FTTP - can residential accounts get it?

I am on the Aylsham exchange which is set to get Fibre in June. I noticed that the samknows site is showing FTTP as well. My question is, as a residential customer - can I get FTTP or is this reserved for commercial only?

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/EAAYL

Edited by deleted (Fri 02-May-14 18:29:56)

Sam Knows only covers at a exchange level so their could be both FTTC and FTTP deployed in the Aylsham exchange area but it depends which part as to what service you may be able to order.

FTTP is available to residential customers but only a few isps are selling it due to the low coverage, mainly its FTTC that is available.

Use the below checker to see which cab you are connected to, it may also list if FTTP is planned.

If you're phone number is sky or tt use the address, postcode can cover multiple cabs.

https://www.btwholesale.com/includes/adsl/main.html

Edited by deleted (Fri 02-May-14 18:48:23)

Thanks, I've been checking the usual places (Openreach, roadworks.org and the ADSL checker) - no mention of any Fibre stuff.

Put my BT line into the website below and here's what I get...

http://i.imgur.com/pgDCR7H.png

Do you know where cab 7 is?

Once a secondary cab appears next to it, keep any eye on the above checker as it will update with a estimated speed and date and will then change to accepting orders.

Aylsham is listed as FTTC/P here on the Superfast Where and When site.

Now there also used to be another list on there, something to do with new housing estates and there was one in Aylesham which was specified as getting FTTP.

They've recently installed cabinets in Wingham, so they are getting close. I saw them fitting one on the road out of Wingham towards Aylesham a few weeks ago - they had traffic lights causing chaos.

Cabinet 7 is outside my house. We have new bigger cabinet - there are several round town but none powered. Roll on June (if it goes live then!)

Having read through the thread, it looks like you are to get FTTC, at some point.

But just to answer your original question, yes they can, I've fitted 8 in the last week and a half !

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

But just to answer your original question, yes they can, I've fitted 8 in the last week and a half !

Not bad for something that obviously has no demand for it given the laughable roll out thus far.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

Not bad for something that obviously has no demand for it given the laughable roll out thus far.

?
If that is what is rolled out to a particular area, surely the demand levels will be identical to if FTTC had been rolled out there?

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

?
If that is what is rolled out to a particular area, surely the demand levels will be identical to if FTTC had been rolled out there?

It was my being sassy. High demand for NGA would justify deploying FTTP straight off the bat. High demand is the explanation Openreach give for deploying more FTTP in the Milton Keynes region than pretty much the rest of England outside of Cornwall put together.

Openreach's allergy to CapEx has become abundantly clear, and areas where they're deploying a second FTTC cabinet at considerable cost, and will follow it up by deploying G.Fast, and follow that up by eventually deploying FTTP are a testament to that attitude. They're like someone running on a payday loan who'll pay way more in the future to avoid having to pay now.

Openreach's demand calculations were pulled out of their hindmost, though most of their calculations appear to be pulled out of their hindmost in my experience. My own 96 home passed cabinet with an expected take up of ~25% according to the commercial modelling unit head which ended up being a 400 home passed cabinet with take up of ~50% comes to mind. Bear in mind that Openreach installed all the lines on this cabinet but appeared entirely unaware of what they installed and stubbornly insisted for the best part of a year that the 96 figure was correct.

Their enabling of a cabinet passing less than 200 homes with zero additional premises to be built with a 288 line Huawei just down the road while saying this one was unviable comes to mind. That cabinet hasn't filled a single line card as far as I'm aware, this one only enabled after a campaign lasting nearly a year is on its last set of ties and being evaluated for a second cabinet. Last engineer who attended it informed he'd never worked on a cabinet that had sold so quickly.

The 2.5 billion commercial expenditure figure that Openreach bandy about is likewise laughable. Thanks to their cutting the FTTP down from 25% of the NGA deployment to virtually nothing outside of subsidised Cornwall that has left a figure closer to 1.3 billion of CapEx, not 2.5 billion. A large proportion of the 'commercial' brownfield FTTP has been in Milton Keynes and has been a complete disaster with an overbudget, delayed roll out. They deployed in the wrong places and on hindsight know it.

It's a really sad state of affairs when Kingston Communications invest more freely than BT do. Longer term it'll cost BT more as they install hardware in high demand areas only to rip it out and overbuild it but, hey, the money men are happy in the short term.

Ahh that's better.

Edited by deleted (Fri 02-May-14 22:41:29)

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

Openreach's allergy to CapEx has become abundantly clear, and areas where they're deploying a second FTTC cabinet at considerable cost, and will follow it up by deploying G.Fast, and follow that up by eventually deploying FTTP are a testament to that attitude. They're like someone running on a payday loan who'll pay way more in the future to avoid having to pay now.

Brilliant

Is like I said about the ECI, cheaper for openreach to have got the vectoring capable hardware of the bat instead of getting the cheaper stuff first and then a few years later replacing it, more long term cost but with the gains of saving money in the immediate short term, your payday description fits what they doing perfectly

BT seem to love milton keynes, they have had a lot of special treatment in the last half a dozen years or so. I wonder which BT exec lives there.

I don't doubt that BT have made some strategic errors here and there, but I really don't buy the theory that Openreach is going to find itself running FTTP to every residence any time soon, nor that we're going to be kicking ourselves as a nation that they don't.

Some of you might have seen the coverage of Netflix's arrangement with the big ISPs in the US. There's talk of how video is very demanding, and the costs involved... but if you looked very carefully you'd find some hard numbers. Netflix customers typically run at around 2-3Mbps. That's on FTTP and FTTN products, and it's _after_ Netflix spent a bunch of money against their will to arrange direct peering. That's "Now our customers are happy with how speedy everything is" bandwidth in other words. But it's a number you could achieve with ADSL2+ if only everyone lived near enough to an exchange. My point is that one of the most "bandwidth intensive" popular applications uses so little.

The reason BT's Infinity adverts focus on a multi-user household with intensive needs is that aside from bragging rights it rapidly gets harder to justify more bandwidth as the numbers go up. FTTC puts a huge number of residences beyond the point where "bandwidth" is something they seriously need (and so will pay for) more of, even on the upstream side. So it's just never going to make sense to provide those residences with FTTP. For other issues like latency due to "buffer bloat" more bandwidth is an expensive sticking plaster, not a real solution.

People tend to wrongly project from a few data points on an upward trend that things will grow endlessly, but in reality they're more often on something like an S curve, and they just can't see that yet.

I bet early electricity distribution looked like this too. At first you're running a cable to someone's home for a light, then it's five lights, then they want to run a refrigerator, oven, heating... it seems to analysts as though demand grows without end, but they're wrong. Running 1MW electrical supply to each home would not be "future-proofing" it would just be wasted money.

In reply to a post by tialaramex:

I don't doubt that BT have made some strategic errors here and there, but I really don't buy the theory that Openreach is going to find itself running FTTP to every residence any time soon, nor that we're going to be kicking ourselves as a nation that they don't.

The percentages on this news story are concerning.

The majority of those not covered by Virgin cable seeing 38Mb/s and below. It's debatable how future proof that kind of performance is.

The long term value of deploying 1 or 2 FTTC cabinets to an area, along with the operating costs of powering them, line cards, etc, then deploying G.Fast to distribution points, then eventually deploying FTTP compared with deploying FTTP sooner is debatable.

For other issues like latency due to "buffer bloat" more bandwidth is an expensive sticking plaster, not a real solution.

Bit confused. What else is to be done about links that are saturated, hence having to use excessive buffering to try and manage traffic, beyond upgrade their bandwidth? Do we just strip buffers and ditch packets as soon as they come onto the line? How then do ISPs manage QoS on the links, nailing up bandwidth for businesses while running best effort residential servics?

