Tag: next-generatin broadband

Article

NBN switched on in Kiama, NSW | The Australian

My comments

This deployment of the National Broadband Network has become the second mainland location for this technology. The first mainland location to have the next-generation Internet was Armidale in NSW.

Kiama is primarily a tourist-attraction country town which attracts many day-trip tourists from Sydney. This then feeds a hospitality-driven economy centred around cafes and restaurants. Other than that, it doesn’t necessarily have a key employer like a corporation or university that could create a significant economy.

Of course, it is worth finding out which areas of these towns are actually wired up for the broadband service, especially if these towns are growing out or becoming major economic centres in their own right, as in the case of Armidale which has the University of New England as a key employer. Here, it could be feasible for certain suburbs or neighbourhoods to have the optical fibre pass every door, rather than the whole town. This is a practice that I have noticed with Australian pay-TV where certain communities had Foxtel cable pass their door while others didn’t.

It is also worth knowing, when one or two towns are established with the technology, it could then allow for infrastructure to be deployed out to neighbouring towns as it is built out, especially if “highway” runs are being constructed and “lit up” in order to connect major economic centres. This may also incite more key employers to set up shop in these towns thus creating an increase in the economy there.

Cynics would describe this effort as being political due to the towns being in marginal electorates and the provision of the National Broadband Network as a vote-catching exercise by the Australian Labor Party. But who knows how this could change if the NBN does change the economies in these towns such as through attraction of new employers.

It will therefore be interesting to see what comes about with the arrival of the NBN through the different towns and whether the fibre-to-the-home next-generation broadband would be a proper winner.

Article

Le Vaucluse veut se doter d’un réseau très haut débit | La Provence (France – French language)

My comments and information obtained from this article

Vaucluse, a department in the Provence area of France is known for features like Avignon with that famous bridge. But it has a sizeable amount of rural space with its eastern half being mountainous and 17% of the population in the rural areas. Of course, there are the 5 major urban hubs being Avignon, Orange, Carpentras, Cavaillon, and Apt.

What is relevant to this site is that 5 of the exchanges in that department are fully dégroupé – served by all the competing Internet service providers independently.This is part of a digital divide that exists through this area with not all areas having a broadband service that is “up to snuff”.

The département’s local government have realised what is going on in this area and are to work on the issue of proper access to real broadband, both ADSL and next-generation service. Here, they will do a stocktake of the existing infrastructure and identify areas that need the work.

They reckon that this work will take 20 years for next-generation service to cover this département. The UMP party who are in opposition consider this as being too long because of the time that the technology takes to evolve in the Internet.

Of course, there are the key problems that beset rural and outer-urban areas when it comes to telecommunications, like ageing or derelict infrastructure. These have to be looked at as much as the existence of service at each of the exchanges. This stocktake may factor these issues in and assess the quality of this infrastructure.

Good marks to the Vaucluse local government in France in tackling this problem of adequate Internet service in rural areas. Here, this is an example of UK and France achieving a lively competitive and accessible Internet service for all.

Article

BBC News – Devon, Norfolk, Somerset and Wiltshire get faster broadband

My Comments

There have been a few efforts to deploy broadband Internet service into rural Britain that matches or betters the similar service available in urban Britain as I have covered previously on HomeNetworking01.info. Some of these have been underpinned primarily by local private companies with, in some cases, help from local government.

Now, London has come to the fore through the establishment of Broadband Delivery UK and the national funding of rural broadband projects. Four of the first few projects that have been started on under this funding are in Devonshire, Somerset, Norfolk and Wiltshire.

The funds allocations are GBP30m for Devon and Somerset; GBP15m for Norfolk and GBP4m for Wiltshire. Of course, the local councils and private investors in all these areas will provide supporting finance to the broadband provisioning effort in their areas.

An example of this is the Devon County Council pledging GBP22m towards the effort in their area. Here, their goal is to have at least 85% of Devon’s residents having access to the superfast broadband Internet service with a rated speed of 16-20Mbps at the end of the project.

The rhetoric put forward by the UK’s Cultural Secretary is that broadband Internet service is to be a common utility for homes and business in the same vein as mains electricity and telephone. They even have a goal to have the United Kingdom to be known for super fast broadband Internet service in Europe by 2015.

There was no talk about what kind of technology was going to be used to provide the service “to the door”. It then opens questions on whether a particular area was being provided with fibre technology or wireless technology; or whether the “last mile” to the customer’s door was to be copper, fibre or wireless links.

