Friday 23 October 2009

Rwanda is more switched on than Britain with its plans for rural broadband - Telegraph

via telegraph.co.uk

Well, the comparison to Rwanda is not entirely relevant and one has to question why their President feels this is the best spend of his budget. However, here in the UK where the issues of genocide, hunger and massive poverty are not ones our government has to deal with we should be asking why there is not a more forward thinking view to delivery of ubiquitous broadband.

I, for one, would like to see some economic stimulus fund to be made available for Britain's broadband infrastructure. Some should certainly be made available to deliver rural broadband services and it should not go to any of the established telecom operators who are traditionally reticent to address the needs of all the country.

Posted via web from Mark's posterous

Posted by NGA UK at 11:08 0 comments

What the Community Wants

Last night we had our first community meeting for our project to deliver NGA in my community. The meeting was an eye opener to me for a number of reasons:

1. It is very difficult to persuade people to come out of their houses at 8pm on a dark autumn night!
2. Broadcasting a live event is not very easy at all and fails dramatically when you cannot get a connection at the event itself.
3. There are community members who are willing to step up, get involved and help drive the project
4. What I thought would excite the people about the project didn't

#4 was the biggest issue, of course. There was I expounding the services and applications: the entertainment services, the healthcare services, education services. I spoke of better and more reliable access, of symmetrical access, of the benefits to home-based businesses and home workers. All of which did not strike the chord I had hoped.

The interest was there, the questions kept coming. We spoke for more than 2 hours on the subject.

So what did the community want?

If it is cheaper than BT, more reliable than BT, and offers us telephony services so that we can completely remove BT from the equation (to the point of removing our fixed line service all together) then we are interested.

Well, reliability can be done: NGA (using fibre and wireless much as described in this related post: http://5tth.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-fiwi-matters-in-uk.html) is inherently more reliable than copper. Telephony can be done, and indeed greatly improved on through the use of wholesale consumer IP telephony solutions.

So to cost... I need to work that one through. Speed is not enough of a concern to want to pay more to go faster. The expectation is a reliable, fixed and low cost solution that means they don't need to concern themselves with how fast it is going. The question is how much will people be willing to pay?
Posted by NGA UK at 03:03 3 comments

Wednesday 14 October 2009

Sorry Sir we only do download speeds...

Warning... Rant Approaching!

A couple of months ago I installed a Vodafone Gateway in my house. That is their femtocell product that will give a better mobile signal in a small area by using the broadband line. All was well... the signal to my phone was drastically improved and call quality was great. That is until a week ago. All of a sudden people were complaining about very poor call quality. I thought it was strange as I could hear them perfectly but they could not understand me.

So I called Vodafone to ask about any potential issues with the gateway. They asked me to run a speed check which showed I had a reasonable download speed but a shocking upload speed (4.1M down, which is much better than usual but 210kbit/s up). They advised that you need a minimum upload speed of 300k for the gateway to function properly and that I should call my ISP.

Great, so I get on the phone to BT. In India. We go through the usual rigmarole of have I tried this, or done that and what is my set up etc. etc. Until eventually I was told, "OK, I am going to run a test to see what the problem is." Good. After a couple of minutes waiting she came back and confirmed what I already knew but added that they felt the download speed was good (agreed) and the upload speed was in the acceptable range. Again agreed other than the fact that is has been much better therefore surely something must have happened to cause the change. This was met with the immortal quote:

"Yes Sir, but we only help with download speeds not upload speeds."

At that point I gave up!

It amazes me that there can be such a lack of understanding of the importance of both directions of the communications path. In fact there should almost be more focus on upload speed and improving that as more people are uploading large files to sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Flickr.

Rant over. Thank you for listening!
Posted by NGA UK at 03:34 2 comments

Sunday 11 October 2009

What Would You Use FTTH For

Imagine for a moment that you have that 100MBit/s second symmetrical connection to your home...

What are you using it for? What would you like to use it for?

Please drop some comments to this post - I am interested to see what is driving our interest for genuinely high speed connections. Be as specific or general as you like.

Here's my list as a starting point (in no particular order):

1. Home working
2. Home entertainment (interactive TV, PPV sports events, PPV concerts, gaming etc.)
3. Learning (so much better to see what you want to learn about rather than have to read it!)
4. Communications - integration of voice, video & data with the most common tools I use today (e.g. email, Office docs, social media etc.)
5. Cloud-based software services (e.g. salesforce.com), now being called SaaS (Software as a Service)!

