Tag: VDSL2

In response to the latest news that has happened with Gigaclear and Rutland Telecom in relation to the Hambleton fibre-to-the-premises rollout, I offered to organise an email exchange with a representative from this company about this broadband access network.

Matthew Hare replied to my email offering to do a short Skype-based telephone interview rather than an email interview. This allowed him and I to talk more freely about the Hambleton and Lyddington rollouts which I have been covering in HomeNetworking01.info .

Real interest in rural-broadband improvements

There are the usual naysayers who would doubt that country-village residents would not need real broadband, and I have heard these arguments through the planning and execution of Australia’s National Broadband Network.

But what Matthew had told me through this interview would prove them wrong. In the Lyddington VDSL-based fibre-to-the-cabinet rollout, a third of the village had become paying subscribers to this service at the time of publication. In the Hambleton fibre-to-the-premises rollout, two-thirds of that village had “pre-contracted” to that service. This means that they had signed agreements to have the service installed and commissioned on their premises and have paid deposits towards its provision.

Satisfying the business reality

Both towns have hospitality businesses, in the form of hotels, pubs and restaurants that need real broadband. For example, Matthew cited a large “country-house” hotel in Hambleton that appeals to business traffic and this hotel would be on a better footing with this market if they can provide Wi-Fi Internet service to their guests. Similarly, these businesses would benefit from improved innovative cloud-based software that would require a proper Internet connection.

As well, most of the households in these villages do some sort of income-generating work from their homes. This can be in the form of telecommuting to one’s employer or simply running a business from home.

The reality of a proper Internet service for business was demonstrated through the Skype call session with Matthew. Here, the Skype session died during the interview and when he came back on, he told me that the fault occurred at his end. He mentioned that he was working from home at another village that had the second-rate Internet service and affirmed the need for a proper broadband service that can handle the traffic and allow you to be competitive in business.

A commercial effort in a competitive market

Matthew also underlined the fact that this activity is a proper commercial venture rather than the philanthropic effort that besets most other rural-broadband efforts. He also highlighted that there were other rural-broadband improvements occurring around the UK, including the BT Openreach deployments. and this wasn’t the only one to think of.

But what I would see is that an Internet market that is operating under a government-assured pro-consumer pro-competition business mandate is a breeding ground for service improvement, especially when it comes to rural Internet service.

Conclusion

From what Matthew Hare had said to me through the Skype telephone interview, there is a real and probable reason why the countryside shouldn’t miss out on the broadband Internet that city dwellers take for granted.

Any of you who are regular readers of this site or who subscribe to it will have seen regular articles on activity concerning improvement of broadband Internet service in rural areas. Previously, I have written a post about why I stand for proper Internet service in the countryside and cover it in this site.

But I have observed activities that have raised the standard of rural Internet service in certain areas where there has been lively and competitive trading environment for Internet service. These range from local startups who offer to raise the bar for Internet in a country town to governments putting their hand to the plough for real broadband in the country.

Why rural broadband service

Farmers and small business in rural areas

Primarily farmers and small-business owners would benefit from proper broadband in the country. This is due to more of the business being transacted online such as the use of e-government services as part of managing livestock on the farm.

There is also the desire to be competitive with urban businesses or, in the case of farming, be responsive to customer and partner needs very quickly.

Motels like this one can offer Wi-Fi hotspots as a competitive edge

It also extends to hospitality businesses like hotels, motels, cafes and restaurants in these areas who want to offer public-access Internet service as a way of offering “that bit extra”. This would encompass resorts created around mountains or water features like ski resorts or lakeside resorts.

Similarly, education institutions who have rural campuses can benefit from real broadband Internet as a study and research tool. This could lead to universities and the like enriching the town with research-driven business.

Country living

The countryside is infact considered an ideal place to live due to a slower pace of life. As well, some parts of the country are particular areas of attraction for this class of living due to features of natural beauty like water features, forests or mountains.

An increasing number of urban-based people visit the country as a holiday destination or even move there. Here they would benefit from the same standard of broadband as they have in the city so they can communicate with relatives or friends there.

