October news from Vfast

I thought I would relay the info posted on the VFast front page.

October news

I know that I have recommended a few people (some of which were unfortunately were out of LOS).

Looking forward to the capacity upgrade for Dunkirk.

Edited by Yaz (Mon 10-Oct-11 00:22:13)

Great news, I like these monthly updates to see how things are going!

Now...

"These are very exciting times for VFast and we will update you further next month at which time we hope to be able to announce some very exciting news !"

Any speculation to what the "Very exciting news" may be? I'm guessing the 100mbit trials were not just for fun....

I would also hazard a guess that faster packages will be on offer.

If the CPE kit is Ubiquiti (Airmax) I wonder what the APs are, as you can't reach 100Mbps downstream from an AP (you can get close but the radio links are about 150Mbps half-duplex with 100Mbps ethernet ports).

Unless each AP only has one subscriber they will be sharing 90-something Mbps and only if the shared upstream is capped at about 60Mbps.

And if you don't use Ubiquiti for the AP, you lose the benefits of Airmax.

The radios are great performers for their price and I would not knock them, but 100Mbps is only ever a headline figure in a shared bandwidth network.

Edited by prlzx (Tue 11-Oct-11 20:46:21)

take your point, although given the "up to" claims by other operators, they ought to be close enough to be allowed the 100mbps claim.

They could perhaps move to 2 antenna mimo to get a "proper" 100Mbps - although again they would need to move to 1Gbps Ethernet ports as well. There is also the issue of deploying 2 antenna mimo sector aerials at the APs, but they are now starting to become available at reasonable prices.

Yes, indeed if Vfast did sell it as "100Mbps" broadband, small print: "subject to contention at the AP / relay", they wouldn't be saying anything different from what other operators / other types of service already get away with so I'm not meaning to single anyone out.

I just get fed up when headline figures and especially wireless "signalling data rates" being quoted as if real IP throughput, or the way that upstream throughput is generally glossed over in the interests of marketing higher downstream. Especially things sold as "Next Generation" still mimic the asymmetry of ADSL even if the newer technologies do not require it to.

On the antennas, (again a big if it's Airmax stuff), yes those sectors and omnis APs are already 2x2 MIMO, as are CPEs (apart from the AirGrid and Bullet), so good links can easily reach MCS15 (300M) but that is still not 100M symmetric on the ethernet port.

I think more throughput is possible if you are assembling your own boards with separate antennas and can go to say 3x3 MIMO or better with gigabit (and/or link aggregation) on the wired interfaces.

But my main reason for mentioning any of this was for other posters not to be too swept up by speculation that speeds can always be increased by upgrades at the centre, and that there will be inherent technical limits unless kit on a customers own roof is also replaced.

accepted.

As for ourselves, I keep our advertised speeds down so that customers can have a realistic chance of achieving them.

We do keep our offerings asymmetric though as that reflects the market needs on the whole. The wireles channel is not full duplex, so fast uploads can only come at the expense of fast downloads (on average, etc etc!). Also (commercial hat very much on), fast uploads tends to mean business requirements and hence ability/willingness to pay more. I fully appreciate that most if not all consumers might disagree with this, but life is life particularly with a wireless network.

I agree that commercially-speaking most offerings are still asymmetric.

I wonder if that would still be the case had the UK market not come from a history of dial-up and early 500kbps ADSL while user-generated content was much lower than consumed content, so favouring downstream was the only way to deliver useful bandwidth, while SDSL was priced so much higher (because it was offering a cheaper alternative to leased line so the market would stand for it?).

So I think we are at a tipping point where even mobiles come with a 5MP+ camera, and people reasonably want to know why it's still taking so long to share their photo album on Flickr or Picasa, or why they have to make their family video clips short (or over-compressed) to put on YouTube. Or even why their Skype video call looks more blocky on their home connection.

As you say, they may well no longer agree that these activities put them into the same box as "Business class" requirements!

But I can see that it would take a brave operator to take a 10Mbps / 1Mbps type asymmetric package and offer the option to take it as 5Mbps / 5Mbps (i.e. upstream capped at half the available bandwidth) because it would be hard to sell the benefits of this choice against it sounding "slower".

VFast APs are Rocket Ms

Thanks, makes sense if they want to use Airmax throughout.