Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users

[gunner45]

From what I've read, some of the estimated costs look like this.

FTTH/PTP
Fibre to the home using point-to-point fibre connections. Capable of supporting symmetric connections of up to 1gbps. Cost: £28.8bn

FTTH/GPON
Fibre to the home using a Gigabit passive optical network. Each fibre is theoretically capable of providing up to 2.5gbps of download bandwidth to the customer premises. However, this bandwidth is typically shared between more than one customer. Cost: £24.5bn

FTTC/VDSL
Fibre to the cabinet using very high bit-rate digital subscriber line (VDSL). Such cabinets are typically within a few hundred metres of the customer premises. Active equipment is then deployed in the street cabinet that connects to the customer premises using existing copper cables. Depending upon the length of the final copper line, download speeds of 30–100mbps can be expected. Cost: £5.1bn

Bearing in mind the state of the public finances, it looks unlikely to me that the government will give much help in building even the cheapest fibre network.

BT's strategy is to deploy a mixture of FTTC and FTTH in the UK. Its plans involve covering ten million premises by 2012, with FTTH being reserved for areas of new build.

Interestingly, operators who do not currently use the existing BT infrastructure may have a different perspective on the business case for FTTH. For example, H2O Networks, which is laying fibre optic cables in sewer pipes, does not have existing ties with the BT network and is pursuing an FTTH strategy. For such operators the difference in economics between FTTC and FTTH may not be as pronounced, making FTTH more attractive.

[cook1984]

Originally Posted by TheDon

Do you think the rural areas have high speed broadband though? The cities you've listed are the only ones in Japan where you'll get 100mb.

Yes, by and large they do. They are aiming for 98%+ coverage of high speed broadband (50Mb+) by 2010. Like with BT, the government there mandates NTT do it.

The current average speed of BB in Japan is 98Mb/sec. In the UK is to 2Mb.

---------- Post added at 13:42 ---------- Previous post was at 13:33 ----------

Originally Posted by gunner45

From what I've read, some of the estimated costs look like this.

Your figures are way, way off.

They would make sense if someone was going to lay a brand new fibre network to every home in the UK. In reality, there is no need to do that.

There is lots of fibre already laid by BT and VM, and by other network providers. It only needs to be extended to homes. What's more, the cost of laying new fibre is greatly reduced because much of the infrastructure (underground pipes or sewers, telephone poles etc) already exists.

Bournmouth is using it's sewer network to lay fibre cheaply, for example.

In Japan they unbundled the phone network, the cable network and the new fibre network. They made it clear that they wanted a fibre network, and they got one. In the process they became the world leader in broadband and stimulated their economy with it.

The way to think of it is as an essential public service like the road network. It's not just nice being able to drive places, it's actually a huge benefit to the economy in general and essential for any modern country. The existence of roads generates new business.

[Ignitionnet]

Quick note, BT have not committed to anything yet, they have announced plans and are still trialling:

Is this investment dependent on Ofcom creating a new regulatory framework?
Yes. The right regulatory environment is vital for anyone seeking to invest. The funds required are extremely large and companies need confidence that risk-taking can be appropriately rewarded.

[Impz2002]

I don't know why people give VM a hard time over claiming to be fibre optic. The fibre to the streetcab then coax setup dosnt really limit the product in the short term as coax can provide the max 444Mbit/s downstream connection on DOCSIS 3 euroDOCSIS as far as i am aware! until the government start investing in a worthwhile programme of fibre deployment with real public funded projects rather than just private funded projects the outlook will not change very much. The cost vs reward aspect of fib re is at the moment out of balalnce especially in rural area's. if you look into foreign fibre rollouts you will see a lot of government backed schemes.

A shame i know but that's the score peeps!


Impz

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Impz2002

I don't know why people give VM a hard time over claiming to be fibre optic. The fibre to the streetcab then coax setup dosnt really limit the product in the short term as coax can provide the max 444Mbit/s downstream connection on DOCSIS 3 euroDOCSIS as far as i am aware!