Edited by deleted (Sat 03-May-14 15:10:02)

ignitionet - as you are will aware there is a challenge between the BAU work and Fibre programme -you comment around he The 2.5 billion commercial expenditure figure that Openreach bandy about is likewise laughable -is unhelpful as you know that to be fact aas you have heard that from a number of senior people your cab was finailly covered under that banner -- as you know developers tend to spend money on new community centres and Schools as part of their 106 - dont engage the infrastrcure provdier about what they are really buildin ans then wonder why the broadband is not as they expect to to be

FYI less FTTP equals more FTTC and more exchanges have become commercial (under the 2.5bn) (which were originally non commercial due to the increase in FTTC and Decrease in FTTP the intervenion areas on some of the later counties are smaller than they could have been due to th fact you can do more FTTC (exchanges) than you can by buildind FTTP

so for avoidance of doubt it is £2.5bn and it was not public money -so the business makes it decisions on this - to the beneift of shareholders / investers
if a commnity want FTTP the they can look at funding it as you are well aware
FYI whats happening with cab 90 ?

Edited by deleted (Sat 03-May-14 17:05:46)

In reply to a post by Fastman2:

ignitionet - as you are will aware there is a challenge between the BAU work and Fibre programme -you comment around he The 2.5 billion commercial expenditure figure that Openreach bandy about is likewise laughable -is unhelpful as you know that to be fact aas you have heard that from a number of senior people your cab was finailly covered under that banner -- as you know developers tend to spend money on new community centres and Schools as part of their 106 - dont engage the infrastrcure provdier about what they are really buildin ans then wonder why the broadband is not as they expect to to be

FYI less FTTP equals more FTTC and more exchanges have become commercial (under the 2.5bn) (which were originally non commercial due to the increase in FTTC and Decrease in FTTP the intervenion areas on some of the later counties are smaller than they could have been due to th fact you can do more FTTC (exchanges) than you can by buildind FTTP

so for avoidance of doubt it is £2.5bn and it was not public money -so the business makes it decisions on this - to the beneift of shareholders / investers
if a commnity want FTTP the they can look at funding it as you are well aware
FYI whats happening with cab 90 ?

The 2.5 billion figure is CapEx and OpEx. The impression is given all over that that figure is for network build which isn't really the case. The last update to investors indicated incremental CapEx of 1.3 billion.

Senior people claim an exchange costs a million and then each cabinet 100k on top to enable for FTTC. Those words came from the then-Openreach CEO and are not the case. Even the final 50 million in additional commercial funding is only costing 125GBP / premises passed.

I believe originally 25% of the 19 million premises roll out was planned to be FTTP. Given the cost differences between the two I would've hoped that dropping from 4.75 million FTTP premises planned to not even 250,000 funded solely by Openreach without ERDF / council funding would've meant quite a lot more FTTC than originally planned.

Regarding self-funding, I was actually wanting to buy FTTPoD sadly I'm in band F, and the exchange was enabled just in time for the price increases to kick in and prevent my ordering. The 100k for this cabinet appears as if it didn't cover bringing the fibre spine closer than a kilometre away.

The install charge went from 500+VAT to 750+VAT, the distance component from 2.5k+VAT to 4.375k+VAT, which still wasn't enough to scare me, and the annual fee from 456+VAT / year to 1188+VAT / year before it gets to the exchange, which does.

Cabinet 90 was enabled before 82, as part of the first infill of Hunslet exchange. I presume you're referring to cabinet 91.

The estates are hybrids of MDUs, terraced, semi-detached and detached housing so a few options are possible. I'm in touch with one supplier over possible hybrid build of FTTB to the flats and FTTP to homes in that area and, in turn, over a wider area of this estate. Any future self-funded deployment will almost certainly be to an alternative supplier.

I'm aware the business decision is to the benefit of the investors - in the short term. They're the ones holding the purse strings. In the case of a cabinet like this one in the longer term Openreach face potentially the costs of standing another cabinet, line cards, and powering them both. Then at some point later on the costs of potentially building a new aggregation node, the current one is a way away and unsure how much capacity it has, but most certainly costs of deploying G.Fast to distribution points. Finally at some point in the future the cost of completing the fibre drops.

Of course this assumes that Openreach won't be tapping up the public sector for money again.

Meanwhile the people on Virgin Media are getting higher downstream speeds than I am, even with 2 x FTTC lines bonded, for less than half the price I pay for the two lines alongside their line rental. The next thing I have in prospect to start to catch up is vectoring which seems to have made very little progress. Being in an Openreach-only area I have no other choices other than to pay over 200GBP/month retail and 6k up front for FTTPoD.

The choice that BT are so concerned about providing to end users seems to only extend to the very low end, the ability to be able to pay next to nothing for second-rate DSL from A N Other cheap supplier. Wanting a contended, best effort product that's between EAD and xDSL pricing seems to be unreasonable though.

Obviously Ofcom are partly to blame, but there's been very little sign in public that Openreach are trying to change things. The 'Fibre Only eXchange', Deddington, isn't fibre only at all, the copper is all still there. Why aren't Openreach out in public trying to get this changed, it's crazy? FTTP would make more commercial sense overnight if Openreach were permitted to remove copper, but I guess it is too profitable to want to do so.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

The majority of those not covered by Virgin cable seeing 38Mb/s and below. It's debatable how future proof that kind of performance is.

Sure, and I summarised the debate earlier. Without as yet unimagined novel high bandwidth applications 20Mbit/s feels very nice even with several simultaneous users, subject to the caveat that I'll get to below.

... then eventually deploying FTTP compared with deploying FTTP sooner is debatable.

Sure, if you're determined to imagine that the trend continues to infinity, which is exactly the scenario I was arguing against.

Bit confused. What else is to be done about links that are saturated, hence having to use excessive buffering to try and manage traffic, beyond upgrade their bandwidth? Do we just strip buffers and ditch packets as soon as they come onto the line? How then do ISPs manage QoS on the links, nailing up bandwidth for businesses while running best effort residential servics?

See? This sounds intuitively right doesn't it. And that's been good enough for people designing things like your average home WiFI AP, DSL modems and so on. It isn't true though, as experienced network engineers knew, but nobody thought to ask them. Of course once they realised why their home network performance sucked so badly they began working on the problem, but first let's see why it's a problem at all and why the intuitive understanding is wrong.

Imagine we have 1Mbps network link, and our packet size is up to 1500 bytes. After we start sending a packet we have to wait 12ms before we can choose what to send next. Even if we realise the very moment after we start sending that we wished we were sending a different packet, it's too late. Still it's possible to achieve acceptable VoIP over this network, I hope you agree, so long as we choose any outstanding VoIP packet to go next if there is one.

Now, suppose we add a small buffer to the hardware. The buffer is 9 kilobytes, enough for six of those 1500 byte packets. The hardware accepts packets right away as long as it has space in its buffer, and they are sent on a First In First Out basis. When the network is lightly used, the buffer will be empty, and our VoIP packets behave much as before, with 12ms latency imposed by the slowness of the network. But when the network is busy, the buffer fills up, and newly sent VoIP packets find themselves behind not one but six other packets, latency climbs to 72ms. The "good" news is that in a straight forward bandwidth test the buffer-equipped hardware comes off slightly better. A reviewer may find that they see 0.98Mbps reported on a test whereas with the "no buffer" hardware it was only 0.96Mbps. So it's better, right?

Well if 9 kilobytes of buffer RAM helped, you can be sure the manufacturer will try adding more. Here's a new model with 64kB of buffer. Reviewers report that now the bandwidth measured was shown as 0.99Mbps, very impressive. They don't measure the VoIP latency when the network is busy, but we shall, as we'll find that it's now over 500ms. Conversations are frequently confused, people interrupt each other, and soon they're saying "Don't use the Internet, I'm trying to make a call". How unsatisfactory.

That's Buffer Bloat, you can read more about it by searching for the term. Most buffers in network hardware are superfluous, added by people who didn't understand the problem they were trying to solve. Because so often people focus on bandwidth to the exclusion of latency they don't realise they've made things worse.

igntiionnet- there is no case for widescale FTTP (its just hard and complcated and expensve and indivually bespoke - it only really works in newbuild when tou can deployit as a greenfiels site) - i sure you are aware of the payback on commercial network -- and BDUk is even longer -- their is no case for FTTP - openreach still have to provide voice serivices as part of its operating licence so lots of FTTP and remove the opper sounds great in tehory - but openreach has to operate ithe real world and it has to be proven to be robust (so reality is another challenge all together) -- can you image the furore of your house buring down and not being able to place a emergency call could not be placed due to voice network not operating -- (copper provides Voice) and wil continue to do so for a considerable period of time (i agree that FTTP is a preference in in new sites but then if you dont do any copper you have to deploy FVA Voice and there is only one provdier deploying that at present - that is also dependant on the develeoper just deploying copper as you know to your cost

Edited by deleted (Sat 03-May-14 21:31:12)

In reply to a post by tialaramex:

See? This sounds intuitively right doesn't it. And that's been good enough for people designing things like your average home WiFI AP, DSL modems and so on. It isn't true though, as experienced network engineers knew, but nobody thought to ask them. Of course once they realised why their home network performance sucked so badly they began working on the problem, but first let's see why it's a problem at all and why the intuitive understanding is wrong.

