Tag: United Kingdom

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

Gigaclear and Hyperoptic Highlight Problems with UK Broadband and BT | ISPReview.co.uk

My Comments

Questions are now raised regarding independent operators providing real broadband to the countryside

The article I read in ISPReview has highlighted some problems that affect the existence of competitive next-generation broadband Internet service in the UK. These same problems can also affect other countries like those in the North American, South East Asian and Australasian areas to varying degrees.

It is based on interviews with Matthew Hare from Gigaclear, Dana Tobak from Hyperoptic and Scott Coats from the Wireless Infrastructure Group, all whom are running up against an incumbent telecommunications company who effectively owns the infrastructure in most of the country and is effectively given a fair bit of blessing from a national or regional government. This can be through state aid as part of a broadband-improvement scheme or through a legal “right of way” that proscribes competitors from operating in the area of concern. In the case of the UK, it is Openreach who is a BT spin-off that manages the telecommunications infrastructure in that country and they have been dominating the state-assisted “Broadband Delivery UK” projects that provide next-generation broadband to most of rural UK.

.. and apartment blocks in big cities

Issues that were raised were:

• The dominance of a particular entity when it comes to delivering infrastructure for next-generation broadband in the UK
• The costs associated with deploying new infrastructure
• Business-hostile local-government property rates that affect the provision of service infrastructure by a private company, especially fibre-optic cable used for next-generation telecommunications
• The difficulty of gaining access to the “pits, poles and pipes” infrastructure that BT Openreach owns or has exclusive access to; and
• Whether BT and Openreach be fully and legally separated such as to make Openreach an entity controlled by the national government or local governments; or have it as a separate company.

Gigaclear are providing a 5Gbps fibre-to-the-premises service in to rural areas and commmuter towns in East Anglia and some of the Home Counties while Hyperoptic are providing a 1Gbps fibre-to-the-premises service to large multi-dwelling units in most of the UK’s main cities.

Gigaclear has effectively invested GBP£1000 / property and has found that the operating costs for pure-fibre setups are less than the costs for fibre-copper because there is no need to run electricity down the line and it is a modern robust technology. But they have paid many times the projected cost for some deployments like in Kent due to shodddy workmanship.

Matthew Hare from Gigaclear was highlighting BT swallowing up most of the BDUK contracts but he has picked up a few smaller Phase 2 contracts like projects in Gloucestershire, Essex and Berkshire. He had noticed a few of the local authorities being helpful about these rollouts like in Kent where Kent county council de-scoped (provided exclusive access) for Gigaclear projects compared to Rutlant where the Rutland county council and BT overbuilt Gigaclear with FTTC service.

This comes to the big question about whether an overbuild by one or more competing operators permit real infrastructure-level service competition. Some countries, most notably France have found that an overbuild by a competing infrastructure provider can achieve this level of competition.

Dana Tobak from Hyperoptic highlighted that fibre-copper technology like fibre-to-the-cabinet is a short-lived asset. She also highlighted the issue of access to the “pits, poles and pipes” owned by Openreach being a burdensome process for competing operators. This ranged from costs to onerous procedures and restrictions sucn as not being able to provide business broadband services.

There was also the issue of business-level property rates and taxes levied on the infrastructure where the workflow associated with these costs was onerous thanks to the Valuations Office Agency. This made it difficult for an operator to factor in the property rates due on the infrastructure when they are costing a rollout. To the same extent, the property taxes levied by a local government could be seen as a bargaining chip especially where the local government is behind the rollout in order to see effective increase in their local land value and tax base.

The question associated with an independent Openreach managing the infrastructure was whether this would breed real service competition. An issue that was highlighted was that Openreach could focus on the premium pure-fibre-based service and make life hard for small-time operators like regional-focused operators or startups who want ot serve the British market. But Matthew Hare reckons that it is better for the UK, especially rural areas to see Openreach as an independent operator.

Here, ISPReview have raised the issue of competitive next-generation broadband provision with independent “own-infrastructure” operators and covered some of the main hurdles facing these operators. This includes proper management of costs including infrastructure-based property taxes and rates; the creation of sustainable competition including build-over rights; incumbent operators’ behaviour including preferential treatment by governments; and access to the same  “pits, pipes and poles” by competing operators.

