Category: broadband

Broadband related posts including superfast broadband, Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) or Fibre to the Premises (FTTP), fibre broadband, VoIP over broadband, broadband usage, wireless broadband, in fact anything you can think of that has to do with broadband! Rural broadband especially arouses high emotions.

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broadband Business

Ethernet over FTTC Broadband

I learnt all I needed to know about Ethernet over FTTC broadband from this supercool infographic over at Timico. Supercool infographics are all the rage these days and this one is right up there – our graphic designer John Heritage is the master of his trade and boy do the product managers know their stuff.

Ethernet over FTTC is over twice as fast as EFM, almost half the cost and half the lead time to install. Now that’s what I call a deal.

Affordable uncontended bandwidth for the business that wants to get into in the cloud. Available now to 36% of UK businesses (1.1m premises), 54% by March 2014 and from all good Timico outlets near you. You know it makes sense.

T’s & C’s apply:
Ethernet over FTTC requires a new telephone line to be provided without any other service enabled on the line. Charges for this are not included as part of the Ethernet over FTTC product. 13 working day lead time does not include the time to install a new telephone line. Bandwidth is dependent on line conditions and distance from cabinet. Price differences calculated by the difference in price quoted for a 5Mbps Etherent over FTTC and EFM service based on a 12 month contract. Sources www.btwholesale.com and www.openreach.com. I should be in advertising. I used font size 4 for a laugh here. I’ve been thinking about doing a spoof advert for some time since listening to an ad on the radio whilst driving along – there seem to be more T’s and C’s than actual advert. In this case there isn’t anything contentious but I thought I’d do the really small font for a laugh anyway. If you’ve magnified this small print so that it is large enough so see you can check out the infographic again here.

Ciao

Categories
broadband Business

Reliable broadband…Just How Important is It? – #godigital2013

reliable broadband

Importance of reliable broadband – video interview

Pinched this off YouTube – it’s a quickfire interview I did at the onlincolnshire #godigital2013 conference

I’m talking about how mission critical reliable broadband is these days and how you plan for problems.

You know it makes sense…

PS In the vid I’m wearing my new sports jacket – Harris Tweed. As the winter continues it vicious bite it makes a lorra lorra sense

Categories
broadband Business Cloud ofcom

How the cloud is changing old business practices

broadband cloud services

an original picture of a cloud

Broadband cloud services make their mark at Olnincolnshire conference

Gave a talk this time last week at the The Onlincolnshire Digital Conference (#godigital2013) chatting about what sort of online or broadband cloud services our customers start to use after they have FTTC installed. I was not the only one. Rob Wilmot of BCS Agency (some of you will remember him as founder of Freeserve) and Stephen Parry of LloydParry told us about the cloud services they used in running their businesses.

Something that Stephen said really stuck in my mind. He uses a SAAS product called FreshBooks for his accounting, invoicing and expense management. What’s more he uses it on the move and recounted a story of a visit to a client in Frankfurt. After having lunch with the client Stephen photographed the receipt and loaded it into his expenses folder using the FreshBooks iPhone app.

After finishing his day’s consultancy and heading back to the airport he invoiced the customer from his iPhone, including the cost of the lunch (no such thing as a free one). One assumes that the customer pays electronically by bank transfer. Wham bang job done.

This is the future.

Continue reading “How the cloud is changing old business practices”
Categories
broadband Business

BT only game in rural town

B4RN rural broadband virgin media expansion

Rural broadband providers drop out of BDUK competition leaving BT only game in village.

I hear that Fujitsu has withdrawn from the race for the BDUK funding. It always seemed strange to me that Fujitsu would be chasing the contracts in the first place. Someone like Virgin maybe companies with an established network and pedigree in the UK.

Its a shame for rural areas that Virgin didn’t see any economic sense in pursuing the farming market.

Unfortunately we are heading back to a BT monopoly for many areas of the country. The shame is that this doesn’t make it efficient for me and you, the taxpayer that is handing their cash to BT to “service” rural communities. There is no incentive for BT to cut costs.

Continue reading “BT only game in rural town”
Categories
broadband Engineer

And then there was light

fibre broadband light

News today is they are electing a new Pope and I have a working broadband line. It was fixed this lunchtime by BT’s Lincoln area ops manager who turned up at our house with two new VDSL modems – just in case one of them didn’t work, fair play. It took ten seconds to unplug the old one and plug in the new and hey presto, it lit up.  Where there was darkness now there is light. It is better to light one small candle than to sit alone in the darkness etc etc etc1.

The Davies household has now breathed a collective sigh of relief. It’s a bit like the feeling you have when your petrol tank goes from nearly empty to full. You feel you can go places.

I’m not going to dwell too much in this incident but I do feel it is worth a little post mortem on how it was fixed.

Yesterday our NOC asked for the ticket to be escalated – basically raised up the priority list to ensure that someone did turn up at the next appointment. Today the escalation was rejected – it would appear that three engineering no-shows was not sufficient reason for escalation.