It's not fibre to the street cabinet it's fibre to the neighbourhood, and relative to full on fibre to the home it's a big limitation, especially as current DOCSIS 3 chipsets limit to between 4 and 8 downstream tuners, giving a limitation of 200 - 400Mbit/s, it's not quite the 1Gbps that GPON/GEPON are delivering over a full fibre network and certainly is a huge limitation on upstream, coaxial networks being limited to somewhat less than the 622Mbps / 64 homes maximum or less usually that GPON delivers.

That coaxial is why the service is 50/1.5 not 50/50 so it certainly does limit the product in both short and long term.

---------- Post added at 18:29 ---------- Previous post was at 18:21 ----------

Originally Posted by cook1984

Yes, by and large they do. They are aiming for 98%+ coverage of high speed broadband (50Mb+) by 2010. Like with BT, the government there mandates NTT do it.

The current average speed of BB in Japan is 98Mb/sec. In the UK is to 2Mb.

Minor points, the average speed in Japan is certainly not 98Mbit/s, nor is the average in the UK 2Mbit.

If you're using the OECD data on average advertised speeds Japan is 93Mbps and the UK just over 10Mbps - the actual achieved speeds are far lower, Japan's average at the time of release of that OECD report being 10.6Mbps and the UK's 3Mbps.

Moreover the target by 2010 in Japan is 90% not 98% having access to ultra high speed services.

[cook1984]

Originally Posted by Broadbandings

Minor points, the average speed in Japan is certainly not 98Mbit/s, nor is the average in the UK 2Mbit.

If you're using the OECD data on average advertised speeds Japan is 93Mbps and the UK just over 10Mbps - the actual achieved speeds are far lower, Japan's average at the time of release of that OECD report being 10.6Mbps and the UK's 3Mbps.

That isn't correct. The OECD data is now nearly three years old anyway.

The average line speed that a customer in Japan receives (i.e. their connection is capable of) is just short of 100Mb. That falls to about 30Mb if you go by recent stats from SpeedTest.net, but they are probably unreliable since it's doubtful any single site could supply 100Mb for the test, let alone 1Gb.

You can argue that someone with a 1Gb connection will never actually be able to download or upload at 1Gb/sec, and to be fair that is certainly true. It also misses the point of such high speed connections. A 1Gb connection can supply a number of services including HD on demand, phone, PVR in your house to your mobile, HD video calls, BluRay downloads, the ability to email HD home videos etc. Also, because fibre is basically a different physical layer for ethernet (you don't have a modem as such, just a transceiver) there is a massive amount of "local" bandwidth. All unlimited.

It's basically an entirely different level of connection. You can't really even compare it.

In the UK, largely because we rely on ADSL, the average line speed is a little over 2Mb. Higher speeds are expensive and not available to a large section of the population. We have a mixture of bandwidth caps, throttling, transparent proxies and other nonsense to deal with.

[Ignitionnet]

The OECD data was from a year ago and indicated the average 'as sold' speed in the UK was 10Mbit/s and Japan 93.3.

Most UK broadband is sold at 8Mbit, and remember that a good part of Japan is still not using FTTH but VDSL / cable.

Comparing the achieved UK speed with the advertised Japanese one is a little unfair.

That said, certainly they are different worlds.

Fibre in Japan is not a different physical layer for ethernet and there's no concept of local bandwidth being available as it's not point to point and switched, it goes back to a local CO / OLT. It's also riding over PPP which needs teminating on an LNS, this is how multiple ISPs are able to use NTT's GPON/GEPON network. It's also not unlimited locally as there's TDMA upstream and a limited amount of bandwidth downstream.

FYI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_optical_network - OLTs and ONUs are a tad more than a simple transceiver, indeed apart from the lack of an RF tuner they work in a similar manner to a DOCSIS modem with regard to upstream MAPs and request / grant cycles, try hooking up to one using straight gigabit ethernet you won't get too far, GEPON just uses straight ethernet framing instead of ethernet over MPEG2 which DOCSIS uses

There are speedtesters that happily deal with 100Mbit+ from single clients, even in the UK we have a couple that will merrily do this! Try www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk or the Thinkbroadband speed tester.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by cook1984

Being an IT outfit we pulled a lot of bandwidth. Drivers, applications, Windows Updates (200MB+ on a fresh Vista SP1 install) etc so at about 9:30AM we were automatically pushed onto the "slow pipe" with all the other "bandwidth hogs".