Imagine we have 1Mbps network link, and our packet size is up to 1500 bytes. After we start sending a packet we have to wait 12ms before we can choose what to send next. Even if we realise the very moment after we start sending that we wished we were sending a different packet, it's too late. Still it's possible to achieve acceptable VoIP over this network, I hope you agree, so long as we choose any outstanding VoIP packet to go next if there is one.

Now, suppose we add a small buffer to the hardware. The buffer is 9 kilobytes, enough for six of those 1500 byte packets. The hardware accepts packets right away as long as it has space in its buffer, and they are sent on a First In First Out basis. When the network is lightly used, the buffer will be empty, and our VoIP packets behave much as before, with 12ms latency imposed by the slowness of the network. But when the network is busy, the buffer fills up, and newly sent VoIP packets find themselves behind not one but six other packets, latency climbs to 72ms. The "good" news is that in a straight forward bandwidth test the buffer-equipped hardware comes off slightly better. A reviewer may find that they see 0.98Mbps reported on a test whereas with the "no buffer" hardware it was only 0.96Mbps. So it's better, right?

Well if 9 kilobytes of buffer RAM helped, you can be sure the manufacturer will try adding more. Here's a new model with 64kB of buffer. Reviewers report that now the bandwidth measured was shown as 0.99Mbps, very impressive. They don't measure the VoIP latency when the network is busy, but we shall, as we'll find that it's now over 500ms. Conversations are frequently confused, people interrupt each other, and soon they're saying "Don't use the Internet, I'm trying to make a call". How unsatisfactory.

That's Buffer Bloat, you can read more about it by searching for the term. Most buffers in network hardware are superfluous, added by people who didn't understand the problem they were trying to solve. Because so often people focus on bandwidth to the exclusion of latency they don't realise they've made things worse.

Sorry, I'm just a network performance guy for a living, and I still don't get your point. Without buffering an overbooked network will simply replace latency with packet loss, and without queuing, which requires buffers, it's impossible to apply QoS to a network, which is essential in enterprise environments.

Surely having enough bandwidth out of the buffer to ensure it doesn't start to fill is the way to go, or if that's not feasible the approach that I've seen more commonly which is not to use FIFO but to use slightly smarter queuing which favours smaller packets over larger ones?

You're aware of weighted fair queuing, for example, which works well to avoid single high bandwidth flows hogging bandwidth, or class-based H-FSC which is effective as a scheduling algorithm across TCP and UDP traffic?

Experienced network engineers tend to see their own bit but tend to ignore what's actually running on the network at layer 4 and above. A VoIP call can cope with a little delay, what it can't cope with is loss. My employer's products are built both to apply QoS and to mitigate packet loss on the WAN, not to introduce loss by dropping VoIP traffic because another flow is trying to eat through the bandwidth.

The simplest way to prevent serialisation is to throw more bandwidth at a problem. The best way is to apply QoS, with maximum delay parameters set on multiple leaky-bucket classes of traffic. A packet spends too long in a queue it gets dropped, the VoIP / real-time / interactive queue gets emptied first.

Incidentally I can assure you that 20Mbit/s doesn't start to feel so nice when you have an unmanaged link and one person hammering at it with downloads. It is precisely to avoid such issues that I have 2 load balanced FTTC lines.

In reply to a post by Fastman2:

igntiionnet- there is no case for widescale FTTP (its just hard and complcated and expensve and indivually bespoke - it only really works in newbuild when tou can deployit as a greenfiels site) - i sure you are aware of the payback on commercial network -- and BDUk is even longer -- their is no case for FTTP

There seems to be a case in Milton Keynes for FTTP. Indeed despite many problems with the deployment it's still being pressed on with. There are certainly pockets around where it's apparently being viable. MK was apparently worthwhile as uptake is expected to be high.

I'm aware of the payback on the commercial network, hence my frustration at the delay over my own cabinet. It's probably going to be paid back in half the average time.

I guess the powers that be really got their sums wrong when the 25%, or 4.75 million premises, being FTTP in the early stages of the NGA deployment was mooted.

In reply to a post by Fastman2:

openreach still have to provide voice serivices as part of its operating licence so lots of FTTP and remove the opper sounds great in tehory - but openreach has to operate ithe real world and it has to be proven to be robust (so reality is another challenge all together)

I take it the tens of millions of VoIP lines running over HFC, or the few million FiOS telco lines running on battery backed up ONTs aren't considered examples of how robust a voice network could be?

If that is the argument you guys are in real trouble given those few streets that are Ebbsfleet have no copper. This doesn't work for me, if it did Openreach would've installed copper in Ebbsfleet next to the fibre just in case.

In reply to a post by Fastman2:

can you image the furore of your house buring down and not being able to place a emergency call could not be placed due to voice network not operating

Two problems there:

1) If my house were burning down I wouldn't be inside phoning the fire brigade, I'd be outside.
2) How many people now use corded phones? Most are on cordless which, just like FVA, require mains power.

In reply to a post by Fastman2:

-- (copper provides Voice) and wil continue to do so for a considerable period of time (i agree that FTTP is a preference in in new sites but then if you dont do any copper you have to deploy FVA Voice and there is only one provdier deploying that at present - that is also dependant on the develeoper just deploying copper as you know to your cost

There's only one provider of it because it's so ridiculously priced and FTTP availability is so poor.

If there were actually a concerted effort to drive FTTP doubtless more retail offerings would come into play. It's not a difficult thing for an operator to offer, it's largely the same as WLR just with a VLAN on a fibre link instead of a copper loop between premises and exchange.

Perhaps if Openreach actually made some effort to press the case for being able to retire the copper network something would happen. They seem able to, quite vocally and publicly, press the case for things that don't potentially threaten a high profit revenue stream such as the copper loop.

It costs about the same to rent a VLAN on a pre-existing fibre line for FVA as it does to rent a copper loop via MPF. Crazy. The addiction to copper within Openreach is made abundantly clear looking at the 'transitional' products. Penalising people for not wanting to keep a copper line active, while Verizon actually want the copper gone.

Openreach and BT Group could, if they wished, lobby Ofcom for variances to their license. Moving away from copper between premises and exchange would lower Openreach's maintenance bill considerably, though again it would also potentially lower the lucrative market in continuing to sell metallic loops that've been amortised time and time again.

Not sure how many houses have actually been built at Ebbsfleet, Google satellite still looks the same as when I visited the site four years ago.

Fibre Voice Access and battery more than fit the voice requirements, and if there was a fire in a home, you don't hang around to ring fire bridge you get out.

Without buffering an overbooked network will simply replace latency with packet loss

And that, if you knew anything about TCP/IP would explain everything. What does a TCP/IP implementation do when packets are delayed? Nothing. What about if they're dropped? It throttles the stream, reducing its internal estimate of the available bandwidth. So the way to signal that the link is full is to drop packets. Something like RED does this rather crudely but still effectively, while newer strategies like CoDel are smarter about it. But just having larger and larger queues makes it worse.

and without queuing, which requires buffers, it's impossible to apply QoS to a network, which is essential in enterprise environments.

Only very tiny buffers are needed for this purpose. We need keep only enough packets to fill the pipe for our anticipated maximum latency. Any more packets (yes even if you think they're super-important urgent double-plus high-priority) are just bloat, our refusal to drop them makes things worse because it removes the feedback for the TCP/IP stack.

