Tag Archive for 'network architecture'

Open is the best (only) policy – Ghost of Christmas Future

Published on December 17, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

In my last post (Open is the best (only) policy) I gave a high-level view on why I think open access networks are important today but I didn’t really explore why I think that offers just a narrow glimpse of why open access will become the single most important thing network operators can do for their customers, and why the UK is unknowingly paving the way.

So a bold statement:

I think that Active Line Access (ALA) will become one of the most important features of public networks in the years to come – but it will take a little time for that to become apparent. I also know that so far very few people have understood this.

When I talk to people who build public networks they typically see ALA as the necessary replacement to PPP/L2TP; that its the technical remedy that allows them to hand-off connections to ISPs in an world. They are of course right in a very practical, narrow sense but what the NICC did in codifying a long list of technical standards was much, much more than that.

When I talk to people who build campus networks their immediate response is what’s all the fuss about; ALA is a codified collection of standards that large corporates have been using for many years. Again broadly true but they have forgotten what their lives were like before they had these tools.

A Ghost of Christmas Past

Travelling back 15 years to the world of large corporates, a network managers lot was very difficult. They typically had the biggest budget in the IT department with the biggest sign-off but they also found it the hardest to provide direct empirical evidence that any incremental increase in their budget would deliver a greater incremental impact on the business; granular return on investment calculations were impossible.

Around this time I started to talk about the proximity to business, and it went like this:

  • The applications people had a direct relationship to the business so anything they did had a direct and immediate bearing on the business; incremental change could be measured and valued.
  • The core software people, like database administrators, were closely coupled to the applications people so although they were one step removed from the business and their systems may be shared, they were were close enough to the business they could measure their impact.
  • The server teams were further removed and incremental investment is beginning to become more challenging because their world is now two layers removed and increasingly shared but by working closely with the applications and core software people they could typically prove enough incremental value to justify additional investment.
  • The network teams were by definition universally shared and with no direct connection to parts of the business, only to the business as a whole; at this time, budget meetings in times of major shifts in the business were a pretty unpleasant affair and something most network managers dreaded (or at least the ones focussed on the business did)

With Y2K looming, I started to focus on how I could bridge the void and improve my proximity to the business. It was also at this time that what I then called 3D networks were beginning to be possible. Traditional 2D networks were a trade-off between distance and speed but 3D networks had a policy axis using a combination of VLANs and qualities of service; combining these meant I now had a granular control over the network and could therefore finely adapt the network in response to changing business needs – it was now possible to improve the network’s proximity to the business and therefore provide a direct and measurable impact. Budget meetings could now be constructive and less confrontational.

It took time for the ideas of 3D networking to take hold, and my name for it never stuck, but today any private network manager of any merit should be able to have a direct dialogue with the business.

When the NICC created ALA, they codified the tools that private network managers use; they put in place the mechanisms to improve the proximity of public networks to people and businesses – and the impact of that will, in time, be far more profound.

A Ghost of Christmas Future

It often takes a single event to focus minds and create the conditions for a shift of this kind:

  • For private network managers it was Y2K, when vast sums were spent renovating application platforms and they needed to justify their budgets.
  • For public networks it will be the shift to NGA network we’re just beginning.

So when I talk about Service Providers I’m not being lazy and omitting “” because I assume they’ re synonymous;  its because I think ISPs are in reality a general-purpose subset of Service Providers – that once “providers of service” become aware of what the NICC has done the service provider market will become a whole lot richer and more exciting.

I had hoped the NHS might have been the pioneer in this space – the confluence of PSNs and the emergence of NGA is an opportunity that should be grabbed with both hands – but I suspect it will take a major commercial company to make the first move.

Who might the early movers be? The major companies and content delivery networks (CDNs) are the obvious choices, and who better than Google (with YouTube) and Amazon Web Services (with Love Films).

Imagine this:

Today Google offer a best endeavours YouTube service, over the top of other people’s transit networks; it works okay if your goal is to support three minutes of viewing per day but isn’t good enough for three hours per day. This is at the root of Google’s concerns over Net-Neutrality.

In response, Google launch a Premium YouTube service for a few pounds month but instead of routing the service via an IP-based BGP interface onto your ISP’s network, its routed via an ALA VLAN hand-over point to your network operator. Quality is assured so now you can watch three-hours a day of broadcast quality media, and Google can secure the rights to premium content as the risk of pixelation has been removed and the rights holders can feel confident their brand wont be damaged.

Love Films backed by an ALA-based “Networks as a Service” offering from Amazon Web Services is at least as well placed to be the pioneer, completely demolishing the current rigid assumption that viewing is either linear (broadcast) or non-linear (on-demand); their new streaming package that learns your viewing habits is the first baby step.

Today, this minute, this is a dream – a perfectly feasible dream – but as companies like Love Films evolve their services and they explore, prod and push the capabilities and limitations of the underlying networks then I’m as confident as I can be that it will become a reality. When (not if) an organisation like Amazon Web Services gets their heads around the capabilities of ALA the world will change and imaginations will be unleashed.

Today we have a world of Over the Top (OTT) services – prepare for a world that combines OTT with RTS (round the side) services – and prepare for a future that blows your mind.

If you build your networks without ALA in mind then you are about to condemn your platform to obsolescence and your customers to boredom!

Start developing your networks with a proximity to your customers in mind and you will never look back!

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 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 government’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 cable 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!

Homework: read the ALA documents

Published on February 1, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

I received an email this week from the NICC’s Ethernet Working Group with links to the finalised Active Line Access (ALA) document. This is very exciting for all sorts of reasons.

ALA is the industry agreed model designed specifically for the next generation world, and at any number of levels it fundamentally changes the way will work in the the UK.

The documents are not an easy read (this is, after all, a set of engineering standards designed to be implemented by engineers) but its impact should be understood by everyone who has an opinion on the future shape of broadband, the or .

I attended some of the early meetings as an observer and because, like any opinionated techy, I wanted to help shape some of the early aspects. The Ethernet Working Group under Chris Gallon’s chairmanship is something of a technical dream team – they are the deeply technical architects and engineers from the major vendors and key network operators tasked with working out how their organisations can interoperate.

The work they have done is undoubtedly impressive – they have taken diverse standards from the Broadband Forum, the Metro Ethernet Forum and other standards bodies from around the world and carefully and creatively sewn them together into a single framework which unlocks the potential of next generation broadband across a wide range or network architectures and technologies.

Whether you opt for , point to point ethernet or VDSL from a cabinet, ALA works and can hand over a connection in a seamless and universally consistent way to a service provider. And I see few reasons why it wouldn’t also work for many wireless technologies based around Ethernet and supporting VLAN’s.

Now this brilliant piece of work is published, we have a duty to understand what is possible and to start to consider what is desirable. It is no longer reasonable to opine on net neutrality or the future of the internet without properly appreciating the impact of this work.

If you are a community, commercial organisation or public body thinking of building a network under the framework you will need to be open access – by law – and that means you need to understand ALA – no if, no buts.

So before you say another word on any of this, and you are of a technical bent, your homework is to read it!

If you aren’t technical, turn to your favourite geek and do them a favour – tell them to read it and explain what its all about.

The documents are published on the NICCs website:

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 cable 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 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!

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 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 Government 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.

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.

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