It was so bad we couldn't even browse the web, let alone download anything. Our business ground to a halt. We called our ISP and spent three hours complaining and demanding the service we paid for before they put us back on the "fast pipe". It was still as slow as it ever was, but at least we could work.

If it's causing that many problems, I would recommend you do as we have done and use a local Windows Update caching system, such as Microsoft's WSUS ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/wsus/default.aspx ) or Autopatcher (http://www.autopatcher.com).

Note: WSUS is integrated better within windows (you can set it up so that Windows Update on the PCs will download from your WSUS server). The way you would use Autopatcher in this instance is to store it on a network drive, run the downloader (apup.exe) to check Windows Update, and download any updates. You would use the client software (autopatcher.exe) to install the updates on the client machine.

The advantages of WSUS are that it integrates well with Windows Update, but also allows you to decide which update(s) you want to download (so you can block any service packs easily). The disadvantage is that it can be a bit tricky to learn. It also needs to be installed on with Windows Server 2003 SP1 or Windows Server 2008.

[cook1984]

Originally Posted by Broadbandings

Comparing the achieved UK speed with the advertised Japanese one is a little unfair.

I wasn't, and you can't anyway because there is are no reliable achieved speed stats for Japan.

Also, don't forget that it's symmetrical 100/100, and an average of 5Mb upload on non-fibre platforms. I dread to think what the average advertised upload speed in the UK is.

That said, certainly they are different worlds.

On that at least we are agreed

Fibre in Japan is not a different physical layer for ethernet and there's no concept of local bandwidth being available as it's not point to point and switched, it goes back to a local CO / OLT. It's also riding over PPP which needs teminating on an LNS, this is how multiple ISPs are able to use NTT's GPON/GEPON network. It's also not unlimited locally as there's TDMA upstream and a limited amount of bandwidth downstream.

That isn't the system I have experience of, but then again it wasn't using NTT's lines IIRC. It is true that there is a limited amount of bandwidth from the local CO out to the wider internet and limited per-fibre upstream bandwidth but the network diagram they had on the web site showed that they had switches and servers for things like on-demand video there too. This was a couple of years ago mind you. It was called "Hikari" (natch) but the web site seems to have changed a lot. It was in Nakano.

I remember it well because I have friends living there, and one of them is married to a French guy. Her sister has an STB and she can watch Japanese TV via the internet in France with it. The biggest problem is the difference in time zones but it has PVR functionality to help with that. She likes it because she can get all the channels available in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area, where as in Europe JSTV is the only channel available and it's about £35/month.

FYI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_optical_network - OLTs and ONUs are a tad more than a simple transceiver, indeed apart from the lack of an RF tuner they work in a similar manner to a DOCSIS modem with regard to upstream MAPs and request / grant cycles,

Again, all true, I should really have been clearer about what I meant. It's more like ethernet in that it's a "best effort" system and doesn't have any of the problems traditionally associated with modems (upload queues/buffers, increased latency due to interleaving like on ADSL etc).

However, you are right in that from a network point of view it is like a modem due to it using PPP. Maybe I wasn't clear in that I didn't mean there was local bandwidth on the same fibre, but rather at the CO.

There are speedtesters that happily deal with 100Mbit+ from single clients, even in the UK we have a couple that will merrily do this! Try www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk or the Thinkbroadband speed tester.

Well, I only have 10 meg so...

I certainly couldn't find any a couple of years ago, and people on 2ch regularly complain that there are no good sites to use. Maybe there are similar sites in Japan but due to 100Mb+ BB being common they are more heavily loaded?

I have pulled 90Mb+ one of of those connections while uploading in the 60Mb range. All the routers in the shops have "99Mb+" on the box now, although even the really expensive gigabit ones often don't mention their maximum speed. Saying that, few gigabit network cards can handle a full 1Gb load and you would need a lot of RAM and a really fast RAID array behind it

[keyholder]

VM say .. "Broadband has become integral to delivering home entertainment services and with data consumption growing rapidly, we are exploring new ways to enhance our product offering. Part of this involves intelligent monitoring and understanding the way people use our broadband service."

NOW quote - Part of this involves intelligent monitoring and understanding the way people use our broadband service.