Surely having enough bandwidth out of the buffer to ensure it doesn't start to fill is the way to go

All else being equal having infinite bandwidth would be great. But we can't afford infinite bandwidth. So, we will have less bandwidth than some upstreams and that download of the entire world map at 1 pixel per 100 metres will have to take a little longer than zero seconds. The download will fill any available buffer. The larger the queue the worse for everyone except the world map downloader, for them everything is very, very slightly better if they can have a huge queue. Fitting the whole map in the queue would mean that they get it a tiny bit faster, and the "only" downside is that the entire system is completely unusable for everyone else sharing the link meanwhile.

, or if that's not feasible the approach that I've seen more commonly which is not to use FIFO but to use slightly smarter queuing which favours smaller packets over larger ones?

This hack is a slight improvement but it relies on a heuristic (guessing that "important" packets will be smaller) which is not reliable. Some things will work better, others will not. Still, it does have one nice feature which is that it doesn't require configuration.

You're aware of weighted fair queuing, for example, which works well to avoid single high bandwidth flows hogging bandwidth, or class-based H-FSC which is effective as a scheduling algorithm across TCP and UDP traffic?

We're actually talking (in case you've forgotten) about residential broadband, which means anything that requires setup doesn't get done. When step 1 is "read this manual about how to configure your broadband for best VoIP performance" virtually nobody will get to step 2. A lot of WiFI APs with bad buffer bloat can be fixed by replacing their firmware with images from the Internet. Guess how many people do that? Virtually nobody.

Experienced network engineers tend to see their own bit but tend to ignore what's actually running on the network at layer 4 and above. A VoIP call can cope with a little delay, what it can't cope with is loss.

Many years ago now I did a presentation in which the audience included some people from big cell phone companies. We were demoing a VoIP system as part of a larger concept, and when it was apparent that our methodology had introduced 200ms latency (which we'd been pretty impressed by considering what we were doing) the cell phone engineers laughed their heads off. Nobody wants that, it's garbage, their customers would leave in droves.

Loss is much more acceptable than latency. Codecs like GSM designed for raw radio with mobile endpoints are tolerant of bit loss, but even the Internet codecs like Opus are tolerant of packet loss and perform "concealment" when they detect a lost packet. Obviously it's not ideal to drop anything, but dropping one packet now is definitely better than delivering the next dozen packets late.

My employer's products are built both to apply QoS and to mitigate packet loss on the WAN, not to introduce loss by dropping VoIP traffic because another flow is trying to eat through the bandwidth.

You will glad to know that even older techniques like RED will tend to drop mostly the "other flow" in these circumstances. Not because of any clever (and thus never to be configured by real end users) QoS but because statistically the larger flow has more packets in it and thus will get hit more often.

The simplest way to prevent serialisation is to throw more bandwidth at a problem. The best way is to apply QoS, with maximum delay parameters set on multiple leaky-bucket classes of traffic. A packet spends too long in a queue it gets dropped, the VoIP / real-time / interactive queue gets emptied first.

Leaky buckets are cool, we had leaky bucket based traffic management in a shared house I lived in about 10-15 years ago. But (a) they need configuring by the end user which won't happen and (b) they can't work around some bloated buffer inside a modem or similar. For that you need active management.

Incidentally I can assure you that 20Mbit/s doesn't start to feel so nice when you have an unmanaged link and one person hammering at it with downloads. It is precisely to avoid such issues that I have 2 load balanced FTTC lines.

I suspect that most people would rather spend half as much (just one line) and have equipment that didn't encourage Buffer Bloat, if only they knew the difference. The good news is that fixing this doesn't really cost anything, we just need to dribble the relevant best practices into Linux and other code used to build consumer network gear and it'll "magically" make everything better.

This is quickly going off topic, please Google "Buffer Bloat" if you care to know more.

In reply to a post by tialaramex:

Without buffering an overbooked network will simply replace latency with packet loss

And that, if you knew anything about TCP/IP would explain everything. What does a TCP/IP implementation do when packets are delayed? Nothing. What about if they're dropped? It throttles the stream, reducing its internal estimate of the available bandwidth. So the way to signal that the link is full is to drop packets. Something like RED does this rather crudely but still effectively, while newer strategies like CoDel are smarter about it. But just having larger and larger queues makes it worse.

I would point out you mentioned VoIP as a potential issue. Increased latency will affect throughput, it affects BDP. I'm quite aware of how TCP/IP works but thanks for the patronising comment.

In reply to a post by tialaramex:

Only very tiny buffers are needed for this purpose. We need keep only enough packets to fill the pipe for our anticipated maximum latency. Any more packets (yes even if you think they're super-important urgent double-plus high-priority) are just bloat, our refusal to drop them makes things worse because it removes the feedback for the TCP/IP stack.

I don't think I disagreed, I merely said that some buffer is required.

In reply to a post by tialaramex:

All else being equal having infinite bandwidth would be great. But we can't afford infinite bandwidth. So, we will have less bandwidth than some upstreams and that download of the entire world map at 1 pixel per 100 metres will have to take a little longer than zero seconds. The download will fill any available buffer. The larger the queue the worse for everyone except the world map downloader, for them everything is very, very slightly better if they can have a huge queue. Fitting the whole map in the queue would mean that they get it a tiny bit faster, and the "only" downside is that the entire system is completely unusable for everyone else sharing the link meanwhile.

Hence WFQ.

In reply to a post by tialaramex:

We're actually talking (in case you've forgotten) about residential broadband, which means anything that requires setup doesn't get done. When step 1 is "read this manual about how to configure your broadband for best VoIP performance" virtually nobody will get to step 2. A lot of WiFI APs with bad buffer bloat can be fixed by replacing their firmware with images from the Internet. Guess how many people do that? Virtually nobody.

Which has what to do with FTTP versus FTTC? I thought you were discussing something relevant like core networks, not CPE?

In reply to a post by tialaramex:

Many years ago now I did a presentation in which the audience included some people from big cell phone companies. We were demoing a VoIP system as part of a larger concept, and when it was apparent that our methodology had introduced 200ms latency (which we'd been pretty impressed by considering what we were doing) the cell phone engineers laughed their heads off. Nobody wants that, it's garbage, their customers would leave in droves.

Loss is much more acceptable than latency. Codecs like GSM designed for raw radio with mobile endpoints are tolerant of bit loss, but even the Internet codecs like Opus are tolerant of packet loss and perform "concealment" when they detect a lost packet. Obviously it's not ideal to drop anything, but dropping one packet now is definitely better than delivering the next dozen packets late.

Some loss may be more acceptable than some jitter. Latency is an unavoidable fact of life. I often place VoIP calls via California and don't really see issues. Jitter or loss are a somewhat different matter.

In reply to a post by tialaramex:

Leaky buckets are cool, we had leaky bucket based traffic management in a shared house I lived in about 10-15 years ago. But (a) they need configuring by the end user which won't happen and (b) they can't work around some bloated buffer inside a modem or similar. For that you need active management.

This is the whole CPE versus core network thing. For some reason CPE network stacks on non-professional kit tend to be dire.

In reply to a post by tialaramex:

I suspect that most people would rather spend half as much (just one line) and have equipment that didn't encourage Buffer Bloat, if only they knew the difference. The good news is that fixing this doesn't really cost anything, we just need to dribble the relevant best practices into Linux and other code used to build consumer network gear and it'll "magically" make everything better.

This is quickly going off topic, please Google "Buffer Bloat" if you care to know more.

Agreed. I'm very aware what buffer bloat is, I encounter it from time to time generally due to misconfiguration, however due to the nature of the equipment I work with there are a few different buffers involved. It's also a fully functional TCP proxy which converts standard TCP flows into HSTCP then back again on the other side, doing some coalescing, header compression, etc.

But, hey, I know nothing about TCP/IP or buffer bloat, so I'd best stop debugging issues of substandard TCP performance due to poor LAN performance causing buffer bloat.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Not sure how many houses have actually been built at Ebbsfleet, Google satellite still looks the same as when I visited the site four years ago.

Fibre Voice Access and battery more than fit the voice requirements, and if there was a fire in a home, you don't hang around to ring fire bridge you get out.

