Articles

thinkbroadband :: Better broadband for one small part of Scotland

Broadband Boost For Glen-Tanar Area | Donside Piper & Herald

My Comments

This story isn’t about a fibre-optic rollout that covers a small town or village with next-generation broadband service. It is, instead about bringing a country area in Scotland up to the current expectations of fast and reliable Internet service.

In the Glen-Tanar area of Scotland, BT Openreach improved the ADSL copper infrastructure using “regeneration” technology to improve the bandwidth available to the residents. This is effectively installing repeaters on the telephone lines so that, rather than getting a very low bandwidth ADSL signal, the rural customer gets at their ADSL modem-router the full 2Mbps signal that an ADSL user in the city would get. No doubt these would be considered “link speeds” with bandwidth reduced due to the overheads required by PPPoA compressing and encoding.  A similar project took place at Ballogie which neighboured this area.

What was know was that the older connection wasn’t just slow, it was unreliable with many of the signal dropouts and modems regularly “retrying” the connections. The new hardware was also about achieving the current 2015 universal service obligation for broadband in the UK.

Of course, other issues like the quality of the copper infrastructure need to be assessed. Here, in these rural areas, there is often ageing connectors due to poor maintenance and the wiring may have started to perform less to expectations. These need to be rectified in order to assure good-quality Internet service.

These kind of broadband-improvement developments that occur in the rural areas, whether through bringing the copper infrastructure “up to scratch” or laying down next-generation optical-fibre or fixed-wireless infrastructure for “next-generation” bandwidth allow people who live or work in these areas to have the expectations of real broadband.

Article – French language

Mégalis pilotera le très haut débit en Bretagne – DegroupNews.com

My Comments

There is an intent by another company to pass next-generation broadband into Brittany, which is France’s northwest rural region. Some of us might say that this has a few of the holiday homes used by British people up there.

There is a long term goal of having the fibre-optic service pass 1 million Brittany households by 2025 but the main effort in the meantime is to pass 85000 households in 12 towns through the next five years. This Mégalis-driven main effort is to focus on enabling rural Brittany with this kind of access, especially with Carhaix, Ploërmel and Redon being focused on.

This project is driven by publc and private funds with the private funds providing most of the investment in the form of EUR€400 million courtesy of Mégalis. Public funds are in the form of EUR€65.94 million from Brittany’s local governments and the European Union are pitching EUR€22 million via FEDER. This is also part of the Brittany local government’s E-government effort to provide an improved online citizen-government interface to the local people. Some experts say that the main issue is that you would need to put down EUR1.8 million and allocate 25 years of work to make sure that all the 1,642 households and businesses in that region are covered.

The questions that weren’t raised were how there would be assured competitive infrastructure access to this network. This would include whether to a single-fibre setup with common infrastructure or a multi-fibre setup with competing infrastructure. 

What I like of this is that there have been some ambitious goals to work a rural French region in to the idea of next-generation broadband and expose it to the highly-switched-on French Internet scene.

Article

In-car wi-fi to boom over next five years – Manufacturers expected to introduce it as standard | TechEye

My Comments

Previously, I have covered the concept of the in-car network, mainly in the context of linking with another network like a home network so as to transfer entertainment content, maps and similar material to a hard disk in the vehicle. This also encompassed the ability for the vehicle to link to a wireless-broadband service for such purposes as obtaining “nearest available services” information or playing online media such as Internet radio to the car speakers. This extends to commercial and government applications where data can be obtained from the office while on the road and shown up on in-dash displays.

The next five years will see this becoming an important OEM and aftermarket feature for most cars. There have been some factory-supplied and aftermarket systems being presented which use a mobile phone as a Bluetooth-linked or USB-linked wireless-broadband modem with the processing in the dashboard or the dashboard as a control surface for the phone or certain apps within the phone. A few implementations use a wireless-broadband modem or modem-router (MiFi style) as an Internet link to the dashboard and the passengers’ devices.

