Tag: Internet service quality

Article

A UK court case is taking place regarding the standard of Internet service available in an apartment block

Owner of Multi-Million Pound UK Flat Sues Over Poor Broadband | ISP Review

Millionaire travel tycoon sues luxury flat owner for £100k over lack of broadband | Evening Standard

My Comments

In the UK, a person who bought a London apartment worth multiple millions of pounds is litigating the owners of the apartment building it is in because of substandard Internet service within the building.

They took up the lease on the apartment after being sold on the fact that there was to be proper Internet coverage to all rooms therein along with proper service within the building. But the service was below par before Hyperoptic ran fibre-optic Internet connectivity through the building in 2016. This led to him using public-access Wi-Fi at a local library and cafe as well as the home network and Internet service at his brother’s home before that installation.

This case, although litigated within the UK, touches on contract-law issues especially when it comes to the description of a premises that is subject to a lease or sale agreement. Here, it is pointing to the expected standard of broadband Internet service and network wiring that is provided within the premises. It is also of importance concerning what is being provided within high-density developments like apartment blocks that based around multiple premises being integrated in few buildings.

But the court case held at the Central London County Court is part of a larger conversation regarding access to multiple-premises developments like apartment blocks by communications infrastructure providers within the UK. This is no matter whether the development is at the budget or premium end of the price scale.

Concurrently, the UK Government are working on regulations regarding the provision of this infrastructure, whether to provide communications and Internet service to the premises in the development or to establish a mobile-telecommunications base station especially where a landlord or building committee who has oversight regarding the building won’t respond.

I see this case bring in to scope issues regarding how the standard of telecommunications services available to a premises is represented in its sale or lease contract. This will have a stronger affect on apartments and similar premises that are integrated within a larger building. It will also be part of the question about infrastructure providers’ access to these buildings and the premises therein.

Gigaclear underscores the value of infrastructure-level competition

An issue that will be worth raising regarding the quality of service for newer high-speed fixed-line broadband services is the existence of infrastructure-level competition.

When we talk of infrastructure for a fixed-line Internet service, we are talking of copper and/or fibre-optic cabling used to take this service around a neighbourhood to each of the customers’ premises.

Then each premises has a modem of some sort, that in a lot of cases is integrated in the router, which converts the data to a form that makes it available across its network. A significant number of these infrastructure providers will supply the modem especially if they cannot provide a “wires-only” or “bring your own modem” service due to the technology they are implementing and, in a lot of these cases, will legally own the modem.

In Europe, Australia and some other countries, this broadband infrastructure is provided by an incumbent telco or an infrastructure provider and multiple retail-level telecommunications and Internet providers lease capacity on this infrastructure to provide their services to the end-user. This is compared to North America where an infrastructure provider exclusively provides their own retail-level telecommunications and Internet services to end users via their infrastructure.

In a lot of cases where multiple retail telecommunications and Internet providers use the same infrastructure, the incumbent telco may be required to divest themselves of their fixed-line infrastructure to a separate privately-owned or government-owned corporation in order to satisfy a competitive-service requirement. This means that they cannot provide a retail Internet or telecommunications service over that infrastructure at a cost advantage over competitors offering the same service over the same infrastructure. Examples of this include Openreach in the UK, NBN in Australia and Chorus in New Zealand.

A problem with having a dominant infrastructure provider is that there is a strong risk of this provider  offering to retail telecommunications providers and their end-users poor value for money when it comes to telecommunications and Internet services. It also can include this provider engaging in “redlining” which is the practice of providing substandard infrastructure or refusing to provide any infrastructure to neighbourhoods that they don’t perceive as being profitable like those that are rural or disadvantaged.

Some markets like the UK and France implement or encourage infrastructure-level competition where one or more other entities can lay their own infrastructure within urban or rural neighbourhoods. Then they can either run their own telecommunications and Internet services or lease the bandwidth to other companies who want to provide their own services.

Infrastructure-level competition

Where infrastructure-level competition exists, there are at least two different providers who provide street-based infrastructure for telecommunications and Internet service. The providers may run their own end-user telecommunications and Internet services using this infrastructure and/or they simply lease the bandwidth provided via this infrastructure to other retail Internet providers to provide these services to their customers.

