Tag Archive for 'fibre'

Open is the best (only) policy

Published on December 12, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

If I’m honest I’m a little tired of the whole open network debate – largely because I don’t think there is very much to debate.

It seems very odd to me that people who are happy to argue that their own networks should be closed and vertically integrated are often well informed about the European open access models and the US net neutrality debates – that these great debates are basic human right but that they somehow don’t apply to their networks but should to everyone else’s.

Until recently it was certainly true that all but the very largest networks had little choice but to deliver their own services – but that was a market imperfection rather than a point of principle or commercial choice. That market flaw is easing – far from fixed but progress is being made – and it is no longer a necessity to restrict service choice.

I’ll accept that the very largest service providers are still unlikely to bite your arm off for anything less than a few tens of thousands of customers but there is a very large world of choice between no service providers and offering each and every service provider. Many of the smaller ISPs are happy to engage in local projects, especially if they themselves are local – and what’s more they may be better attuned to providing a bespoke service to your new customers than many of the very biggest providers.

So why should networks be open?

  • People like choice – it may not be the number 1 factor for everyone but it is very important and will be in the top thee for most people. With take-up being the top success factor, its simply not worth putting an impediment in your way.
  • Encouraging service competition is likely to generate more exciting, innovative services. As the capabilities of NGA networks, and more especially ALA,  become understood by the market service innovation will be more exciting than anything we’ve seen so far  but it will miss any networks not geared to delivering variety.
  • If you need support from public funds then you have no choice; EU and UK law insists on open access wholesale networks. Shooting the messenger doesn’t change the law, so frankly if you have a hole in your investment case open up and you might find public funds are available to help.
  • Without wholesale services, you’re footprint is deemed “NGA White” and the State reserves the right to intervene with public funds. It may not be likely and you may have a case to challenge publicly subsidised competition but by the time the law rules you will probably be no more – its not a fight worth fighting.
  • And finally I fully expect Ofcom to rule within the life of your investment that networks are a natural monopoly and may either force you to offer a wholesale service or impose challenging regulations on you.

Or to summarise – there are no good reasons to have a closed network and a good many to be open – its not a fight worth defending.

What’s actually going on?

Published on October 28, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 7 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

It still surprises me that after 18 months there seems to be confusion in the twittersphere about what is actually happening in terms of deployment and the goal of the ’s policy.

There have been conversations which seem to jump from a position that to every home is the only real solution to suggesting they are being short-changed by some mythical with nothing in between.

This is far from a simple binary mechanism – anyone who suggests “Fibre good, everything else bad” is at best badly misinformed. The debate is far too important to be stifled by this kind of mantra – it has to move on.

One of the great shifts in thinking within the industry has been to consider multiple solutions – gone are the days when ADSL won simply because it was the best solution to reach the widest audience. Now the best technology from a basket of possible solutions is becoming the norm.

So this is my attempt to make it all a little clearer – hopefully.

There are essentially two different government broadband policies:

  1. Basic broadband – To ensure everyone has access to at least 2 Mbps
  2. NGA broadband  - To make the UK the best superfast broadband market in Europe

Both policies are currently working towards 2015, and both are being delivered by BDUK. But, while the delivery of NGA broadband may have some impact on the basic broadband policy, they are essentially two different things – basic broadband is not NGA and vice versa! This is a simple undeniable fact.

The two EU Black/Grey/White models

The grid shows how these two different measures – NGA and basic broadband – are likely to play out in the UK. The purple area is where the commercial developments will focus, and the red is where the Government’s policy will have its key impact – the black boarder around the NGA White/Basic White is where the rural community broadband fund will focus.

NGA Broadband

The definitions of NGA and superfast broadband are many and varied but essentially the Government’s goal is to deliver fibre to the cabinet to 90% of the population as a base reference offer – that is not the same as actually delivering FttC to 90%, only that this is the base upon which other solutions will be measured.