It is perceived that Wi-Fi will be seen as another link to the car infotainment system for the smartphones and tablets to use. It would typically be implemented in the Wi-Fi Direct manner with the access point in the dashboard or the car being a client to an existing wireless network. This could allow concepts such as a smartphone being a DLNA media server for the car, the in-dash navigation being able to benefit from the address book that the smartphone or tablet has or rear-seat entertainment setups being auxiliary screens for a tablet thanks to Miracast.

But I have always seen it beyond the in-vehicle network that applies within the confines of a vehicle. Here, I have seen these networks link with stationary networks like home networks for syncing content to and from the vehicle or updating large amounts of data like maps while at home. Similarly, I would see the vehicle-based network interlink with a home network at a secondary location like a holiday home to do things like serving music to DLNA-capable AV devices for example.

This could be a very interesting trend to see just as we have seen in-car entertainment evolve over the last fifty years with technologies like tape and disc playback, radio reception, mobile telephony, satellite navigation and the like.

Article – French language

Le haut débit s’étend à Mayotte – DegroupNews.com

My Comments

Mayotte is a “département outre-mer of France located in the Mozambique Channel on the east coast of Africa near Madagascar and has two main islands. It achieved this status in 2011 and is intending to become the outermost region of the European Union in 2014 although there is some of the Islamic culture still existing in that area.

Just lately, France Télécom – Orange have rebuilt the main exchange to integrate ADSL support in the telephone system. This is in conjunction with the connection of the country to the LION 2 submarine telecommunications cable that is integrating the eastern African islands to the LION connection that is servicing the east cost of Africa.

This would allow the islands in this DOM to benefit from an increased amount of bandwidth where there is a goal to make sure that 90% of the households and businesses in this DOM have access to the real broadband service. Initially the households located at the south of the DOM in Kani-Kéli, Chirongui, Poroani or Tsimkoura would receive the service.

Personally I would see this as a chance for areas neighbouring Africa to be in a position to show that continent that the Internet can enable people in this area to benefit as far as cost-effective communications is concerned.

Article

NBN Co – National Broadband Network – Australia | I’m connected to NBN Fixed Wireless: what it’s like

Also originally published on SRW.ID.AU

My Comments

I have become interested in the account of an NBN fixed-wireless installation in a country property south of Ballarat as an example of what has been done to bring real broadband to the bush.

Previously the owner had to put up with a poor-quality and expensive 3G broadband service as his Internet solution. But this brought the same kind of ADSL quality commonly expected in metropolitan areas to his country property.

NBN installed the service on an inclusive contract which covered 2 hours of labour and the hardware and equipment needed to receive the service. This was part of a beta-test for a new ISP service to cover this country area.

The aerial (antenna) with transceiver was mounted on his TV-aerial mast and connected to the consumer-premises equipment that was installed in the house. This box has 4 Ethernet connections for four different services with connected to the Wi-Fi router that serves his home network.

The particulars with this installation was that he could see the NBN communications tower from his house with a although 2 trees were in the way. This could reduce the signal strength to 2/3 (according to the LED signal-strength meter on the above-mentioned CPE box) for momentary periods on a wet and windy day.

As mentioned before, there was the nominal ADSL2 bandwidth but could improve on upload bandwidth. He raised this as he is a content creator, but this issue would be of concern to rural users who “Skype” a lot for example. The throughput could be improved as the fixed-wireless broadband service is improved over the coming years.

Personally, I would see the fixed-wireless deployment as being worth it for rural users because they can get the real broadband service that would suit most home applications at a price commonly associated with an ADSL or cable broadband service. On the other hand, I wouldn’t recommend this for rural areas that start to become dense like small towns. Here, this could be a chance to look towards implementing the fibre-optic setup for these areas.

Similarly, properties like caravan parks, motels, business or industrial campuses could be allowed to opt for an FTTP setup rather than fixed-wireless as a “business option” so they have stronger throughput for their needs.

Articles

thinkbroadband :: Gigaclear delivers Gigabit in Appleton, Oxfordshire

Previous Coverage

Two large Oxfordshire villages now to have fibre-optic broadband

From the horse’s mouth

Website for Appleton & Eaton deployment

My Comments

Previously, at the end of May 2012, I wrote an article about action taking place by Gigaclear to wire up Appleton and Eaton in Oxfordshire for real next-generation broadband.

