Openreach Pause UK Trial of G.INP Fix for ECI FTTC Broadband Cabs UPDATE2
Openreach has paused a trial of Physical Retransmission ReTX (G.INP) technology for their troublesome ECI based FTTC “fibre broadband” street cabinets. The technology works fine on their Huawei estate but ECI has long been the naughty child, although their trial is expected to continue next year.
G.INP (ITU G.998.4) is essentially an error correction solution that is designed to help resolve spikes of Electromagnetic Interference (impulse noise), which can impact the stability and performance of VDSL2 lines (FTTC). The introduction of this technology can, on some lines, also produce a small increase in service speed.
In June 2017 we received some good news after Openreach announced that they may have finally found a solution to the long running problem of getting G.INP to play nice with their ECI estate (here) and we understand that the trial finally started on 25th September 2017. This was due to run until December 2017, although a new announcement states that the trial has been “paused” (here).
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The related briefing is private but we hope to get a bit more background from our contacts in the near future. Suffice to say, ECI has long been a problem area for new FTTC upgrades and so it wouldn’t surprise us if Openreach were still having trouble getting it to work.
UPDATE 1:53pm
We understand that this pause is temporary and will last until sometime in early 2018, which is largely attributed to the Christmas and New Year break.
In other words the trial should continue and Openreach are currently examining the initial rollout to 30,000 lines. Once resumed the plan appears to be for this to be extended to 570,000 lines, which suggests more of a wide-scale pilot than a limited trial.
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UPDATE 1st Feb 2018
We understand that so far the ECI Retransmission Trial has migrated around 600,000 lines and the official rollout is about to commence across their estate. The xdB (3dB profile) has also been successfully applied to some ECI lines.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Well it’s now Feb. – Anyone know if the trials have resumed, it’s all gone very quiet. The least ECI could do is supply redesigned cards for the cabinets that actually work properly on the grounds that the old ones ‘are not fit for purpose’. Also BT/Openreach could consider rolling out G.Fast to areas served by ECI cabinets first.
Why did OpenReach use ECI cabinets know they where shit. Where I live it’s a mixture of Huawei and ECI Cabs.
Digital Durham part of BBUK all fitted Huawei Cabs.
I’m on a ECI Cab when I joined BT I was 70Mb/s now because of noise has fallen too 55Mb/s. On a night it fall too 20Mb/s or less.
love to know where the supposed 600,000 lines are. been waiting nearly 2 years for its elusive return…
let’s hope it actually works this time properly.
There’s dozens of ECI lines being monitored live on MYDSLWEBSTATS but absolutely no new G.INP activations on any the ECI lines recently.
It’s a very small sample of lines but spread right across the country.
When this rollout really gets going it will show up there. Worth keeping an eye on.
I know. I am one of them :(……still no sign of it apart from the 2 lines that were enabled in April 2016 and are lucky enough to have held on to g.inp..
@mark.
any chance you can ask for an update?? Still not seeing any new activations on mdws after another month on from your article update. thanks
Anyone seen news on this – seems to have gone quiet. Wondering if it will happen after all. All open reach site says is the trial was paused no mention of resuming.
Surely isps are fed up with more and more users complaining of speed drops
still not active on my line. been waiting since April 2016…..
lol.. just noticed the picture shows a huawei cab.. need to change pic to an eci cab…
Is the author of this article able to check his source for an update on G.INP on ECI lines?
Bad news guys… this update was posted on kitz forum supposedly from an openreach source:
“we have paused the trial of ReTx whilst we work with ECI and their partners to fix a bit loading algorithm problem in one of the chip sets which was causing anomalies on a subset of lines on the trial. We do not have a date for any next steps for this trial as we are concentrating our efforts on working with our supplier and their partners to find a fix”.
Openreach should do the right thing and rip this rubbish kit out and replace with decent stuff, this really does now seem like a two tier service and its just pot luck which side of the fence you are on.
Do you have a link to that please?
the link to the post is http://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,21320.0.html