It means that a company wanting to bid into the framework will need to offer at least FttC but will be able to deliver FttP or anything else they can successfully argue delivers at least as much as FttC.

The EU currently views NGA as a fibre-based fixed-line solution and specifically excludes satellite and wireless solutions; it is highly likely that some microwave technologies will be included in future definitions if they deliver specific characteristics but unlicensed and light licensed solutions like WiFi are unlikely to be ever considered as NGA even if they deliver high speeds.

Any suggestion that satellite or BT’s BET are NGA is simply wrong, and I’ve never heard anyone in either BT or the satellite industry claim otherwise! Just ignore anyone who suggests they are, they simply aren’t credible.

The main NGA contenders today are FttC/VDSL and FttP in both point-2-point/Ethernet or PON variants.

Changes to NGA broadband in the UK

The two bar charts above attempt to show the impact of the Government’s policy on NGA broadband. Today there are commercial pledges to deliver a competitive physical infrastructure to at least 50% of the country, predominantly in the areas where Virgin Media are updating their network and BT is delivering their Infinity service.

In addition, BT has pledged to reach two-thirds of the country with an open-access wholesale service, making a further 17% Grey in the EU’s language. This leaves the “final third” where traditional commercial approaches begin to fail.

The Government’s aim is to extend the Grey area from 17% of the population to 40%, with only 10% of the population unlikely to see NGA services in the medium term.

Why only Grey? I find it difficult to see a case where the Government would invest in a competing NGA platform where one already exists but it is at least a theoretical possibility if the existing NGA service doesn’t deliver a whole service and is vertically integrated. As I’ve written before, if you run an NGA network and you don’t offer wholesale competition then you are carrying a risk that it is at least legal for the state to subsidise a competitor even if its poor value for public funds and probably unlikely to happen.

The focus of the £20m rural community broadband fund is on this final 10%, where communities are prepared to become more actively involved in a more ambitious plan.

Basic Broadband

Today its possible to argue that anything above 512 kbps might be classed as broadband; the Government is redefining that as 2 Mbps and that it should be as near universal as practicable.

Changes to basic broadband in the UK

The bar charts above show how today there are in fact two degrees of White basic broadband – there are those that currently receive a services above 2 Mbps but have no choice of provider, and those below 2 Mbps regardless of how much competition there may be at the telephone exchange. The Government’s policy is to remove the top White section, where services are less than 2 Mbps.

Some of this will be solved by the NGA plans – there are locations where the cabinet, as well as the premises, is a long way from the exchange. Evidence is already beginning to appear where BT is deploying Infinity in Hertfordshire with some homes now in an NGA Grey area when they were previously in a notspot – it is also the focus of organisations like Rutland Telecom.

Where the NGA policy won’t solve the notspot problem, the Government will intervene to ensure all premises are reasonably able to receive at least 2 Mbps.

In communities where the 2 Mbps offer doesn’t meet their ambition, the £20m rural community broadband fund may be able to help turn a basic broadband offer into a viable NGA plan where the community will exists.

An observation on British broadband #1

Published on May 21, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Some key announcements have been made in the last couple of weeks or so and its worth considering what they may mean for in the UK – I don’t know why it took me so long but the conclusion is quite startling!

Firstly, we are seeing a host of new models and investment announcements which are making the final third – the most rural parts of the UK – a viable and exciting place to invest in -optic broadband – providing you have the logistics and business model sorted. Fujitsu, Rutland Telecom, NextGenUs and Jendens – jointly and severally – all making headway in their own distinctive way.

Secondly, BT has announced it expects to be lifting VDSL speeds using existing phone lines under its Infinity investment from “up to 40 Mbps” to northwards of “up to 80 Mbps” in the relatively short term. In their word – VDSL is a technology in its infancy and they expect to see considerable improvements as it matures. The combination of Fibre to the Cabinet (FttC) and VDSL is an architecture which really works best in more urban areas with diminishing returns as it tends towards more rural areas.