Also yesterday I dropped BT’s regional director an informational note linking to the blog post and highlighting the fact that it had been covered by The Register, ISPReview and quite possibly elsewhere. I also said that the next appointment was set for Friday – the first day I would be able to work from home and thus be around to let an engineer in. It was a belt and braces approach to making sure that someone turned up on Friday. It wasn’t in anyone’s interests for there to be another no show.

The issue was processed at director level and this morning the BT ops manager rang my wife to ask if he could pop around this afternoon which as you know he did to smiles all round.

Apparently over the last twelve days or so the volume of tickets requiring engineering visits has shot up. My solution is not scalable. I can’t drop BT senior management a note for every customer fault and not everyone venting their frustrations in a blog post is going to have that blog post covered in the mainstream media.

Lets hope there will be a lesson or two learn’t from the incident, though I fear not. BT has a huge organisation to run and change is not easy. I did ask whether the 1,000 engineers being taken on by Openreach would help but I’m told that they are specifically targeted at supporting BTVision which is unlikely to influence resource levels on FTTC.

Fibre broadband modem light at the end of the FTTC tunnel. Tune in tomorrow for the next exciting blog post from trefor.net.

That’s all…

1 I realise that one is not totally relevant but I thought I’d stick it in anyway 🙂

Categories
broadband Business Net

The BT engineering visit lottery – get yer tickets ere

broadband engineering lottery

Broadband engineering visit lottery results in 3 cancelled appointments.

BT has some great engineers on the ground. I witnessed one in action recently when he did some troubleshooting on my line and found a corroded pair of wires creating noise. The knock on effect was a modulated line with slower speeds. It was fixed. Great.

On Thursday Mrs Davies called me whilst I was in London to say “the internet isn’t working”. Now I love her a lot but whenever she says the internet isn’t working it is working and usually it is down to user error with whichever gadget she happens to be playing with. Either that or Microsoft software.

On this occasion I got home and found that indeed “the internet wasn’t working”! A quick skeet showed me that the VDSL modem was kaput. A technical term for “knackered” – from the same school as vorchsprung dorch technik (or however they spell it). It’s kind of ok because we all have mobile connectivity in our house. Frustrating for my wife who has grown used to “lightning” speed connectivity. Lots of “” in this post btw.

The upshot of it is largely that the kids couldn’t play Xbox live games and she who must be obeyed could not catch up with the Hairy Bikers on the iPad in the kitchen. Not the end of the world I’d say but certainly noticeable from a family feedback perspective.

My parting shot on the way in on Friday was “Not to worry” and “I’ll get someone out with a new modem”.

Continue reading “The BT engineering visit lottery – get yer tickets ere”
Categories
broadband Engineer

Openreach – it’s all noise

Openreach broadband engineers working at an FTTC cabinet

openreach engineer up a poleOpenreach broadband engineer finds corroded pair up pole

It’s a complicated old game, broadband. Ethernet is far simpler. You connect a length of fibre to  router at one end and one way or another it gets back to a bigger router at the ISP’s core network somewhere and hooks you up to the internet/intranet/wherever you want to hook up to. I realise that’s a simplistic way of putting it but basically that is it. it doesn’t matter if it rains or blows a gale. Fibre doesn’t normally mind.

Broadband is different. Broadband is made up of copper cables, aluminium1  if you are unlucky. Even fibre broadband, as the BT marketing hypers like to call it, is not usually fibre. Fibre broadband is, unless you happen to be one of the few with Fibre To The Premises, carried over copper in the last critical few hundred yards to your house.

So fibre broadband, or Fibre To The Cabinet, has some copper. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. Well actually I have been complaining. My home broadband performance had dropped right off from the 53Megs down and 11Megs up to at times a pathetic 6Megs in either direction.

Fortunately I have “a man who does” named Adam Rutter who leads one of our tech support teams. The BT System had rate adapted a line that could theoretically hit 80Mbps (I never expected it to do that – I am a few hundred yards from the cabinet). It normally does this if it finds errors on the line – the speed is adjusted to a point where the errors disappear. In my case the line was synching at 15Megs. Nogoode.

Adam knew there was something wrong and called out the cavalry in the guise of BT Openreach. The engineer arrived at the appointed time (good) and I hung around whilst he ran through some tests.

Now one thing you should know about a copper broadband line is that it was originally designed to carry your voice via analogue electrical signals. The specification for the copper telephone cable is therefore based largely on the parameters needed for your Aunty Mabel to hear your dulcet tones without having to put a bigger speaker in her hearing aid. Broadband hadn’t been invented in Aunty Mabel’s day (may she rest in peace).

When the boffs at the Post Office BT came along and said “Eureka we have read this article about something called ADSL and we think it is a good idea” they were stuck with a copper line that had a pre-Mabel date on it. That line spec, SIN349 for the purists amongst you, was designed to keep Mabel the inveterate talker happy on her Plain Old Telephone line and not Mabel the Skyper who loves to video conference with her nephews and nieces who in turn indulge their auntie because she shells out at Christmas and birthdays.

