Tag: FTTP

Article

Freebox Ultra Wi-Fi 7 router being defined as the cutting-edge for carrier-supplied customer-premises equipment for home networks

The Freebox Ultra’s First Test: Wi-Fi 7 Surpasses Expectations – GAMINGDEPUTY

French language / Langue française

Freebox Ultra : pourquoi elle est devenue rapidement une référence technique | Freenews.fr

Test de la Freebox Ultra : notre avis complet sur la box Internet de Free (frandroid.com)

My Comments

The competitive telecommunications and Internet market in France has led towards some exciting equipment being offered has led to the local telecommunications providers offering customer premises equipment way above the average for this class of equipment.

One firm I have given space to a lot on this site is Iliad who run their “Free” Internet service in France as something that raised the bar for value there. They ended up offering a highly capable piece of equipment in the form of the Freebox Révolution with a highly-capable router / NAS unit / DECT cordless-telephone base station in one Phillippe-Starck-designed box and a “décodeur” set-top box with Blu-Ray player in another similarly-designed box. It even ended up with features like “box-to-box” or “client-to-box” VPN support, software-defined Wi-Fi 5 support and a gyroscopic remote control and both devices benefited from continual firmware upgrades that offered new functionality.

Previously, the Freebox Révolution was defined as the cutting edge for this class of hardware

Now Iliad have taken things further with the Freebox Ultra which is usurping the role of the Freebox Révolution. This, like the Freebox Révolution uses fibre optic as the WAN connection but can work at 10 Gigabit speed, allowing for a competitive 10G Internet service courtesy of Free.

There is an extraordinary local network offering with a Wi-Fi 7 4-band access point with two streams for all of the bands. This media network is protected using the latest WPA3 security specification and there is the ability to steer client devices to the best band to work with. As for the wired network, this Freebox is about multi-gigabit Ethernet all the way with a 10 Gigabit SFP connection and four 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet sockets as a switch.

The CPU in this Freebox Ultra is an ARM Cortex A73 RISC CPU, something that wouldn’t look out of place in smartphones, tablets or the connected car. Here it is about using less power to handle a lot of data and offer a rich user interface. A user can install a NVM3 2280 SSD stick in to this router to have this work as a NAS the Freebox way with support for UPnP AV / DLNA, Apple Time Machine and other common standards. The other approach for connecting storage to this device is to use a USB-C socket with 60W PowerDelivery power for a USB hard disk or SSD of some sort.

Like the recent Freebox setups since the Révolution, this unit works on the Freebox OS which has a user interface that wouldn’t look out of place on a recent consumer or small-business network-attached storage device  or a desktop operating system’s GUI. Here, I wouldn’t put it past Free to add more functionality with a Freebox OS firmware update, even have it work with newer Wi-Fi or other network standards.

This device even comes with an extender known as the Freebox Répéteur 7 which works on Wi-Fi 7 to cover larger French homes like the “mas en Provence” so you can have continual Wi-Fi coverage through them. There is even an Ethernet connection so you could connect a wired Ethernet device to the extender or, perhaps, run a wired backhaul to the Ereebox 7.

Due to this connectivity and these capabilities, it bas been realised that the Freebox Ultra is about achieving a future-proof home network for your French home. This device is typically offered for EUR€49.99 per month with a fibre-optic broadband service that offers Internet, TV and fixed-line telephony of the kind expected in a French competitive telecommunications market.

Once you have the French telecommunications providers and AVM continually offering cutting-edge consumer-premises network equipment, it wouldn’t take long for these firms to compete with Silicon Valley and become an “Airbus” or “Arianespace” equivalent.

What is independent install

As more fibre-to-the-premises connections become ubiquitous, there will be a call towards independent-install as a service provisioning option in order to save costs for subsequent FTTP deployments

Independent installation of fibre-to-the-home / fibre-to-the-premises broadband Internet is where the installation and provisioning of this service doesn’t require a technician employed or contracted by the infrastructure provider or ISP to come to your premises.

Most likely these kind of FTTH / FTTP installations will take place in an environment where the consumer owns the optical network terminal and can replace it with equipment that suits their needs better. As well, such equipment will be typically in the form of desktop equipment that is the size of a typical home-network router.

