day between 3Mb/s ADSL, 3G, 4G and fixed line SFBB churlish and absurd. I can and do quite easily.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

By the time that becomes an issue (if it ever does) FTTPoD will be everywhere so easily solved by people paying to upgrade.

By then it may even be priced to try and encourage rather than actively deter people from purchasing it.

I know it's not a great comparison but I still believe that advancements are important because one day that becomes the norm and anything less is considered inferior.
Let's consider this, if fttc was never considered and everything was straight to fttp, would this be pointless, overkill? Ignoring the cost implication.
But yet other countries have gone down this route

I'm too sensible to pay for $ky, never had it. I've used Freesat since HD became available, we now have BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV and channel 4 all in full time HD

SD prior to transmission looks better than HD does at home.
HD prior to transmission looks stunning and still good at home.
4K at trade shows is slightly scary with the realism

SD picture quality could be a lot better than it is, just needs bit rates pushing higher rather than resolution.

As far as I'm aware Netflix use both VBR and ABR, so they may encode one 10-second section at 2Mb/s then another at 10Mb/s leaving an average bitrate of 6Mb/s. Smoothing this out is part of what the buffering is for.

It's still delivered as a solid 6mbit/sec stream though. It doesn't go down to 2mbit/sec and then up to 10mbit/sec all the time.

It's twice that now, and that includes everyone who may be browsing or even doing nothing on their connection. It's simply taking the number of active sessions and dividing it by the total bandwidth consumption.

Obviously that's what the stat is - but it shows you how little of the actual capacity is being used. Less than 0.3% - or 0.6% if it has doubled since then, assuming everyone on FTTC has a 60mbit/sec connection on average.

I wasn't aware of a huge increase in consumer bandwidth per user in the late 90s. At that time the Internet was still paid for per minute, most of the new usage was academic and business, and broadband was only just in its infancy in the UK.

Actually, in %age y/y terms the late 90s were by far the biggest increase in consumer bandwidth (in transit and peering) per user. Hence why so many companies went bust in the early 2000s when it became very clear that the 10,000% Y/Y increase wasn't sustainable.

Of course Virgin Media are still seeing a big increase - but 500% in 5 years is still much less than the 10,000% you saw back in the day.

It's a simple fact - the pace of bandwidth usage growth is slowing. Yes, bandwidth use itself is still going up, but it's not going up at the same rate it used to be. That's because there simply isn't the applications that require it.

I find your claim that you can't tell the difference day to day between 3Mb/s ADSL, 3G, 4G and fixed line SFBB churlish and absurd. I can and do quite easily.

Apart from downloading/uploading big files, its hard to tell the difference. DC-HSPA+ when not congested easily delivers sub 75ms pings with low jitter and 10mbit/sec down and 2.5mbit/sec up. If I switch over to WiFi, unless I'm downloading "100 linux isos" I'm not going to see the difference.

BTW - I am not against the rollout of SFBB by any means. I just think that BT have got their rollout spot on. FTTC is more than enough for the near future and has allowed them to serve more houses more quickly.

It's this doom mongering that unless we get every single house in the UK on FTTP the country is doomed because people won't be able to stream 5 4K channels simultaneously that drives me up the walls.

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

It's still delivered as a solid 6mbit/sec stream though. It doesn't go down to 2mbit/sec and then up to 10mbit/sec all the time.

I watched something on Netflix early. It wasn't streaming at all, it was filling buffer periodically with bursts.

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

Actually, in %age y/y terms the late 90s were by far the biggest increase in consumer bandwidth (in transit and peering) per user. Hence why so many companies went bust in the early 2000s when it became very clear that the 10,000% Y/Y increase wasn't sustainable.

From an incredibly low base. Weren't companies going bust from overspending on network construction in the case of transit and peering and underestimating demand for dial up in the case of the free call ISPs?

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

It's a simple fact - the pace of bandwidth usage growth is slowing. Yes, bandwidth use itself is still going up, but it's not going up at the same rate it used to be. That's because there simply isn't the applications that require it.

LINX appears to disagree, their graphs suggest bandwidth usage growth has accelerated in the past year. We're probably seeing some of the same effect we did from the migration between dial up and xDSL / cable alongside increased prevalence of streaming.