Now I’ve had Openreach out before to check my line and it has always passed their tests. This time I explained in no uncertain terms that there was something wrong – the evidence being in the speeds I was getting. I know it wasn’t congestion on our network and I also know how BT manages the capacity at the exchange so it wasn’t going to be down to congestion there.

Tim Drake, the Openreach engineer realised that there was no point in performing the normal line test – it would have passed. He got on the blower to their operations team and asked for the limits on my line to be lifted (the limits imposed to prevent line CRC errors).

My internet access speeds shot up, as expected.  However it didn’t take long for the errors to return. Tim spent the next hour or so testing the line looking for the source of the errors. He eventually found it at the top of the telegraph pole down the road from my house.

“Eureka” says I. Tim finished his stuff up the pole and brought down a piece of cable that showed corrosion on both strands of one pair. These wires, rubbing together in the wind and rain would have resulted in noise that was the cause of my errors and the speed downgrade. Mabel and her yakking on the Plain Old Telephone would not have been troubled by the problem. Mabel on Skype would.

My FTTC line is now back a lot nearer to where it needs to be and I am a happy bloke. I am next week having dinner with a senior team from BT and I intend to specifically commend Tim Drake for his efforts. Openreach broadband engineers have a budget of one hour to fix each problem.  Mine took two hours and Tim could have walked away early on in the process with the throwaway observation that the line was in spec and there was nothing he could do.

This he did not do and he now has a happy customer. He is a good man. He cares.

The only real answer to all this would be for a total network rollout of Fibre To The Premises. Whilst I am not saying that fibre is totally immune from the environmental problems that affect copper it is far less so. Ubiquitous FTTP ain’t going to happen any time soon, we all know that, but perhaps this blog will be used one day as an illustration of the issues that dogged that historical piece of communications antiquity, the copper telephone line.

Thanks Tim. The photo is of Tim up the pole.

Ciao.

1 That’s alue-min-eeum and not aloominum, y’awl

Categories
broadband Business media

I could have leant upon that coppice gate – Thomas Hardy and homeworking

broadband for working from home avoids long commute

early morning sun in December in LincolnshireBroadband for working from home avoids long commute.

Took me an hour and ten minutes to get in to work this morning. That’s twice as long as usual – broken down tanker on the A46. Walking in to the office I felt a bit like the Reggie Perrin of old – “20 minutes late, frozen points at Clapham Junction”.

I went on a very long diversion through the Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire countryside. The stark winter beauty reminded me of the Thomas Hardy poem “The Darkling Thush” :

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.

It’s one of my all time favourites.  Anyway driving in on this extended albeit pleasant detour made me think about the whole subject of commuting and broadband for working from home. The number of times I have the radio on driving home on a Friday night to hear the UK wide traffic reports – quite often its gridlock on all the major routes around the country.

Makes you wonder how much time and money we really waste travelling to work. Granted there are some jobs where the person absolutely needs to be in the office but equally there are many where a little bit of mix and match (home versus office) would be perfectly acceptable. Phone system vendors often try to model the financial benefits of homeworking as part of their pitch to customers. I don’t think you really need to work out the payback in terms of pounds shillings and pence. It’s bloomin’ obvious.

Quite a number of our customers see this. We have a portal that some of them use to manage estates of hundreds, if not thousands of home worker broadband connections. The portal is integrated with the customer’s HR system and when an employee moves house and change their address the portal automatically informs us to migrate their broadband to another location. For some large organisations this can save a considerable workload on the IT department – managing what is really a tedious and time consuming process that really benefits from automation. Bung in a VoIP account and hey presto, you have a home office just like in the office.

To conclude, my other favourite Thomas Hardy work is “Under The Greenwood Tree”. I don’t get on with most of his novels, they are depressing, but this one  is a nice novel and signals the end of an era in a similar way to the Darkling Thrush. It is also very seasonal and I am now most definitely feeling Christmassy.

That’s all folks…

Categories
broadband Business

#FTTC video outtakes #broadband #fibre

superfast broadband video case study camera

Broadband video case study – the outtakes

Just browsing through some bits of video left on the cutting room floor after we finished the FTTC case study. Thought a couple or three might be of interest.

The first one was taken with a GoPro camera positioned inside the cabinet filming the door opening and the Openreach engineer coming in to do some work. In this one you can see one of the cameramen filming the cab from the outside.

Bit like the David Attenborough nature stuff where at the end of the programme they show you how they did the filming. Nothing particularly dramatic such as a close encounter with a shark or a yeti. We were however filming outside a school and a very concerned headmaster did come out so see what was going on. He went away though I sensed that he would have been happier if he had shooed us away.

The second film is a short one taken from the outside with the open cabinet so that you can see the workings. No GoPro camera inside this time – obv we had to do multiple takes to get all the different angles in.

The third is one I took of the BT crowd in my conservatory. Of course you only see me in the case study but in actual fact there was a huge support team including the outside catering van, make up artists, continuity, clapperboy, director, producer, personal masseuse etc – you get the drift. I couldn’t fit them all in the conservatory so you get four.