Given Virgin Media are apparently planning a move to VoIP over HFC I sincerely hope that FVA with battery back up fits the requirements else Virgin might have some trouble ahead.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

The 2.5 billion commercial expenditure figure that Openreach bandy about is likewise laughable. Thanks to their cutting the FTTP down from 25% of the NGA deployment to virtually nothing outside of subsidised Cornwall that has left a figure closer to 1.3 billion of CapEx, not 2.5 billion. A large proportion of the 'commercial' brownfield FTTP has been in Milton Keynes and has been a complete disaster with an overbudget, delayed roll out. They deployed in the wrong places and on hindsight know it.

I don't think it was the wrong place. They had some massive issues in the area because of the way their network was deployed. Most of the FTTP properties are lucky to get 1Mbit ADSL. It was also easier to trial FTTP in MK as we already have ducting into each house. A monkey with a blindfold on could install the network. However, this is Openreach we are dealing with and they managed to screw it up. They used MK trial as an excuse to prove how expensive FTTP was by doing an FTTP trial in an area where it should have been VERY inexpensive for them. Quite an achievement.

Also the deployment figures quoted in the press in 2010 / 2011 are not correct. The deployment covers near 7,000 properties but isn't complete. In many cases areas of estates, whole sides of roads or individual properties have been missed. Openreach's latest STUNT was an attempt to submit the missing areas as requiring BDUK funding. They have, however, voluntarily withdrawn them from their BDUK programme and are now considering approaches for inclusion of around 1100+ properties into the commercial programme from 2015 onwards. However, I suspect they will try and wiggle out of it because they can't go down the FTTC route easily.

So the trial is very much delayed. They started in 2010 and still haven't finished it.

G.FAST sounds good but I'm quite surprised that they haven't done it on my estate. We have a sole engineer currently deploying non-trial commercial FTTP to 300 homes but from what I've seen I think the sneaky *****ers are deploying higher split 64-128 FTTP. I've got a sneaky idea they might be doing CWDM to get 128 lines out of 1 fibre. I also have a sneaky they might be trying to run the mux over longer distances to allow them to move the active equipment into core exchanges rather than metro nodes. BT research have done a lot of work on rubbish like that.

Regards,


Gareth

you forget fTTC is still a variable product like adsl, yes the numbers are much better, but there will be people on FTTC with a sub 20mbit connection and upstream not a whole lot better than adsl2+.

Ignition is probably right that this will all end up on FTTP, the question is when. Openreach seem perfectly happy to do it one step at a time, with the fibre creeping slowly closer to the home as it maxes out the time they can use old infrastructure and avoid spending as long as possible. I am not an exec of BT so I am not going to claim I know whats best for that company but it is clear they are very conservative when it comes to new technology and investment.

I do feel tho what they have done on FTTP is a complete balls up, this wont help matters as now they will be even more shy of FTTP, hence the increase of pricing on FTTPoD.

Edited by Chrysalis (Sun 04-May-14 06:32:54)

did verizon in america even state FTTP paid for itself by the reduced maintenance costs?

Edited by Chrysalis (Sun 04-May-14 06:59:04)

actually since tcp/ip performance is based on RTT as well as link capacity, it WILL slow down if latency of packets increases unless there is sufficient buffers allocated to handle it. By that I dont mean buffer bloat supplied by the isp, I mean buffers at the end points. This is why I often state interleaving DOES harm performance as it increases RTT. So the TCP send window and TCP receive window.

Also packetloss will kill performance if present, the recent BTw capacity issues only highlighted that. There is a big difference between temporary small amount of dropped packets when TCP has to throttle itself, to constant large packetloss from a backhaul supplier, TCP wont handle the latter well in terms of performance. So in terms of network congestion, delayed packets is favourable to dropped packets.

Put it this way, when they have the fight over whether to do FTTP or NOT, I suspect once someone asks who is going to beat us to it? And the answer is no one currently then they decide to carry on current stepped system.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

you forget fTTC is still a variable product like adsl, yes the numbers are much better, but there will be people on FTTC with a sub 20mbit connection and upstream not a whole lot better than adsl2+.

I don't think I have forgotten this. My point isn't that nobody should get FTTP, but that the appetite doesn't and won't exist to justify pre-emptive FTTP in areas which can and do get good FTTC service.

Relatively high density housing means the UK is a good place to do FTTC. I grew up in a dormitory village, where you could hear the cattle in the fields yet you were only a tube ride from the City. Despite the expanse of open countryside on all sides, planning regulations combined with commercial sense meant dense housing. The village did not have a telephone exchange (with only a few thousand residents why should it) but it did have half a dozen BT cabinets. You will not be surprised to know that typical ADSL2+ bandwidth was 2Mbps while most residents can get far more than 20Mbps now that FTTC is rolled out.

I have no doubt that people in that village will have pressed for FTTP rather than FTTC - to be paid for either by BT or failing that from central funds no doubt. You don't get rich by spending your own money. But IMNSHO they're adequately served by FTTC and refusing to indulge them shows good sense.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

did verizon in america even state FTTP paid for itself by the reduced maintenance costs?

Their maintenance costs of FTTP, after teething troubles, are about 1/5th those of POTS.

Edited by deleted (Sun 04-May-14 11:55:13)

In reply to a post by garethr:

I don't think it was the wrong place. They had some massive issues in the area because of the way their network was deployed. Most of the FTTP properties are lucky to get 1Mbit ADSL. It was also easier to trial FTTP in MK as we already have ducting into each house.

So the trial is very much delayed. They started in 2010 and still haven't finished.

Thank you Gareth. You have rather confirmed things.

Bad network, check. Network here was in a bad state thanks to no communication between developers and Openreach so we ran out of e-sides in the wider area and on this cabinet d-sides too. People waited for the best part of a year for a phone line.

Bad ADSL, check. Varies from 300kbps to an unstable 2Mb for a lucky few.

Ducting to individual properties, check.

I am guessing by the tone of your post remaining residents are getting a bit grumpy?

The bigger PON splits aren't a problem by the way. CWDM would actually benefit you however PON can be split between 128 drops and given most will buy 40 or 80Mb it is probably not an issue.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

Also packetloss will kill performance if present, the recent BTw capacity issues only highlighted that. There is a big difference between temporary small amount of dropped packets when TCP has to throttle itself, to constant large packetloss from a backhaul supplier, TCP wont handle the latter well in terms of performance. So in terms of network congestion, delayed packets is favourable to dropped packets.

You've actually more or less exactly contradicted yourself in this paragraph. When there is congestion the TCP/IP endpoints should throttle, and the most effective way to signal that is to drop packets not delay them. It makes sense to queue packets very briefly, to smooth out the moment-by-moment variations. But in real systems, especially at the edge, cheap RAM means a tendency to allow queues to grow into hundreds of milliseconds. This is counter-productive.

Packet loss that's independent of throughput is a fault, not a reaction to congestion, and it should be repaired just like any other type of fault.

PC providing you are on an enabled cabinet - vouchers cannot be used to fund cabinets only connection to them

tcp/ip will self regulate when the end to end point is saturated.

it cannot deal with major isp congestion, instead it will just run very badly. Of course I am also reffering to packetloss caused by a fault as well, the point is any intermediate device thats not the endpoint causing packetloss will not be dealt with well.

isp congestion shouldnt be there in the first place, thats the proper way, but if it is there, delayed packets are a lesser evil than dropped packets.

the intermediate routers dont provide feedback to the end point serving the data they just pass on the packets, so the end point receiving the data doesnt know slow throughput is due to congestion.

Edited by Chrysalis (Sun 04-May-14 17:47:50)

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

it cannot deal with major isp congestion, instead it will just run very badly. Of course I am also reffering to packetloss caused by a fault as well, the point is any intermediate device thats not the endpoint causing packetloss will not be dealt with well.

TCP/IP doesn't care where the bottleneck is. I have no idea where you could have obtained the idea that it does, or even could.

the intermediate routers dont provide feedback to the end point serving the data they just pass on the packets, so the end point receiving the data doesnt know slow throughput is due to congestion.

Actually the "feedback" from routers is mostly in the form of dropped packets. You send packets out, if some of them aren't received then presumably those packets didn't fit, the pipe is smaller than you thought. Exactly how TCP/IP behaves next is up to the implementation, you can read about well known algorithms like Vegas or New Reno for yourself. Every node along the route is capable of dropping a packet, so there is no difficulty with this method of feedback and TCP/IP was conceived from the outset with it in mind.

