Broadband in the UK.

G'day  Steve,      UK Gov (bless'em) is officially committed to provide superfast broadband to 90% of the UK by 2016 and 95% by December 2017. Most of this is done by fiber to a local street cabinet & the short distance to the property by copper.   They seem to be getting it done, although we read about some is behind schedule in some places.   There are challenges to places in remote & very low populations & they are also committed to investigate various alternatives in these locations,  I believe they are committed to provide 2Mbs as an absolute minimum to 100% of the population everywhere.    I pay for a 76Mbs service & get 70-72Mbs (250m copper distance) with the national network service provider,  other services can go higher.  

Hi Steve, ok, it sounds like Australia is no different from much of the developed world. Superfast is a marketing term used genereally for shared access distribution data speeds above regular ADSL2. It can encompass many technologies such as FTTP (GPON), G.FAST and VDSL. All these technologies provide different advantages at different cost points.

The FTTx is a terminology expression to define Telco distribution topology.

Therefore FTTN which is approx equivalent to FTTC in the U.K. uses fibre distribution to a node/cabinet and uses the existing twisted copper distribution for the final run. This is usually cost effective in urban and suburban areas and can provide good asynchronous speeds say 80/20 Mbps depending on distance from the cabinet or node. This is a Superfast category.

There is also FTTP which uses a high capacity  fibre, usually a gigabit fibre,  to a passive optical splitter, (GPON) and then each split fibre is distributed to a premise. This is still shared bandwidth and is often more disruptive hence expensive to provide but can provide asynchronous speeds of 330/30 Mbps and higher... note on this distribution topologies the uplink speed is often much smaller than the downlink speed, and with FTTP the ratio differences can be higher than FTTC/N.

In the U.K. we will shortly be seeing FTTdp , which is GFAST technology which will be close to FTTP speeds using the existing property twisted copper access or drop wire.. providing even more speed for many if they want with minimal or no disruption to their property..

However in short FTTx distribution of one sort or another is great news.. and FTTC/N can make it affordable for many... but the limiting factor with these fibre  topogies is the distance from the cabinet/node to the property and it's a balance of infrastructure cost vs payback vs speed of deployment- disruption... and this is what many countries including the U.K. and now it appears Australia is adopting. 

In my experience in certain third world countries, wired access can be precarious and radio/4G and satellite is often a more attractive alternative.

The alternative for uncontended symmetrical bandwidths discussed above  is direct Ethernet fibre. This is what often is used in larger commercial access.. and there is often no limit on placement usually other than customer cost to deploy.. and this can run into several £100,000s in extreme scenarios. Here the fibre is effectively run from the exchange to the property, but installation cost will vary on disruption required to lay the fibre or splice in available trucked fibres... this can get very costly and disruptive to provide for the customer but is the highest quality access you typically can provide.

AUSSIESTEVE, I had some relations over from Sydney during  Christmas of 2015 and they were saying how pathetic and variable the Broadband speeds were in Aus.

They used my PC to download and print their flight itinerary to Paris and couldn't believe my download speed of 37mbs on a fairly cheap basic package the maximum they have ever seen at their house was 2.5mbs which is located in a suburb of Sydney.

Must be pretty frustrating and limiting in what you can stream.

Try living in rural England - about as good as a piece of wet string! 

Pev posted:

Try living in rural England - about as good as a piece of wet string! 

Yes, in Britain if you live in a densely populated area tgere is a ggo chance that you might reaistically achieve a connection of between 10 and 100 MBps (though I think strongly slewed to the lower end of this range), but elsewhere that frequently drop to speeds measured in kbps. And I think the UK  Gov't target is % of population, not % of country.

unfortunately the rise in video and music online streaming and online game-playing hasn't improved people's experiences in poor areas, as the available bandwith is rapidly gobbled up,..

The biggest problem we have in the UK is BT's monopoly (via openReach) of the "last few yards" of pipe into homes and businesses.It doesn't matter who your ISP is, BT controls the end of the pipe.

As they are in a monopoly position, there is little incentive for them to get better.  Service levels are dreadful and the infrastructure is years out of date. Ofcom should force BT to sell off OpenReach (which of course BT doesn't want to do, as it generates most of its profits, allowing it to overpay for PL football and crap movies in an attempt to compete with Sky). All it has done so far is to request that BT spins off OpenReach into a separate company, which actually does nothing to address the issue.

As of the end of last year, almost six million homes and businessses in the UK do not have Ofcom's minimum acceptable broadband speeds - and 2.2 million of those are in our large towns and cities!

Innocent Bystander posted:

Pev posted:

Try living in rural England - about as good as a piece of wet string! 

............. And I think the UK  Gov't target is % of population, not % of country.

  "The Government’s aim is to provide superfast broadband (speeds of 24Mbps or more) for at least 95% of UK premises and universal access to basic broadband (speeds of at least 2Mbps)"   .........  thats by Dec 2017

Rural UK is not all bad, so be careful with the broad brush   .............   

Mike-B posted:

Innocent Bystander posted:

Pev posted:

Try living in rural England - about as good as a piece of wet string! 