Some of them will be at my Xmas bash so if you are coming to that you will be able to chat with them in person. Not often you get the chance to meet the people behind the movie eh?

Some of you have asked for a video showing the process of the installation. I didn’t get any of that off the production team but I will ask. Bear with…

Categories
broadband Business

Superfast broadband video case study by Timico and Openreach

superfast broadband video case study camera

Superfast broadband video case study

“Never before seen footage of the inside of the Davies household now viewable on tinterweb.”

This is it, the video you’ve all been waiting for. Well I have anyway. A few weeks ago we shot some footage around and about Lincoln and chez Davies for a video case study of a Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) aka superfast fibre broadband installation.

Get your popcorn and fizzy drinks ready and settle in to your favourite armchair to watch this much anticipated movie. I don’t have an agent yet but if any major studios are interested in talking then you know how to get hold of me.

That’s all folks 🙂

Link to what BT has on their website http://www.btplc.com/ngb/News/Timico.htm

Categories
broadband End User mobile connectivity

When did you last phone “home”?

landline use Timico VoIP phone app for iPhone available from Apple App Store

Landline use in decline

Landline use seems to be in decline. When I got into the office this morning I called home. I’d lost a tie and thought I might have dropped it on our drive.

When I want to call someone my usual way is to go to the logs on my phone and click on the relevant number/name. As often as not the person I want to talk to is high up on the list of recent calls – wife, kids, stockbroker, shrink (etc).

I called my wife’s mobile. She didn’t answer. So I called “Home”. I had to scroll a very long way down the list of logs to find Home. In fact I last called Home at 20.08 on the 1st November. 70 calls or text messages down the list. Anne answered the Home phone and you will be happy to know that she found the tie, a very smart blue bow tie, and has it safe in the house.My point is that we are using our landline less and less. Typically for calls to grandparents. I’ve even taken to answering the home phone by saying “Newport Arch Chinese Restaurant” as quite often its a scammer on the other end of the line.

Everyone in our house has a mobile phone. All the adults are on all you can eat plans and it makes no different whether we use the fixed or mobile phone. Nobody rings me on the Home phone. The kids rarely use their phone for voice calls. They either text their friends or they use it to access the internet for Facebook Messaging. The youngest often goes online on the XBox if he needs to chat to a friend!

I’d like to bet that for a large proportion of the population the landline number is hardly used at all and is effectively only there because you need a landline to get Broadband.

There have occasionally been calls for BT (Openreach) to provide data only lines, known as “naked DSL” without the costs and overhead of the voice service. BT has always pushed back on this, saying there is no demand and that the costs would not be greatly reduced.

It would be interesting to see how many households don’t use their landline at all. My bet is that millions of us would put our hands up and voluntarily relinquish possession of our old fashioned phone. It might be worth having the debate…

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Apps broadband End User social networking

Home broadband data usage growth

home broadband data usage trends for Trefor Davies

Broadband data usage growth driven by photo uploads

I’m installing a RaspberryPi computer at home carrying an IPCortex PBX with SIP trunks. I just needed to find a free IP address and found myself checking out available addresses so that I could provide a static one to the IPCortex.

I just happened to find myself looking at my home broadband data usage and came up with some interesting stats.

The first chart plots the growth in my overallgrowth in upload data usage for home broadband - Trefor Davies usage for the last four years. It actually shows almost an order of magnitude (20GB to 160GB) growth from the lowest point in 2008 to the highest point this year.

I realise this is not scientific but you can easily see the trend. The rise in upload usage in the May/June time frame (2nd chart) this year coincides with my taking proud possession of the Samsung Galaxy S3 and the fact that all photos now get backed up to Google+. Trefor Davies photo storage requirements ytd 2012

The final chart shows the growth in photo storage needs this year and you can see a very good correlation between photo storage and the growth in bandwidth upload usage.

The numbers don’t exactly match because we use the home broadband connection for other applications and I, being both gregarious and fertile, do not live alone.

I haven’t drilled into specifics but a reasonable chunk of the photo storage space is now used for video. I do both a daily (ish) video diary for the kids and take lots of “generally interesting” videos. Check this one out from the weekend visit to the Beamish Open Air Museum in county Durham.

 

Categories
broadband Engineer

When Things Go Wrong…

broadband Network Operations Centre

Broadband Network Operations Centre spots when a line goes down

I was in the broadband Network Operations Centre  the other day talking to the guys. We were looking at our instance of the Solar Winds network monitoring tool. Then I remembered I was on the way to see a customer later that day so I asked to see their network status.broadband

Blow me down if one of their sites wasn’t showing up as red – connectivity problem. I sauntered over to first line and to my delight one of the team was already looking at it. It was an ADSL connection. As we were watching the status reverted to green. ADSLs sometimes lose and reestablish connections on their own – that’s the vagaries of copper for you.

It’s nice when systems work like this. With ADSL we have a suite of tests we can run to see where the problem might lie. Sometimes the customer has unplugged the router for some reason. If we can’t find out the answer we spring into action depending on what we have agreed with the customer. Maybe it’s just a phone call asking him to switch the router back on. Maybe its a site visit.