Cotswolds – part of the big 10000 for Gigaclear

10,000 of these connection pots for the fibre-optic broadband installed

Now Gigaclear has covered 50 small villages around the Oxfordshire and other areas of the UK with their service passing 10,000 properties. From this interview, Matthew had mentioned that 4000 households and businesses had bitten the bullet and taken up the next-generation broadband service that Gigaclear offers.

When this is happening in your village, the broadband service quality becomes better

There have been some benefits across the board with the arrival of these next-generation fibre-based broadband services.

For businesses and other income-generating activities, the next-generation broadband services have been valued as an enabler. One of the benefits that has been noticed was a reduction in traffic levels because of a reduced need to travel to work which has become important for the villages that exist within commuting distance of the large towns. Knowledge workers like accountants, consultants and lawyers also benefited because of their increased bandwidth that is available to them at home so they can run their practice or business more effectively.

Fibre-optic cable laid alongside a lane to a premises in a village

The food, beverage and accommodation industries have valued these rollouts in a few different ways. Initially they saw the increased bandwidth as a way to improve the Wi-Fi-based public Internet service they provide as an amenity and having a consistently-good experience with this service attracts customers. In the interview, Matthew highlighted Oxford Country Cottages who sell this as a significant amenity for their self-catering holiday cottages.  I sent a follow-up email to Oxford Country Cottages regarding their experience with this service and what they identified as a core benefit was the business guests who were returning to these cottages because of the guest-access Wi-Fi that was served by Gigaclear’s fibre-to-the-premises service. This was something that the business guests were finding that was “beyond the norm” for guest-access Wi-Fi networks.

This leads on to the feasibility to use cloud-based business systems which avoids the need to maintain servers on the premises and is considered an essential business tool.

The local communities have benefited from the broadband deployments due to increased cohesion. This was even evident in the initial stages of each project because of the initial curiosity surrounding the projects and that the visibility of the works taking place meant that something good is happening for their village. Some of the townsfolk in each community may want to preserve the status quo but more of them wanted an Internet service better than what the were being provided with.

There have been anecdotal reports of local property values increasing due to the arival of fibre broadband as I have covered before but Gigaclear haven’t seen this as evidence for themselves with any of their rollouts.

But where Gigaclear stands when it comes to providing Internet service is that they will exist as a pureplay broadband provider. That is where their business is about providing an Internet service alone rather than offering a voice telephony or pay-TV service.

Gigaclear are also operating this infrastructure as an infrastructure provider to serve these communities. This is to allow competing retail-level Internet service providers to include the villages in their footprint if they wish to do so.

BT are saying that they are doing the right thing when they are covering Britain’s rural areas but there needs to be a lot more work done to provide a proper level of service for these communities. A lot of these issues aren’t just about adding the necessary equipment but more about making sure that the wiring to the customer’s door is working properly.

What is showing up from the interview is that Gigaclear are putting the pedal to the metal when it comes to deploying infrastructure in to rural communities in order to provide a broadband service that would be considered the norm for big business in the city.

Article

Cotswolds – part of the big 10000 for Gigaclear

From the horse’s mouth

Gigaclear

Press Release

My Comments

I have been following Gigaclear’s efforts in making sure that rural areas in Britain have access to real broadband. Think of places like Epping Forest, the Cotswolds, Underriver in Kent along with a few Oxfordshire villages gaining real broadband that attracts city dwellers wanting to “get away from it all”.

This effort started off in 2010 when Gigaclear was founded by Matthew Hare in 2010 with a focus towards real broadband in rural areas. The first effort was in Lyddington, Rutland where there was a VDSL2-based fibre-to-the-cabinet setup serving that village, then there was a fibre-to-the-premises setup in Hambledon shortly after that.

I did a Skype interview with Matthew Hare regarding the impact these broadband developments had on these towns in the early days of Gigaclear’s existence.  Through the interview, I had found that there was real interest in rural broadband with at least a third of Lyddington subscribing to the fibre-to-the-cabinet rollout and two-thirds of Hambledon pre-contracted to the fibre-to-the-premises rollout at the time of the interview.