I appreciate that not everyone will need high bandwidth, however it would've been rather nice for the option to be there. What Openreach have done is, for the most part, the bare minimum in terms of quality, we'll see how sustainable it is in the medium term. The financials imply they expect that kit to be delivering our services for a decade or more.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

SD prior to transmission looks better than HD does at home.
HD prior to transmission looks stunning and still good at home.
4K at trade shows is slightly scary with the realism

Who's ever going to want to stand in front of a 4K camera?!

In reply to a post by R0NSKI:

...we now have BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV and channel 4 all in full time HD

I can get the channels you listed, plus BBC 3 & 4, CBBC, Cbeebies, BBC News HD and Aljazeera HD. And that's on Freeview HD!

Are you in a low coverage area or something?

Edited by deleted (Wed 05-Mar-14 18:51:07)

The way the buffering works varies across playback platforms and how the content provider also decides to offer stuff....

Some sources do buffer, stop, buffer
Others appear to be a constant stream and evolve the bitrate on the fly

All my TV reception is done via media PCs and I haven't yet purchased a DVB-T2 tuner which is required for free view HD.

In reply to a post by flipdee:

I think you can still get a black and white only tv license.

Last year there were 13,202 B&W TV licences in force apparently so there are still some out there that are OK with it.

I've heard iPlayer in b&w brings a new feel to live shows, especially football matches. Much more engrossing.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

The financials imply they expect that kit to be delivering our services for a decade or more.

Correct, and certainly longer for BDUK cabinets.

But it doesn't have to be delivering *everyone's* services in parallel all the way through that decade. It is certainly possible for the kit to be used by the high-end users in the first few years; they can migrate out to faster equipment as it becomes available, while subscribers further down the digital food-chain will migrate in to FTTC.

The kit stays in use, while the type of subscriber changes...

I watched something on Netflix early. It wasn't streaming at all, it was filling buffer periodically with bursts.

http://grab.by/uTxG - if you're looking at a network activity monitor then it would appear as bursts. But the video bitrate is the same regardless. Noone would ever use a *transport* stream as VBR. You can use VBR within the stream, but on IPTV you set it to the same value throughout. How on earth would smooth streaming work if it went from 1mbit/sec to 32mbit/sec to 2mbit/sec... etc?

From an incredibly low base. Weren't companies going bust from overspending on network construction in the case of transit and peering and underestimating demand for dial up in the case of the free call ISPs?

From a low base? You could argue the 1970s was a low base. You could argue that the 1980s were a low base. On a logarithmic level, bandwidth growth has *declined* in acceleration. It's a total fact. Bandwidth use has grown. The pace of bandwidth usage increase has slowed - totally different. This is one example of it: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/Talks/2013/01-11-fut...

LINX appears to disagree, their graphs suggest bandwidth usage growth has accelerated in the past year. We're probably seeing some of the same effect we did from the migration between dial up and xDSL / cable alongside increased prevalence of streaming.

You've already said that LINX was bad for predicting this. LINX is not a proxy for home bandwidth use. LINX themselves say PI traffic is more important, and that is not shown - which you agreed with.

I appreciate that not everyone will need high bandwidth, however it would've been rather nice for the option to be there.

Noone is debating that. All my point is that FTTP for good reason isn't what people need right now.

What Openreach have done is, for the most part, the bare minimum in terms of quality, we'll see how sustainable it is in the medium term. The financials imply they expect that kit to be delivering our services for a decade or more.

But the point is that fibre is closer to people. FTTPoD, while horribly expensive now, is going to be available to >80% of the UK population within a few months.

I can remember being on these forums in 2008 and everyone saying that BT would 'never' roll out fibre and they'd leave everyone on ADSL forever.

The fact is that the UK has the best, and in my opinion more importantly, cheapest rollout of >30mbit/sec broadband in the world - minus a few edge cases like Korea, Hong Kong and E Europe (where population density is so high and/or no existing copper infrastructure).