So the natural conclusion of these two shifts is that rural areas should become the place where fibre all the way to the doorstep dominates first – and urban areas will remain on copper for much longer but with services that keep in touch with their lucky bucolic friends.

Not something I expected to say out loud!

Time well spent looking down the drain

Published on November 24, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

I’ve just had one of those days you feel good about.

So often I tend to get involved in projects at the very beginning and my work is done before a single spade breaks earth – in some cases its been as long as three or four years between my involvement and anybody actually receiving a service.

However, there are now several projects live today, in very different locations and run by very different people, which I’ve been lucky enough to have some hand in at the very beginning. So today it was great to spend the morning in with the guys at to see how they’re getting on.

It was back in 2008 when I spent some time with a group of maverick entrepreneurs trying to work out what was the best passive architecture when delivering fibre across a city using as much of the sewers as possible. I learnt more about sewers in those few weeks then I ever thought possible but at the end of it we came up with what seemed like a pragmatic but potentially blistering open access solution.

In an ideal world everyone would have liked to deliver an ultimately flexible point to point fibre solution which could support either  with the splitters in the POP or Ethernet or both but the size of permitted in the sewers meant that it had to be PON. However we worked the topology of the sewers to minimise the splits to make sure today’s GPON equipment would deliver a 100Mbps symmetrical service with no contention in the access network so it could match anything a point-to-point Ethernet could deliver – more splitters could be added in the PoP to keep port costs down if needed but the lower splits could be used to deliver the fastest services possible should the need arise.

Two and half years later they have now passed 21,000 homes and the first real customers are starting to benefit from the work put in back then. Seeing the network in action it was great to see the early work really paid off. The 100 Mbps really was a 100 Mbps, except they have the optional burst turned on which meant they were demonstrating 1 Gbps – and there was no doubt it was 1 Gbps. HD movie files were downloading in seconds and speed-tests were heading off the scale.

There is no doubt that Fibrecity are mavericks – but its entrepreneurial mavericks that are needed just now if we are to break the mould. They are in the process of restructuring the company to bring the UK networks more in line with their international projects. I wish them all the very best of luck with that!

And when you see ads or articles telling you some 50/100/200Mbps service is the fastest in the UK, remember, the UK already has Gigabit out there – I know I’ve seen it!

How successful would Finland’s broadband policy be here?

Published on September 11, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

At the NextGen Road-show event in Edinburgh this week, Professor Michael Fourman gave a fascinating talk on the special challenges for delivering in Scotland. At the heart of his work were some maps which very effectively demonstrated the impact the Finnish ’s policy might have on some of the more remote areas of Scotland as well as a GIS-based estimate of how much it might cost to deliver it.

Heavily summarised, Finland’s policy says that there should be a  back-haul connection within 2km of any community; and they define a community as an area containing at least 70 people per square kilometre.

I was left wondering how effective this policy might be across England and Wales, as well as Scotland.  I don’t have to hand the core network details that Prof. Fourman used to calculate the costs of delivering the policy nor the time just at the moment to build the shortest-distance spanning tree model he used, so I’ve restricted myself to simply looking at where Finland’s policy might reach that the market won’t.

Finland's broadband policy applied to England & Wales The map (click on it to see it life-size) depicts in green the areas which the policy would deliver a fibre to, and the black is the extent of market-led next generation broadband according to DCLG’s 65% model. A first glance says “so what – doesn’t seem very impressive”. However this is where maps have the power to overstate a problem. Using the 2001 census, there would be 11,946,819 (don’t you love computer precision!) English and Welsh people who remained without broadband when 65% of the UK was already enjoying it. Applying the Finnish policy reduces this figure to just 275,451 – or in other words, increases the reach of from 65% to 94% of the population.

The Finnish broadband policy would reach 94% of the English and Welsh population

Of course this is academic without the costs that Prof. Fourman generated, but it is a powerful example of how the village pump model that Rory Stewart MP is advocating. So how many of these green areas are close to a Primary School, Library or GP whose existing broadband connections could be upgraded and converted into a Village Pump?