Similarly, the appeal of telecommuting wound go in hand with the country life as people can head in to the city only when they need to conduct business meetings. This would appeal to semi-retired people who are reducing their time in the main office.

Peri-urban areas

I am also encompassing peri-urban rural areas as well as the typical rural areas that are a distance away from major towns in the scope of this article. These are typically farming districts, areas of outstanding natural beauty or areas surrounding classic monuments that abut a major city; but are sparsely populated compared to the major city.

The people who live in the major city see these places as being a destination for a day trip and a lot of business in these areas is boosted by the tourists from the major city. Some of these areas, especially those focused around areas of outstanding beauty also attract retirees or other people who are “done with the city” as a place of residence, although it doesn’t take them long to travel to town when they need to visit it.

Examples of these in Australia are the Yarra Valley Wine District and the Dandenongs in Melbourne; the Blue Mountains in Sydney and Barwon Heads in Geelong. In France, there would be the wine regions surrounding some of the major cities like Bordeaux.

Action that has been undertaken on this front

Local initiatives

A major form of action that I have noticed is initiatives that are driven by local government and business. This has commonly occurred in broadband-improvement rollouts that are funded by local councils and / or facilitated by small local telecommunications firms or ISPs.

The best examples are the UK developments where local broadband service providers are formed or regional broadband service providers plough effort into “switching on” particular parishes. There are intense local awareness campaigns run by these small broadband service providers to solicit interest from the residents and business owners; and they will manifest in the form of offline and online promotions; including town-hall meetings.

In some of the UK deployments, there has been the use of local “sweat equity” for assisting in the establishment of fibre trunks as well as local landowners setting up easements for these fibre trunks.

Similarly local governments in the UK and France have provided seed money to the broadband initiatives. These are usually to make the towns attract more investment as well as to ignite local “e-government” initiatives.

National assistance

Defining universal-service obligations

Some countries are taking action to define a minimum broadband Internet service standard to be available across their territories. This is akin to the universal service standards that have been applied to electricity and telephone services.

Here, this may be achieved through extending the remit of the universal telephone service, including collecting monies associated with its provision, to the broadband Internet service.

National and international funding

This also leads to national governments funding broadband-service improvement; usually as part of an Internet-service improvement for the nation.as In Europe, for example, the nations also receive handouts from the European Union in Brussels towards facilitating these improvements.

In some countries like Australia and the UK, the upgrading of the telecommunications backbone to fibre-optic technology and the provision of fibre-based infrastructure close to or reaching the customer is considered a major driver for rural-broadband improvement. The use of public resources for this kind of upgrade has often beem met with derision by various conservative groups because they would rather see it all left in the hands of private enterprise.

Technology

Some of the technology is based on what is being used to established the “next-generation broadband” Internet services and is being used as a way of catering to the growth of these rural areas and the changing data transfer needs.

Fibre-to-the-cabinet technology

This typically creates a high-speed fibre-optic backbone to one or more street cabinets located close to customer clusters.The customers have the phone connections linked to this cabinet and the Internet service is delivered via ADSL2 or VDSL2 technology over these phone services.They may have the regular telephone provided via the town’s exchange, a sub-exchange in the street cabinet or VoIP technology.

In some situations, this technique has been used as an “ADSL2 booster” effort by bringing a higher-throughput ADSL2 service to customers who, by virtue of distance to the exchange, would receive lower throughput service or no service at all.

This also opens up a path for offering fibre-to-the-premises next-generation broadband Internet to customers in these towns, either as a service differentiator or as an upgrade path. It also provides for service growth especially if a town acquires a major employer and sees its capacity grow.

Fibre-optic trunks

A fibre-optic trunk line that passes country areas may be treated like a natural-gas pipeline passing these areas. Here, branch lines or “spurs” are connected to the trunk line and used to serve local communities; while the trunk serves cities that are at each end of the line.

This is seen as a way to establish a next-generation broadband Internet service in to the neighbouring towns in a cost-effective manner.

Terrestrial wireless and “white space” spectrum

Another technology that is exciting the prospects of real broadband to the country is the concept of terrestrial wireless. These setups are typically fixed-wireless links that serve individual households or, in some cases, communities or household clusters, with a wired technology like ADSL2 or Ethernet linking to each customer.

