Blog

These are some of the things that interest me at present. All views reflect my current opinion. You can add comments here. Constructive criticism is welcome. Even better, are comments which provide better answers to the issues raised.

23 February

House of Commons committee conclude no pent-up pressure for super-fast broadband?

The Business, Innovations and Skills Committee issued its recommendations on the Digital Britain initiative. The committee met in the midst of the expenses scandel, which might be one reason the level and type of questioning was slightly obsessive for short periods on things like the definition of 2Mbps, the nature of the 50p levy and a fear of market distortion in rural areas where there is no prospect of investment in network upgrades. These topics received a lot of attention for short periods as MPs drifted in and out checked their emails and texts. The report keeps mentioning the telecommunications network, yet the subject under discussion is the UKs high speed data transport network, not the 1970's telecommunications superstructure.

The report recommends against the 50p levy and believes that public intervention in NGA is too early and suggests the need to remove business rates, introduce duct sharing, focus on achieving the USC (2Mbps) and overcoming Digital Exclusion.

The conclusions on NGA investment is disappointing as it is based on the opinions of BT/Carphone/BSkyB and Ofcom from whom the committee drew the conclusion thet there was no pent-up pressure for super-fast broadband from customers, due to both a lack of new applications and an unwillingness to pay higher bills for internet access.

The committee seem to miss totally that the connectivity revolution is not always about people continually paying more, it can be about substituting payments for one service with another. Consumers are paying for Mobiles calls and messages, fixed calls, set-up fees, facility fees and rentals. We are paying TV Licence fees, fees to Cable and Sky. If the 'market' was fully functioning we would see far greater levels of service substitution, as the 'market ' delivered better connectivity this would permit users to fully replace legacy services. However, we are not working in a true market. Ofcoms current remit is to 'provide competitive access to a legacy asset in the form of the copper network', so the industry is organised to re-sell BT's legacy services, not challenge the basis on which these services are offered or defined.

The telecommunications industry has a fundamental role in delivering high speed data transport, but that same connectivity is more than capable of replacing legacy revenue streams. The change by nature is very disruptive and has to be fostered. The Committee did not touch on how the this conflict was being managed or not managed as is the case.

You need to do a double take when executives say there is no pent-up demand, when the growth in internet traffic is 40% pa and most operators have implemented 'fair use' policy to contain our usage during peak periods. The news for the committee is not that users will not pay, but our total communication bill is more than enough to pay for a high speed always on service. How can they be no demand for better connectivity when petrol is over £1 a litre and train fares are rising so regularly? Apple do not put a camera in the iPad because the networks do not offer adquate quality! How exactly do we expect to deliver better care, better education and cut costs? In the old telecom world these would be complex business services . No longer, which is why the most progressive countries have policies to force the changes through as part of the infrastructure upgrade programme.

The proposed NGA investment in the final third is not just about upgrading rural infrastructure. It is the means through which the existing complex telecommunications superstructure gets supplanted by a very simple high speed data transport service, where most of the intelligence shifts from the network to residing in the attaching computing devices, be it PC, laptop, handheld computer or set top box. Yes, the legacy service remains but used less and less. This networking revolution has to be primed and the next generation fund sets the terms of reference changing interconnect, cost recovery and market definitions as the infrastructure is upgraded.

Maybe the next Committee may grasp that NGA is about the switch from a focus on telecommunications to creating world class connectivity.

08:15 GMT | Read comments(2)

22 February

Connectivity lessons from the North Yorkshire Moors

The 130 odd homes of Newton-on-Rawcliffe and Stape in North Yorkshire have gained an up to 10Mps symmetric connectivity with the outside world.

Total project cost is estimated at less than £300 per home. There is a £100 installation fee and rental is circa £25 a month.