Independent install approaches have been seen to be successful with ADSL and cable broadband Internet due to the copper infrastructure being ubiquitous in most households. In a lot of cases, this has allowed ISPs and telcos to offer cheaper broadband Internet to the masses.

New connections

A new connection to a premises that hasn’t been previously connected would require a technician employed or contracted by the infrastructure provider or ISP to run a connection from the street to the building or premises. They would be required to install a “demarcation point” on the premises where the infrastructure provider’s legal responsibility ends as far as the infrastructure goes.

Some ISPs or infrastructure providers may supply and install the fibre-optic cabling from the demarcation point to a wall socket close to where you are to have your optical network terminal and home-network router. Here, this would be part of the installation cost for a new connection to an existing premises.

On the other hand, an independent third-party installer with fibre-optic skills would install fibre-optic runs as part of electrical / AV / data cabling during the construction of a new building or full-on renovation. This would be paid for by the building owner as part of the project costs.

As well, there will be pressure on building developers to install the necessary infrastructure for fibre-to-the-premises Internet as a standard offering. This will be exerted by customers, urban planners, regulatory authorities, competing developers and the like to have that project set up for today’s online expectations. In this case, electricians engaged by the developers will be required to be skilled in FTTP fibre-optic installations.

Existing connections

The AVM Fritz!Box 5530 is one of these home-network routers with a connection for fibre-optic internet in the form of an SFP plug.

As fibre-to-the-premises broadband takes hold, there will be more of the existing connections to this kind of infrastructure. This will be where independent install will earn its keep. It will also include premises that are part of a previously-mentioned building development that have been wired for fibre-to-the-premises.

Self-install, including wires-only / BYO setups

Self-install is where there is cabling to the premises and a wall socket installed therein. The customer picks up the equipment they need and, perhaps, a flylead or adaptor from the ISP’s bricks-and-mortar presence or a retailer. Or this equipment is delivered to the customer’s premises by post or courier.

Then the customer unpacks the equipment and installs it themselves. They may find that the ISP or infrastructure provider has to remotely activate the equipment and set it up for the Internet service.

If the arrangement is described as a BYO or wires-only setup, the equipment isn’t bundled with the service. Rather the customer buys the equipment from the ISP or infrastructure provider or a technology retailer. They can take the equipment between premises rather than leaving it behind when they move.

The BYO or wires-only setup would be pushed for in the name of competition and innovation. This is due to the idea of offering higher-performance ONT modems or ONT/router combo equipment a.k.a. fibre-optic gateways that is equivalent to modem routers. As well, it would be pushed as a lower-cost service-provisioning option due to the ISP or telco not needing to have customer-premises equipment on their books as a rapidly-depreciating asset including the cost to warehouse the equipment, nor needing to have technicians drive to the customer’s premises to deliver or install the equipment.

Should the equipment fail, the customer would have to disconnect the equipment and organise to have it repaired. Here, they would send the equipment to the ISP or infrastructure provider if it is bundled with the service. Or they would send it to a repairer if the equipment isn’t bundled, such as a BYO equipment deal. The same situation also applies where a technical upgrade is taking place and the customer needs to use newer equipment.

Similarly, self-install especially BYO / wires-only setup may permit a customer to take the equipment with them when they move to premises where there is already the FTTP infrastructure therein. This would appeal with people who purchase ONT modems or ONT/router units that are about higher performance.

Independent technician install

An independent-technician install relies on a suitably-trained technician engaged by the customer to install the fibre-optic wiring between the demarcation point and where they want to install their equipment.

Such technicians would be able to move the fibre-optic connection on the customer’s side of the demarcation point if you had to reposition it to a newer location. The technician would also be able to do repairs on the fibre-optic cabling if it failed or was damaged.

If you are renovating your home or working on a new-build premises, having an electrician or AV technician who is skilled with fibre-optic handling will come in to its own. Here, you have the same tradesperson doing the fibre-optic cabling as well as other copper-based cabling runs, whether AC wiring, RF for a TV aerial or master-antenna TV setup, AV for multiroom audio and video or Ethernet cabling for your home network.

