Lack of options, FTTPoD price increase harmful, where's the feedback?

[#1]

That's on the upload side though - the download is dominated by online video streaming.
Edit: I reckon by 2020, all TV will be available by the internet, getting rid of the need for aerials and satellite dishes.

[#2]

True but a quick glance at the graph seems to forecast about 2500MB per day for streaming in 2020
That is 20,000Mb per day which if taken over 6 hours is 55Mbps in 2020
This equates to about 10 films at current HD streaming rates

[#3]

I think they are assuming that 1 in 5 streams are 4k or 8k in 2020 - but their estimation for the streaming rate of 4k (15Mb/s) looks low as I believe Netflix have revised theirs upwards.
Also, that graph takes into account all users (power/innovators/mainstream and laggards).
The interest one I find is 'Future revolutionary services', which they predict will dominate our usage. Something that does not exist now, but will exist by 2020.

[#4]

Quote from: dave

I'd be interested to know what you need more than 70Mbps for today.

Unsure if I mentioned a 'need'. Those who are further away from the cabinet than I am may well point to the 38Mb qualification for YouView Multiroom that BT Retail have. I believe the response from one Openreach staffer to that product involved turning the air blue.
I should mention a desire though, which is why I have 2 FTTC lines coming into the property - performance and resilience. I shouldn't have to do this, though, to get an equivalent performance service to the one Virgin Media were delivering to me over 2 years ago.

Quote from: dave

In the last 14 years I've seen speeds go from dial to 512kbps to 1Mbps to 2Mbps then the up to 8, 16, 38 and 76Mbps speeds and we'll see speeds go beyond 76Mbps.

Dave, 512k->8Mb was turning up the dial on the headline speed. 16Mb was line card swaps or a change of equipment in the exchange. The 76Mb FTTC can reach if close enough to the cabinet will perhaps go to 100Mb, indeed I believe 100Mb is being trialed. That's about the end of the road without pair bonding or pushing fibre deeper into the network. Apples and oranges, the FTTC product is already near the limits of headline capabilities.

Quote from: dave

If you're trying to compare Virgin Media with Openreach then how much has Virgin's network increased in the last few years? Openreach's fibre products cover around 2/3rds of the country now and with the BDUK funding it's growing further. It's much easier to just turn up the dial on the headline speed than to expand coverage.

Virgin actually have to dig to each property they want to pass with their cable network. They can't just overbuild using largely pre-existing ducting and erect street cabinets which then drop to homes using pre-existing copper. For them to build to new areas is an equivalent effort to Openreach building FTTP, if not more so as they don't have the luxury of using pre-existing poles and ducts to reach properties. When we compare Openreach's commercial brownfield FTTP with Virgin Media's infill suddenly it doesn't look so good. Openreach spent about 80 quid per home passed on their commercial fibre deployment, that is actually 3-4 years of Virgin's network upgrade spend in terms of capacity upgrades and the required network rebuilds. Evidently not that much easier to turn up the dial on the headline speed if it costs Virgin as much per 4 years per premises passed to do so as Openreach spent, of their own money, building out the fibre network.

Quote from: dave

When I asked about vectoring they were planning on trialling on both their vendors but hadn't made decisions on rollout as that would depend on the results of the trials.

Depending on what they do with the vectoring they may well need to upgrade hardware on both of the vendors, so vectoring will not exactly be flicking a switch. In addition I haven't seen any trials of node level vectoring.
As I understand it Openreach are already feeling some pressure. They deserve a pat on the back for a job well done rolling out FTTC in record time for a record low cost (the 2.5 billion figure is not the build cost of the rollout, it includes OpEx and spend on pre-existing products) however they are facing having to invest in that platform in record time to upgrade it, too.
I will, however, defer to your better knowledge of the situation in that regard, and I thank you for taking the time to respond.

[#5]

I'm slightly confused by BT Retail's 34Mbps requirement for YouView Multiroom. The BT site says you need over 5Mbps to watch HD on a Youview box, so how do they work out that you need 34Mbps minimum for two Youview boxes?
There's a lot of people that think that Openreach/BT have to compete with Virgin Media for the fastest broadband in the UK, when the reality is that there is no need to compete. Openreach could very easily (and relatively cheaply) upgrade the FTTP OLT kit in the exchange and offer 1Gb symmetric speeds - but there is no demand or reason to do this.
Going forward, I think Openreach/BT's focus will be on two things:
1) Those people on exchanges that have not been upgraded to fibre (who funds this etc?);
2) Those people on FTTC that are at the lower end of the speed thresholds.