............. And I think the UK  Gov't target is % of population, not % of country.

  "The Government’s aim is to provide superfast broadband (speeds of 24Mbps or more) for at least 95% of UK premises and universal access to basic broadband (speeds of at least 2Mbps)"   .........  thats by Dec 2017

Rural UK is not all bad, so be careful with the broad brush   .............   

Correction noted. As for actual performance, I can only comment on connections I know, from complaints of family and friends...

And 2Mbps is with a high contention ratio can mean considerably less when all neighbours are online in the evening...

My experience of rural broadband is dire. I live between two villages in Mid-Sussex and both have 30mps. I live 1.5 miles between the two  see 6 MPs if I'm lucky and on most evenings this collapses to kbs!

It looks like this area will still be in the slow lane at the end of the year and they have no idea when things will improve.....perhaps they're waiting for West Sussex County Council to stump up the cash? BT did at least say that things could improve after 2020 in my hard to reach area - I'm still laughing - clowns!

It's got to the point where they plan to send me a deadlock letter which I suppose is code for go away. What an awful outfit and the sooner they're given serious competition the better! I'd go satellite BB if it wasn't so expensive.

Mike-B posted:

  "The Government’s aim is to provide superfast broadband (speeds of 24Mbps or more) for at least 95% of UK premises and universal access to basic broadband (speeds of at least 2Mbps)"   .........  thats by Dec 2017

Rural UK is not all bad, so be careful with the broad brush   .............   

Fair point - but where I am it's 100% crap. A mile away they get 10x the speed but that's no use to me and BT seems to think this area is sorted! Extended complaining has got me a huge discount and a new Home Hub 6 so don't suffer in silence.

You might well have crap Pev,  all I saying is your experience is not the same for all who live in rural areas,  its not a broad brush.   I know numbers of people from around the country who's homes & businesses are located in rural areas,  the speeds they get from BT are a mix of good & bad,  but there is no consistency such as 'rural = crap/bad'  that I can detect.  But don't get me wrong,  there is no doubt BT/OpenReach have some work to do & they really are not stepping up IMO.

At least in the U.K. there is an objective for broadband coverage (95% of something), whereas in France there is nothing.

In my small rural village, the broadband used to be 2-4mb/s, but now it's about 25kb/s. There is nobody you can complain to and the local Orange shop manager lost his temper with me when I asked for their plan to improve my connection.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, my nominally 16mb/s connection is reliably about 5mb/s, but costs US$110/month...

Kevin-W posted:

The biggest problem we have in the UK is BT's monopoly (via openReach) of the "last few yards" of pipe into homes and businesses.It doesn't matter who your ISP is, BT controls the end of the pipe.

As they are in a monopoly position, there is little incentive for them to get better.  Service levels are dreadful and the infrastructure is years out of date. Ofcom should force BT to sell off OpenReach (which of course BT doesn't want to do, as it generates most of its profits, allowing it to overpay for PL football and crap movies in an attempt to compete with Sky). All it has done so far is to request that BT spins off OpenReach into a separate company, which actually does nothing to address the issue.

As of the end of last year, almost six million homes and businessses in the UK do not have Ofcom's minimum acceptable broadband speeds - and 2.2 million of those are in our large towns and cities!

This is so not right.. there is no 'monopoly', OpenReach access infrastructure can be leased out and telcos can provide their own access and in urban, profitable areas this is frequently so, the trouble is many service providers just don't want to do that kind of investment in less profitable area and so lease final access wiring off Openreach. If more were willing to make the investment in less profitable, longer payback areas it could be so different... the trouble in the UK,  most want a quick buck and are not interested in longer term payback investments, but are happy to whinge about those that do and not get off their backsides and do something about it. I thought the recent united stance between Virgin and BT on this was quite telling... two normally fiercely competitive access providers who actually invest in their own access and took a shot at those that don't but just parasite off others.

Its also telling when local subsidised rural infrastructure projects go to tender it's often the same players all the time that appear to bid... it's so sad more don't compete, but that requires vision and a longer payback plan.. my rural subsided  infrastructure  superfast access went to tender last year..and surprise suprise its OpenReach who responded and won and will be finalising their deployment plans next month...  and thank goodness they did or I would be left with my 2-3Mbps rural ADSL2 access for years to come. and some in my village have just 1Mbps - although some of that might be poor domestic wiring and RFI hygiene .. which often gets overlooked with low speed broadband ...

Another mis understanding is contention ratio... this especially with ADSL is  nothing to do with final mike infrastructure. The so called contention ratio usually occurs with the backhaul from the exchange. If it's a BT exchange, OpenReach will lease out space for other telcos to use so they can use their terminating equipment like DSLAMs or MSANs which piggy back off OpenReach access wiring or lease backhaul capacity from another Telco . It is this Telco backhaul where contention can and will occur.. again a Telco over subscribing their backhauls will have lower costs but poor peak performance. Carriers like BT tend to have loads of headroom so there is very little peak contention, alas this can't be said for all and it's a shame Ofcom doesn't focus on this more rather than just headline sync speeds which definitely doesn't give the full picture for network performance and contention. Not all broadband providers  are the same in this regard...