What is needed

Demarcation point

The fibre-to-the-premises installation has to have a distinct demarcation point at the user’s premises. This delineates the point of responsibility between the service/infrastructure provider and the premises owner/occupier as far as the fibre-optic infrastructure is concerned.

This would have to designed so that a skilled independent technician can connect a fibre-optic installation to this point when they have installed it. It could be feasible to have this support a “multi-fibre” connection with a “mutual / independent / open” demarcation point for environments that support infrastructure-level competition, something that is already established in France. That is where multiple street-side fibre connections are connected to this point and a technician engaged by the service provider the user is contracting with switches the user to that infrastructure.

Of course a consumer may want wall points for two or more infrastructure-level fibre connections. This would be called upon by businesses, for example, who subscribe to service providers on different infrastructures for increased fault tolerance of their Internet connection. In these cases, there would be two or more of the demarcation points on the premises in addition to two or more wall points or one multi-fibre demarcation point is used to serve two different outlets with connections to different infrastructure providers.

Multiple-premises buildings like apartment blocks or shopping centres may have the demarcation point in the telecommunications equipment room, typically in the basement or on the ground floor. This may be held as the building demarcation point while the cabling is maintained by technicians appointed by the building committee or owner. Some setups may then require a second demarcation point per premises with this being installed in a cupboard therein. In that area, cabling to the wall socket may be serviced by a technician engaged by the premises owner or occupier.

To assure access to infrastructure-level competition, there may be the idea of having multi-fibre connectivity to each premises with the premises-level demarcation point being where a household is switched between competing infrastructure providers.

Wall point

As well, there would be a requirement to have a fibre-optic wall point so that customers can easily connect and disconnect their optical network terminal. This would make self-install or “BYO device” arrangements work properly because the customer would have to be able to easily connect equipment that they supply.

Such wall points would be required to be installed where the customer wants their equipment placed. There will be instances where a customer wants two or more wall points that are connected to different fibre-optic infrastructure providers so as to provide a fault-tolerant setup.

Rugged flylead with rugged plugs

Then there would be the need for a rugged flylead with rugged plugs that the customer uses to connect between an optical network terminal (fibre optic modem) and the wall point.

Such cables and plugs would be about being able to be connected and disconnected easily by anyone and not being at risk of damage. It may also be about having these cables offered at lengths that suit the customer’s needs. These would be supplied through retail outlets, packaged with the ONT equipment or supplied by the installer. Most likely this will be in the form of the Single Form Pluggable connection on the equipment side like with the AVM Fritz!Box 5530 advanced home network router.

Why independent install

Having independent install as part of a fibre-to-the-premises setup for home and small-business users would become an economical measure for infrastructure providers. This makes a lot of sense with existing installations where a premises has FTTH / FTTP cabling to the point where a user wants to set up their network equipment.

Here, a technician doesn’t need to come out, supply and install an ONT modem in the premises; avoiding the need for the customer to book an appointment and make sure a responsible adult is waiting around to welcome and supervise the installer.

It would also permit the customer to choose their own kind of FTTP optical-network-terminal equipment. This is more so where the ONT equipment is part of a router and there is the desire to offer innovative better-performing equipment that has functionality that is desired by the customer. As well, manufacturers are encouraged to design smaller desktop units that fit in with the customer’s premises.

This also applies to installation modifications where a customer engages a trained technician to do the job. For example, the customer could engage an electrician who has been trained for AV, telecommunications and other similar work to do any “customer-side” work like moving their equipment or even to wire up a new building or premises.

The role of the infrastructure-supplier’s technicians would be reduced so as to “pull” the fibre-optic cabling from the street to the network demarcation point on the building and maintain that connection. As well, in an environment where there is competing infrastructure providers, the technicians supplied by the competing provider can know where to connect in their cabling to the building’s cabling infrastructure.

The disadvantage associated with independent install for FTTH setups is that the infrastructure provider would lose quality control over the installation. This may not necessarily apply to a self-install arrangement where the goal is to connect customer-supplied equipment to existing connections. But it would apply where new fibre-optic cabling is installed or an existing fibre-optic cabling installation is modified by a third-party technician.