The solution delivered by NextGenUs, UK CIC a community interest company in partnership with NYCC (North Yorkshire County Council), NYNET Ltd, the local parish, and community broadband company Beeline includes a 20km, 4 hop microwave radio link, connection to a NYNET IP feed at a school in Pickering, and then a relay of radios providing connectivity from home to home.

Under CIC rules, NextGenUs UK CIC reinvests the operating surplus generated in extending and improving connectivity to releasing its underlying potential of 100Mbps, the next stage plans for the

NextGenUs NANDS network are two-fold:

deploy FttH in and around the main village of Newton, using microducting and blown fibre. (NextGenUs is interested in the possibilities of sharing both poles and ducts from BT and poles from electricity utilities if possible, and if not then they will direct dig!)

deploy fibre from the local community back towards Pickering so that we can have a fibre middle mile to complete the end to end FttH story.

The radios support 802.11n, so if any mobile operators wishing to save money on masts (£150k to build, -£50k to run, each) then all they need to do is make available a shared gateway to their networks and let the community do the rest. Help with additional end points I am sure would be appreciated!

No competitor has found its way to unbundle BT's Pickering exchange (6km as the crow flies, 16miles by Google) although BT has done its 21C upgrades. There are 400 Mobile masts in the North Yorkshire region (52,000 nationally), but Stape gets a 2 out of 5 bar coverage experience.

I do hope the citizens of Newton-on-Rawcliffe and Stape declare that not only can you traverse the North Yorkshire Moors for free but this has been extended to include the free passage of bits at Gods speed in at least part of Gods county.

I hope also they declare their network open, and should any national provider wish to re-use some of these facilities they can do so on a reciprocal 'free' basis.

NextGenUs UK CIC as a Community interest company is operated by Social Entrepreneurs who are happy to work within regulated opportunities to deliver connectivity to Notspot

communities in a way that puts people first.

The lessons for the proposed UKs Next Generation fund currently in consultation are many. The desire to deliver a next generation experience looks more than feasible if the focus is on delivering connectivity rather than engineering a service to fit around existing regulated services.

In this case the solution bypassed Openreach altogether, proving if a fibre access can be found, backhaul need not be a problem. The completion of Pathfinder North in the Highlands and Islands would seem to offer that region a similar opportunity.

BT, as a carrier of last resort worry that they would pick up the pieces should these entities fail, but here the demarcation lines and the method of sustaining service offer a different approach and the opportunity exists for something else to emerge. Community interest companies are not entrepreneurs trying to take advantage of regulated opportunities but deliver connectivity to their communities.

BT's rural alternative BET, is a 1Mbps ADSL service over 1 copper pair serving up to 12Km from an exchange is a product of solid hardcore telephony engineering. BET not only boosts a signal but changes the signal to get the last few kilometers.

No wonder it costs £1k-£3k per line.

It comes from a company which can spend huge amounts engineering a solution that fails to meet customer expectations. In BT it is more important not to raise the potential liabilities and expectations on a carrier of last resort. BET is engineered first to sustain a telephony service and then deliver broadband connectivity, the notion of delivering high speed connectivity only is outside its regulatory remit.

This is why the Newton and Stape example is important, it provides the opportunity for something different to emerge and break a regulatory bind. For Newton and Stape residents and the NextGen US CIC the Broadband end point is no longer the the end point in their home.

It is where their wireless network co-joins with NYNET fiber in a Pickering junction outside a school many kilometers away. While BT is still obliged to offer telephony services, the residents of Newton and Stape are free to use to their connectivity as they wish and not take the regulated service.

For a company which does not believe it can invest in Next Generation Networking in market 1 (rural) exchanges, without public support, it would seem appropriate to create a means to re-draw BT's line of responsibility for NGA and NGN services. Newton and Stape and NextGenUS is providing a template.

The Newton and Stape relationship with Nynet provides a ready made template for simple interconnect to a single point of handover. As the radio network is replaced with fiber this ought to be covered by a reciprocal infrastructure sharing contract using BT duct and poles where they exist, in exchange for BT re-using the fibre or spare fibre tubes with a means to add its own radios should it wish too.

