Tag: United Kingdom

Article

Epping Forest – to get fibre-to-the-premises Internet

From the horse’s mouth

Superfast Essex (Essex County Council)

Press Release

My Comments

Gigaclear has put their foot in Essex’s door to offer fibre-to-the-premises broadband Internet.

Here, they were selected by the Superfast Essex project team initiated by the Essex County Council as a break from BT deploying most next-generation Internet projects in the county. It is part of the new “Rural Challenge” effort covering the Epping Forest area and receives funding from public and private sources with public money coming from the UK Government and from local government in the form of the Epping Forest District Council and the Essex County Council. The private source of funding comes primarily from Gigaclear.

They will deploy fibre-to-the-premises next-generation broadband to 4,500 properties in the Epping Forest area which will encompass Fyfield, Stapleford, Tawney, Bobbingworth and closely-located communities. The project will get off the ground in November 2015 and be complete by December 2016 if things go to plan and Gigaclear were awarded GBP£7.5m to have it running. As regular readers will know, Gigaclear’s fibre-to-the-premises infrastructure supports the same bandwidth for both uploading and downloading and they are capable of offering Gigabit transfer speeds for the Internet services.

If this project is deemed successful, the Essex County Council could consider covering more of that county with the fibre-to-the-home technology courtesy of Gigaclear. The wider Superfast Essex project is still based on FTTC fiber-copper technology provided by BT Openreach and this covers 87% of the county.

A good question that is worth raising is whether these rollouts could technically and legally support infrastructure-level competition including allowing one provider to provide infrastructure for FTTP broadband while another can provide infrastructure for fibre-copper broadband services. It also encompasses whether a retail provider would be able to have access to one network or all of the networks and I would find it worth looking at how the French have been rolling out fibre broadband on an infrastructure-competition basis and is something that Ofcom could investigate when it comes to assuring a sustainably-competitive best-value Internet service for urban-living and rural-living Britons.

Articles

It now becomes easier to chase value for money for your British Internet service

At last, switching between rubbish broadband providers now easier | The Register

Switching your broadband supplier just got really easy | Engadget

From the horse’s mouth

Ofcom

Press Release

My Comments

In the UK, Ofcom have simplified the processes involved for customers who want to change DSL providers that use the BT Openreach or KCOM telephony infrastructures.

Previously, a customer who wanted to “jump ship” had to obtain from their prior ISP a “Migration Authorisation Code” and had to pass this to the newer provider they were about to sign up to. Now, from Saturday 20 June 2015, the newer provider will facilitate the switchover without extra work from the customer.

There will be a requirement that the both the existing and the new ISPs send a letter to the customer advising them of the switchover and this will be the point where the customer can opt out. As well, both ISPs are required to keep records of the customer’s consent to change ISPs in order to protect customers against “slamming”. This is the practice where a customer is switched between electricity, telephone or Internet services that use the same infrastructure without their knowledge or permission and can result from participation in a “cold-call”.

But there could be the ability for customers to arrange with their ISP to have any switch-over to be an opt-in process to frustrate “slamming” attempts. This may be of value to small-business users who are often at risk of falling prey to various scams targeting that sector.

According to Which?, UK’s main consumer-protection body who is similar to Choice in Australia, customers are receiving sub-par Internet bandwidth from most of the providers who are using this infrastructure.

As I have said before, this would apply to Internet services which use the BT Openreach or KCOM telephony infrastructures and wouldn’t really apply to customers switching between services with different infrastructures like cable or FTTP fibre-optic. But a good question worth raising is that if a customer is made aware of aVDSL2 service and switches to the FTTC service, would this arrangement take place for customers switching to the FTTC service?

What this improvement should offer is to allow customers to have more control over the Internet services they subscribe to so they have greater value for money.

Article

More of the Cotswolds to benefit from real broadband

UPD 1Gbps FTTP Broadband Coming to 6,495 Premises in Gloucestershire UK | ISPReview.co.uk

From the horse’s mouth

FasterShire public-private Internet partnership

Press Release

My Comments

The Cotswolds is an Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty located south of the centre of England. Because of this characteristic underscored by the rolling hills and the villages that have their buildings built out of the local stonework, it is another of those country areas that attract people who want to move out of the city to the country. It also attracts an artisan culture with a fair bit of local arts and crafts going on.

But what about making sure that these people who live and work in the Cotswolds have access to real Internet service? This problem is being rectified by a partnership between Gigaclear and the FasterShire public-private Internet-service partnership to bring full fibre broadband to the villages of Guiting Power, Chedworth, Whelford, Bilbury and Icomb.

This was initially a British Telecom project which covered Phase 1 of the rollout but the Gigaclear partnership has underscored that BT can’t have a clear run of the Phase 2 contracts. It is based on Gigaclear’s track record with supplying some of the small villages around the Home Counties with a future-proof fibre-to-the-premises broadband service, something regular readers of HomeNetworking01.info will be familiar with. It will still complement British Telecom’s efforts in this locale and the goal will be to have the Internet service pass 6,450 premises in the Cotswolds area and will break FasterShire’s goal of 90% broadband coverage.

