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More on Broadband in the UK

I continue to have concerns about the provision of Broadband in the UK. ADSL is now used widely in the UK and is hailed by some as a solution to the bandwidth problem. However, it seems that we have consumer needs that outstrip the capacity of this service to deliver! A colleague pointed out to me the following service

TV Links

As we see more of this sort of service being delivered over the internet I can only assume that the effects of contention will become more pronounced.

In my view the only real solution to this in the UK is to move to a service delivery model can support the sorts of bandwidths needed to support the emerging applications. Delivery of TV on the internet is interesting in the form demonstrated above but also when you consider a need for a higher quality experience – HDTV for example the capacity of the last mile once again becomes a major bottleneck.

Bill St Arnaud make some very interesting point in his blog post about the need for fibre in the last mile.

click here to see Bill’s post

The basic contention here is that we need to take a long term view about the development of the last mile infrastructure and move towards a medium which can sustain the ever increasing needs of consumers in bandwidth terms. He points toward the need for fibre and also suggests that Ofcom recognize this in their recent reports.

click here to see the Ofcom Last Mile report

I have to confess that I have not fully digested this as yet but Bill’s post give a a good flavour of its contents.

Clearly any move towards a fibre last mile in Scotland will only be possible if there is an economic model that makes it fincially attractive to the telecoms industry or we see the government provide some strategic investment as it has done in the case of the two Scottish Broadband Pathfinder projects.

Pathfinder North

Pathfinder South

These projects have now finally signed contacts for the provision of broadband connectivity to schools and other local authority building in their areas. This has some very positive effects with schools in some areas having their connectivity upgraded from 128k (ISDN) to 4 Mbps and better.

It would be great to see Scotland following the lead of Japan and Korea and making strategic investment in the last mile to move to a all fibre infrastructure. This of course can only be achieved if a much longer term view is taken so that economic models can be built that can demonstrate good value for money. The cost of digging up the road to install fibre is the current disabling factor – this can only be overcome if we can take a much longer term view about our investments.

There is no such thing as a free ride!

I have commented about YouTube before and that service continues to grow in popularity. Apparently, while YouTube has yet to generate much revenue, it online traffic continues to grow rapidly. According to comScore Media Metrix, YouTube attracted 133.5 million visitors worldwide in January, up from 9.5 million a year earlier. This is pretty impressive growth by any standard.

The service is now owned by Google and empowers users to share their own home videos online with relative ease. Of course the service has also been used by some users to publish copyrighted materials. This is clearly illegal and to some extent has been tolerated by the media industry as long as YouTube takes down any illegal footage which is discovered.

However the scale of this is quite remarkable. An article on Mercurynews.com states

“Last month, Viacom demanded that YouTube remove more than 100,000 unauthorized clips from its site, and since that time, the company has uncovered more than 50,000 additional unauthorized clips, Viacom spokesman Jeremy Zweig said.”

The outcome of this is that Viacom are now suing YouTube for $ 1 billion (interesting what we consider that Google bought YouTube for $ 1.76 billion last November).

Of course the thing that interests me is that fact this would not be an issue if people refused to use the service in this way. The YouTube service has all sorts of useful useful applications but once again we see abuse of the system hitting the headlines. Alas I fear that the convenience offered by YouTube to circumvent copyright will continue to win out in the end.

Perhaps, if we consider that YouTube does abuse the right of the copyright owners we should consider being very selective when viewing content there. The effect of denying the producers of ‘content’ their just return can only have a negative effect which may lead to an overall reduction in the quantity and quality of material being produced.

It will be interesting to see what the outcome of this legal action will be. I expect to see a an out of court settlement of some form.

I feel that it is the introduction of interactive multimedia that that is leading to the sort of performance problems that I have commented on elsewhere in this blog. I am of course referring to home broad band which continues to provide what I consider to be less than acceptable performance. A recent speed test at my daughters flat showed a slower download speed than the upload speed!!!! Not good. (there are times in the day now when we can achieve 6 Meg plus download speeds so I am convinced that we are seeing the effects of bandwidth contention)

Update on ADSL

I have written about the performance of ADSL ( or broadband as this connection is commonly referred ). I am particularly concerned that often people sign up to services from which they expect to get “up to 8 Meg” etc….. Reality is of course that actual performance ofter falls way short of this level. The BBC has an interesting article that states that currently average download speeds are in the region of 2Mbps compared to 512kbps three years ago. If the average is 2Mbps we can expect that some people will see better than this and some will see average performance which is lower than this figure. The the earlier tests I have documented substantiate this. Read the article and take particular note of the comment towards the end of the article about Japan where apparently speeds of 50 – 60 Mbps are possible using VDSL.

Click Here to see the BBC article

It would be interesting to see a little more information about average download speeds in the UK at peak times! I have seen performance on an up to 8 Mbps service vary between 6.5Mbps and 250kbps depending on the time of day! Evening speeds are typically in the region of a few hundred k’s this is when most users want to use their BB service.

It seems that the UK regulator is holding back on the introduction of VDSL and VDSL2 until some problems which relate to radio interference when these technologies are delivered over telephone lines. Hopefully, it will not be too long before we see this next generation of technology being introduced here!

8 Meg ADSL operational

When I arrived back yesterday evening I spent a short time catching up with email etc. and noticed that the performance of my link seemed vary good. On checking my router config this morning I note that the free upgrade to ADSL has been implemented which is great news. I did a speed test to compare to the performance I was getting prior to upgrade. Here are the results.

As you can see it is better than the test published in my last post. I am coming to the view that it is necessary appreciate the importance of the term ‘up to’ when reading about ADSL services. The service I have now is ‘up to 8 Meg’ so the 1915 kb/s and 379 kb/s I see in the test must be acceptable. I can certainly feel the difference between this service and my previous service.

I decided to do some more reading into the issue of backhaul from the local Exchange, I found the following interesting reading.

http://www.vnunet.com/personal-computer-world/features/2168402/fix-broadband
http://www.aaisp.net.uk/maxatm.html

Continuing to monitor ADSL

I have been monitoring my home ADSL account over this weekend. The results I have been seeing are fairly good ( my service is a 2 Meg service)

See an example of the result from the test I did a few minutes ago!

I am now getting even more concerned about the performance on my daughters broadband connection! I am now beginning to wander if there is a fault on her line (but I have done checks which seem to indicate that her line is clean) – or that it is simply the affect of congestion which is causing her problem. Her service is on 50 : 1 contention ration and I expect that it just may be the case that there people in her part of the country are making very good use of their service which would lead to poorer performance for all. Strange that ADSL leads to a point where if it is being well used by the users who are contending for a particular service that everyone would receive a much poorer performance.

I noticed that my home ISP has now advertised an 8 Meg service at no additional cost. I have decided to apply for the upgrade and will be closely monitoring the situation once it has been applied.

Jim