The recent politicalisation of infrastructure sharing should not preclude the recognition that there needs to be one set of passive infrastructure rules for rural areas where connecting small numbers of people demands pragmatism, and reciprocity. This understanding can be sorted well in advance of the commercial negotiations for access to all providers street and roadside cable carrying assets in urban areas. The latter negotiations will be refereed by the Office of the Telecommunications Adjudicator and governed by the outcomes of Ofcom reviews of wholesale line rental. The latter will take a minimum of a year to emerge, the former ought to be set out as quickly as possible.

07:02 GMT | Read comments(0)

09 February

A Terabit Incentive Scheme and the BT Pension Deficit

On January 28th, Ofcom concluded the review of Next Generation Networks. The low key consultation document issued in August had two explosive pieces of information for Digital Britons. It spelt out clearly the near abandonment by BT of its plans to replace its PSTN service with an emulated service based on IP, stating IP based telephony was not yet suited to replacing PSTN. Ofcom also announced that the supporting call conveyance regime would continue for at least another four years. For those who get angry when filling their car with £60 of petrol each time, this gives UK network operators the excuse to keep our data transport as a minimally defined service, low peak hour allowances and high packet loss rates, so we keep making phone calls, and ensuring our broadband connectivity can support real time services sometimes but not enough that we can rely on it to stop the needless travel. The £1bn a year of promised operational cost savings also disappeared with this announcement.

In December 1st Ofcom issued another consultation on what to do and not about the £9bn BT pension deficit. Reading between the lines, Openreach are requesting to add a £160m a year to the cost budget to be recovered on the call conveyance charges to make up their part of the deficit. Ofcom make clear they have no obligations in this matter, but holes that big are bound to effect the amount of money available to invest and the cost of capital. The £160m pa is approximately the same amount as the money to be raised for the Next Generation Fund through the 50p levy.

The Next Generation Fund will be applied to upgrading as much rural access as is feasible. This submission to BIS describes one approach to achieving significant upgrades. However this still leaves the lingering fear that peak hour capacity upgrades will be reserved for value added services.

In a submission on the pension deficit consultation I made the case again that the UK communications needs to move to a conveyance system for bits not calls. In this submission I outlined a Terabit Incentive Scheme. It shows that todays UK connectivity supports approximately 1Tbps (1and 12 zeros) of bits every second, that's about 37Kbps per premises delivering a browsing experience should everybody be online together, but no more.

Digital Britain needs about a factor of 16 times this number if it to realise the benefits of quality homeworking and advanced care delivery, and really begin to have an impact on reducing travel. The Terrabit Incentive Scheme makes a deal, release the increased peak hour capacity we need in exchange for an ability to collect more per bit as more capacity becomes available. The more bits carried the more operators can collect.

This is a longshot, but that pension deficit is not going to get any smaller if BT Group get any encouragement from the regulator that calls can remain their core business indefinately. The call conveyance cost recovery regime needs a sunset date and Digital Britain needs peak hour capacity of 16 Tbps by 2016/17. The solution to the pension deficit must be found in the latter, not annual hikes to the former.

07:39 GMT | Read comments(0)

21 January

Copyright infringement code and Fair Use (congestion) policies.

Heres one improvement to the proposed Copyright Infringement code.

Progress on the Digital Economy bill will be dependent on the skill of law makers to offload the Copyright Infringements code of practice to Industry and Ofcom to sort out. This looked to be the original plan of the Digital Britain report and in observing snippets of the webcast from the House of the Lords, it was good to see many of the amendments were being withdrawn on the basis that they will be covered in the industry code. It was good to see that the much fought over amendment 138 in EU telcoms package being used to draw a boundary around the limits of the code.