Geoffrey Clifton Brown, who is the local MP for Cotswolds established an election promise to cover his electorate with real broadband at the door for all of his constituents.

As well, the Gigaclear solution isn’t just about fibre to the premises but also about Internet services with a subscriber-level bandwidth of a Gigabit/second symmetrically this achieving a service that is effectively future-proof for these areas. This also caters for the increasing trend towards video-conferencing and cloud-based computing in both the home and business computing applications.

What I would like to see for Gigaclear to achieve is to provide FTTH not just to new areas but as a competing service for areas that have an FTTC setup provided by BT Openreach so that they can be able to benefit from the higher throughput.

Keep up the good work in providing city-business-grade broadband to rural communities, Gigaclear and FasterShire!

Articles

Fibre-to-the-basement broadband could be seen as a way to add next-generation broadband to a marina

Hyperfast broadband for boats in London’s South Dock marina | ThinkBroadband

Fibre to the barges: Hyperoptic connects houseboats to gigabit broadband | Recombu

UK ISP Hyperoptic Touts Hyperfast 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Boat Broadband | ISPReview.co.uk

London marina boats get faster broadband than most UK homes | Cable.co.uk

From the horse’s mouth

Hyperoptic

Press Release

My Comments

There are some of us who use boats for more than just sailing around. For some of us, they are our residences but whether you are at a marina or tying up at a quiet shore, the issue of broadband can be a limitation.

Typically, if a marina provides broadband Internet service to its tenants, this would be in the form of Wi-Fi provisioned in the same vein as a hotel’s or caravan park’s public-access Wi-Fi service. This typically involves a few Wi-Fi access points over the marina’s area and a Web-based login experience. On the other hand, if there isn’t any Wi-FI Internet, the sailor would have to use a USB wireless-broadband dongle or a Mi-Fi router to get broadband on the boat and most of these services aren’t very good value for money especially for those who live on a boat.

A dual-WAN router like thsi one coudl earn its keep on a houseboat or yacht

Now Hyperoptic have worked with the Southwark Council in London to provide a more exciting broadband service to sailors who live at the South Dock Marina. They have implemented the same technique used to provide “fibre-to-the-building” or “fibre-to-the-basement” next-generation broadband to multi-tenancy buildings, work they are familiar with, to setting this marina up for wired broadband.

Here, they have a communications hub installed at both the South Dock marina and the Greenland Dock marina along with Cat5e Ethernet cabling toe each of the residential berths. The resident sailors would need to drop an Ethernet cable between the facilities box on the berth and their boat and use a wireless broadband router with Ethernet WAN connection to distribute the broadband across their craft while they are moored at the dock. Of course, the “Mi-Fi” would still be needed when you are out sailing, but this need could be served better through the use of a dual-WAN router that uses a USB connection for mobile-broadband modems as a WAN option.

They subscribe to a private Internet service similar to what we would subscribe to at home or in our businesses and can benefit from broadband and landline packages with 20Mb/s, 100Mb/s and 1Gb/s bandwidth depending on the package. At the time of the press release, there has been at least 50% takeup of these services which I see as being of promise for this kind of service.

Here, this dodges the bullets associated with the metal construction associated with most craft or mobile-broadband plans that are either capped or charged at exorbitant rates.

Using the fibre-to-the-building method of deploying broadband to a marina that has a significant number of people living “on-board” could make for a value-added extra especially in any of the “new shoreline suburbs” cropping up in most of the cities where each of these developments has to have a marina. Tie this with next-generation broadband service plans that are sold “by-the-month” or in a manner that appeals to occasionally-occupied premises and this could appeal to more sailor types.

Article

Local government could also improve the reality of proper broadband in the country

Good Broadband Helps Lift Rutland to Top Halifax’s 50 Best Rural Areas | ISPReview

My Comments

I have given increased coverage to the subject of rural broadband, including implementation of next-generation technologies in the country.

Here I have stood for proper rural broadband due to raising the bar for people who live or work in the country rather than treating them as second-class citizens, something I have experienced with radio, television and telephone. An example of this was a telephone service that was frequently riddled with crosstalk, a radio service with reduced access to music content or a TV service with unreliable reception.

In the UK, the Broadband Delivery UK programme assisted by British Telecom made sure that real broadband passed 98% of the county’s premises courtesy of fibre-to-the-cabinet technology. This was also complemented in some villages with fibre-to-the-premises technology courtesy of Gigaclear and Rutland Telecom. This has been demonstrated as a way to lift the value of the properties in these areas as the quality of broadband service can improve one’s online life.

But real broadband in rural areas has been seen as contributing to an improvement to quality of life in these neighbourhoods, which was highlighted in a Halifax survey that was just published. Halifax factored the quality of broadband service in to this list with a bandwidth of 2Mbps or greater as a positive influence. Here, the Rutland neighbourhood appeared at number 1 thanks to the Gigaclear and BDUK

These figures could be used by local government and citizen groups to substantiate why real competition is important for Internet service and why country areas need real Internet service that is reliable. It can also be used by national governments to define the standard of adequate broadband Internet service and justify having this service covered by a universal-service obligation along with protection of real competition for these services and the provision of public money to set these services up.

