In reply to a post by GMAN98:

Who would want to use Virgin's own networks especially when its congested in that area (out on the street) in many areas.

One example. Parents cable is congested. They live about 3km from the exchange, so ADSL available at circa 256kbps. So nobody has ADSL. Look at a speed map and it all looks pretty respectable - lots of red VM dots with fair speeds.

They get (or were getting) 7Mbps out of the 10Mbps they "should get". I spoke to VM. They gave me a date for upgrades, as it's a known issue they are dealing with.

Meanwhile, ADSL is still available at 256kbps.

I don't place that much store in the upgrades actually being done by the date (witness the cable forum on here with something similar in Leicester, was it) but the difference in approach is startling.

However, how do we know that the FTTC cabinets aren't going to become the same type of congestion points in the next couple of years - it's only an "up to" service after all.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

Infinity strikes me as a strike at LLU, which overnight is basically obsolete except for a few handfuls of people with short good quality lines where LLU can compete for downstream speeds. Of course BT's FTTC is Wholesale only at the moment. It would be, wouldn't it.

Not sure what you mean by the above?

Infinity is a strike at LLU for sure and Virgin I guess (in terms of price and coverage (eventually))

Not sure what you mean about a few handfuls with short good quality lines though?

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

What concerns me, and a growing number of others, is that we will still be having the same discussions in another few years.

That used to worry me as well but to be honest I'm not bothered any longer. I think the current situation is progressing at an 'adequate' rate. No-one has ever managed to persuade me that we need FTTP. Oh sure it'd be nice to have but I don't see that it's essential or worth bankrupting the country or our biggest telecoms companies over.

What we need is infill work to remove the slow- and no- spots. Improvement in backhaul and interconnect provision so that people get full speed all the time. I'm not suggesting actual 1:1 contention but it ought to be possible to get something that feels like it to the end user.

Someone with a line length of less than 1km might be able to get an ADSL2+ service which performs at about 20Mbps which compares reasonably well with Infinity/FTTC.

But how many people have line lengths of < 1km?

Some will stay on LLU because as Andrue alludes to, the connection gets used mostly between the hours of say 1pm and 3am when the user is awake, more or less exclusively for P2P downloading at home and an unthrottled FTTC service which does that is expensive by comparison.

These are the sort of customers VM actively attracts and which do their best to congest the local nodes.

In reply to a post by dustofnations:

However, I still agree with the fundamental point that any capitalist company will not willingly surrender their prize assets; and presumably if they did so willingly the directors would be in breach of their obligations to shareholders!

And if they were forced to by court action then every other private company operating in the country would leave. On the plus side we'd then have such a broken and useless economy that no-one would care about lousy internet access

Edited by Andrue (Mon 11-Apr-11 15:19:14)

And where are these countries with 50Meg available to more than 50% of the population?
Whether its 50meg from docsis 3 or fttp does it matter to the person using the link? Generally no.

BTW with the new independent local loop firm, how are all these local loops linked up? Are people talking of new local loop, and a new IP backbone too?

In reply to a post by Andrue:

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

What concerns me, and a growing number of others, is that we will still be having the same discussions in another few years.

That used to worry me as well but to be honest I'm not bothered any longer. I think the current situation is progressing at an 'adequate' rate. No-one has ever managed to persuade me that we need FTTP. Oh sure it'd be nice to have but I don't see that it's essential or worth bankrupting the country or our biggest telecoms companies over.

What we need is infill work to remove the slow- and no- spots. Improvement in backhaul and interconnect provision so that people get full speed all the time. I'm not suggesting actual 1:1 contention but it ought to be possible to get something that feels like it to the end user.

That "infill work" would presumably be:

FTTP, or
FTTC (with some new cabinets needed perhaps - need to be close to compete with VM or they will be a waste of time and money), or
Another new exchange in parents town nearer to where they are, or
BET-style repeaters along the old phone lines

From a long term perspective, only the first option really makes sense, agreed, not that we "need" it now. But the structure we have does not encourage anyone to play for the long term.

FTTC is different architecture, if congestion exists on the last mile its a case of adding more backhaul. But I expect the phrase "up to" to exist in the future as there's always a possibility of a bottleneck somewhere within the network

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

And where are these countries with 50Meg available to more than 50% of the population?

The 50Mbps and 100Mbps services strike me as being available more to draw attention to the superior network capabilities than because they thought hordes of people would either need or want it. But it leaves them well-placed for the medium term.

That was achieved by needing to attract customers, and having something to lose.

The latter has only just started to apply to BT with 4G/LTE in the offing and people starting to stream TV and finding that their 1Mbps ADSL link won't cut it.

But it's no use building infrastructure on a "need now" basis. By then, it's too late.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

BTW with the new independent local loop firm, how are all these local loops linked up? Are people talking of new local loop, and a new IP backbone too?

Probably, yes. The duplication is a monumental waste of money, but I'd welcome any suggestions as to how we get past the seemingly intractable issues that we have.

Does FTTP long term make sense?

In ages past villages have been abandoned when a local business collapsed, the rising cost of travel to work has the capacity to create an upheaval over time, of people moving closer to where they work, meaning that expensive work to put fibre in the ground may not be a good idea.

At some £6k per property or so for fttp in not-spot areas the need for faster than say BET technology has to be pretty compeling if you take a 30 year view even. The TV argument is mute, as in most rural areas satellite is a reasonable option for TV signals.

Also with fibre in the long term the network kit has little in the way of long term lifespan, so replacing this every 10 years or so is not cheap. The fibre will last longer unless broken, but what about the stuff sending the light down the fibre, and converting it to something useful.