Of course it is so easy to think about whether an area will be covered by a broadband improvement drive but it is worth making sure that the service arrives at the customer’s door at the proper standard. This includes questions about how farms and similar properties are to be covered and the issue of older telephone wiring in rural areas, a factor that is increasing real when deploying cheaper “copper-in-the-last-mile” setups like VDSL2 FTTC systems.

Articles

Fibre Optique : 11 zones labellisées Zone d’activité Très Haut Débit – DegroupNews.com (France – French language)

www.labelzathd.fr – Home site for the ZA THD logo program (France – French language)

My comments

It is so easy for land and building developers to hawk the possibilities of new technology like fibre-optic communications when they sell their properties. This was increasingly done through the 1970s to the 1990s as a way of stating that the development was “ready for the future” and is still practised today with some residential-commercial developments. In a lot of these cases, there really isn’t a way of benchmarking the quality and capacity of the fibre-optic technology that goes in to these locations and knowing whether they really live up to the expectations.

The French government have taken a step in the right direction with the “Zone d’Activité Très Haut Débit” (Very High Bandwidth Business Zone) where there is a particular logo for fully-qualified developments.

Here, they required the following standards of the infrastructure for the development to be “logo-compliant”:

• Next-generation broadband to be delivered by optical fibre to every property
• A minimum service bandwidth of 100Mbps symmetric “to the door” 
• Provision for the competitive delivery of next-generation broadband by several retail providers.

This was to be supervised by SETICS in order to assure throughput and competitive-service compliance.

The current shortcomings that I find with this project is that it doesn’t qualify residential developments or the provision of next-generation broadband to the tenancy units (offices, shops, apartments) in a multiple-tenancy building like an office block, shopping centre or block of flats. These kind of developments are where there is the likelihood of hyping-up broadband infrastructure that falls short of the mark.

What needs to happen with this is to extend the logo standards to residential developments and multiple-tenancy buildings owned or managed by a particular entity. As well, local government should be involved in the promotion of the minimum-standard next generation broadband service so that if they have a logo like the “ZA THD” logo, they can become attractive to the “switched on” residents and businesses.

Article

Telstra super-fast 4G wireless sparks debate over NBN

My comments

As many countries agressively build out fibre-optic-based “Next Generation Broadband”, there is also the reality that companies involved in wireless broadband will deploy LTE or WiMAX “4G” technologies for this service.

This issue has been raised recently as Telstra, Australia’s incumbent telephone and mobile carrier announced its intention to deploy LTE-based 4G wireless broadband. This is even though the Australian Federal Government were rolling out the National Broadband Network, which is the next-generation broadband service based primarily on “fibre-to-the-premises” technology.

A key issue that have been raised include the “all-wireless” household or small business, which doesn’t have a landline telephone or ADSL/cable-based broadband Internet for their telecommunications. This may be implemented by students and similar households where each user wants control over their communications costs as well as assuring proper service privacy.

Issues of comparison

Value of service as a primary Internet service

A common disadvantage with this kind of setup is that the bandwidth available to the user from a wireless broadband service is less than that for a wireline broadband service like ADSL, cable or fibre-optic. As well, the wireline service is typically able to offer better value service than the wireless service. This disadvantage may be eroded if the 4G wireless broadband services are priced aggressively against the Next-Generation-Broadband wireline services.

Reliability and Stability

Even so, the 4G wireless broadband setups won’t yield the same bandwidth as a next-generation broadband setup; and these systems are based on radio technology which can be affected by many factors such as  the environment surrounding the radio equipment, the aerial (antenna) that is used as part of the equipment and the calibre of the equipment itself.

Examples of this include wireless-broadband modems used in double-brick / cinder-block buildings; equipment like USB modem sticks designed to be compact therefore not having adequate aerial systems; and simple weather conditions that affect wireless performance.

Here, this could lead to inconsistent performance for 4G wireless-broadband setups, with results like stuttering during VoIP telephony or multimedia playback.

Multiple device setups

No-one has yet raised the issue of a person operating multiple devices that connect to wireless broadband Internet. This is a common reality as people buy smartphones, tablets and netbooks that have integrated wireless-broadband connectivity. Here, these devices are operated on their own services and it requires users to keep track of the many accounts and bandwidth allowances that each device has.