You are correct that the receiver has no way to distinguish packets dropped due to congestion from packets missing due to errors. In practice hops with significant unrecoverable error rate are unsuitable for TCP/IP and no such links are used intentionally for the Internet. Where a medium makes errors unavoidable (e.g. radio for WiFi) the link-layer protocol must be beefed up to make recovery possible within that hop, so that the IP packet still arrives intact, even if the underlying medium had to retransmit it.

in short I think someone who manages a device on the internet that forwards packets (router) and have knowledge that device is dropping data packets for whatever reason may it be resource saturation or a fault is been irresponsible if they assuming tcp/ip will handle it fine. (not to mention not everything uses tcp).

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

in short I think someone who manages a device on the internet that forwards packets (router) and have knowledge that device is dropping data packets for whatever reason may it be resource saturation or a fault is been irresponsible if they assuming tcp/ip will handle it fine. (not to mention not everything uses tcp).

Aside from toy implementations (I think somebody made simple TCP/IP work on a Commodore 64 for example) everybody has congestion management algorithms in their TCP/IP implementation to allow them to get reasonably good transfer rates on the Internet.

Maybe that seems contradictory, why would you need congestion management to go fast but not to go slowly like a Commodore 64? To actually get the high transfer rates we need to avoid exceeding the link capacity at the narrowest bottleneck so that the packets we transmit are actually received. We won't need the Internet to demonstrate. Suppose that I have a nice fast PC and a 1000baseT switched Ethernet LAN, in another office a friend has an older Mac with 100baseT connected to the LAN. I have a hypothetical TCP/IP without congestion management, let us call it Slough (as a contrast to names like Vegas or Reno which are used for real algorithms).

I want to transfer a file to the Mac. Slough on my PC just sends all the packets with the file data in as quickly as possible over its Ethernet. Obviously 1Gbps will not fit into 100Mbps and so the switch or router between the PC and Mac must drop 90% of my packets, even with say 1MB of RAM just for buffering this nonsense, it will fill almost immediately and have to drop further packets. Because Slough has no congestion management it doesn't do anything about that - eventually the fact that most packets weren't received gets back to the sender (because they aren't ACKed), and Slough just retransmits them in the same fashion continuing at 1Gbps. Although Slough saturates my link at 1Gbps, the actual data transfer rate of the Slough TCP/IP will drop to a trickle, with most packets being transmitted many times before finally arriving. Even if the switch has a huge buffer, that just confuses the issue, with some packets being received after they've been retransmitted or arriving out of order, reducing transfer speeds even more.

So, now hopefully you see that congestion management is effectively mandatory in TCP/IP, and thus why yes, the right thing (not to mention eventually the only thing) for a router to do about congestion is to drop packets. And in practice congestion will happen. Some ISPs aim to avoid it within the systems under their control, but that's aim and under their control not promise and across the entire Internet.

Other Internet protocols fall roughly into two camps. Very lightweight low bandwidth protocols like DNS that should never saturate any useful link and protocols which have their own congestion management usually cut-and-paste from TCP.

Reading some more of these posts I suspect, tialaramex, most of our disagreement came down to misunderstanding.

I thought you were referring to core / transport network, not CPE, as we were discussing FTTP and FTTC.

I entirely recognise that some implementations of IP stacks on CPE are nothing short of banal and indeed the only real way to resolve them is to fix them on the kernels that these CPE are built on. The developers of CPE firmware rarely show any interest so best to simply take it out of their hands.

Such issues on edge and core carrier/enterprise class routers are absolutely inexcusable, not that they haven't happened of course...

My expertise lies at that stage and I am familiar but definitely not an expert with consumer CPE. I have done plenty with HSTCP and MX-TCP of various varieties along with the occasional bit of fun with satellite and other things however consumer grade CPE are something of a dark art and I'm happy to defer to you on those.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

did verizon in america even state FTTP paid for itself by the reduced maintenance costs?

Have you seen a FIOS install? They don't protect the fibre. You can get at it. If you're really unlucky they wrap the excess around the externally mounted ONT. Mind you the yanks seem to have this approach to infrastructure anyway. I doubt it took them long to install. I think BT are missing a trick!

They do have battery backup which is (on my bros house) installed internally on the property close to the ONT. The ONT is an Alcatel Lucent cable box. The house is then wired with COAX. The STB's are all very nice Cisco jobs. The CM I think is Alcatel.


Regards,


Gareth

In reply to a post by garethr:

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

did verizon in america even state FTTP paid for itself by the reduced maintenance costs?

Have you seen a FIOS install? They don't protect the fibre. You can get at it. If you're really unlucky they wrap the excess around the externally mounted ONT. Mind you the yanks seem to have this approach to infrastructure anyway. I doubt it took them long to install. I think BT are missing a trick!

They do have battery backup which is (on my bros house) installed internally on the property close to the ONT. The ONT is an Alcatel Lucent cable box. The house is then wired with COAX. The STB's are all very nice Cisco jobs. The CM I think is Alcatel.


Regards,


Gareth

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-ZPQh-9vXRoY/UlB9b...

There is also COX cable there as well. To move the house over to COX instead of Verizon the engineer simple unplugs the COAX cable. Its a pretty clever way of dong things really.

Verizon can also swap out the ONT without talking to the customer.

Regards,

Gareth

again I repeat, endpoint congestion.

Is this line of thinking why we have a senior bod at BT claiming packetloss is ok?

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

Is this line of thinking why we have a senior bod at BT claiming packetloss is ok?

I've tried to explain so that it's easy to understand how this actually works. Maybe if you say what you struggled with, rather than talking about some "senior bod at BT" then I can expand on the part where you got stuck.

Better, take it to the tech sub-forum, where it would be more on topic.

In reply to a post by tialaramex:

I don't doubt that BT have made some strategic errors here and there, but I really don't buy the theory that Openreach is going to find itself running FTTP to every residence any time soon, nor that we're going to be kicking ourselves as a nation that they don't.

...

People tend to wrongly project from a few data points on an upward trend that things will grow endlessly, but in reality they're more often on something like an S curve, and they just can't see that yet.

I bet early electricity distribution looked like this too. At first you're running a cable to someone's home for a light, then it's five lights, then they want to run a refrigerator, oven, heating... it seems to analysts as though demand grows without end, but they're wrong. Running 1MW electrical supply to each home would not be "future-proofing" it would just be wasted money.

^^^ This. I totally agree with this observation.

I'm not convinced that there is much higher-bandwidth content coming than we already know about (ie streamed 4k HDTV); I'm also convinced that there won't be much demand for that - and that for many people plain HD is sufficient - especially if video becomes pay-per-pixel.

Of course, we'll have many new apps that manipulate (for a price) content in new & fascinating ways, but for many people, the volume & timeliness of content isn't going to get bigger than those two.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

Openreach's allergy to CapEx has become abundantly clear, and areas where they're deploying a second FTTC cabinet at considerable cost, and will follow it up by deploying G.Fast, and follow that up by eventually deploying FTTP are a testament to that attitude. They're like someone running on a payday loan who'll pay way more in the future to avoid having to pay now.

You're probably right that they will follow these steps, and probably right that they'll pay more.

However, there is a good reason for a business to work in steps like this - it helps them secure a return on their investment in manageable steps, which stops them going bust if they make a bad investment.

John Cioffi points this out in a more US-centric way. The operators will invest a sum of money when they have a certain level of confidence that they'll get it back over a period of time. It helps immensely if they can lock you into a contract for that period.

As you point out, KC have (effectively) a vertical monopoly, and are left with the confidence to invest in something that they won't get full return on for 20 years. BT work in a more competitive environment - and they need to feel safe (or rather their investors do) that they'll get enough of their money back to warrant spending it in the first place.

Stepwise investment gives you stepwise confidence that you'll get a return... and you can stop whenever that turns out to be not as true as you thought.

In reply to a post by tialaramex:

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

Is this line of thinking why we have a senior bod at BT claiming packetloss is ok?

I've tried to explain so that it's easy to understand how this actually works. Maybe if you say what you struggled with, rather than talking about some "senior bod at BT" then I can expand on the part where you got stuck.