WHAT A JOKE. Limiting 10 meg conections to 3 meg when they have only downlaoded less than 1gb in a whole 24 hours.

Inteligent monitoring. whats that mean, turn on a script monitoring program and thats it.

Bunch of cowboys.

Personally they can shove thier 50 meg, and thier throttling. Vm say we can realse 100 meg, even 200, well do youself a favour, stop the STM, and go with the 100, Untill then SHUT UP PLEASE us the customer want results not some lame ass speech from youre over paid trap !. i personally wud say that over 60% of the vm users get thier stuff from torrent sites/ ftp , and if they are going to restrict them then they will loose custom.

They say that they are cutting 2200 jobs , PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, GET RID OF INDIAN BASED CALL CENTRES!

VM are just diggin themselves ONE BIG HOLE !!! even with the amount of bull they spill they still wont be able to climb out of it !

[General Maximus]

that is the problem, what they say and what they do are two completely different things. I hate hipocracy.

"we are exploring new ways to enhance our product offering..................Part of this involves intelligent monitoring and understanding the way people use our broadband service".


Hmmm, well this means that they realise what everyone is primarily using their connection for and instead of screwing us over with application throttling, you come up with a way to improve the service and provide sustainable speeds for everyone.

They make it sound like they are putting the customer first and offering a 5* service when in actual fact they are doing everything they can to stop us from using our connection how we want to.

[Rik]

Originally Posted by General Maximus

that is the problem, what they say and what they do are two completely different things. I hate hipocracy.

"we are exploring new ways to enhance our product offering..................Part of this involves intelligent monitoring and understanding the way people use our broadband service".


Hmmm, well this means that they realise what everyone is primarily using their connection for and instead of screwing us over with application throttling, you come up with a way to improve the service and provide sustainable speeds for everyone.

They make it sound like they are putting the customer first and offering a 5* service when in actual fact they are doing everything they can to stop us from using our connection how we want to.

That is a very good post.

Im very happy with my VM 20MB service but when they release and word crap like the above it makes my blood boil.

[brundles]

Originally Posted by General Maximus

that is the problem, what they say and what they do are two completely different things. I hate hipocracy.

"we are exploring new ways to enhance our product offering..................Part of this involves intelligent monitoring and understanding the way people use our broadband service".


Hmmm, well this means that they realise what everyone is primarily using their connection for and instead of screwing us over with application throttling, you come up with a way to improve the service and provide sustainable speeds for everyone.

They make it sound like they are putting the customer first and offering a 5* service when in actual fact they are doing everything they can to stop us from using our connection how we want to.

As Rik says, that's a good post. The only thing I'd add it's that it's worse than them trying to stop people using connections how they (the customer) wants. They're trying to encourage people to use connections how they (VM) want. i.e. Maximum revenue for minimum use.

[gunner45]

Let's face a few facts. VM's 2mbps customers comprise 71 percent of users, doing little more than emailing, browsing and a bit of downloading. Yet it is these people who would pay the bulk of the cost for a major upgrade to the network which would enable the minority to enjoy unlimited downloading. And the benefit of such a network upgrade to these 71 percent? Not a lot.

And there isn't going to be a big network upgrade any time soon as VM is is in debt and, in any case, the recession is hardly likely to encourage major capital expenditure.

So, the issue to me is not STM as such but how best to make use of the network. VM has chosen to limit the heaviest downloaders in a certain way. There are more intelligent ways of doing this, and this is what we should be pressing VM to do.

[Ignitionnet]

The 50Mbit wasn't a massive upgrade, however it came on the back of other upgrades. The switching off of analogue releases both bandwidth downstream and gives cleaner networks indirectly increasing available bandwidth upstream as well.

VM are rather fortunate in that, due to past investments, the kind that BT ignored to commence a £2.5bn share buyback, they were able to deploy DOCSIS 3 at a relatively small cost.

That said of course the deployment is in a very early phase still.

Reminds me I must get in touch with the network bods... my own hubsite, Mortlake, has 3.5 CMTS filled up, the entire hubsite could be taken off the legacy platform and put onto a shiny new CMTS if they were up for it, be cheaper and easier than running 4 chassis + DOCSIS 3 chassis eventually.