Anyway I suspect that on this occasion the customer hadn’t even noticed there was a problem, but we did…

c ya

Categories
broadband End User media

Why We Will All Need 1Gbps FTTP – 20/20 Vision – Conversations with Nat Morris

gigabit broadband conversation with Nat Morris

Nat Morris in conversation with Trefor Davies (pic taken by Umar Bajwa)

Gigabit broadband is the way forward.

Met with Nat Morris (Google him) last week. We discussed life, networks and Ultra High Definition TV. Ultra High Definition TV will dispel any doubts you ever had about why broadband networks need to get faster and faster. Gigabit broadband is the future.

Developed by Japanese national broadcaster NHK in conjunction with the BBC, Super Hi Vision has sixteen times as many pixels as HDTV. Frames have 7680 pixels across by 4320 pixels down – roughly the equivalent of a 32Mpixel photo.

It’s going to be a while before this becomes mainstream. There are only three cameras in the world capable of filming in this format (known as 8k) and the footage has to be shown on a 145-inch (3.7 metre) prototype display co-developed with Panasonic.

TV makers are currently focusing efforts on launching 4K enabled devices offering a quarter of the resolution. This is the format currently used by most digital cinema cameras. LG recently unveiled the biggest 4K television set to date  – an 84 inch screen costing more than $22,000 (I won’t be buying one). Manufacturers are likely to want to offer 8K screens by 2020 when NHK aims to begin its first experimental broadcasts in the standard.

Now this is all very well and good but what will it mean for us men in the street? Well the amount of digital bandwidth needed to stream 8k video is around 350Mbps. If we assume that households will want to have multiple streams so that people can watch Big Brother, Coronation Street, Eastenders and the footy simultaneously in different rooms whilst sharing the experience with their friends via Telepresence it isn’t difficult to imagine a world where several Gigabits per second is required to the home.

Much more info together with pics can be found at the links below. V interesting stuff that is not only going to drive broadband speeds but also memory sizes and processor power.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/researchanddevelopment/2012/08/the-olympics-in-super-hi-visio.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2012/07/super_hi_vision_ultra_hd.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19370582

Follow Nat at @natmorris .

Categories
broadband Engineer internet

Penis Envy, Broadband Style: 1Gbps FTTP at Appleton & Eaton

Gigaclear gigabit broadband broadband week image - Gigaclear speedtest showing 1Gbps broadband speeds in Appleton & Eaton

Gigaclear speedtest showing 1Gbps broadband speeds in Appleton & EatonGigaclear gigabit broadband is blazing fast.

This is the nearest thing you can get to penis envy in the broadband world. It’s a speedtest, performed on the new Gigaclear gigabit broadband network in the fortunate communities of Appleton and Eaton.

I was recently gushing over the 20Mbps and 40Mbs speeds I have encountered at WiFi hotspots in London. Well, it won’t be long before properties in Appleton and Eaton get to London prices, as this amazing new network is sure to have a beneficial effect on valuations.

Gigaclear quote one of their customers as saying, “I run my business from home, and with only 1-2Mbps available before Gigaclear I had to plan well in advance when to upload and download”. Pricing starts at £37.

Gigaclear is digging fibre into a number of communities (check them out here).

Categories
broadband Business

Why We Need High-Speed Broadband Connectivity: London2012, Bell Ringing World Record Lincoln Cathedral

I’m working from home this morning – car is in first thing having something sorted. At 8am I nipped round to Lincoln Cathedral to film the London2012 world record bell ringing attempt. There were 7 bell ringers in Minster Yard as well as the ones inside the cathedral. A small but perfectly formed bunch:)

Anyway I got home and immediately started to upload the 500Meg video file to YouTube – time is of the essence in the news business. What a waste of time. I have one kid downloading Ubuntu for RaspberryPi and two others engaging in online warfare with unknown foe.

Decent levels of broadband connectivity bandwidth are clearly an everyday necessity.

The video is still on the phone so it is probably uploading to Google+ quietly in the background, hogging some bandwidth.

Roll on superfast with stripes connectivity.

Categories
broadband Business

FTTC Update – Light at the End of the Fibre (Almost)

gpo cabinet

GPO cabinet 10 in LincolnBT FTTC cabinet 10 in LincolnFibre broadband install

Looks like my FTTC cab is in situ at last – progress. I think I have found out why there is a delay to the fibre broadband install though. The old cabinet (number 10 in Lincoln) is full. There is no space to feed in any fibre tails so it is going to need a new and bigger pressed Aluminium cab fitting.

I got this from the Openreach engineer who has just been to sort something out for me. He checked the cab and indeed it was chocker.

The work involved in fitting the new one is just a couple ofGPO cabinet 10 in Lincoln - right next to a pedestrian crossing days but I guess that Openreach will have had to reapply for planning permission. To complicate matters the old cab is on the pavement right next to a school pedestrian crossing. There will be some umming and aahing in the planning department over this one.