[#6]

Not really, BT have never made any attempt to compete with Virgin Media in terms of headline speeds. The joys of having about half the country to yourselves. If we had wider coverage of cable perhaps the situation would be different.
No upgrade would be required on the OLTs to support symmetrical 1Gb by the way. To quote Dave it would be just a case of 'turning up the dial' - each PON split has 2.4Gb downstream, 1.2Gb upstream available to it, would just be cutting it rather fine on the upstream to do so. Certainly 1Gb/100Mb would be doable, however that would most definitely take a toll on business revenues.

[#7]

Quote from: AndyH

I'm slightly confused by BT Retail's 34Mbps requirement for YouView Multiroom. The BT site says you need over 5Mbps to watch HD on a Youview box, so how do they work out that you need 34Mbps minimum for two Youview boxes?

Conjecture - Recording two HD programmes on each box will use 20Mbps or more.  The line profile is reduced to reserve room for the IPTV traffic so perhaps there's a minimum setting that the profile system works down to?

[#8]

@ pwatson  - That's possible - my understanding is that multicast traffic takes a priority over data traffic in the Openreach network. So if an end user is heavily downloading and fully saturating their connection, then viewing a multicast channel at the same time should work without issues because the data packets will drop first. I am now sure though if recording something is classified as mulitcast traffic or data traffic? I would guess it's the latter.
I've never used a YouView box, but is it possible to download something and watch live TV at the same time? This would make more sense, because two boxes could in theory be streaming 4x HD streams at the same time.
@ Melancholie - I'm not sure whether that would be do-able though, because you have 32 or 64 homes on a splitter and you would probably end up with people exceeding the shared bandwidth. I am kind of interested though to see how much a large number of FTTP users can push the Openreach/BTw networks (i.e. we try a group test, hammering our connections at the same time).
Off topic here, but interestingly it looks like the BTw network was pushed a bit last night (everyone watching the football?):

You don't normally see packet loss on the MSE/BRAS.

[#9]

Quote from: AndyH

@ pwatson  - That's possible - my understanding is that multicast traffic takes a priority over data traffic in the Openreach network. So if an end user is heavily downloading and fully saturating their connection, then viewing a multicast channel at the same time should work without issues because the data packets will drop first. I am now sure though if recording something is classified as mulitcast traffic or data traffic? I would guess it's the latter. I've never used a YouView box, but is it possible to download something and watch live TV at the same time? This would make more sense, because two boxes could in theory be streaming 4x HD streams at the same time.

As I said, the line profile is reduced for the duration that a channel is being watched so the bandwidth required for the multicast data is reserved.  Recordings of IP channels are the same as watching live - Multicast data from the exchange.
See page 9 of this:
http://www.sinet.bt.com/sinet/sins/pdf/511v1p5.pdf

[#10]

Quote from: dave

The most expensive and complicated part of the FTTP rollout is betting the fibre into the property so technologies like G.FAST that can do several hundred Mbps speeds are ideal.

I was sure I'd read something about this not being the most expensive part:
Mathew Pitt-Bailey, Alcatel-Lucent’s Director of Comms
“In terms of cost, G.fast vectoring is going to be relatively close to that of FTTH because, after all, you’re bringing fibre NEARLY to the home so you’re not going to save that much. And you require some additional equipment. But you avoid entering the home, and for some operators this is a very important factor and a very costly and time-consuming part of the roll-out.
So that’s where you save the money. How much depends on the particular circumstances: labour costs, how much does it cost to send an engineer to a customer, new buildings (with cable ducts and pre-fab walls) vs old buildings (with beautiful stone walls and no cable ducts) etc. So cost savings could be anywhere between 0 and 25%, with perhaps 10-15% a good average.”
That obviously just covers rollout; OpEx on FTTdp is higher than that of FTTP, and I note that under testing is XG-Fast, requiring pair bonding hence truck rolls.
It's an interesting discussion to be had but, obviously, is a way away.
Again appreciated your responses, were interesting and educational, thanks Dave.

[#11]

Around 1 in 3 or 4 homes in MK had some kind of duct blockage when installing FTTH.
It normally takes 2 engineers half a day (assuming no issues) to do the external work. It then takes an engineer a half-full day to do the internal work (if he has to put in extensions, then normally a full day).
I think most countries just use micro-trenching for FTTH. I would imagine it's quicker and more cost effective.