Conclusion

As more countries take on fibre-to-the-premises broadband Internet, there will be the question about making sure that independent installation options are part of the course. This is more so as more premises become wired up to FTTP and the prospect of self-install where customers install replacement or improved equipment themselves becomes appealing as a way for operators to save money.

Articles

Fibre to the premises courtesy of Gigaclear

Queen’s Birthday Honours for CEO of Rural FTTP ISP Gigaclear | ISPReview

Matthew Hare awarded OBE for services to broadband provision | ThinkBroadband

From the horse’s mouth

UK Government – Cabinet Office

Queen’s Birthday Honours List

Previous coverage about Matthew Hare OBE

Interviews (2011,2015)

New ISP players working against established players to provide competitive Internet service

Gigaclear hits the big 10,000

First it was Hambleton, now it’s Uppingham to have fibre-optic broadband in Rutland

My Comments

I have given a fair amount of coverage to Matthew Hare and his company, Gigaclear, on this Website. This is due to the effort put in by Matthew Hare and this company to put fibre-to-the-premises broadband in to a significant part of rural England like East Anglia, the Home Counties and now Devon.

As I have highlighted before, rural areas do have a real need for urban-grade broadband Internet service. This is due to the many small businesses that serve these areas, including people who run these businesses from home along with people who live a significant distance from friends and family who are based in city areas. In some cases

It has also encouraged other independent fibre-to-the-premises networks to exist like the Hyperoptic urban network and the B4RN communitiy-driven rural networks.With these networks, the provision of current-expectation Internet service has been about working independently of BT Opennreach who look after the main telecoms infrastructure of the UK.

As I have covered before, Gigaclear have invested GBP£1000 / property to provide a standard of broadband not normally associated with a rural-broadband deployment. It is to provide a symmetrical Gigabit service using fibre-to-the-premises technology rather than a fibre-copper technology which can introduce many variables like decrepit infrastructure.

Just recently, Matthew Hare and Gigaclear received FTTH awards from the FTTH Council Europe who represent European fibre-to-the-premises network providers. This was because of his successful use of that technology in British rural areas.

Now Matthew Hare has received an Order of the British Empire as part of the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours thanks to his groundbreaking effort in providing broadband Internet service that is beyond ordinary for rural areas. This Honour, fully referred to as “Officer of the Order of the British Empire” was cited as for “Services to Broadband Provision in the UK”.

There have been some other Royal honours issued in relationship to providing independent Internet service using independent high-grade infrastructure within the UK. One of these is Dana Tobak CBE, whose Honour was granted as part of the New Year’s Honours list in 2017-2018 for her work with Hyperoptic and two granted in 2015 in relationship to the B4RN effort – Christine Conder OBE and Barry Forde MBE.

What these awards are showing is that someone has gone out of their way to provide a high standard of Internet service to Britain’s rural community and has broken the ground to offer it independently of an established incumbent telco or ISP.

Article 

UK fibre operator Gigaclear wins FTTH Council Europe Award | ThinkBroadband

From the horse’s mouth

Gigaclear

Gigaclear’s Chief Executive first Brit to receive prestigious FTTH award (Press Release)

FTTH Council Europe

2018 Awards Press Release (PDF)

My Comments

I have given a fair amount of coverage to the effort that Matthew Hare and Gigaclear have undertaken to get the ball rolling for establishing fibre-to-the-premises in a significant area of rural England. Here, the standard for the service was up to a Gigabit per second symmetrical (upload and download) which was above average for consumer-grade broadband and they were even working with Fluidata to open up these networks for competitive service access.

This includes two telephone-based interviews with Matthew Hare regarding how this company is answering the rural-Internet need and providing a real benefit to the various rural communities. From one of these interviews, I had called out in the report how Oxford Country Cottages were selling this connection as a significant amenity for their self-catering holiday cottages. with follow-up communication with that estate’s owners leading to them identifying that they were benefiting from a significant amount of return business due to this feature.

I was regularly identifying issues like people in the rural communities working from home or running a home-based business or practice as a user group that would benefit from the high standards of coverage. It also included the reality that most of the business activity in rural areas was driven by small businesses who would benefit from cloud computing and other similar technologies that also benefit frim this same coverage standard.