In the first photo on the right you can see where they dug in the new duct work leading to the existing chamber on the corner – there is no way this cab would have fitted next to the existing one by the pedestrian crossing. Note of course the cab wasthe old GPO cabinet 10 in Lincoln probably there before the crossing – they used horses in them days.

The last photo is a close up of the “full” old cab. One does wonder why they didn’t apply for planning permission for the new shell at the same time as the new FTTC cab.

The planning permission bit is guess work but I’m probably not far off the money.

Categories
broadband Business

B4RN is a hero at ISPAs 2012

B4RN broadband -Barry Forde and Chris Conder at ISPAs

B4RN Broadband is award winner

B4RN broadband has just been announced as winner of the Internet Hero at the Internet Service Providers Association annual Awards bash. They were pretty clear winners in the vote that involved all of the ISPA council (moi included).

I’m not going to dwell on the other candidates or on the Internet villain. It is quite fair that the attention is all focussed on B4RN. B4RN has featured on the blog before. It is literally a ground breaking project.

B4RN is aiming to light up 1,500 or so properties across the 8 parish areas in the Lancashire/Cumbria borders at a cost £1.86M. That’s roughly over £1,200 per home/business. They are doing it with a combination of hard cash raised from investors and potential customers and “effort”. The “effort” is payment in kind – much of the total cost of the project is down to civil engineering works – digging the trenches in which the fibre is laid.

The 1,500 properties will need over 256km of fibre – that’s roughly £1,200 per property connected and just over £7 per metre. A very significant chunk of the cost of the project is going to be paid for in kind so the overall cost per property/per metre will come down from this. B4RN has enough cash to initially light up the core of the network – that’s 40,000 km through 8 parishes.

If you take a look at the Openreach website you can see their regulated tariff. For laying fibre the costs range between £25 a metre and £140 a metre.  Believe me this is not a “have a go at BT” post. BT has to gear for scale and is not used to having to gear for low cost.

These numbers suggest there is a clear need for competition in the local loop/Openreach space. The Openreach position will be that the market isn’t big enough for two players.

The people that got B4RN going are real heroes. The biggest problem that the UK has is that there aren’t enough of these heroes to go around. It’s not just guts you need it’s know how and it’s not just know how locally on the ground. It’s know how right the way up through the ranks of the civil service and up to government ministerial level.

BT will be whispering in the minister’s ear “do you really want to take the risk with critical national infrastructure by letting just anyone get involved”. That’s what’s happened with the BDUK rollout of funding for rural NGA broadband – we are left with BT and possibly Fujitsu though only in a few regions (that’s my understanding anyway).

I don’t have the right answers here. Hopefully B4RN’s winning of the ISPA Internet Hero award will give someone food for thought.
imagePhoto – Barry Forde and Chris Conder of B4RN proudly show off their award.

Categories
broadband Business

Planning issues holding up really important FTTC connection.

fibre broadband planning issues

Fibre broadband planning issues hold up my install

I realise that most of you aren’t the least bit interested in my own ambitions to get fibre broadband. From the number of comments I get on the subject most people are more concerned with when they will get it themselves. Fair enough. Thought I’d share my own fibre broadband planning story.

I was due to be connected by the end of March 2012. Then it slipped to end of June.  The end of June is this coming Saturday. My cabinet, which is only a hundred metres or so from my house, looks decidedly lonely. It wants a friend.

I am often asked if I can find out what is happening with someone’s particular cab. It’s doable but not worth the effort in most cases. Openreach would get so many enquiries they would never get any work done.

In my case I have made an exception (only because someone offered to do the work for me) and asked what is happening. Will I wake up later this week to the sound of pneumatic drills and the sigh of white Openreach vans hugging the kerb near my house? Only in my dreams, and therefore by definition before I wake up:).

It looks like my cab is being held up in the planning permission process. Sigh. If I get any more info I’ll let you know because whether you are interested or not I will want to get it off my chest.

Note added at some point in the future. Check out the progress with this update. It’s now been in for a couple of years and has been a rocky ride though I wouldn’t be without. It has revolutionised internet usage in our house.

So long and thanks for all the fibre broadband.

Ciao amigos…

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broadband Business

Cumbrian Broadband Hiccups – Will the Rest of the Country Catch a Cold? #BDUK #digitalbritain

B4RN broadband BT rural broadband reinvestment B4RN business model broadband vision

Cumbrian broadband – BDUK

Cumbria is the region leading the charge in the implementation of superfast broadband to rural areas using government funding via BDUK.

Cumbria has just rejected the bids made by BT and Fujitsu and asked them to retwrite the proposals. Neither bid apparently met the criteria laid down by the Cumbrian authorities.

This should be noted with concern by other Local Authorities around the country, all of whom are trying to get to grips with how to spend the government money in their own areas. The reason for the concern is that the model for how much the rollout should cost, and therefore the amount of money apportioned to each area was developed by BDUK using a subcontractor.

If this model turns out to be wrong then we could be facing the “Cumbrian” situation in every county. Delays and shortfalls in meeting targets are bad news all round.

The BBC coverage on the Cumbrian broadband situation is here.

You should also follow Ian Grant’s coverage here – he is very close to this stuff.

