UPD B4RN Connect 157 Homes to FTTH Broadband in Lancashire UK
The Broadband For the Rural North (B4RN) project has told this week’s FTTH Conference 2013 in London that they’ve now managed to connect 157 homes in Lancashire’s (England) Lower Lune Valley to its 1000Mbps capable community built and funded Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network.
The update marks significant progress since October/November 2012, when B4RN’s network connected its first 14 premises in Quernmore, and they recently began to do the same in Arkholme (despite a concerted attack by evil fibre eating mice).
The CEO of B4RN, Barry Forde, informed the conference today that it was spending approximately £1,000 per property to deploy the service (£750k was raised to fund this, between 2011 and 2012, as part of the 1st share offer) and had seen an average take-up of 50% (some specific routes within its coverage have hit more than 80%). The network typically focuses on the most remote 3% of rural areas, which other big commercial operators would find financially extremely difficult to tackle.
By comparison BTOpenreach is expected to charge around £1,500 to deploy its 330Mbps capable FTTP-on-Demand (FTTPoD) solution to homes or businesses that reside roughly 500 metres away from one of their NGA Aggregation Node’s (here). But this is only applicable to FTTC (up to 80Mbps) capable phone lines and those aren’t expected to reach the last 3-5% of predominantly rural areas for a fair few years, if ever.
So good news for B4RN but unfortunately most of us won’t be so lucky and will have to wait for BT to complete their FTTC roll-out before gaining access to faster connectivity. BT are currently close to covering 50% of all UK premises with FTTC (mostly in urban areas where Virgin Media’s cable network with similar coverage is also present) and have ambitions, supported by public funding from BDUK, to cover 90% by 2017 (they’ll reach 66% through private investment come spring 2014).
UPDATE 23rd Feb 2013
The stats given at the FTTH Conference appear to have been taken slightly out of context. So far B4RN’s FTTH network has passed about 300 homes and should have connected around 157 by the end of next month. Thanks to Martyn Dews for the update.
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Is there a fair usage policy?
Fair usage is if you use it fairly you will be fine. No limits. Its not allowed to feed another county with your connection though.
There is no need to throttle or cap on a peered fibre connection, its not like copper phone connections where there is a false scarcity model, there’s more than enough capacity for everyone. Abundance is bliss.
“There is no need to throttle or cap on a peered fibre connection”
That’s not true though Chris, if all of the B4RN users (even just the 300 that are on now) used 1Gbps all at once all of the time you would not have enough backhaul to cope with the demand so you would need to throttle and shape.
I doubt very much backhaul will be an issue at all for B4RN but to say fibre connections do not need traffic management is wrong, it is still a contended service.
Wether it’s copper or fibre into the premises the scarcity comes from the network behind those connections.
Great news, that’s more like it.
It will be interesting to see what the average speed usage is per home connected once this gets going.
Great news although I do question one sentence of the article:
“The network typically focuses on the most remote 3% of rural areas, which other big commercial operators would find extremely difficult to tackle.”
I assumed that this was supposed to read “[...] financially difficult to tackle.”
After all, B4RN has proven that it’s able to be tackled.
You assume correct but then you can break anything down to money, even though money is always just a reflection of other complicated factors.
@FibreFred: I recall them putting 10Gbps to each of the points of presence so yes, if everybody used at once there would be contention issues. Reality is customer’s usage won’t read on the usage graphs with those sort of top speeds, though! Its amazing how little people use on fast connections. Their downloads are done so quick, it opens the slot for the next customer.
Totally agree, I just wanted to highlight the point that its contend so traffic management has to be inplace, whether it comes into force is another matter
Oh yeah I know… its rare that I use my 80Mbps connection to the max, most of the time it sits at under 1Mbps utilisation
Congratulations to them. Wish it would come to my area in Lincolnshire but that’s highly unlikely. Can’t be doing with waiting for BT to roll out their FTTC which no doubt will become “slow” as other types of connection continue to advance and then BT will have to spend another bulk load of cash (or wait for the UK goverment to cash match their investment) to roll out FTTP/FTTH which will take yet more time.