Boosting the funnel

Published on September 10, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

It was reported this week that a group of British scientists at Southampton University have developed a technique for keeping the light in -optic cables nice and tidy and in sync. I thought I’d write a short blog on it because the importance of the discovery seems have been missed by some commentators.

For my purposes, the is like a giant funnel; lots of stuff poured in the top at ever higher rates into narrower and narrower pipes the further we get from home. Funnel

We are now pouring more in the top than ever before, which means we need to make sure the neck of the funnel doesn’t become the problem.

One solution is to use a leaky bucket – the genuine name given to the techniques which lie behind many of the traffic shaping tools– but that doesn’t solve the problem, it merely optimises the experience for services squeezed by the neck of the funnel (not that its necessarily a bad thing either).

Increasing bandwidth over short distances is easy but extending over long distance is more problematic; we saw this in first generation and laser light is no different. But, and this a big but, as we move towards next generation access networks, with  the speeds already being deployed around Europe, the pressure on long haul inter-city and inter-national links will become immense. Delivering 100 Gbps is challenging over transatlantic distances and that’s only a hundred customers with gigabit watching quad-hd 3d movies.

If we reach in the home then rest assured the core will soon need . Delivering such bandwidth over 10’s of kilometres can be demonstrated but not over 100’s or 1,000′s – not in a single channel of usable bandwidth.

And here’s the problem. Fibre-optic cables are now so fine there isn’t much room for a beam of light to bounce off the wall of the fibre; so much so that over relatively short distances the effect is tiny and the signal emerges at the far end unscathed – but over long distances even small levels of bouncing around add up, corrupting the signal.

The developments announced this week are aimed at correcting the bouncing and corruption over distance, paving the way for terabit speeds across the ocean so our gigabit connected homes can still watch Hollywood/Bollywood films on our new  42” quad-hd 3d tv’s.

The whole space of photonics – the boundary where electronics meets light – is one which will move centre stage as we try to manage the funnel. Delivering high speeds to people’s homes is technically easy but ensuring there is the intelligence and scale in the rest of the network to match will frame the problem. Visionaries, like the people at Southampton University and others like InTune Networks and their work on switching tuneable lasers, may not make good dinner party talk but they will be the people that ensure the future Internet keeps up with the uses imagination puts it to.

Rating success or land-grabs?

Published on August 31, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

I’ve one final piece to get off my chest about the VOA’s “clarification” on business rates applied to networks, and its about the upside-down nature of the rules and how the new framework exacerbates an already difficult situation.

The old rules taxed fibre owners for homes passed regardless of whether anyone bought a service. The new rules almost triple the tax but apply it only to homes connected.

So the old rules penalised investment but the tax could be mitigated against a successful drive to build take-up. The new rules still penalise take-up but now mitigate in favour of land-grabs to keep other providers out rather than in driving take-up – and the ones which are most heavily penalised are likely to be companies specialising in green field developments where they are unlikely to achieve much less than 100% of the homes as the default telecoms infrastructure. (remember BT has special treatment, so this only applies to alternative providers).

The new VOA rules would seem to imply an almost tripling of the tax bill for green field network builders.

The new made it clear it wanted to encourage, enforce if necessary, infrastructure sharing but these new rules encourage a more monopolistic mindset – build to stop others building, and make just enough revenue to cover the costs – oh, and make the architecture so esoteric it could never support infrastructure competition anyway.

The VOA has shown no signs that they are even beginning to understand anything the Government has said since coming to power. Had they chosen to develop rules which moulded the rates system around Government policy they might have recommended a system which:

  • Reduced or eliminated business rates on new fibre investments in Ofcom Market 1 areas where there is currently no investment rather than the opposite
  • Favoured community led “” smaller-scale networks over national carriers rather than the opposite
  • Penalised idle assets and favoured shared and used assets rather then the opposite

I try to avoid clear attacks like this my blog but the VOA appears to have worked against the key policies of BIS, DCMS, DCLG and DEFRA, while creating a framework so arbitrary and complex that the Treasury can’t possibly have any confidence in any figures estimating the revenue it will generate.