Some competitors buy and use whatever “dark fibre” that exists from other previous fibre-optic installations to provide this service. Or they provide an enterprise communications infrastructure for government or big business in a neighbourhood but use dark fibre or underutilised fibre capacity from this job for offering infrastructure-level competition in that area.

As well, larger infrastructure operators who pass many premises in a market may be required to open up their infrastructure to telcos and Internet service providers that compete with their retail offering. This is something that ends up as a requirement for a highly-competitive telecommunications environment.

This kind of competition allows a retail-level telco or ISP to choose infrastructure for their service that offers them best value for money. This is more important for those retail-level ISPs and telcos who offer telecommunications and Internet to households and small businesses. As well, whenever a geographic area like a rural neighbourhood or new development is being prepared for high-speed broadband Internet, it means that the competing infrastructure providers are able to offer improved-value contracts for the provision of this service in that area.

Infrastructure-level competition also allows for the retail-level providers to innovate in providing their services without needing to risk much money in their provision. It can allow for niche providers such as high-performance gaming-focused ISPs or telcos that offer triple-play services to particular communities.

There is also an incentive amongst infrastructure providers to improve their customer service and serve neighbourhoods that wouldn’t otherwise be served. It is thanks to the risk of retail ISPs or their customers jumping to competitors if the infrastructure provider doesn’t “cut the mustard” in this field. As well, public spending on broadband access provision benefits due to the competition for infrastructure tenders for these projects.

What needs to happen

Build-over conditions

An issue commonly raised by independent infrastructure providers who are the first to wire-up a neighbourhood is the time they have exclusive access to that market. It is raised primarily in the UK by those independent infrastructure providers like Gigaclear or community infrastructure co-operatives like B4RN who have engaged in wiring up a rural community with next-generation fibre-optic broadband whether out of their pocket or with financial assistance from local government or local chambers of commerce.

This is more so where an established high-profile infrastructure provider that has big-name retail Internet providers on its books hasn’t wired-up that neighbourhood yet or is providing a service of lower capability compared to the independent provider who appeared first. For these independent operators, it is about making sure that they have a strong profile in that neighbourhood during their period of exclusivity.

Then, when the established infrastructure provider offers an Internet service of similar or better standard to the independent provider, the situation is described as a “build-over” condition. It then leads to the independent provider becoming a infrastructure-level competitor against the established provider which may impinge on cost recovery as far as the independent’s infrastructure is concerned. Questions that will come up include whether the independent operator should be compensated for loss of exclusivity in the neighbourhood, or allowing a retail ISP or telco who used the independent’s infrastructure to offer their service on the newcomer’s infrastructure.

Pits, Poles and Pipes

Another issue that will be raised is the matter of the physical infrastructure that houses the cable or fibre-optic wiring i.e. the pits, poles and pipes. These may be installed and owned by the telecommunications infrastructure provider for their own infrastructure or they may be installed and owned by a third-party operator like a utility or local council.

The first issue that can be raised is whether an infrastructure provider has exclusive access to particular physical infrastructure and whether they have to release the access to this infrastructure to competing providers. It doesn’t matter whether the infrastructure provider has their own physical infrastructure or gains access rights to physical infrastructure provided by someone else like a local government or utility company.

The second issue that also can crop up is access to public thoroughfares and private property to install and maintain infrastructure. This relates to legal access powers that government departments in charge of the jurisdiction’s regulated thoroughfares like roads and rails may provide to the infrastructure provider; or the wayleaves and easements negotiated between property owners and the infrastructure provider. In the context of competitive service, this may be about whether or not an easement, for example, is exclusive to a particular infrastructure provider.

Sustainable competition

Then there is the issue of sustainable competition within the area. This is where the competitors and the incumbent operator can make money by providing infrastructure-level Internet service yet the end-users have the benefits of a highly-competitive market. A market with too much competition can easily end up with premature consolidation where various retail or infrastructure providers cease to exist or end up merging.

Typically the number of operators that can sustainably compete may he assessed on the neighbourhood’s adult population count or the number of households and businesses within the neighbourhood. Also it can be assessed on the number of households and businesses that are actually taking up the broadband services or likely to do so in that neighbourhood.