As well, the wireless-broadband technologies discourage the idea of establishing local-area networks which could permit bandwidth sharing / pooling or sharing of resources like printers or file directories. Here, the users would end up not creating a local area network at all, and may just end up using technologies

Political issues peculiar to the Australian scenario

I also see certain political issues in the “next-generation-broadband vs 4G wireless broadhand” issue more so in Australia. Here, the Australian Labour Party see the National Broadband Network as a tool for nationalising or “claiming back” the wireline telephony infrastructure that they relinquished when Telstra was privatised. Here, Telstra, like British Telecom was originally part of the government-owned “Posts, Telegraphs, Telephones” department and became its own telephony entity as this department was separated.

There hadn’t been any mentions of intent to nationalise the Telstra-owned wireless infrastructure used for reselling their mobile telephony and wireless-broadband service. As well, Telstra were wanting to set up the aforementioned 4G LTE wireless-broadband technology on this infrastructure as a retail service and the Australian Labour Party were seeing this wireless-broadband service as a broadband service that competes with their National Broadband Network.

How I would see this argument is a way of seeking legal authority to require Telstra to do a “BT-style” sell-off of its mobile-telephony and wireless-broadband business. This is where they would be forced to divest themselves of the infrastructure and retail mobile-telephony / wireless-broadband business to another service

Conclusion

How I see the role of any wireless-broadband technology is that it is a complementary technology to a wireline technology rather than a competing technology. It exists primarily for mobile, portable and temporary computing applications.

PS. If I am appearing to write this article in a manner that supports Telstra, I have no pecuniary interests in this telecommunications company other than to be a regular customer of its telephony services.

Articles

DNS:NET bringt VDSL ins Havelland | VDSL-News (Germany – German language)

My Comments

Comments relating to an experience with an ADSL service in a country district outside an urban area

Even a country district outside of a well-serviced metropolitan area can suffer limitations with communications. This can happen where you have “green wedges”, farming districts (e.g. wine districts at Yarra Valley or Rosebud) or “beauty districts” (e.g. The Dandenong Ranges in Melbourne or the Blue Mountains in Sydney) located on the edge of or as “pockets” in a metropolitan area and many small communities exist through these areas.

Take Yarra Glen, which is located in the Yarra Valley Wine District outside of Melbourne, for example. You could get the radio and TV programmes receivable in the Melbourne metropolitan area very easily but you can end up with a telephone system that is allowed to “go rotten”.

This was exemplified when I saw a friend of mine who was living in the town and she had trouble with her ADSL Internet service. She had an ADSL modem but it appeared that there was no ADSL signal after she had the service for a few years. The service provider suggested that she try out another modem and she bought a wireless ADSL router and this unit wouldn’t show the existence of ADSL service.

After many troubleshooting hours on the telephone to the service provider and the wireless router’s manufacturer, we found that the telephone infrastructure had “gone rotten” as far as proper ADSL service was concerned. The service provider had come back with information that a lot of repair work needed to be done at the exchange (where the DSLAM was) and at a lot of wiring points between the exchange and her location. This then allowed the router to register proper service and the service had yielded significant improvement since the repairs were done.

I have been following the issue of country areas being set up with decent-standard broadband service and even hamlets, villages and small towns that exist outside a metropolitan area need to be considered.

Comments and notes on the Havelland VDSL deployment

This VDSL2 deployment is taking place in the Brandenburg-Land (German Federal State) outside the Berlin metropolitan area. For Australian readers, this may be similar to a deployment that takes place in a state like South Australia but isn’t servicing the Adelaide metropolitan area. It is in the Havelland district which is between Brandenburg town and west of the Berlin metropolitan area.

There are two main deployments in this area – one in Seeburg which will have a fibre backbone and one covering Elstal (Wustermark) and Falkirk which will have a radio backbone. Each deployment will use the VDSL2 technology to bring the next-generation broadband to the customer’s door and this technology has been valued due to less need to lay out new infrastructure to the door.

DNS:NET, who are behind this project, are working on extending its next-generation broadband infrastructure to bring this calibre of service to the small Brandenburg communities.

Conclusion

The reason I was citing the Yarra Glen poor-quality ADSL incident is that small communities that exist just outside major urban areas are at risk of being neglected when it comes to providing proper broadband service. I was citing this in conjunction to the Havelland VDSL deployments because DNS:NET were working on small communities outside the Berlin and Brandenburg conurbation by making sure they have real next-generation broadband service.

It also caters for the reality that as urban sprawl occurs, these communities will end up becoming part of that urban area and their transport and communication infrastructure needs to be taken care of.