Initially this technology was based on 2.4GHz or similar radio links but there is a new break being facilitated at the moment and it is known as “white space”. This is where UHF or, in some cases, Band III VHF, TV spectrum that has been vacated by TV broadcasters as they change to spectrum-efficient digital TV technology.

Governments are looking at using this bandwidth as a cost effective way to provide terrestrial-wireless Internet service to country areas where it would be difficult or cost-prohibitive to provide copper or fibre-optic wireline Internet service. Examples of this kind of setup would be mountains or islands.

This will typically end up as a fixed-wireless deployment with a modem connected to the aerial (antenna) which would most likely be a high-gain TV aerial. This modem would be connected to a broadband router to serve the home network installed at homes in these locations.

Issues to be looked at

A key issue to be looked at in relation to providing a proper broadband Internet service to the country is the decrepit telephony infrastructure that exists in these areas. This is something that I have seen for myself with people who have lived in the country or peri-urban areas as they experienced ADSL service that performed poorly or became less reliable.

Here, telephone companies have historically allowed the telephony infrastructure to perform just enough for voice traffic. As well, due to long cable runs, it has become cost-prohibitive to always renew this telephone wiring to the customer’s door. In some cases, monopoly telephony carriers have allowed the telephony infrastructure to become severely derelict, with callers experiencing poor-quality telephone conversations where they hear crackling or crosstalk.

Dial-up modems and fax machines have worked to what was expected of these phone lines, usually using error-correction methods as part of the data transmission protocols.

ADSL broadband has put a newer requirement on the phone lines due to the bandwidth decreasing as the distance increases. In some cases, newer wiring has effectively increased the performance of the telephone system as far as ADSL service is concerned. On the other hand older and decaying connections would impair the telephone circuit’s ADSL performance, even causing the ADSL signal to drop out. This is even though you could successfully make or take a telephone call on that same line.

What needs to happen if ADSL broadband is being rolled out in to a rural area, the telephone lines need to be checked for quality and reliability. This includes checking connections for quality and reliability; and that ADSL line-distance metrics need to be true to the phone service’s distance from the exchange.

It also includes re-assessing telephone systems whenever newer building developments take place; which can happen over a town’s lifespan. It also includes situations where a neighbouring town becomes larger and the current area becomes a suburb of the neighbouring town.

Conclusion

There have been some positive steps taken by different parties to make the idea of real broadband Internet service in the country a reality. This includes encompassing it as part of defining the minimum requirements for an Internet service.

Telekom startet FTTH-Ausbau für VDSL in Potsdam – VDSL.de (Germany – German language)

My comments

The fat pipe is becoming fatter in Germany

Deutsche Telekom are intending to roll out FTTH (fibre-to-the-home) next-generation broadband into Potsdam, Germany. This is although there is a great penetration of VDSL-driven FTTC (fibre-to-the-curb / fibre-to-the-cabinet) setups in most of Germany, including this capital city of Berlin-Brandenburg.

They intend to have this fibre infrastructure pass at least 21,000 households in the southern and western areas of this city. Building owners will need to give Deutsche Telekom a permit to give the “go-ahead” for the fibre-optic installation work to start in their building, as would be required for most telecommunications works in these buildings; but this could be simply a formality as they realise the benefits of this technology for their tenants.

The deployment pricing will be similar to what has been called for Australia’s National Broadband Network where the installation will be free when the service is rolled out to the area but will cost more for installations commenced after the rollout.

As well, Deutsche Telekom do have a long-term intent to roll out FTTH next-generation broadband to Germany’s major cities.

Moving from FTTC to FTTH

What has interested me about this work is that it is an example of being able to move from an FTTC or FTTN setup with a copper run from a street box to the customer’s door; to an FTTH / FTTP setup which has fibre-optic all the way to the customer’s door. Thi is done while reusing existing fibre-optic cabling infrastructure rather than laying down new infrastructure.