Go to the US if you want - FiOS is insanely expensive and the rollout was abandoned years ago. Same with France, Germany, Spain - far smaller penetration of any sort of FTTC/P and much more expensive service. I think this is all just Daily Mail talk - "the UK is the worst". In fact, we've done the best and with a comparatively tiny government subsidy. We should be proud of this as a country.

where the uk is unique is that we have decided to spread the rollout to low density rural areas, whilst other countries target urban high density areas with better technology, so we are very bad on FTTP rollout but our average speed is good because of the high availability of FTTC.

We also are probably on a average level better of than america who's isp's are still struggling to get to grips with netflix, and game digital distribution, youtube is full of videos of americans moaning about their isp limits dont allow them to download digital games as 'america isnt ready', and of course now at least one american isp has decided to charge netflix to route its traffic over non congested routes.

So to me our problems are urban areas are falling behind since they are effectively subsidising FTTC rollout in rural areas and that the fact openreach is unaccountable to the end user, I think the latter will never be addressed as ofcom seem to have accepted it in return for cheap broadband from BT.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 06-Mar-14 09:15:29)

You don't mean to suggest that the digital divide is less in the UK than other countries?

Shirley we are the worst in the world hence all the lobbying about digital divide and investment going to a monopoly provider to install BT Infinity.

its most defenitly less yes.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

its most defenitly less yes.

Often cheaper as well (although as that relates to RoI it might not be a good thing). I've been working with colleagues in Minneapolis and more recently Boston and both sets are paying more 'per Mb/s' than me.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

You don't mean to suggest that the digital divide is less in the UK than other countries?

Shirley we are the worst in the world hence all the lobbying about digital divide and investment going to a monopoly provider to install BT Infinity.

Nope, we have the worst digital divide that I know of. But not in the way that this phrase is usually taken to mean.

To me, the "digital divide" is at its worst when the first line of a new technology goes in, and then narrows slowly while the rest of the country catches up.

Right now, B4RN has set the highest bar. It will be a while for the rest of us in the poor cities, on the wrong side of the divide, get a chance to catch up with that.

Obviously migrating all cabinet eligible lines to the corresponding cabinet, possible backwards compatibility with ADSL2+ would be out of the question?
Taking the exchange effectively out of the equation?
Total crazy talk?

I know the total unavailability of Gigabit in cities is terrible, oh hold on aren't people like Hyperoptic doing something about that?

In reply to a post by flipdee:

Obviously migrating all cabinet eligible lines to the corresponding cabinet, possible backwards compatibility with ADSL2+ would be out of the question?
Taking the exchange effectively out of the equation?
Total crazy talk?

Yes, there aren't nearly enough ports available in the FTTC cabinets.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

So to me our problems are urban areas are falling behind since they are effectively subsidising FTTC rollout in rural areas and that the fact openreach is unaccountable to the end user, I think the latter will never be addressed as ofcom seem to have accepted it in return for cheap broadband from BT.

Really?

Surely if anyone is being subsidised it's the urban areas.

I live in a rural area, more than 2 miles from either the exchange or cab. FTTC won't change a thing for me as the copper will still be the same and I'll be stuck at 2.5meg.

Yet my monthly ADSL bill is more than the cheapest (and faster) fibre product and my taxes go towards the rollout. My exchange doesn't even have a date at present so is likely to be 2016 at the earliest.

In reply to a post by fiddler:

Really?

Surely if anyone is being subsidised it's the urban areas.

I know I'm being pedantic here but the total taxes paid by those living in London, which hasn't seen a penny of BDUK funding and has many thousands with no access to NGA, is just a little more than any rural area.

In reply to a post by fiddler:

Surely if anyone is being subsidised it's the urban areas.

Nope. Urban areas are profitable. Rural areas often aren't(*). Thus some of the money paid by urban dwellers is being used to cover the losses of rural areas. This is true of most services and why urban areas generally have better facilities.

(*)A simplistic view but broadly correct. It's down to population density and, fundamentally, is why Homo Sapiens invented urbanisation thousands of years ago. It's always cheaper to provide a service to a large densely packed population.

If paying more for ADSL than fibre suggests you are in the 4% of properties NOT connected to an exchange TalkTalk have unbundled.

96% of UK homes have access to the FULL LLU from TalkTalk at £2.50 + voice line rental

Outside this footprint Ofcom has operated to keep the BT Wholesale pricing high, so that firms like TalkTalk and Sky are encouraged to roll-out further and can undercut the monopoly provider. There is a fight going on by BT to stop this and a fight by the other side to continue it and force fibre pricing down at the wholesale level in the areas its available.

