By: MarkJ - 3 March, 2010 (8:10 AM) - Score: 10064 - Fixed Line Broadband
The boss of BT Openreach, which is responsible for ensuring that all rival ISPs have equality of access to BT's local UK network, has claimed that its fibre optic based up to 40Mbps FTTC broadband technology "can achieve peak information rates of 100Mbits/sec". He also warned that demand for peak data rates of 1Gbps (Gigabits per second), as touted by its rival Fibrecity ( i3 Group ) in Bournemouth, will eventually surface but probably not for "a long time" yet.Fibre-to-the-Cabinet technology ( FTTC ) delivers a fast fibre optic link to the operators street level cabinets, while the remaining connection - between cabinets and businesses - is done using VDSL2 (similar to current ADSL broadband but faster over short distances) through existing copper cable; FTTC will initially deliver speeds of up to 40Mbps (uploads 2-10Mbps).
BT Openreach's CEO, Steve Robertson, told PC Pro magazine's interview:
"Q. With Virgin Media announcing its 100Mbits/sec service will be live by the end of the year and initiatives such as Fibrecity offering bursting speeds of up to 1Gbit/sec in some areas, how confident are you that BT can compete with those speeds?
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A. I think we will be able to keep up with Virgin and Fibrecity. Clearly our [up to 40Mbits/sec] fibre-to-the-cabinet offering is more limited than Fibrecity. However, we know that we can achieve peak information rates of 100Mbits/sec on fibre-to-the-cabinet. We know that, if you take the full quoted speed on fibre-to-the-premises, we know we can do a Gigabit.
There’s an obsession with access speed, but when I look at the world from an Openreach perspective, the last thing I’ll actually be worried about is access speeds. Even if we’re talking about 20, 30, 40Mbits/sec access speeds, to actually give the end user a true 30 or 40Mbits/sec experience on an end-to-end basis, you very quickly get to issues around the backhaul network, the way that the server structure that supports the internet works, and a whole bunch of other things.
Access speed is really important... but it’s a lot more complex and richer discussion than just the obsession about headline speeds when it comes to the real end-user experience."
"Q. With Virgin Media announcing its 100Mbits/sec service will be live by the end of the year and initiatives such as Fibrecity offering bursting speeds of up to 1Gbit/sec in some areas, how confident are you that BT can compete with those speeds?
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A. I think we will be able to keep up with Virgin and Fibrecity. Clearly our [up to 40Mbits/sec] fibre-to-the-cabinet offering is more limited than Fibrecity. However, we know that we can achieve peak information rates of 100Mbits/sec on fibre-to-the-cabinet. We know that, if you take the full quoted speed on fibre-to-the-premises, we know we can do a Gigabit.
There’s an obsession with access speed, but when I look at the world from an Openreach perspective, the last thing I’ll actually be worried about is access speeds. Even if we’re talking about 20, 30, 40Mbits/sec access speeds, to actually give the end user a true 30 or 40Mbits/sec experience on an end-to-end basis, you very quickly get to issues around the backhaul network, the way that the server structure that supports the internet works, and a whole bunch of other things.
Access speed is really important... but it’s a lot more complex and richer discussion than just the obsession about headline speeds when it comes to the real end-user experience."
Sadly Robertson does not detail the restrictions of achieving 100Mbps over FTTC, which until now was thought to have a maximum future download performance peak of 60Mbps (15Mbps upstream). We suspect that achieving that sort of performance, even over a short run of copper from the cabinet and into homes, would be quite difficult and only attainable by a very slim minority.
Likewise BT's faster 100Mbps FTTH / P technology will have a hard time keeping up with comparable products from Virgin Media UK. BT's current target for the summer of 2012 is to reach 10 million homes (40% coverage) with a mix of FTTC and FTTH / P technology. However its faster FTTH / P solution will only reach 2.5 million homes, which compares poorly with Virgin's ability to reach roughly half of the country.
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Comments: 12
Gareth EvansPosted: 3 March, 2010 - 10:21 AM
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What always seems to be missed in all of this (and Steve Robertson touches on it in an oblique way), is that the BULK of websites can't serve up content to match these download speeds. Imagine the bandwidth a site getting 100k hits per hour all "demanding" 50Mbits/sec (about 30 users per second so 30 x 50Mb = 1,500Mbits/sec)
In fact you don't need these sorts of speeds right now. It's fine to watch iPlayer on a 3-4Mbits/sec link and even HD doesn't need much more.