Article

Expect Sky and BT to launch new 4K boxes sooner rather than later | Engadget

Sky accelerates new set-top box launch | The Telegraph (UK)

My Comments

4K UHDTV – part of the UK pay-TV battleground

The UK pay-TV battleground between Virgin, BT and Sky, is to benefit the 4K UHDTV technology with BT and Sky offering an IP-linked set-top box that will yield 4K content as part of their service.

This is because BT is stepping in to the battleground when it comes to broadcast rights for UK and European football (soccer) matches and 4K UHDTV will become a bargaining chip whenever the rights are being renegotiated. It is also about keeping the subscriber base alive through and beyond the footie season especially as 4K UHDTV-capable sets start to come in to price ranges that most can think about.

Both the companies will deliver the 4K UHDTV services via Internet with the use of 4K-capable set-top boxes that are connected to the home network and Internet service. These companies are also on about offering the services as a multi-play “eggs in one basket” package with pay-TV and fixed broadband Internet along with, perhaps, fixed-line telephony and a mobile telecommunications service. The 4K technology will be seen more as a subscription driver for these multi-play services.

They are also factoring in multi-room and multi-screen viewing so you can view the TV content on devices like your regular computer or your tablet.

Sky’s imminent 4K-capable set-top will be seen as a way to stave off them shedding subscribers due to loss of Champions League footie broadcasts. This is while BT is intending to have 4K on BT Sport within months with the provision of a new set-top in UK Spring that will be augmented with a heavy marketing push. Let’s not forget that Virgin Media, UK’s cable-TV service, is not taking this lying down. They are trialling a 4K UHDTV service with an intent to put 4K down the cable.

Brits will have to eventually consider implementing a wired backbone along with their Wi-Fi network as this momentum becomes strong with the competing pay-TV providers. This will most likely mean looking towards HomePlug AV500 or HomePlug AV2 which uses the existing ring main that delivers the household electricity as the “wired no-new-wires” data backbone.

Article

Brit mobile firms in FOURPLAY TUSSLE – how very French of them | The Register

My Comments

Same level of competition for quad-play services in France and the UK

France and the UK have recently become hotbeds for Internet-service competition whether at a pure-play (single-service) level or with packages that integrate landline telephony, fixed broadband Internet and / or multichannel pay TV. Those companies typically are offering this service via a “single-pipe” setup with some of them reselling content and services from competitors who offer it on a wholesale basis if they can’t sell it directly.

This has been due to government telecommunications and competitive-trade authorities enforcing real competition through measures like stopping incumbent operators from selling wholesale service to competitors under unfair terms compared to their retail offerings. As well, in France, it took Free to offer broadband and triple-play packages with increased value at ridiculously-low prices to effectively “shake up” the market and start this level of competition.

The smartphone to be part of cost-effective home telecommunications and pay-TV packages in the UK

Now this is being expanded towards “four-play” or “quadruple-play” services that include mobile telecommunications along with the fixed telephony, “hot and cold running Internet” and pay TV. This is facilitated typically through their own mobile networks or buying mobile telecommunications from an established. typically pure-play, mobile operator on a wholesale basis as a “mobile virtual network”. Some companies may call the mobile broadband service as a distinct service and describe the packages that include this service as “five-play” or “quintuple-play” packages.

Over previous years, France has established an example of a healthy competitive market for this level of telecommunications and entertainment service. This is with all their telcos and broadband operators offering the “boxes” which integrated telephony, broadband and pay TV at some very keen prices, something I have covered regularly on HomeNetworking01.info. But most of these providers either have their own mobile infrastructure over the country or are putting themselves in a position to set up mobile virtual networks that they resell with their packages. An example of this is Free selling mobile telephony to their customers for an extra cost that is effectively “pennies’ worth”.

The way this level of service has come about for a lot of the UK operators is through varying levels of consolidation and business partnerships. A lot of these consolidations and partnerships have been with the companies who offer one or more services that can complement their own service packages to construct the “quad-play” package. But one of the situations that this has led to is for BT who sold off their Cellnet mobile-telephony service to O2 which is part of Spain’s Telefonica company in the 1990s, wanting to buy back the mobile network from this telco to run as the “mobile arm” of their quad-play package.

The directions that this could lead to include the availability of private femtocells that provide local mobile-phone coverage for the customer with the broadband connection serving as a backhaul or “cellular over Wi-Fi” for voice calls on one’s smartphone; TV Everywhere which is about access to the pay-TV packages anywhere in the country with your laptop or mobile device; and integrated landline / mobile telephony setups i.e. to receive calls destined to your landline on your mobile phone for no extra cost or call from home using your mobile phone at home-phone tariffs. As well, multiple-mobile-device Internet service could become very much part of the packages which can cater to those of us who maintain more than one mobile-broadband device like a “Mi-Fi” device.

Even integration of “over-the-top” telephony services like Skype and Viber could become the norm for these service providers by allowing customers to make or take calls through these services via either the mobile or the landline phone for nothing.

Other countries like the USA, Germany or Australia could be highly aware of this level of competition and know how to be prepared when it hits their shores or to know how to encourage it in a viable and sustainable manner.