Retail providers having access to multiple infrastructure providers

An issue that will affect retail-level telcos and ISPs is whether they have access to only one infrastructure operator or can benefit from access to multiple operators. This may be an issue where the infrastructure operators differ in attributes like maximum bandwidth or footprint and a major retail-level operator want to benefit from these different attributes.

In one of these situations, a retail-level broadband provider who wants to touch as many markets as possible may use one infrastructure provider for areas served by that provider. Then they use other providers that serve other areas that their preferred infrastructure provider doesn’t touch yet. This may also apply if they want to offer service plans with a particular specification offered by an infrastructure provider answering that specification but competing with the infrastructure provider they normally use.

Multiple-premises developments

Then there is the issue of multiple-premises buildings and developments where there is a desire to provide this level of service competition for the occupants but offer it in a cost-effective manner.

This may be answered by each infrastructure provider running their own wiring through the building but this approach leads to multiple wires and points installed at each premises. On the other hand, an infrastructure cable of a particular kind could be wired through the building and linked using switching / virtual-network technology to different street-side infrastructures. This could be based on cable technology like VDSL, Ethernet or fibre-optic so that infrastructure providers who use a particular technology for in-building provision use the infrastructure relating to that technology.

Estate-type developments with multiple buildings may have questions raised about them. Here, it may be about whether the infrastructure is to be provided and managed on a building-level basis or a development-wide basis. This can be more so where the multiple-building development is to be managed during its lifetime as though it is one entity comprising of many buildings.

Then there is the issue of whether the governing body of a multiple-premises development should be required to prevent infrastructure-provider exclusivity. This can crop up where an infrastructure provider or ISP pays the building manager or governing body of one of these developments to maintain infrastructure exclusivity perhaps by satisfying the governing body’s Internet needs for free for example.

In all of these cases, it would be about making sure that each premises in a multiple-premises development is able to gain access to the benefits of infrastructure-level competition.

Conclusion

The idea of infrastructure-level competition for broadband Internet is to be considered of importance as a way to hold dominant infrastructure providers to account. Similarly, it can be seen as a way to push proper broadband Internet service in to underserved areas whether with or without public money.

Article

Ofcom extends speed code of practice to business broadband | ThinkBroadband

My Comments

The Pantiles at Royal Tunbridge Wells – representative of a shopping strip with small businesses

But BT Business, Daisy Communications, KCOM, Talk Talk Business, Virgin Media, XLN and Zen Internet have agreed to a code of practice for selling business Internet service, which will come in to effect from 20 September 2016.

This code of service primarily affects the bandwidth and service quality concerning the business Internet service.

It calls for transparent accurate information on broadband speeds at the point of sale. This covers providing knowledge of estimated download and upload line-level speeds and, where available, the “real” throughput speeds as early as possible through the sale process. There will also be detailed information about the bandwidth of the service after the sale and on the ISP’s Website. The service speed that is disclosed has to be as accurate as possible and the ISP has to deliver this information to their resellers and solution providers who onsell the service.

If there are issues with the business Internet service not “hitting the mark” when it comes to throughput, the ISP has to manage these issues and help the business customer when that problem is raised by the customer.

The code of practice also include a “walk-out” right where the business custome can leave the Internet-service contract without penalty if the dowload speed falls below and is consistently below the agreed speed even after the ISP and business customer have had an opportunity to rectify the issue. Of course, the business would have to return any customer-premises equipment leased to them by the ISP.

A question that was called out in the article was whether a business customer on a multi-year contract could walk out due to substandard performance encountered during a time where the Internet service is overloaded at a time where residential users are placing intense demand on that service.

But there are a few gaps missing that may affect small businesses.

One of these is that the code of practice doesn’t apply to fixed-line-speed services like cable-modem services or fibre-to-the-premises services. Nor will it apply to “dedicated-line” business services like leased-line services, Ethernet-First-Mile services and Ethernet-over-FTTC services.

The Ethernet-over-FTTC service was called out in the article’s comment trail because it is offered as an entry-level dedicated-line service for small and medium businesses. Here, it is known to exhibit performance traits where the core-network bandwidth is predictable but the access-network bandwidth isn’t predictable.