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broadband Business

Ubiquitous FTTP Broadband Business Case Crowd Source

BT says there is no business case for the rollout of ubiquitous Fibre to the Premises (FTTP broadband). I believe it.

The government says there is a business case for HS2 rail link between London and Birmingham (and beyond1). I probably believe it. After all according to Justine Greening, the Transport Secretary,  “HS2 will deliver four pounds of benefit for every additional pound spent compared to a new conventional-speed line, as well as driving regeneration, creating jobs and providing our country with the infrastructure we need to compete in the 21st century.” It must be true.

It will also no doubt save the Irish economy as gangs of ‘Navigationals’ return to the English countryside to “earn a bob” but that is another story.

I’m not aware that anyone has put much effort into a business case for ubiquitous FTTP broadband. I can see why BT wouldn’t bother. The amount we (the nation) are willing to pay for our broadband won’t make it compute. This isn’t BT’s business case to assemble. It belongs to UK PLC.

What we have ended up with is

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broadband Engineer

TalkTalk Ethernet Exchanges Added to List

Another quick update just to say I’ve now added the Talk Talk Business Ethernet and EFM exchanges to the lists in the Ethernet section of the blog. Also a statement from Virgin Media on the subject.

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broadband Engineer

Ethernet Exchange Update

I was pleasantly surprised to find that this blog ranks quite highly in Google searches for Ethernet. This made me feel quite guilty that I hadn’t updated the exchange availability list for what seems like forever (since 2009 in fact which is effectively forever in this industry).

That situation has now been remedied and the updated list of BT Ethernet enabled exchanges is now available here.  In keeping with what must clearly be an authoritative page on the subject I will now have a hunt round for the equivalent Talk Talk and Virgin Ethernet lists and those of any other network partner we might use.

Note this is different to FTTC/FTTP,  both highly popular search terms herein.

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broadband Business

It’s Nice When Someone Impresses When You Are Not Expecting It – BT Wholesale Broadband Performance

My home ADSL has occasionally been causing me issues with the broadband performance dropping right off. I know it isn’t the Timico network because I can see our network utilisation and when I have problems at home there is plenty of capacity available in our backhauls.

So gnashing my teeth I blamed BT and pulled a favour. As a one off they took a look at the Lincoln exchange to see if it was suffering congestion. Blow me down if they didn’t send me a graph showing that usage never get near capacity.

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broadband Engineer

Monthly ADSL Usage Trend and Prediction for 2015

monthly broadband usage

monthly adsl usage is on the increaseIt might interest you to see my monthly ADSL usage over themonthly adsl usage trend at the Davies house last four years or so, reported in GigaBytes per month. There is a very clear upward trend – over 500% growth from the low point in April 09 to Jan 12.

There would have been a technology upgrade from ADSLMax to ADSL2+ – quite possibly around mid 09 which would explain the jump but I can’t remember exactly.

The average household usage is around 17GB a month so us Davies’ are clearly heavy users. Our oldest, Tom went to University in October 2010 but this doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect. In fact there doesn’t seem to be any particular reason why one month his heavier than another. it’s just the general trend that tells us that I should expect to be using 150GB a month by sometime in 2015.

My broadband connection by 2015 is likely to be at least 100Mbps so I will have bandwidth available that would sustain large amount of data transfer. I suspect that reality will be higher than this. We as a family will begin to use even more services so I am going to predict 200GigaBytes a month. I’d also like to bet that my mobile data usage will be in the tens of GigaBytes compared with the very low single digit GigaBytes at the moment.

Any insights happily discussed.

 

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broadband End User

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells FTTC Broadband Availability Data Reliability

Actually that post title was a bit misleading. It should have read “frustrated of Lincoln”. The FTTC broadband availability checker has been saying 31st March for FTTC at my house for a good six months now.

For a long time I considered this to be a reasonable target date – 2 out of 4 Lincoln exchanges have already been upgraded. Moreover I’ve seen teams out laying fibre up Lindum Hill (down the road from me in Lincoln)  and when asked they confirmed this was for FTTC broadband.

As we got nearer the deadline I noted that they still hadn’t upgraded my cabinet – it is easy to find out which is your cab – you just follow the  telephone wire back from your house. Last weekend I noticed that the availability date for my line had totally disappeared from the checker.

I get so many enquiries re cabinet availability that it isn’t feasible to ask Openreach for information on every one but on this occasion I pulled rank on myself and decided to use my contacts to find out what is going on. All I can find out is that my exchange is not due to be upgraded until the end of June. This potentially means that my own FTTC broadband connection could be months after that date. The checker data base is knackered because this info is not in it.

BT of course say that the dates they give are “only indicative”. TBH I wouldn’t plan anything around availability of FTTC. It will come when it comes. Openreach does have a difficult job to do but the company doesn’t do itself any favours with what can only be described as terrible expectation management. Also it can’t be so difficult to provide their engineers and planners with some mechanism for properly reporting progress with network roll outs.