The problem in writing a bill, before the industry code is written and agreed, is that the bill will list a whole series of things a code should look like based on the imagination of the good Lordships (Whitty, Lucas, deMauley, Earl of Errol, to name four) and their advisers, whom are a very erudite bunch and are quite brilliant at finding all sorts of peculiarities. Given the very imperfect nature (its a kludge) of the internets naming and addressing system, their list of tabled amendments will be worth a special edition of Hansard. They have to guess, because industry has given them so little to work with, but it could produce something unworkable and impractical to implement. The evidence gathering, the letter writing, another letter, a means to appeal and as yet undisclosed technical measures, the costs are mounting, and the behaviour we are seeking to change can itself change in shape through encryption and other measures.

Left to itself industry would or ought to come back with something different, a fix, best agreed within industry and consumer groups. It is built on the assumption that copyright infringement problem and network congestion are related. Tackle the congestion issue in an open and transparent way and the copyright issue is mitigated. ISP like to claim their 'up to' speeds while placing their fair use clauses on their online help pages. The latter allude to limits of the system without explaining the actual resources allocated too each broadband service. If as anecdotally told a high proportion of traffic is p-2-p and and a proportion of this is illegal copyright as alleged then adopting the ISPs 'fair use' policies to tackle copyright infringement would be a mutually beneficial line of attack.

Fair use policies form part of a users contract, and would normally stipulate that ISP is free to take measures to protect its network for the benefit of all if an individuals activity is over using a resource that needs to be shared. In this particular case the Fair Use Policy could be adjusted to specify in traffic terms per month the amount of peer to peer traffic above which that particular data stream (application specific) is then limited to say 5kbps. As it stands many ISPs limit this traffic type at busy hours. It's not a hammer, it is quite surgical and and the ISPs have tools to do it. It would serve another purpose.

Current Broadband services lack transparency in terms of resources applied per customer. Developing and exposing 'fair use' policies would lead to better informed customers. Our connectivity is shared so has limits, managing congestion is essential element of delivering customer service. The fact the industry is also dealing with copyright issues would be a benefit to an industry which needs to become more transparent in its practices. Industry have a ready way of dealing with the problem in a generic way, the costs appear when you begin dealing with individual cases. Is their a way to match a CIR (copyright infringement report) and match it with a congestion report and trigger a clause in a fair use policy? Yes, win, win surely, the biggest offenders are dealt with and all those costs are kept at bay.

Earl of Erroll did pose the question as what volume of records in a CIR would trigger an action. The answer ought to be the number that causes a breech in his ISPs fair use policy. The action then is not a letter, but an automated action to slow down one particular data stream, which provides relief to anybody else using that connection. It's not cutting anybody off, but eases congestion and mitigates the copyright problem while keeping the lawyers out of the process.

05:58 GMT | Read comments(0)

19 January

Next Generation Fund consultation response

It was great to see the consultation document on the Next Generation Fund published.

In our response we state the following is possible for rural users.

at least a 5 times increase in average speed over todays average urban speed for both fixed (15Mbits ps) and roam from home (600Kbits ps). Speeds are synchronous.
a 10 times improvement (.1% packet loss) in quality for applications that need it.
a factor of 16 times increase in peak hour resources -to circa 480Kbps per user.
Unlimited usage for all local networking.

I also believe that that coverage of more than 99% is possible based on the emerging costs per premises past.

I dislike the attempt to limit the scope of the fund to a fixed line perspective when all connectivity encompasses a cable and a radio attached. Neither do I understand how public funding can distort a market that does not not yet exist in locations the market is not interested in serving or investing. You could equally argue that the market is trying to limit our connectivity in order to preserve legacy service billing relationships.

The BBBritain perspective on how the above outcomes can be achieved is downloadable from here. Feel free to take, use and improve. Comments welcome.

08:33 GMT | Read comments(0)

Add your content here

Campaigning for better Connectivity and Universal Broadband Access!

A UK 'bit' commons.