As well, these deployments were satisfying business reality by allowing a “country-house” hotel in Hambledon to put forward a fully-functional public-access Wi-Fi Internet service as a drawcard feature; along with allowing small businesses to think of cloud-based software as a way of feeling “grown up”. It also encompassed the fact that an increasing number of villagers were using their computers for some form of income-generating work, whether to telecommute or to run a business or practise a profession from home. This underscored the need for reliable Internet service.

The interview also underscored Gigaclear’s rural-broadband effort as being a real commercial effort in a competitive market rather than philanthropic effort. This is because Gigaclear were coming through as an infrastructure competitor to BT Openreach for these rural areas.

Gigaclear found that the symmetrical FTTP technology was found to be more scalable than other technologies and this led to future-proof setups which can come about as a village or town grows. I would see this underscored more when the same village or town or one nearby acquires a larger employer and more people move in to these communities to work for the employer or work for new shops, schools and other employers that come on the scene to support a larger community.

There has been 40% takeup across the 36 communities in 5 different counties where this service has been deployed with a focus on the slower underserved communities. For that matter, construction activity surrounding a fibre-to-the-premises rollout piques interest because of the impending arrival of an Internet service that realistically serves local needs.

Keep up the good work with covering more villages, hamlets and small towns with real broadband Internet service, Gigaclear!

Articles

York is intending to become a battleground for next-generation broadband Internet

Sky first ultrafast broadband connections | Advanced Television

From the horse’s mouth

Sky Broadband

Press Release

My Comments

York in the UK is showing up as a market where there is some intense competition for next-generation broadband Internet service.

This has come about due to fibre-optic infrastructure being laid down by CityFibre in conjunction with Sky and TalkTalk for a fibre-to-the-premises network capable of operating to 940Mbps. Just lately, Sky had connected their first customer to this network.

It brought out a war of words about what qualifies a city as an “ultrafast” or “gigabit” city when it comes to the presence of next-generation broadband Internet service. The European Union and the UK Government qualified a residential Internet service “ultrafast” as being greater than 100Mbps “at the customer’s door”. But CityFibre were using the term “Gigabit City” to qualify where there is an Internet service with a bandwidth capable of close to a Gigabit per second and is an actual revenue-providing service rather than a trial service.

It is feasible to call many of the UK’s cities as being “ultrafast” when it comes to next-generation broadband deployment because there was services of at least 152Mbps bandwidth penetrating 90% of these cities. Then the other qualifier was the presence of fibre-to-the-premises service with Kingston Upon Hull having 30.9% coverage.

Questions were also raised about BT Openreach providing full fibre-to-the-premises service in York with their central-activities district having native FTTP coverage of 12.4% and the rest of that city having 3.25%. As well, Hyperoptic had wired a large number of apartment blocks in York with FTTP broadband,

The competition issue that may need to be resolved is whether there is any “building-over” taking place where competing infrastructure providers are deploying their infrastructure in to each other’s territory. In a similar vein, there is also the issue of the availability of competing retail Internet service across many or all of the different infrastructures that exist. This could come to a point where the UK will need to determine a policy that affects competing next-generation broadband Internet services delivered using competing last-mile infrastructures in urban areas. This will have to encompass competitors “building over” each others’ infrastructure including access to multiple-premises buildings like apartment or office blocks and shopping centres.

What is happening in York could lead to a very interesting road for delivering fibre-based next-generation broadband in the UK’s urban areas. As well, it could lead to next-generation broadband Internet that is increasingly affordable for most households and small businesses in these areas and yields increased value for money for these users.

Article

Aylesbury Vale – to benefit from real broadband

Aylesbury Vale Broadband Project Starts Rollout of Fibre Optic Network |ISPReview.co.uk

From the horse’s mouth

Aylesbury Vale Broadband

Project Page

Press Release – At long last we’re laying the fibre

My Comments

Two villages in Aylesbury Vale, Buckinghamshire have been reached for real next-generation broadband thanks to the Aylesbury Vale Broadband project.