To be even more simplistic, if we don't have fibre then we're not being subsidised.

In reply to a post by fiddler:

To be even more simplistic, if we don't have fibre then we're not being subsidised.

Your ADSL was subsidised. Your telecoms have probably always been subsidised.

Everyone's or just those in rural areas?

I'd had four years of ADSL in London before moving back here to dial-up, only having ADSL in '05 [SWCOO].

yeah by coincidence watching a treasure movie on sky disney movie channel, sky obviously transmit their premium channels at a decent bitrate, this movie was from 1950 and it looks very good quality and I dont think they had HD cameras then

its as if they deliberatly transmitting SD channels at low bitrates to promote HD

Transponder bandwidth allocation is shocking for some channels.
Even freeview suffered a little but not to the same extent.
The perfect example was trying to broadcast football matches on ITV 4 SD, a blurry (pixelated) mess most of the time.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

yeah by coincidence watching a treasure movie on sky disney movie channel, sky obviously transmit their premium channels at a decent bitrate, this movie was from 1950 and it looks very good quality and I dont think they had HD cameras then

No. They used film which has an even higher resolution. Quite a lot of film based media has been resampled in HD now. Consequently you can see a lot of Columbo episodes in HD. Even some Doctor Who. Basically anything recorded on film can now be resampled in HD to get an improved picture.

They also upscale SD, but obviously use broadcast quality equipment, and as you say a lot of popular old films/shows have been digitally remastered. We could of had much better TV quality but the UK went for more channels over quality.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

No. They used film which has an even higher resolution. Quite a lot of film based media has been resampled in HD now. Consequently you can see a lot of Columbo episodes in HD. Even some Doctor Who. Basically anything recorded on film can now be resampled in HD to get an improved picture.

Even The Italian Job from 1969 is available in BluRay:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Italian-Job-40th-Anniversary...

I believe this was originally paid by Sky to be restored and converted to HD as it was a Sky Movies HD opening film back in 2006 / 2007 when HD launched. Subsequently its been released on BluRay.

The agenda of a talking shop is not going to generate much heat or light worth worrying about two years later IMHO.

Two years ago we were in the citys. Today we are moving on from the market towns. Two years time we will be well into the villages.

Edited by deleted (Fri 07-Mar-14 21:42:53)

It's one of several films Sky paid for the restoration and remastering. Zulu was another one IIRC.

No attempt to generate light or heat, merely noting how expectations have changed in a couple of years. One of the things that hasn't changed is expectations regarding coverage.

Oddly we're still in the cities in some cases; in my own immediate locale Leeds Basinghall and Wakefield are examples, and the cabinets serving 3 of my 4 previous addresses in London are all still awaiting deployment despite being on the rollout for one reason or another, one of those addresses being in the first phase of the initial 29 exchanges announced in 2009.

Regardless coverage is quite irrelevant as it's proceeding according to plan. The key points I was noting were the much lower level of FTTP, that vectoring is still on the drawing board, and that the expectations of required bandwidth per household have changed dramatically.

I'm sure BT would much rather the shortfalls in coverage/speed weren't highlighted as there may be some explaining to do when all is said and done and the bduk commitment proves to be especially difficult in practice.

Sadly just like all digital transmission mediums. Technology advancements fuel greed not necessarily blanket improvement of service.
SD satellite can be such low bitrate that analogue terrestrial would be more enjoyable.
Don't start me on DAB, FM sounds like studio quality over the nasty bitrates used on DAB, although in fairness it was a premature deployment, dab+ is the way to go but not backwards compatible.

yeah how better would the SD channels be if

(a) HD channels had no price premium on sattelite services.
(b) HD tv's were free.
(c) and more bandwidth available due to not having the 100s of trash channels. I watched a channel showing some star trek yesterday and was roughly 50/50 on the adverts and the programme, it was literally 5 minutes of star trek followed by 5 mins of adverts. This is of course a reason why scheduled tv is on the way out.

Edited by Chrysalis (Sat 08-Mar-14 23:39:49)