Now the setup is in full flight and Gigaclear were running a demonstration about the idea of Gigabit next-generation broadband in these villages at the Appleton Village Hall to prove to Appleton & Eaton residents what this is all about. Here, they demonstrated the high-speed broadband service and what it can offer including VoIP, IPTV and similar services.

They will install the services to the property boundary but it will cost GBP£100 for 50m of drop fibre and a fibre modem-router. Here, the cabling will be installed by the owner or a separately contracted third party like www.boxcomngn.net who charge £85 for up to 25m. On the other hand, Gigaclear could do the job for up to £500 for a 50m run.

The service, which supports future-proof IPv6 dual-stack will typically cost £37 / month for 10Mbps reserved to £195 / month for 100Mbps. It includes use of 1000Mbps burst bandwidth and is sold in a similar manner to how most interconnect and hosting bandwidth is sold, and, to some extent some business Internet service are sold. It may seem expensive but there isn’t a requirement to maintain a PSTN line with British Telecom for an Internet service to exist.

The villagers can sign up to VoIP as a telephone replacement if they are happy with no battery backup if power is out. As well, there is the option to sign up with various IPTV services. Even Vodafone had offered a “Sure Signal” femtocell service for their subscribers so that they can get proper mobile telephony in to their properties.

This is another example where the small villages in the UK are being made aware of the idea of real broadband and what it can offer. It is also a good chance for villagers with larger properties to have a look at the feature articles so they can gain the best out of the new Internet benefit.

UPDATE:

Householders can use a UPS like the APC BackUPS ES series units (Amazon UK) or the Zigor Ebro 650 UPS (Amazon UK) to power the router, modem, analogue telephone module and DECT base so they can keep a lifeline VoIP service for this Gigabit fibre-optic broadband service.

Article – French language

Les résidences secondaires : sujet de discorde entre SFR et Orange – DegroupNews.com

My Comments

In the USA, some of the carriers who run wireless-broadband service have had to deal with an untested but real market in the form of the multiple-device user. This is where an account holder maintains multiple wireless-broadband devices like a smartphone, tablet or “Mi-Fi” router, Here, they are having to formulate the right plans that encompass multiple devices and have them gain access to larger bandwidth-allowance pools. It will take some time for these plans to be adjusted properly as the “bugs” and customer-service issues are ironed out in order to achieve the right multi-device plan.

But in France, a spat has occurred between SFR and France Télécom (Orange) over another untested but real service class that is facing the telecommunications aind Internet-service industry. This is a service that is provided to a secondary house like a city flat or a holiday house that is lived in on an occasional basis; and is considered important with France with 3 million householders owning such a place that is typically occupied 44 days in a year.

The accusation that is being raised by SFR is that Orange is working in an uncompetitive manner when targeting this market by offering a particular non-committed Internet package for this user class. SFR say that they can’t offer a similar deal because of their wholesale-bandwidth purchasing agreement with Orange.

There is a reality that people who use these properties do use a wireless broadband service due to its suitability to temporary setups and “there-and-then” setup requirements. But there is a desire by the carriers to provide the “full-bore” fixed broadband service, especially as part of a fixed-line telephony or triple-play package to these houses.

This is augmented more so by the desire for the competitive operators needing to pitch to this market and yield a “secondary-home” service that represents high value in a similar vein that is expected across France.

Personally, I would like to see other telecommunications and Internet-service operators that exist outside France looking at the “secondary-residence” user class more seriously and pitch telecommunications and Internet services that mean real value to them. This includes rental plans for services that are occasionally used such as 3-month / 12-month plans, plans that offer value to multiple-location services and, where applicable, services where bandwidth allowances for many locations are pooled to a larger allowance.

This also should encompass homes which are occupied on a seasonal basis like “summer homes” or houses that are let out to other users on a short-term basis. As well, it could encompass home / business setups where a person has a home office but also maintains a shopfront or secondary office for their business and they want the same communications needs replicated at both sites.