I always feel quite fortunate when I hear/see discussions such as this.

We bought our house new about 20 years ago and fibre optic cable was fitted by the builder.

Of course we didn't really see benefit until taking up broadband a few years later but since then it's been exemplary. The original provider NTL was replaced by Virgin some years ago and whatever we've paid for we usually get pretty much all the time. We use the 200 package and download speed tests usually show a figure in excess of this, say 210-230 mark. Very handy given the number of people usually on net and streaming something in the house!

Virgin's kit isn't all that but we get round that and there is an online fault tool such that on occasional slowness it's usually fixed in minutes after using it.

Yes the Virgin fibre accesses are good, I assume you have a GPON type setup so the fibres are probably contented / throttled back on the uplink (often glossed over in marketing spin) but it is certainly a big step forward. [ I think on Virgin 200 - the uplink speeds is a rather modest 20Mbps]  I suspect the closest suburban type volume approach on existing properties  BT and HOPEFULLY OTHERS will provide is FTTdp - which is fibre to the drop pole / drop wire and the G.FAST to the premise - this should provide upto 300Mbps downlink and 50Mpbs uplink over the property twisted pair access link .. thereby avoiding customer premise building work and disruption.

Yes uplink is slow at about 20-30 but then it's not key for us...

Positive news from the Broadband Team at Chichester Council - our address is one of 4000 customers in this area earmarked for service improvements - but, it looks like Openreach won't start much before the Summer and real progress won't be made until the end of 2018. If only BT and Openreach had been as helpful....

Good news, its probably because you are referring to subsidised rural broadband that is government funded - and so it is down to the customer - i.e. the Council to provide status updates of the progress - not the contractor awarded to provide the infrastructure. The same is here in Suffolk. It it was commercial funded then I would expect that to come directly from the Telco such as OpenReach - but I think most commercial deploys are now already in place.

I live both in Sydney and the UK.

In Sydney, on ADSL2 we see around 15mbps which I think is very good. We will be changing to the NBN Superfast fibre network later this year.

In the UK, in rural Oxfordshire, we currently get, on a good day, 2.5mbps. On an average day 1.5mbps but typically, which is most days, less than 1mbps.

It really depends on where you live and although we have repeatedly been told Fibre is coming through a company called Cotswolds Broadband, that contract has just been cancelled by the company actually building the infrastructure. A letter to my local MP assures me he is very interested in resolving the issue ASAP as he lives locally! However, are we likely to be connected by December 2017? I doubt it....

Kevin-W posted:

The biggest problem we have in the UK is BT's monopoly (via openReach) of the "last few yards" of pipe into homes and businesses.It doesn't matter who your ISP is, BT controls the end of the pipe.

As they are in a monopoly position, there is little incentive for them to get better.  Service levels are dreadful and the infrastructure is years out of date.

What do you mean BT are out of date?

We're very proud of our state of the art local exchange that was only build in 1897

"Yes, a collect call for Mrs. Floyd from Mr. Floyd......"

The usual "kick BT" stuff from those with short memories/ under 30s here, I'm afraid. 

The culprit is dear John Major and his woeful Governemnt in the 90s and their mindless "privatise everything" kick (and look what a success that has made of the railways now run by DB and Arriva)

BT had unveiled a superfast broadband and would have rolled it out, but Major and his merry men egged on by the usual suspecs like Branson and Aussie/Yank Murdoch and the Daily Heil decided BT should face "compettion". (They had been a nationalized industry after all, so by definition they were useless). The Government made a dog's breakfast of that as usual, but BT responded rationally by not investing in something they might lose after a year or two and spent their investment money elsewhere and kept the more lucrative "wires and pliers" business, as any sensible business would and startrted t build the cash pot which means we watch the Champions League on BT now and not on Sky.

Major meanwhile gave us the Cones Hotline - which would be funny if it weren't (under 30s look it up).

For Steve and other Aussies, last time I was there it was a bit like Mitchell Johnson's bowling; all over the place, with the occassional quick one which was good but overall not as good as it thinks it is!

In the US, Telco ADSL is 1-50mbps, cable is about 1-300mbps, and fiber is about 1000mbps (all small "b").  Of course, the higher speeds cost a small fortune - most people are in the 1-50mbps range.  The fastest internet download I've ever seen is 3-5mbps and I pay for 200mbps.  Download servers are the rate limiting step, IMHO.

The Think Broadband website

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/

keeps uptodate with Broadband news in the UK, it also has a set of active forums dealing with the various ISPs as well as the technologies and roll out plans.

Re JSH's comments re the nationalised BT and various incarnations over the years. I can remember waiting 5 months for a home telephone to be installed, the phone company only allowing equipment supplied by the Post Office to be connected to the telephone line.  The equipment had to have been tested for ten years.

THE Post Office/BT as it was called was slow moving and resistant to change not until it was denationalised did it start providing an enlightened service.

UK telephony was decades behind the US in capability, perhaps now the UK is ahead in what is being supplied to the end user.   

US is a mass of huge cities, so much easier to fibre. I don't know what sort of service the rest of the US get?