[#12]

Quote from: AndyH

That's on the upload side though - the download is dominated by online video streaming. Edit: I reckon by 2020, all TV will be available by the internet, getting rid of the need for aerials and satellite dishes.

There is a desire to get to the point where TV is broadcast over the Internet. Satellites are expensive, especially with the bandwidth needed for 4k (and then 8k and 32k) TV and the terrestrial TV frequencies are seen as being very valuable spectrum for mobile coverage especially because of the inbuilding reception.

[#13]

Quote from: Melancholie

Dave, 512k->8Mb was turning up the dial on the headline speed. 16Mb was line card swaps or a change of equipment in the exchange. The 76Mb FTTC can reach if close enough to the cabinet will perhaps go to 100Mb, indeed I believe 100Mb is being trialed. That's about the end of the road without pair bonding or pushing fibre deeper into the network. Apples and oranges, the FTTC product is already near the limits of headline capabilities.

There's still a bit of room yet for speed increases out of FTTC, I don't know where it will top out, but Openreach are doing as much as they can get get faster speeds out of the technology. Vectoring will come at a cost if it's launched as will some of the other things.
I just looked back and we did our first FTTP install almost 4 years ago, as AndyH notes the hard part is getting the fibre into the home. We've done FTTP installs at most of the locations that Openreach have deployed it, the easy ones are the greenfield sites where the ONT is already in situ, customer says can I have FTTP, we most them a router and it's on the next day. I've lost track of some of the issues we've had with brownfield, road closures, rabbits in ducts, cars parked on top of manholes, blockages, hedges, trees, you name it we've probably had it as a problem for one of them.
In comparison FTTC prebuilds everythings before the install but has to have an expensive cabinet and power. One of the things Openreach are working on for G.FAST is backpowering the kit from the end users eliminating one of the most expensive parts of the delivery getting the power to the site.

[#14]

Quote from: dave

There's still a bit of room yet for speed increases out of FTTC, I don't know where it will top out, but Openreach are doing as much as they can get get faster speeds out of the technology. Vectoring will come at a cost if it's launched as will some of the other things.

As the only line on the cabinet, Dave, I topped out at a touch under 98Mb attainable. A look at the profile of my line showed the high end bins were empty - too far from the cabinet. I'm on fast path so nothing lost to FEC and G.INP won't make any difference. Short of the option of introducing pair bonding, which will require truck rolls and fundamental product changes, are BT planning on breaking the laws of physics to deliver faster to my if anything somewhat better than average line?

Quote from: dave

In comparison FTTC prebuilds everythings before the install but has to have an expensive cabinet and power. One of the things Openreach are working on for G.FAST is backpowering the kit from the end users eliminating one of the most expensive parts of the delivery getting the power to the site.

Reverse powering I'm aware of indeed and it's something that hardware vendors have worked on pretty much since the beginning for this so can't give Openreach credit for that. It's actually already being used to power FTTB MSANs in basements of some buildings and Swisscom's FTTS deployment, they deploying a combination of FTTP and FTTdp, so is a pretty proven tech

Quote from: dave

I just looked back and we did our first FTTP install almost 4 years ago, as AndyH notes the hard part is getting the fibre into the home. We've done FTTP installs at most of the locations that Openreach have deployed it, the easy ones are the greenfield sites where the ONT is already in situ, customer says can I have FTTP, we most them a router and it's on the next day. I've lost track of some of the issues we've had with brownfield, road closures, rabbits in ducts, cars parked on top of manholes, blockages, hedges, trees, you name it we've probably had it as a problem for one of them.

This kinda goes some way towards confirming something that was said to me - a point was made that said person believed Openreach chose the wrong areas to deploy brownfield, it went pear shaped and over budget, hence they back pedaled on original plans. Thanks for that.

[#15]

This issue of the last few (10's of) yards from the Distribution Point is in part why Gigaclear only install their FTTP to a connection pot on the property's boundary line.
From there across the garden, and in through the house to the desired termination is at the cost of the subscriber to sort out , though they do have a installation partner who can cost it up, quote and do it for you.
Reverse powering FTTC seems fine for apartment basement located Dslams - bill the owner for the power and it will vanish as yet more service charges for the leaseholders.
Back powering "fit and forget" mini-dslams mounted on a pole feeding 4 rural houses from one or more of the houses is going to be rather more difficult to arrange to everyone's satisfaction without a major row brewing between all of them. I'm sure we can all envisage the issues!