As well, I was also calling out the so-called “tree-changers” who a class of residents who have moved from the cities to rural communities in search of that tranquillity associated with country living. Here, these users want to be able to benefit from the same or better standard of Internet connectivity to maintain contact with their family or, perhaps, to run a business of some sort.

Now the FTTH Council Europe have awarded Matthew Hare with an FTTH Individual Award for his effort in using fibre-to-the-premises as a way to bring real broadband to rural areas. As Matthew said:

“It is an honour to be recognised by such an influential industry body. Since 2010, we have been delivering on our quest to connect some of the UK’s hardest to reach communities to reliable, ultrafast broadband. Every day, we see the difference having a reliable internet connection can make to people’s lives and we remain committed to closing the digital divide, ensuring we put an end to rural isolation. This is just the beginning. There is a lot more we aim to achieve with our fibre networks ”

he was underscoring the realities with working with rural areas along with the benefits that these rollout efforts would bring to the communities. He was also highlighting the feasibility of rolling out full-fibre broadband in to relatively-sparse rural areas including hamlets and villages. There is also the fact that if the established operators won’t answer a need, independent operators could end up satisfying that need.

What has happened today for Matthew Hare and Gigaclear could be a ray of encouragement for anyone wanting to provide fibre-to-the-premises broadband in a rural area.

Article

County Broadband Bring 1Gbps FTTP Network to Rural Homes in Broughton | ISP Review

From the horse’s mouth

County Broadband

Home Page

Broughton Fibre FTTP Project

Home Page

Press Release

My Comments

County Broadband are a wireless ISP who are offering improved Internet service across most of rural Cambridgeshire and East Anglia in the UK. But they have decided to run a 1Gbps fibre-to-the-premises service in Broughton, Cambridgeshire as a proving ground for deploying this technology in rural villages.

This is similar to the efforts that Gigaclear, B4RN and other small-time rural ISPs are undertaking to enable real broadband expectations in other parts of rural England. In this case it is to provide a viable alternative to substandard ADSL service that may not have a chance of hitting the headline 2Mbps speed thanks to the typically decrepit telephony infrastructure that these areas end up with.

They are announcing the impending arrival of this service through a village hall meeting for the townsfolk on the 4th of August 2017. The ISPReview article raised issues about poor-quality service with BT Openreach saying on their Website that the local street cabinet was mad ready for fibre but this installation was found to be located 3 miles or 4.828 km away from Broughton, without the likelihood of delivering high-speed broadband to that town.

That article also said that, like what has happened in other British rural areas, larger companies would “wake up and smell the bacon” with the intent to service those areas because of the small-time operators offering next-generation Internet in to those areas thus leading to infrastructure-level competition. Of course, there is also the fact that as the town grows, more retail-level ISPs could be offering to use the infrastructure to service that neighbourhood along with mobile telephony providers using the same infrastructure to provide an improved cellular mobile telephony service for that area.

But I also see this as being of benefit to the householders and businesses who want to benefit from what a high-speed Internet connection offers. This is more so where small businesses see the cloud as a way of allowing them to grow up such as for a shop to move from the old cash register towards a fully-electronic POS system as part of “growing up”, or for the hospitality trade to benefit from offering high-speed Wi-Fi Internet as a marketable amenity.

For County Broadband to provide the FTTP fibre-optic infrastructure to Broughton as a proving ground could lead them to better paths for rural broadband improvement. This could mean something like more villages and small towns in East Anglia being wired for next-generation future-proof Internet and perhaps making that area an extension of the Silicon Fen.

Article

Fibre to the premises courtesy of Gigaclear

“Full Fibre” ISPs Call on ASA to Stop Misleading UK “Fibre Broadband” Adverts | ISP Review

My Comments

While the NBN are taking things slowly to roll out next-generation broadband Internet in to Australian communities and providing most with a fibre-copper service, the UK are facing a similar problem.

Most of urban Britain are being provisioned with similar fibre-copper next-generation broadband service, typically “fibre-to-the-cabinet” with a copper VDSL2 link between the street cabinet and the customer’s door. This is while a handful of ISPs and infrastructure providers like Gigaclear, Cityfibre and Hyperoptic are running fibre-to-the-premises next-generation broadband infrastructure, whether to country properties or large urban developments.