The National Audit Office was scrapped for a less fulsome opposition – can we hope the VOA has a similar fate awating?

Rant over.

I’d really like to thank Pauline Rigby for joining me on our journey to understand the VOA rules. We both felt uncomfortable writing politically charged articles like this one of mine but it was clear this was a major issue for the industry we both care about.

Rating the big society

Published on August 17, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

I’ve already written about the impact the clarification by the VOA has on technical decisions and , but there is a wider impact and one which suggests the civil servants at the VOA haven’t really understood the new ’s agenda.

By way of an example I’ve attempted to work through a typical rural project and see what the impact the VOA rules will have.

In this hypothetical community lives around 2,500 people in 1,000 homes with 20 shops and businesses along the main street, mostly cafés and family businesses.

Lets say that an project for the area has a single point of presence, and for simplicity that all the shops on the main street average 1km from the PoP and that each take a service over a single . This project is then connected to a neighbouring scheme 25km away using a direct connection the scheme owns. So in total they have 45km (20 x 1km businesses plus 25km backhaul) of rateable and 1,000 domestic customers.

All the tables of what rate what length and capacity are taxed at is here but this is a quick summary for this village:

  • The domestic access network element is rated at £20 per home connected, so we have an immediate £20,000 to consider.
  • Then we have 20km of business access with a single fibre lit, so this adds £6,600
  • And the 25km of backhaul adds a further £16,750 because they lit 4 fibres

A total rateable value of £43,350, which is rounded down to probably £43,250 and a multiplier is applied to calculate the payable rates. I understand the current multiplier is 0.417, so the rates payable by this community is £18,035.25 – or almost £18 per customer per year.

To add further complexity to this, I’ve assumed this project was an isolated community wanting to help themselves but if they had accepted an offer from a much bigger commercial company who had more than 1,000km of fibre, they might find the rates bill drop to a little over £13 per subscriber because scale, for the Valuations Office, matters.

There are any number of lessons to be learnt from this. Firstly that the additional rates for migrating a corner café shop from first generation broadband to a fibre-based connection costs as much as they may be currently paying for their broadband connection which seems to counter the ambition of the Government to unlock the potential of small businesses.

But equally curious is the disadvantage a self-help Big Society community is being asked to endure over a larger corporation through the business rates system. In my hypothetical village, a Big Society community would be asked to pay almost 40% more in business rates than Major Plc (setting aside the special treatment of BT which further exacerbates the problem).

It seems the VOA have created a very unique landscape for the UK to overcome. The UK has neither the appetite nor the money to fund a Da Wo top-down national fibre network, but the VOA rules means we also have a tax system which penalises grass-roots developments as well.

So who is encouraged to build if macro and micro approaches are being discouraged?

A model being championed by Rory Stewart MP for his Cumbrian constituency, part of which falls within the Big Society pilot area, is the idea of a village pump for broadband – a high-speed backhaul connection delivered to the heart of the community. If this is delivered by an large organisation then they may also benefit from lower business rates than the community itself would.

This then leaves the community to pick up the rates on the access network element for which there is less discrimination. As I coved in a previous article, if the community opt for a PON network rather than point-to-point then they can argue that the businesses can’t be isolated from the domestic customers, which limits their rates liability to “just” £20 per subscriber, business of domestic.

This seems such a complex, arbitrary model which serves to further contort the market rather than open and improve it. Somehow I don’t believe that Rory’s Village Pump concept was at the heart of the civil servant’s thinking when they “clarified” the rating system – its one of the many unforeseen outcomes.

VOA views on network architecture

Published on August 16, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

The Valuation Office’s clarification on rating networks seems to have aroused much debate – I decided not to publish my own piece on the general tone of the clarification as much has been said before, and none better than this: as clarification goes, this does seem to be a unique piece of work.