WISH LIST
1. Healthcare - a service that offers me online diagnoses or brings remote care to those in far greater need than me
2. Genuine online entertainment services - new & old TV shows from around the world, live sports, concerts etc.
3. Far broader use of video for customer facing functions such as sales or customer services (e.g. Blue Peter model - here's one I made earlier, just follow my instructions)
Posted by NGA UK at 11:44 9 comments

More About ADSL2+

Since I posted about ADSL2+ a couple of weeks ago it came to my attention that the exchange I am connected to is due an upgrade before the end of this year. I had mixed emotions on that one: on the one hand at least BT are spending some small amount on this exchange on the other it does rather diminish the impact of selling a community broadband project to the community.

So I looked into it a little more closely. On the surface of it ADSL2+ allows a downstream throughput of up to 24MBit/s and upstream up to 2MBit/s - or about 3 times better than ADSL, at least for the headline rates. Then I found this graph:



What stands out from this is the very steep degradation over distance and the fact that if your loop length (distance from the exchange) is more than about 3,000 feet then this 'new' technology will bring virtually no improvement to your speed. So, yes I will be connected to an exchange that will deliver 'up to' 24MBit/s and will therefore be part of the statistics that show what broad coverage we have in the UK and yet I will be no better off than the (sometimes) 2MBit/s I get today.

In USC terms (the Universal Service Commitment of 2Mbit/s to every household in the UK) I guess my house will be ticked off the list although most days I don't even get close to 2M.

Still, those emotions are unmixed now! My sales pitch has been given another boost!
Posted by NGA UK at 07:07 1 comments

Friday 9 October 2009

Lane End Community Broadband

LECB is my project to bring high speed broadband services to Lane End - a rural community in Buckinghamshire, near High Wycombe.

The project is in its very early stages, indeed you may remember a post I wrote a few weeks ago about community engagement. Well, we are taking the next steps...

On October 22nd we will hold our first meeting. The intention is to hold an open discussion on high speed broadband to help educate people as to the benefits high speed broadband can bring to them, their families and the community. Of course, ultimately I am hoping to convince them that they should help support this project or even get involved with it.

The meeting is primarily for the community, however I am also streaming it (technology and local broadband permitting) and would be delighted to see others join remotely and perhaps learn a little more about this project and may be even get some ideas about how they could do something similar in their area.

Details of the event can be found here: http://nga-uk.com/page6/page6.html

By all means, spread the word!
Posted by NGA UK at 10:18 1 comments

Wednesday 7 October 2009

Will FTTH (Football to the Home) be the death of Copper?

So, this weekend in the UK our broadband lives are to be enhanced with FTTH!

No, sorry, not Fibre to the Home but Football to the Home.

For an increasing fee (the closer we get to kick off the more the subscription will be) you will have the opportunity to watch a somewhat pixelated version of the now meaningless World Cup qualifier between England v Croatia.

There is a lot of debate as to how our broadband infrastructure will cope with this so I thought I might take the opportunity to add to that. As far as I can tell there are three possible outcomes:

1. Everything works just fine. People will quickly realise that paying between £5 and £12 for a low quality version of a meaningless match is ridiculous so virtually no one will watch therefore our broadband lines will cope just fine (that is for those who have a 2MB service - those who don't should probably not even try to watch!). The net result being it will be heralded as a great success by those in ignorance and we will be no closer to a broadband infrastructure for the future.

2. Works fine on urban exchanges that offer ADSL2 or ADSL2+ but rural areas who have the paltry "up to" 8MB service have quality issues that mean watching becomes a pain rather than a pleasure. The net result being a maintenance of the status quo in which the digital divide is no closer to being bridged.

3. Everything comes crashing down around our ears. So many people try to stream the match that exchanges cannot cope, DSLAMs burnout and the whole thing is shown to be a huge farce (our broadband rather than the England football team, for once!). People finally see that improvement must be made if we are to enjoy our expanding possible uses of the Net and demand that high speed broadband is made a reality.

Sadly, while I'm praying for #3, #1 is the most likely so don't get your hopes up too high that changes are afoot.

But do try to remember that Internet delivery of high profile events (Pay per View events) will become the norm. It is technically very feasible today. In fact it is technically very feasible to deliver this in high definition - other than that first mile connection. As long as we remain on copper we remain constrained and unable to improve.

You know the answer!
Posted by NGA UK at 09:40 1 comments
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