If these are the approximate maximum speeds of these connections:
56k = 5.6/4.8 kB/s
ADSLMAX = 1024/128 kB/s
ADSL2+ = 3072/448 kB/s
VDSL = 7000/375 kB/s
VDSL2 = 25000/25000 kB/s
The jump from 56k to ADSLMAX was at most 182x faster. ADSLMAX to ADSL2+ at most is 3x faster. ADSL2+ to VDSL is 2.3x faster. VDSL to VDSL2+ is 3.5x faster. BT should be ultimately doing the jump from ADSLMAX and ADSL2+ to VDSL2 which would be an increase of 24x or 8.1x which would be more in keeping with the higher values. BT you are just wasting your own and the publics money
Not a waste for me, I went from 4Mbps to 80Mbps / 18Mbps up so… no complaints here
When BT enable an exchange or a cabinet, then any home that ‘could’ connect to them is counted as ‘homes passed’ by their marketing department.
In that case, by enabling the two hubs with 10 gigabit feeds, B4RN has ‘passed’ around 10,000 properties?
We don’t use that phrase for that reason, its weasel words, as many people on ‘enabled’ exchanges won’t get the bt service because of line length. We concentrate on actual connections. In Arkholme we ducted down the street and of the 40 houses we found 32 took the service, 2 dug the duct in ready but didn’t install, 2 paid for the install but not the service and 2 didn’t want it at all. So that is 32 customers. over 75% take up? Whereas when FTTC passes by, the take up is what?
You’d have to ask BT that, it will obviously vary from cab to cab. Your network setup if different, its very targeted. If BT followed the same principal and only deployed FTTC where they had spoken to the community and were guaranteed take up many people would be left out.
@CD
The difference on “homes passed” is that B4RN’s need a physical fibre link to be counted, not just the fibre spine. For FTTC, the property is connected via the existing copper cable, so is “passed” (able to access the service) once the cabinet is enabled. And remember, 90% of us live within 1km of the cabinet, so do benefit in terms of speed improvement.
Whilst the B4RN project is commendable, it illustrates the benefits of FTTC in terms of cost per connection and speed to deploy vs FTTP. In the time the project has been running, over 4 million additional premises have gained access to FTTC across the UK, or over 50% of properties in Cornwall. Neither would be the case if there was an insistence on FTTP, despite the hype of the industry lobby (the so-called FTTH Council of Europe).
And as for the apparent lack of throttling etc on FTTP, if that were true then you’d be offering far higher speeds than are currently the case, would effectively need dedicated back haul for each connection – a private circuit in other words. Broadband is by definition contended, irrespective of the connection to the premise, let’s not pretend otherwise by hiding behind techno babble.
Awesome news Chris,
The only traffic management I see needed would be “prioritization” and “vlan’s”.
I suppose B4RN is registered with ripe for ip allocation?
Critical mass is the key for cost reductions across the board along with creating an ixp or two along the way???
I take it with your name you’ll know about contending. Most ADSL conenctions have a 50:1 contention ratio – that is you’ll share 1Mb with up to 50 other people, which is why you never get the advertised download speeds.
The difference with B4RN is that they are getting peering; that’s uncontended bandwidth. If 300 people share 1Gb of peering, they are getting 3Mb of uncontended bandwidth. That is far better than any BT product out there, even infinity. Their ratios are 50:1, the reason that download speeds are so high is that not many people have it. Peering will always beat ADSL.
@Michael
Quote “Peering will always beat ADSL” doesn’t really make sense, perhaps “WDM will always beat ADSL”?
Even with 1Gb, the bandwidth is contested given each connection runs at 1Gbs. Whilst you could reasonably say this is less contended than many other service provider offerings, it is down to the amount of backhaul per connection, not the choice of FTTP over FTTC or even ADSL.