Better, take it to the tech sub-forum, where it would be more on topic.

I am sorry you have failed to understand it properly.

The self regulation part of tcp expects packetloss to dissapear when it "slows down" which it typically will do in a normal situation, of course that doesnt happen when an intermediate router is the cause.

Yes there is algorithms that try to manage intermediate caused congestion better, but ultimately that type of congestion should never be there in the first place.

I am not stuck thank you.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

Openreach's allergy to CapEx has become abundantly clear, and areas where they're deploying a second FTTC cabinet at considerable cost, and will follow it up by deploying G.Fast, and follow that up by eventually deploying FTTP are a testament to that attitude. They're like someone running on a payday loan who'll pay way more in the future to avoid having to pay now.

You're probably right that they will follow these steps, and probably right that they'll pay more.

However, there is a good reason for a business to work in steps like this - it helps them secure a return on their investment in manageable steps, which stops them going bust if they make a bad investment.

John Cioffi points this out in a more US-centric way. The operators will invest a sum of money when they have a certain level of confidence that they'll get it back over a period of time. It helps immensely if they can lock you into a contract for that period.

As you point out, KC have (effectively) a vertical monopoly, and are left with the confidence to invest in something that they won't get full return on for 20 years. BT work in a more competitive environment - and they need to feel safe (or rather their investors do) that they'll get enough of their money back to warrant spending it in the first place.

Stepwise investment gives you stepwise confidence that you'll get a return... and you can stop whenever that turns out to be not as true as you thought.

Do you think their investment in football is in managed steps?

Always liked to think the proximity to Bletchley Park was in some way connected

FVA and battery backup meets the requirements fine - the battery the responsibility of the customer to replaced when required (would be cheaper than BT Retail prices anyhow)

BT though are in no way ready to launch a full retail product for FVA as in my experience they cannot support it

BT contact centres particularly the offshore ones need far better training for a start

May be lower line rental may be the trick here

I'm told by BT that uptake of FVA is slowly increasing but was unable to pin them down to even rough ballpark figures. I would imagine it is fairly low

Anyone thinking of it, I would advise wait and stick with copper for the time being - unless of course you have no choice

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

Do you think their investment in football is in managed steps?

Yes. A few years at a time. Renewable if it turns out to have been a successful strategy, measured by reduced churn, increased take-up of triple-play subscribers, increased viewing figures of those on dual-play, and increased stickiness of both kinds of subscriber. Droppable if not successful.

It is if they think they can make that much revenue based on the purchase. And anyway, wasn't football bought by retail rather than Openreach - maybe retails allergy is a little less inconveniencing.

Reading through this I am not sure that anyone has really answered your basic question.

When BT deploy an exchange for fibre most cabinets will get FTTC, some will get nothing and a few may get FTTP. So as a residential customer you will get either FTTC, FTTP or nothing depending upon what happened to the cabinet that you are attached to, but you will have no choice. Generally FTTP is priced the same as FTTC for the same speed, but of course you do get the option of greater speed for a higher price. In my case FTTC was available 3 years ago but we were destined for FTTP, which I have now been able to order but am still waiting for them to dig up my garden to actually bring the fibre to the house.

FTTPoD (Fibre to the premises on Demand) is different from native FTTP in that Openreach will deploy fibre to your premise on some FTTC exchanges and cabinets but there is a high price for the installation and the only speed option is 300/30 at a higher price then the same speed for native FTTP.

well 1.5billion for a few years of benefit doesnt seem managed to me. But I accept ian's point its a different division.

Also I am not sure if customers will like the idea of BT giving something and then taking away a few years down the line, oh we will give you this feature but if it doesnt pay back for our shareholders in a few years we drop it from the package spec. If it gets dropped churn could skyrocket on top of the churn that was caused by the policy changes on line features to subsidise BT sport.

There is a simpler answer. If a business can get FTTP then so can a residential address.

But, whilst an exchange may support FTTP that may only be available to some houses with other houses served by FTTC, ADSL or no "broadband" at all.

But, there is also the option of leased line services - these can also be bought for residential properties but tend to be outside of most people's price range.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

They're like someone running on a payday loan who'll pay way more in the future to avoid having to pay now.

They've been like that for a while. About 5 years ago my POTS line went faulty, because it was passing the branches of a tree. The tree had grown and the wire was really tight, and movement had worn away the insulation.

They ended up with two normal engineer's vans and a cherry picker van to sort it. I suggested that they should also replace next door's wire, which was took exactly the same route, but the engineers couldn't get permission to do that, because there was no fault reported.

So when it did fail (soon after), the whole circus had to come out again. They wasted twenty man-hours or more to save the cost of installing 20M of wire when they were there the first time!

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

I am sorry you have failed to understand it properly.

I think your uh, claims were pretty easy to understand at first, they were just wrong. The "senior bod at BT" stuff did seem to disappear off on a tangent though.

The self regulation part of tcp expects packetloss to dissapear when it "slows down" which it typically will do in a normal situation, of course that doesnt happen when an intermediate router is the cause.

Once again, and I can't tell if you do this on purpose or just don't understand why it matters, you've confused two separate cases. If the intermediate router is faulty and is dropping packets or inducing unrecoverable errors as a result of a fault without any congestion, slowing down won't help. Somebody has to repair/ replace the faulty equipment.

But where an intermediate router drops packets due to congestion on a link, slowing down will help, in fact it's more or less mandatory as we saw before. Everybody will have to slow down, and this allows everybody to continue to make efficient use of the link (albeit with their throughput constrained).

Check out the graphs Level 3 released when publicising deliberate congestion on major ISPs in the US (L3 said that they don't see this problem in the UK due to effective competition between ISPs). At peak times these links saw hundreds of thousands of packets dropped every five minutes, which seems like a lot, but this is 100Gbps, so a few hundred thousand packets in five minutes is a tiny fraction of all packets. That's possible because each dropped packet isn't just one less packet to be sent over that link, it's also functioning as a signal to somebody's TCP/IP stack to take its foot off the accelerator.

The other thing you'll see, or rather won't see in those L3 graphs is the real error rate. It's zero throughout the week-long period of the graphs. That's pretty typical. If your packet didn't arrive it wasn't because of an error, it was because of congestion.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

You're probably right that they will follow these steps, and probably right that they'll pay more.

However, there is a good reason for a business to work in steps like this - it helps them secure a return on their investment in manageable steps, which stops them going bust if they make a bad investment.

John Cioffi points this out in a more US-centric way. The operators will invest a sum of money when they have a certain level of confidence that they'll get it back over a period of time. It helps immensely if they can lock you into a contract for that period.

As you point out, KC have (effectively) a vertical monopoly, and are left with the confidence to invest in something that they won't get full return on for 20 years. BT work in a more competitive environment - and they need to feel safe (or rather their investors do) that they'll get enough of their money back to warrant spending it in the first place.

Stepwise investment gives you stepwise confidence that you'll get a return... and you can stop whenever that turns out to be not as true as you thought.

There is no competitive environment to Openreach to speak of outside of cable areas.

The problem isn't that Openreach are in a competitive environment, it's that they aren't. As soon as competition shows its face BT rapidly find money, be it BT Wholesale in the early days of ADSL, or Openreach in Dolphinholme (with taxpayer help).

Openreach know they'll get paid whatever in many areas so sit on existing assets because they know people have little option but to use them.

If it were about tying people into contracts that's not an issue. Openreach are supposed to fund themselves, not be cross-subsidised by other business units. If they know people have no other viable choice they know they've a revenue stream. Why bother spending money when your CPs have no real choice but to hand you cash for copper that paid for itself decades ago? A swift bit of playful accounting and any excess profits from Openreach, of which there are plenty if stories are to be believed, soon disappear.

A proper regulatory environment to encourage Openreach towards a copper replacement programme would be good, sadly Ed Richards and Ofcom as a whole appear more interested in politics and continue to run an environment actively deterring investment. What right-minded SMP telco wouldn't happily take advantage and sit on assets?

A proper regulatory environment to encourage Openreach towards a copper replacement programme would be good

Interested in what thoughts you have as to how this could be done? They could I suppose get taxes on fibre lowered or removed but people would complain that is just helping to extend BTs monopoly.