But a lot of telcos and ISPs are using the word “fibre” as part of hawking their next-generation broadband Internet product, while it is seen as a keyword by the marketers to say that the service will provide higher bandwidth to the customer than what was normally expected. This is although they are running a fibre-copper Internet service in most of their territories.

What is being raised is how should a broadband service be qualified in relationship to its infrastructure when the service is advertised to the public. It isn’t just about whether a service implements fibre to the premises or not, but how much of the run between the exchange or head-end and the customer’s premises is being covered by a fibre link.

There has to be distinct keywords to say that a service is being provided “fibre-to-the-premises”, a “majority-fibre” service like fibre-to-the-building or fibre-to-the-distribution-point, or a “minority-fibre” service like fibre-to-the-cabinet. Other issues that need to be raised is whether a service is being delivered with symmetrical (upload / download) bandwidth or is an “exclusive bandwidth” service like active fibre where each customer gets the full contracted bandwidth rather than facing bandwidth contention.

What Gigaclear and co are raising is that customers need to know what they are able to get when they sign up for a next-generation broadband Internet service or other advanced telecommunications service.

Articles

A new provider starts to offer competitive Internet service to the apartment-block market

Fiber Corp looks to fill NBN gap | The Australian Business Review

​Fiber Corp rolling out NBN alternative | CIO

NBN rival Fiber Corp to offer alternative CVC model | Optical Solutions

Fibre optics firm plans to offer 10Gbps speeds | ITWire

From the horse’s mouth

Fiber Corp

Home Page

My Comments

… this time up in Sydney

A highly-politicised National Broadband Network deployment in Australia, which has led to the slow rollout of its services across most of Australia’s urban areas has brought on the arrival of infrastructure-level competition.

This is where independent companies are rolling out fibre-optic or other infrastructure to deliver next-generation broadband Internet service to various neighbourhoods. It has been facilitated by recent liberalisation of the market where multiple retail-level ISPs can buy access to these networks. A similar situation has occurred in the United Kingdom to open up next-generation broadband in to various urban and rural areas thanks to independent operators laying down their infrastructure independent of BT Openreach – the UK’s British-Telecom-controlled equvalent of the National Broadband Network.

One of these that has started taking action is DGTek who had started to run their own fibre-optic infrastructure around Elwood and some of Melbourne’s inner-south-east bayside suburbs, while another of these is TPG who have installed their own infrastructure in a number of apartment complexes across Australia, putting the wind up NBN to cover those locations.

Fiber Corp, a Sydney-based fibre-optic infrastructure company backed by veteran food-industry business and turf identity Nicholas Moraitis who owned the 1997 Melbourne Cup winner “Might And Power”, has started to offer their own competing infrastructure to multiple-occupancy building developments in central Sydney and Mascot. Their infrastructure is based on fibre-to-the-premises implementing Gigabit PON and NG-PON technology capable of offering up to 10Gbps but is being deployed with a similar business attitude to TPG’s infrastructure efforts. Here it is about the “best bang for the buck” where you are thinking about a high-quality service at an affordable price.

It will take advantage of the recent liberalisation of the infrastructure market that allows multiple retail ISPs to compete on the same physical infrastructure, but will be architected to allow small-time and startup operators on to the infrastructure at a cheap price.

Although Fiber Corp is focusing on the larger multi-occupant developments, they have had attracted interest from some of the local councils who are frustrated with the rollout delays associated with the NBN service.

Joel Clarke, Fiber Corp’s CIO, is pushing for a better “NBN levy” scheme for financing rural broadband rollouts. Here, he wants to see that all of the compliant and participating infrastructure providers are seen as part of a larger logical NBN rather than just the infrastructure provided by NBN Co.  It will also require NBN Co to be aggregated to offset all additional costs to wholesalers, retail ISPs and consumers. Otherwise, this levy will simply be seen as a tax upon competing infrastructure providers, making it harder for them to do business.

It also includes the requirement to allow any retail ISP to connect to any infrastructure and offer their service to every customer endpoint. This would allow for customers to benefit from a wider choice of Internet service providers and permit the existence of boutique service providers on the infrastructure.