Let's stop fixating on 100Mb to the few.
MarkJPosted: 3 March, 2010 - 10:43 AM
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Agreed 100Mbps isn't really needed (at least not 'today'), though we do need the improved infrastructure to bring general broadband performance up to par.
WillPosted: 3 March, 2010 - 10:44 AM
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Ok... it's time to move on and install more fibre around the country. I demand faster speeds.
Iain CollinsPosted: 3 March, 2010 - 11:48 AM
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I agree with Gareth and Mark, it would be more useful to get more people up to throughput of around 16-24 Mbps, which is enough for high quality video and sufficient for reasonably fast downloading.
I'm used to high speed access, but I don't think having 100 Mbps in the home would help most people because not enough destinations have the capacity to handle speeds like that.
So many of the destinations I connect to these days use barely half my DSL connection speed, because the network capacity / peering just isn't good enough, or they rate limit downloads to speeds like 200-500 Kbps.
With new game downloads in the region of 10 GB or more (with regular patches of several hundred MB's) and HD movie downloads being over 1 GB that's a lot of progress bar time.
Iain CollinsPosted: 3 March, 2010 - 12:05 PM
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I'd add to the above, that 10 years ago I used to have fiber to the desktop (yes, really), and I work in the telco/carrier background so I'm used to unfettered > 100 Mbps office network connections.
In the last decade or so I would say the percentage of mainstream public destinations where I can get high throughput has, if anything, gone down as consumer connections speeds have gone up.
I think that to some extent Gareth's point has already been proven, these days pretty much the only public destinations I can get > 2 MB/sec from reliably are sites like Linux or BSD mirrors and that the majority of sites are either rate limited or contended to hell.
I find this very annoying when it comes to paid content and think online retailers (for games in particular, which can take hours to download) need to step up and start providing decent download services (e.g. by partnering with Akamai).
SlomanPosted: 3 March, 2010 - 12:08 PM
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I'm a Virgin-Media 50MB customer, TBH i would be happy with 10MB connection with the ability to have 100MB boost for 30mins when needed for downloading a film or software updates etc...
Completely agree 100MB is currently not need yet but if we can get the infrastructure/fibre in place now for when its needed we wont have to wait years for BT, VM & the Gov to pull their fingers out of their _ _ _ _!
PhilPosted: 3 March, 2010 - 6:46 PM
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I am a virgin media customer, I do agree that 100Mbps (what the point as we don't need it for at least next 10 years) We all want to get rid of 2Mbps in 100% uk and push it up to 40Mbps is more than enough. I used to have VM 50Mbps trial for 28 days and it not needed for website loads, HD video, webcam, BBCi player as my currently 10Mbps can do it all with no problem. I think BT are sensible to stick with 40Mbps for now.
MorrisPosted: 13 June, 2010 - 7:07 PM
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After having been ripped off by our ISPs for so long it's about time technology slapped them in the face. Now
we (the paying public) aren't going to be ripped off by paying for 8Meg or 20Meg, yet only recieve 1.5Meg to 2Meg.
They (my ISP) say that's all my line can handle - yet they still take the full amount out of my bank every month - you ripping off, robbing bastards! Wish i could take you to court for misselling me my last 18 month contract - my lawyer has told me it would be very expensive - with no guarantee of winning - they have more money & will bleed me dry. Contract is coming to an end now, and on the day it does - my ISP will know - and after being ripped off for so long, wish i could do something to them rather than just move to another ISP - if i do - it'll be my own private punishment - but, yes - they'll be sorry.
BradPosted: 4 October, 2010 - 4:40 PM
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ADSL2 is fast but I can't wait for this to arrive in our area!
Brad Foster
http://www.fttcbroadband.co.uk
JOJOPosted: 3 November, 2010 - 11:10 PM
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Some of you guys need to move forward why would 10 mb be enough when parts of the world are starting 1gbs. Ofcourse many sites do not feature content to meet with these speeds atm but for me and many other who use new groups/servers the more speed the better as where d/uploading vasts amount of data and it always at maximum of your line, there are no load issues imo.
MichaelPosted: 18 December, 2010 - 7:00 PM
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guys I too would love 100mps speeds but the fact is in areas like where I live now the speeds are barely 1mb> they really need to sort out the rest of us with decent speeds first. Like more exchanges etc. Rather than the cities getting faster than their already fast enough connections.
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