Articles – The Age

Buy or beware – competitors gear up to do battle with NBN

No NBN price war, despite competition

My Comments

There have been some recent articles about next-generation broadband services appearing in or being planned for particular locales in Australia that compete with the government-backed National Broadband Network.

UK and France offering competitive broadband service

Two countries, namely the UK and France, have established the idea of competitive next-generation broadband after their success with achieving competitive ADSL broadband Internet service. This is because the governments in these countries have worked ahead by establishing a mandatory competitive telecommunications regime including encouragement of local-loop and sub-loop unbundling. They have even ben cited by the European Commission as examples when it comes to broadband-Internet service being competitive and affordable for most people.  

In France, the government have encouraged competitive fibre-to-the-premises service in the form of two methods. The first method is for one or more providers to share infrastructure, especially that which goes “to the door”, while the second method permits a provider or provider coalition to have their own fibre infrastructure “to the door”. That same country also encourages unbundled local-loop ADSL provisioning or “degroupage” in order to see competitive ADSL broadband service.

In the UK, the government is encouraging Unbundled local-loop ADSL provisioning and there are companies who are setting up or planning local next-generation broadband infrastructure in certain cities, towns and villages. These setups, which are based on either fibre-to-the-cabinet with VDSL copper runs or fibre-to-the-premises technoligy, are even being done as a way of giving rural households access to real broadband even though Openreach, the UK company in charge of the wired telecommunications infrastructure, are taking their time to provide this service. As well, Openreach is slowly rolling out a next-generation broadband network that will work on either fibre-to-the-cabinet or fibre-to-the-premises technology.

The Australian next-generation broadband direction

In Australia, regular wireline broadband is provided through one of two methods. Cable-modem broadband is provided by Telstra or Optus in the major capital cities or through TransACT in Canberra or Neighborhood Cable in Geelong, Ballarat or Mildura. These companies own their own cable infrastructure “to the door”. ADSL infrastructure is provided by different retail providers who either resell Telstra ADSL service or through Optus who either may resell Telstra service or use local-loop unbundling. Recently, some other ADSL providers are selling retail ADSL broadband in a “local-loop unbundled” manner with a few offering “naked ADSL” service which doesn’t provide classic landline telephony on the same line.

The Labor Party had started action on the National Broadband Network which is to be a fibre-to-the-premises network covering most metropolitan, regional and rural areas of Australia with wireless and satellite technology to cover the rest. It was also intended to be a replacement for the copper telephone network that is managed by Telstra and there was the idea for Telstra to decommission this copper network and hand it over to the National Broadhand Network authority. This is in a similar manner to how the Openreach entity has come about when it came to provisioning wireline telephone and broadhand service in the UK. Lately, there was a key issue raised about the service being delivered on an “opt-out” arrangement with customers being charged AUD$300 if they don’t have their property connected to the NBN during the actual rollout and want to continue with their classic phone service at their property after the copper network is decommissioned.

TransACT and Neighborhood Cable are offering National Broadband Network their infrastructure at a price that suits them or they will run a competing next-generation broadband service in their operating areas. As well, i3 Group are working with the Brisbane municipal government to set up a fibre-to-the-premises next-generation broadband service in inner-north Brisbane and intend to run it as a competing service if National Broadband Network set up infrastructure there.

At the moment, the main markets to watch when it comes to next-generation broadband are the metropolitan Sydney and Melbourne areas because of them being population centres in Australia. It will be interesting to see whether companies or local governments will set up next-generation broadband infrastructure there in competition to National Broadband Network.

Questions to be answered

One main question that is to be answered is whether it will be feasible for competing infrastructure providers to set up shop alongside the NBN especially in major markets. This includes whether a building landlord or body corporate can have control over the provision of infrastructure for competing service providers.

Another question is whether IP-based broadcasting and voice / video telephony will be controlled on the NBN so as to prevent access to the network by competing IP-based telephony and TV providers. This may be a game changer when it comes to the provision of subscription TV through Australia because it could open up a pathway for retail operators and others to offer competing or complementary multi-channel TV services. It may also affect IP-based telephony providers like Skype or “virtual-network operators” who don’t own their own infrastructure locally but want to provide competing or complementary telephony services.

Conclusion

If there is a desire to see competitive next-generation broadband service in Australia, there will have to be rules and regulations set up to ensure this kind of competition and if the government is serious about this, they should look at what France and the UK are doing to achieve the competitive broadband market there.