Yes, a small thing called a procurement process. ECI were able to meet the needs of BT's procurement for FTTx and they were obviously a similar or lower price than Huawei.

I guess all you ECI critics were vehemently opposed to the contract when it was signed back in 2010...

Any more sensible questions from you today?

In reply to a post by AndyHCZ:

obviously a similar or lower price than Huawei.

Obviously, you get what you pay for. Obviously.

I think they were also de-risking by having multiple suppliers so that if one supplier hit a supply issue they had another to fall back on.

Whatever the reasons back when the contract was signed it doesn't mean us customers on ECI who understand the lower quality service we receive are happy about, especially as we pay the same as someone on a Huawei cabinet, which may even in some cases have vectoring enabled!

I'm lucky in one respect as we've just had a second cabinet installed, which just happens to be a Huawei, so I'll be switching to that once I'm sure it's live.

Incidentally I'm also out of range for gfast from the cabinet, but if/when they deploy further out hopefully I'll be in the right place to benefit.

What lower quality of service do you get?

Edit: I assume we're going to talk about G.INP/retransmission...

When retransmission was applied to ECI DSLAMS, it was found to cause short bursts of intensive noise at certain frequencies. This was fine and didn't impact performance, however a software bug in firmware for modems containing Lantiq/Intel chipsets meant the noise caused the modems to lock up. All parties were notified about this.

Lantiq/Intel developed a firmware update to resolve the issue and ECI developed a firmware upgrade that would detect a modem lockup event and proactively retrain the line.

The modems should be updated with the new firmware (although CP wires-only need to ensure their customers have updated modems). The ECI firmware update and retransmission are due to be released next month (I would guess the same time as the new DLM algorithm is introduced).

Edited by deleted (Thu 02-Feb-17 16:34:37)

How can you guarantee you're gonna get a port on the new cab? If a few people cancel around the same time it's very plausible that you'll get allocated a port on the ECI cab.

he doesnt need to give a reason, you asked for an example and he gave you one.

That is because there is no commercial reason to replace the ECI kit.

The equipment does what it was supposed to do. We would most likely be having exactly the same discussion if another hardware manufacturer provided the equipment instead of ECI.

In reply to a post by AndyHCZ:

That is because there is no commercial reason to replace the ECI kit.

The equipment does what it was supposed to do.

No, it doesn't support upstream G.INP

ECI cabinets will support upstream G.INP.

However (even if they did not), that is still not a commercial decision to spend several hundred million replacing all ECI kit.