Some of the FTTC or FTTN setups like a few of the deployments occurring in rural Britain are being designed with support for migration to the all-fibre layouts. So anyone who does want to advocate for a part-fibre part-copper setup for a next-generation broadband rollout would need to factor in a future-proof arrangement for FTTH/FTTP all-fibre setups down the track. As well, this approach can cater for environments where some buildings like offices or educational facilities could have an all-fibre rune but as needs change, other buildings could have the all-fibre run. Similarly, it can allow reuse of existing head-end equipment used for the copper deployment like DSLAMs on newer extensions of the part-copper part-fibre setup such as entry to new neighbourhoods for example.

So this setup means that even a part-copper part-fibre setup like an FTTC setup could benefit from higher throughput speeds by moving towards an all-fibre setup while retaining the existing fibre-optic backbone infrastructure.

Customers please note with these conversions

When these networks switch over from a VDSL2-based part-copper part-fibre network to an all-fibre network, you will have to move from a DSL modem router to a broadband router with an Ethernet WAN (Internet) port.

Some high-end modem routers will have a dual-WAN setup which uses an Ethernet port as a secondary WAN port and this may be in the form of a LAN port that can become a WAN port or as a dedicated WAN port. It is worth checking if your modem-router has this setup by referring to its instruction manual or manufacturer’s Website.

Mehr VDSL im Raum Bopfingen – VDSL.de (Germany – German language)

My comments

Just lately, the German VDSL2 next-generation broadband Internet network could be increasing its footprint in parts of Bopfingen, a small city in Baden-Württemberg. The intended scope is to cover the communities of Pfaumloch, Goldburghausen and Utzmemmingen

This is intended to be part of a natural-gas rollout project that is servicing the neighbourhood and this project would provide the opportunity to lay down a fibre-optic backbone to service this same area with VDSL2 next-generation Internet service.

The Bundesregierung (German federal government) were intending to offer to underpin this project at a cost of 450k Euro.

There is some resentment about the VDSL deployment in Goldburghaussen because of the perceived extra expense that the fibre-optic backbone would cause. It is more so for a small VDSL2 deployment which covers fewer “doors” than the other deployments in this region because the economies of scale don’t exist in these locations. This is although Goldburghaussen could increase its VDSL2 service demand due to business wanting to set up where there is the “full-on” next-generation Internet.

There is public money going towards this project, especially from the Bundesregierung as previously detailed. But the main feature that I liked of this project is that it is intended to be part of an already-funded infrastructure-rollout project i.e. the gas rollout where similar work is being done, thus avoiding the need to put up more of the public money just to perform new works for this project.

It should still be subject to competitive access requirements so that there is the ability to deliver competitively-priced service.

Therefore I would support the concurrent deployment if next-generation Internet service with a major customer-facing infrastructure project like a natural-gas rollout or power-cable undergrounding project.

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.

Telekom: VDSL-Ausbau in BaWü geplant (VDSL service in Baden-Württemberg planned) | VDSL.de (Germany – German language)

My comments and translated notes from this story

There is some increased VDSL deployment activity occurring in Baden-Wurttemberg with an intent to make sure it is “switched on” in Crailsheim, Satteldorf and Rudolfsberg by June-August 2011 (north-hemisphere Summer). I have used Google Maps to have a look at these towns and found that these are the small country towns with Rudolfsberg being a village.

Deutsche Telekom will be needing to lay 70km worth of new fibre-optic cable and install the necessary VDSL2 switch-boxes to provide this service to the three towns.

At the moment, they would need to have 2000 potential subscribers registering interest for VDSL2 service in these three towns by the beginning Dec 2010 and want to run with their “Call & Surf Comfort VDSL” telephone+Internet plan as the preferred deal.

This plan which is worth €44.95 / month yields inclusive telephone calling to German landlines and VDSL Internet use with a bandwidth of 25Mbps standard or 50Mbps for €5 extra.

What would be interesting to know is whether all of these communities will achieve the 2000-potential-customer goal in order to see more of rural Baden-Württenberg become covered with VDSL2. It would also be interest to find out whether any of the rural VDSL2 services in Germany do make the contract bandwidths. This may be more likely because of that country being one who operates on precision and excellence and the telephony infrastructure being kept in high order.