However, there was one aspect I didn’t think had been explored yet.  It’s worth understanding the VOA’s position on and the impact they may have.

On the access network piece they have two means of calculating :

  • For domestic users there is flat rate of £20 per home connected
  • For businesses there is a table which relates to the distance, amount of fibre in the scheme and the number of fibres lit

However, the VOA has this to say in their worked examples:

The following scenarios are intended to provide clarity to the approach the VOA would adopt when applying the approach set out above. The scenarios cover FTTC, FTTH- and FTTH-P2P, and have the following assumptions underlying them.

  • The end users in each case are a mix of residential and business customers; the identity of the end users as either residential or business users will not necessarily be available to the organisation liable for the rates on the asset (particularly if they are providing wholesale access to other service providers).

The implications of this are that if business customers can’t readily be singled out then they will be rated as domestic customers at £20 per connected premise. This really only applies to PON networks (not just GPON as the VOA asserts) where customers share a single splitter, while in an Ethernet overlaying a point-to-point network each customer will always be identifiable.

I calculated that the additional rateable value for connecting a corner café in a small town network might be in the order of £330 per year depending on all sorts of variables but as an order of magnitude it will do. This would be unavoidable if the network used a P2P Ethernet but if the café happened to share a PON splitter with some domestic customers then the rateable value might be reduced to £20 per year.

If I were designing a network today this would certainly influence my choice of technology, and if I were a member of the Metro Ethernet Forum or a manufacturer of fibre I’d be rather concerned that I’d been singled out in this way.

** UPDATE ** But this has wider implications than just prejudicing the technology choices of network owners. For it to be reasonable to claim that its not possible to differentiate between business and domestic customers, the PON splitters would really need to be buried in the network and not in the point of presence; the deeper the splitters are embedded the more reasonable the claim.

However this reduces the openness of the networks and the degree of infrastructure competition that can be developed. So adding to the clamour of the MEF, fibre manufacturers and network owners should be Ofcom – the VOA’s guidance as it stands impacts competition and choice.

Perhaps rather than a little more clarity, a simpler, fairer mechanism is called for!

It would be so much nicer if the civil servants behind this work sat back and took a long, deep look at what they are actually trying to achieve and designed a framework which did that simply and directly, rather than adding more caveats and “clarification” to an already over-complicated morass.

Virgin virgin territory

Published on May 12, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 1 Comment Tags: , .

I received a hand-delivered letter from Virgin Media this week:

“Dear Occupier ….. Amazing HD with no extra monthly fee - Guaranteed to be in your home before the world cup.”

Fantastic I thought, knowing that there is a Virgin street cabinet within 100m of my home and have been told in the past that we can’t get services – since the postman delivered the letter, and he knows about postcodes, the in-fill programme must be heading my way. So I wandered of to their website, put in the URL the letter said to use:

http://www.virginmedia.com/3for18/

Nothing – blank

(UPDATE: The website page now appears to be working but wasn’t at the time the leafleting campaign was active)

So I entered my postcode on their main site and:

“You’re not in a optic area, but can still get our brilliant down your phone line.”

I know I’m not in a fibre optic area but what that has got to do with Virgin’s HFC coax service is beyond me – why do they continue to insist on calling a cable service fibre? They have a great offering – why mislead people? I don’t really care overly whether a company uses coax, fibre or wet string if they can deliver a 50 – 100 – 200 Mbps service but I don’t like being misled.

The upshot is that it seems Virgin just lazily blanketed an area with junk mail which would generally appreciate Virgin’s interest, an area which knows cable services run along the road, yet they had no intention of getting their shovels out.

Message to Mark Davidson, Executive Director of Customer Care: If you can’t learn to target customers that you are willing to connect now and be straight about what it is you’re promising, when you start your in-fill programme the rest of us won’t believe you.

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