But the commenters raised the possibility that a business could sign up to an Internet service that has a service-level-agreement which would cover situations and services beyond the code-of-practice’s scope. Similarly, could it be feasible for an ISP or telco to strike a service-level-agreement that is modelled on this code of practice and uses it as a fallback measure?

There is another issue that wasn’t addressed in this code of practice which can affect many small businesses and community organisations. It is where a business cannot see out a contract due to events in the business’s or organisation’s life-cycle such as when the business changes hands or the worst comes to the worst. Similarly, it doesn’t address a situation where a business changes location and the dynamics of the Internet service can be affected by that change.

At least a few steps are taking place to provide the same level of customer protection for small-business owners that consumers would enjoy when they sign up to Internet service.

Article – French language / Langue Française

Montée en débit en ADSL dans la commune de Sibiril en Bretagne | DegroupNews

My Comments

In a lot of rural and peri-urban areas, even ADSL internet service can be substandard as I have witnessed a few times. This is typically aggravated by established telecommunications entities that underinvest in the infrastructure that serves these areas and this infrastructure is not conducive to proper performance for any service based on DSL technologies.

In Brittany, France, the community in Sibril have decided to take action to have their telephony infrastructure improved before the arrival of an impending fibre-based next-generation broadband service. This effort has paid off with the bandwidth for 259 households in  the territory being improved to nearly 20Mbps where it was in the order of 0.5Mbps to 2Mbps. It has made the service fit for IP-based video services  to Full HD specification along with quicker downloading for even large files.

What Orange have done is to install cabinets closer to the affected locations and run fibre-optic cable to these cabinets, in a similar vein to a fibre-to-the-cabinet setup which implements VDSL2 technology. But they have deployed ADSL2 DSLAMs in the cabinets to assure continuity of ADSL2 service with existing Liveboxes. As well, the customers’ telephone cables are routed to the communications cabinet rather than the main telephone exchange.

This technique comes in to its own with country areas that have a village, hamlet or town which services a collection of smaller communities, something that is taking place in a lot of rural areas. It also comes in to its own with country towns that are growing and the telephony infrastructure needs to be re-worked. Here, a telecommunications cabinet could be installed closer to the various communities and it houses DSLAMs and similar “on-ramp” equipment but has enough rackspace to cope with a few large-property subdivisions that increases the number of customers. Then this cabinet is linked back to the main exchange using a fibre-optic connection while the premises’ telephony and ADSL services are terminated at the cabinet.

There is a greater chance of increased communications security for these areas because if there is equipment breakdown or power failure in a particular cabinet, other areas aren’t affected by the failure. This could also lead to the provision of battery backup in those cabinets for the local telephone services with this requiring a reduced energy need.

At least this comes across as a near-term solution to providing real broadband to densely-populated country areas or to cater for country areas that take a different more-dense housing character.

Article

Obama’s Plan to Loosen Comcast’s Stranglehold on Your Internet | Gizmodo

From the horse’s mouth

The White House (US Government)

Report (PDF)

Video by Barack Obama

Click to view

My Comments

An issue that is constantly raised in the USA is the lack of real competition when it comes to Internet service provision.

This is because incumbent cable and telephone companies, especially Comcast and Time-Warner Cable, are using their lobbying power to influence state governments to proscribe competing interests like municipal Wi-Fi projects or Google Fiber from setting up infrastructure and service. Similarly, these companies effectively tie up fibre-optic and other backbone infrastructure also to prevent real competition. Here, this leads to an Internet service that simply is poor value-for-money due to prices that go up, reduced bandwidth, onerous terms and conditions and poor quality-of-service.

As illustrated in the video that President Barack Obama made regarding this topic, this limits the available throughput for Internet service and he compared the US situation to cities like Paris, France or Seoul, South Korea where they have the high-speed broadband.

He underscored the role of state and local government to pull their weight to support high-throughput last-mile Internet connections on a competitive level. Uncle Sam had already facilitated the backbone of the US Internet connection but he sees these governments being responsible for the connection to the customer’s door.

It also comes at a time where Comcast and Time-Warner Cable have registered an intent to merge and this is becoming a hot potato issue in the US due to the state of the Internet and pay-TV services that exist there.