North Marston (population 800) and Granborough (population 600) have been the first to benefit from this technology which will primarily be fibre-to-the-premises. But the Aylesbury Vale Broadband Project is taking a mixed-technology approach with fibre-to-the-cabinet if it isn’t feasible to roll out the better technology. Once these villages are proven as successful for this project, other Aylesbury Vale communities will be looked at for covering with next-generation broadband.

This is a complementary project that will focus on areas that are missed out on by the Broadband Delivery UK and the Connected Counties rural-broadband programmes. A lot of the effort is driven by volunteer labour courtesy of the local villagers. There is public funding from the New Homes

Once the service is fully active, the cost to join will be at least GBP£25 per month along with a GBP£150 installation fee. This will include the supply of a wireless router that supports 802.11ac Wi-Fi technology to be positioned at the home network’s Internet “edge” while the service has a 12-month minimum term contract. The full-fibre services will run initially at 300Mbps but are capable of Gigabit speeds.

The Aylesbury Vale Broadband project is one of many examples in the UK that I have read about where local effort and initiative has brought a rural area out of the digital backwaters and drawn it to something that satisfies today’s realities. This is being seen as of importance when we deal with the countryside being a small-business hub or attracting people who have had enough of the city life.

Article

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

My Comments

All too often, when there are discussions about assuring Internet service quality, these discussions focus on consumers who are primarily downloading content from the Internet. But small businesses and telecommuters are easily left out of the equation.

These users have particular needs as far as Internet service goes. For example, they frequently upload data; whether to transfer data between colleagues using an online file exchange like Dropbox or BitTorrent Sync, to use a cloud-computing service, or to use IP-based telecommunications services like Skype to talk with colleagues in town or across the world. Similarly, they rely on these Internet services to “keep the pot boiling” and if these services underperform or fail, their earning potential is reduced very heavily and the “pot doesn’t boil”. But they don’t have the bargaining power that a big business has because they work on a very small cash flow and have fewer employees with some relying on one who is the “chief cook and bottle washer”.

Decent internet at a reasonable price is essential for small businesses

ISPs have often forgotten about this class of user by having them either use consumer-grade Internet services or prefer them to sign up to a leased-line or similar “big-ticket” Internet service for their business needs. This is typically shown up by product lists for small-business Internet service having the only action that a potential subscriber can do is to request a quote for their service rather than looking at a tariff chart to compare costs. It is even though some services like leased-line services have prices that are particular to the business’s location and needs. Similarly, small businesses, telecommuters and similar users may not have the need or be able to afford a “big-business” service like a leased-line.

The main ISPs in the UK have taken this head-on by working on a code-of-practice for provisioning Internet to a small business or similar user. This factors in upload speeds, the availability of next-generation broadband “at the door” and service-level agreements. As well, at the moment, ISPs that use BT Openreach’s infrastructure have the ability to sell a service-level-agreement option with faster repair times but it is not always that quick to have problems remediated.

There is a call in the UK for certain small-business Internet services that can be provisioned on a self-install basis using existing infrastructure like ADSL2, fibre-copper (FTTC/VDSL2) and the like to have the tariffs and packages listed on the ISP’s Website. Similarly, Ofcom is requiring ISPs who use the Openreach infrastructure to support the simplified switch-over arrangements for their small-business services where these services use the same infrastructure. As well, they want Broadband Delivery UK to set targets for the level of reach for business-grade next-generation Internet.

Personally, I would like to see small-business broadband that uses existing infrastructure be offered at reasonable prices and these services to come with a decent bandwidth for uploading and downloading along with a service-level agreement that covers the contracted throughput and the time it takes to remedy service faults. If the service requires new infrastructure to be pulled from the street or the building’s infrastructure hub such as FTTP fibre-optic or cable Internet, there should be a published quote for this kind of requirement.

As well, small businesses, whether working from home or other premises such as a shopfront should be factored in when it comes to assessing the quality of Internet service and the level of competition available to these users. Similarly, multi-tenancy business developments like office blocks or shopping areas need to factor in access to business-quality broadband service for their tenants as a key drawcard feature.

At least there is somewhere where action is being taken to provide proper value-for-money Internet service to small businesses, start-ups, telecommuters and similar users.