 

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broadband Engineer

FTTC Broadband Trials (80 Meg) Pretty Much Over – The Apps Will Come

screenshot of speedtest from 80Megs FTTC trial - Fibre broadbandThe FTTC broadband 80Meg trials are now more or less over with production launch of the faster service currently due on 12th april. FTTC80 was the version of the 40Meg FTTC but using a different baseband frequency that results in a doubling of its overall speed performance.

You can see from the small pic inset that this user saw an impressive 75Megs down though he didn’t see much change in the uplink. The ping time at 14milliseconds is also pretty good. it’s just the way ahead. Waiting for an onscreen response when using the internet is just not acceptable. It needs to be instantaneous.

It doesn’t matter that no application has an use for this kind of speed. Now that we have built it the applications will come.

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broadband Engineer olympics

I’m Just a Big Kid, Really – Excited about the Olympics

Usain Bolt - billions of fans want to see him win at the London 2012 OlympicsJust had a communication through from BT re planning for the Olympics. This year the good citizens of the United Kingdom are divided into two camps – those that are looking forward to the Olympics, think it is a great thing and are really excited, and those who think it is a huge waste of money that would be better spent on hospitals and schools and have been whinging about it ever since it was announced.

I am excited. What’s more I have tickets for me and the kids to see the kayaking slalom finals aaaand we have some great friends in Windsor who have kindly agreed to put up the whole noisy lot of us (and before anyone chips in we aren’t kipping at Windsor castle – they already had too many people staying). That for those of you who know the Davies’ (6 of us) is a big ask.

I’ve already posted about the expected growth in traffic on ISP networks during the Olympics. Interesting research just in is a look at the lessons learnt from the Vancouver Olympics.

One in four organisations suffered broadband network capacity issues

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broadband End User

Leeks, Daffodils, and Lincolnshire Broadband – Happy St. David’s Day

a typical rural Lincolnshire scene - we have no time for the internet and other new fangled stuffI’m missing tricks here. Yesterday I came into the office with the intention of writing something highly entertaining yet informative around the subject of February 29th – leap day as it seems to have been labelled on Twitter. Instead RaspberryPi came along and hijacked the slot. Fair enough, though I did follow the Twitter deliberations of one female friend as she mulled out loud the prospect of proposing marriage to her partner. It didn’t happen. She is content with waiting another 4 years 🙂

Today is March 1st. St David’s Day or Dydd Gwyl Dewi Sant as we say in the principality. It is also a beautiful spring day though there are no daffodils out in the garden yet for me to have wantonly torn the heads off to wear into work. Also my wife didn’t like the idea of my nicking a leek – she has been tending to them with loving care all winter and they are destined for the table.

So here we are pinching and punching into March and I have no idea how to weave the fact into a technical blog post.

In other news yesterday

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broadband End User internet mobile connectivity

Being Back in the Land of Broadband Connectivity Feels So Good – Center Parcs WiFi

We have just been away for a holiday for a week. 2 days visiting the in laws and a 5 day break at Center Parcs in Cumbria. We had a good time. We go  every year with the kids to Center Parcs and do the same things every year. I won’t trouble you with the details.

This year we took with us some electrical equipment: 5 laptops, 1 iPad, 2 HTC droids, 1 Samsung Galaxy S2, a Nokia N97 and another Nokia so old that I can’t even remember the model number – it belongs to my wife.

The laptops did see some use but not nearly as much as they might because of the paucity of broadband connectivity. The iPad struggled with (failed actually) getting on the free wifi at the pool or Cafe Rouge (my Galaxy S2 worked from both locations). The mobile reception in most places showed typically no bars and occasionally crept up to one or two bars.  Two bars did not necessarily mean available data connectivity.

Fortunately Twitter is sufficiently lightweight to not mind the poor connectivity too much. My wife couldn’t understand why the internet didn’t work on the iPad. It did work but in her mind waiting two minutes for a page to load = not working.

So where am I going with all this? Should I mind that I can’t get connectivity on holiday.  After all it’s a holiday and connectivity often = work, at least working “in the internet business” as I do. Last summer I had a camping break that was completely offline. It was planned that way and we had a great time.

I must say though that the experience of having a holiday that was only partially offline was a frustrating one for all. It would probably have been better to have no connectivity at all than poor connectivity. The experience would have been better for all.

Center Parcs is also missing a trick. Having forked out £800 or so for 4 nights I can’t imagine there would have been many guests not willing to stick another £20 say on their bill to get decent wifi in their villa – especially considering the demographic of their customers – not many “holiday parks” stock Veuve Cliquot in the camp shop I’ll bet.

Just for their benefit I’ll do the sums. £5 a day per villa, say 200 villas taking up the offer on average adds up to a £365,000 revenue stream a year. For that kind of money they could afford to wire up the site, provide a 1Gig connection and have a hugely profitable contributor to the bottom line.

If Center Parcs want to get in touch I’ll tell them how to go about it.

That’s all. I’m still on holiday but back in the land of Wifi and HSPDA – yay.

PS no comments about the amount of electrical kit taken on holiday – this is the 21st Century, the internet age – get with it man

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