One analogy I have used regarding the state of the US Internet service is that it is moving towards a similar standard to monopoly-era telephone service where a single privately-owned or government-owned post-office or telephone company looked after the telephone service. This led to situations like the poor quality of customer service, disinvestment in areas that weren’t considered profitable along with very high prices especially for service-provisioning costs or long-distance calls.

What I have liked about this is that someone “from the top” of the food chain is addressing the issue concerning the quality and value of Internet service in the USA.

Article

The Forgotten Importance of Broadband Internet Upload Speeds | ISPReview.co.uk

My Comments

Skype, Viber and Dropbox which require the ability to upload as important as YouTube.

Increasingly, Internet service providers focused on the download aspect of their customer’s bandwidth because most customers use this for downloading or browsing the Web. Typically, they provided a smaller capacity for uploads because of smaller data requirements used for interacting with the Web.

But they are realising that the upload bandwidth is as important especially as we enter the age of cloud computing, IP telecommunications and the Social Web and are highlighting the requirement to give upload speeds as important a footing as download speeds. This is of importance when ISPs are highlighting their offerings’ headline transfer speeds which typically emphasise the download speed only.

Key applications

IP telecommunications

A key requirement for decent upload speeds is IP-based telecommunications. These range from households implementing Skype or Apple Facetime to have long-distance free videocalls with relatives and friends through businesses using VoIP setups to save on telephony costs, The videocall is not just confined to being an element of 60s-70s science fiction anymore.

The upload speed is being considered important as technologies come on to the scene to enable high-quality voice and video telephone with AM-radio-grade voice calls or high-resolution videocalls.

Online storage services and cloud computing

Good upload speeds give the remote access abilities on these NAS units a lot of mileage

An application that is drawing attention to the need to consider upload speeds is the prevalence of online-storage and cloud-computing services. These also include “remote-access / personal-cloud” functionality that is a part of many home and small-business network-attached storage devices.

In a similar vein, the Social Web is encouraging us to tender photo and video content to one or more social-network services or image/video-sharing services.

Here, the ability to use these services without frustration can only be achieved when you have a high-throughput upload bandwidth. This is more so as we transfer files with increasingly-large file sizes like “master-quality” image, audio and video content that is to be shared, stored offsite or “taken further”.

The Web-based cottage industry

Increasingly there are people who are running their own Web site or blog. This cottage industry has become increasingly cost-effective for most with Web hosts that provide an always-alive hosting service either for free in some cases or you renting the space that you need for a modest sum of money.

The content-creation and publishing effort has been simplified thanks to the many content-management systems like Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki and vBulletin that is hosted on these Web hosts. It also has been simplified through the use of word-processing software that implements XML-RPC functionality

Telecommuting and working from home

An increasing workplace trend is to work from home. This can manifest in the form of a person who works for an employer by doing some or all of the work from home, through a professional who has their home office as their sole workplace to small-organisation operators who have a shopfront or similar public point of contact but use their home as their office.

These users are expected to upload large work files, especially if they are in the creative industries. As well, the concept of cloud computing, including “thin-client” cloud-computing setups, has encouraged small businesses to be able to “think big”.

Communications is also being considered of importance for the professional or small business to maintain a competitive edge. This is more so as business catches on to video conferencing and unified communications technologies which are more data intensive.

How is this being factored in

Some “last-mile” technologies do support symmetrical download-upload speeds such as “fibre-to-the-premises”, Ethernet-based setups and symmetrical DSL setups. But asymmetrical “last-mile” setups can support increased upload capacity when they are adjusted for this, typically with these services being provided for larger businesses.

What can be done

The ISPs can use upload speeds as another way of differentiating their services and expose the services that offer the higher upload speeds to residential and small-business users. One example of someone stepping in the right direction is Gigaclear who are promoting symmetrical bandwidth for their fibre-to-the-premises installations in some Home Counties villages which are attracting the “work-from-home” crowd.

As well, the ISPs who promote decent upload speeds could be ending up courting a lot of usage cases like professionals working from home and expatriates who maintain a strong loop with overseas contacts.

Conclusion

Making sure that the upload speed is highlighted as a feature for an Internet-service package may allow the telecommunications carrier or Internet service provider to maintain a competitive edge and satisfy new Internet usage realities. After all, it’s not just about downloading YouTube videos anymore.