They could force BT to install fibre but if they did that would directly impact shareholders as the finance to do it would come from BT profits and could damage the share price - which probably wouldn't be good for the country overall.

They could force low pricing for copper services making fibre more attractive but they are trying to increase competition and so making BT prices lower would actually deter competition as no-one else would be able to match it.

There is a question of how Ofcom can encourage BT to rollout fibre whilst also encouraging other companies to compete at a network level. I think that would be very difficult to achieve.

What about applying a new tax to copper based services, tax per say every 100m (so its also higher on longer lines) and regulate it cannot be passed onto the consumer via higher prices?

At the same time adjust the USO to prevent openreach from cancelling services on long lines (to avoid paying the tax).

Then watch the fireworks as BT takes the gov to court

I think ofcom got hurt by losing to sky in a protracted legal battle, I think there is no willpower to force openreach to progress.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 08-May-14 12:48:46)

Whatever BT does will be wrong, the only way it would not would be if a provider was to announce total UK coverage plan and they just ignored anything BT tried to do to slow them down, i.e. was a proper altnet with no use of BT Group resources. Costs prohibitive and we tried this with cable and got to 48% and largely stopped.

What I do know for sure is that there is a healthy circuit of 'what can we do' conferences that have gone on for some years, but nothing significant (i.e. equivalent to a county population) has happened. Maybe this conferences should be at a village without fibre and have a meeting in the morning and roll-out some fibre in the afternoon.

To conclude the sackcloth of poor broadband is one beloved by many, but the constant putting down that results may be having the effect of discouraging investors .

I vote for demolishing the suburbs and building mega cities with FTTP wired flats and banning commutes longer than 5 miles, so that rural areas are not full of sleeper villages.

well given historical events, eg. a new provider deploys in a location with no adsl. Then as ignition said suddenly BT find the area commercially viable, rollout to kill that supplier.

What do you think would happen if e.g. google fibre started been deployed in the UK? would FTTP suddenly become viable overnight and be rolled out by BT to the same areas?

end of the day capitalism dictates shareholders are priority, profit is king. From BT's point of view spending on FTTP is a waste of time, prices would be regulated low, they be forced to wholesale the services and revenue would be barely any higher as people will pay for the existing services anyway. BT would be disservicing their shareholders if they did a FTTP rollout in my opinion. Which is why I think state intervention is needed for this.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 08-May-14 12:56:25)

But wouldn't a tax on copper also impact on Virgin as I believe their coax network is running over copper? Or would Virgin be exempt from this tax? And if so for what reason? Are you really saying that anyone providing a service that isn't "superfast" should see increased taxation? But then you couldn't tax FTTC.

Partly playing devil's advocate but without careful thought anything done to BT could have an adverse affect on others or be seen as massively distorting a market or damaging BTs shareholders.

Suspect google wouldn't as it wouldn't be financially viable to do in the UK - for the same reasons as it isn't viable for anyone else. Google are very careful to pick where they rollout their services for either commercial or publicity gain. UK just isn't going to hit the mark for either.

they wouldnt, I just painted a theoretical example.

Only a business giant such as google has the capability to build a competing network with openreach from the ground up, such a thing needs deep pockets.

It would be interesting to do a proper analysis on the vampire roll-out ideas, since by the levels stated all those areas with Hyperoptic, IFNL and Gigaclear should also have at the very least FTTC available surely?

Google Fibre - if deployed to the same scale as in the US, would be like wiring up 60% of Bangor with FTTP. Don't have the link but some firm has done a door to door survey to judge take-up and estimates 50 - 60% in four to five years. Did not say what take-up level was now - and Google does not say.

BT can do nothing right, if it does not roll-out it is criticised, if it does it is criticised, if it attempts to compete it is criticised.

If things plan out as some believe, then we can look to 20% of York in 2015 having FTTP via Sky and TalkTalk, and the same properties also having FTTP from Openreach and probably the 20% who can already get DOCSIS 3 too.

It is not just BT sales/managers who over state things, have found competitors giving out mis-information too, i.e. it is a game they all play, but calling out the underdog when this is done is seen as bad form.

Indeed. And even then with regulations, issues with digging, other utilities in the ground, wayleaves, etc it is quite possible they could not cover 100% anyway - even completely ignoring the cost of doing so.

Like it or not we have BT and in my opinion they aren't doing too bad a job compared to many other countries (and better than most that have a similar history on telecomms).

We have the disbenefit of nice villages/towns/small cities in some lovely countryside that had very early rollout of telecomms that now has a significant cost to change. Most countries ahead of us have few of these barriers and therefore have advantages to rollouts (highly urban or no real infrastructure to speak of and therefore no investment to throw away).

however.

That's short term costs, over time FTTP costs should even out as is lower maintenance and less expense on short intermediate solutions.

One reason they get criticised they do it different to everyone else. They somehow manage to spend much more to deploy FTTP than other providers worldwide with no real explanation for it other than bodging it up or maybe cooking the books.

They very slow to deploy new technology, even if its cheap to deploy.

They have an adverse attitude to dealing with faults.

Gigaclear reckons on £1000 per premise passed and while B4RN may be lower that is down to the volunteer labour.

For those chasing numbers be aware some Europe figures role FTTB into the equation, which can be cheaper in large blocks as just blown fibre to each floor and then good old CAT5e or CAT6 to each apartment. Can be more in flats where utility ducting and space to house media converters is harder to find.

BT is never cheap, and once you get any large firm that was even larger once and has a big pension debt to service then costs are not going to be cheap.

Did the Broadband Stakeholders Group get its FTTH costs very wrong, when they said cities at around £1000 per prem, but getting higher on the more spread out suburbs and even more for the rural areas, where it tends to be small clusters outlying from a fairly dense village.

Deploying FTTP is not rocket science, but it takes time to do, and if you want it done in a short timescale you have to ramp up the amount of staff or contractors.

Should be lower, and am sure in the UK as we are seeing for FTTC that calls for lower wholesale prices would be along very soon.

Google probably save a large amount of tax by sinking spare cash that is already inside US Borders into the Google Fiber project and the massive amounts of feel good PR it generates.

If you look at the man power involved in my installation:

1) One fibre engineer - 2-3 hours to 'survey' the installation
2) One normal engineer to put in a pull rope. Had to remove some concrete and then found a blockage - half a day
3) External contractors to dig up the driveway with a digger, remove blockage and put back to normal - half a day
4) Two fibre engineers to do the external work - half a day
5) One fibre engineer to do the internal work - half a day (he said people want the extensions and this can take a full day)

That's a huge cost considering the fibre network was already installed in my street.

Edited by deleted (Thu 08-May-14 13:46:47)

In reply to a post by ian72:

A proper regulatory environment to encourage Openreach towards a copper replacement programme would be good

Interested in what thoughts you have as to how this could be done? They could I suppose get taxes on fibre lowered or removed but people would complain that is just helping to extend BTs monopoly.

Allow BT to remove copper when they provision fibre to an address.

The Fibre Only eXchange, Dedington isn't fibre only, it just has ubiquitous FTTP coverage. The copper is still there and as far as I know the vast majority of those with access to FTTP are still using copper. Those with FTTP still have a copper line running next to it for telephony due to BT's 'transitional' pricing on FTTP.

EDIT: BT's monopoly isn't going anywhere. Either we accept that and move to a model like that in Japan where it's NTT-everything with some altnet here and there or carry on with our current half-backside LLU-obsessed model which has left a series of competitive lowest common denominator services.

For most of the UK, ignoring Virgin Media, it's going to be Openreach for the foreseeable. If we could just get with that programme and have a regulator that will work with Openreach on VULA over GEA rather than obsessing over physical LLU of obsolete copper loops that'd be awesome.

Edited by deleted (Thu 08-May-14 14:17:24)

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Should be lower, and am sure in the UK as we are seeing for FTTC that calls for lower wholesale prices would be along very soon.

Perhaps if BT's retail / wholesale pricing weren't so close to the Openreach pricing those calls couldn't have happened. It's not about the wholesale pricing being too high but margin squeeze, again.

Edited by deleted (Thu 08-May-14 14:13:55)

which is a bad thing when crunching the numbers for FTTP viability. Talktalk would want to sell it for a fiver.