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Why are speeds still asymmetrical?

telemach

Casual Member
I was talking to a friend who lives on Fitzjohn’s Avenue, London NW3 earlier, who (according to Ofcom’s broadband checker) can still only get ADSL, 15Mbit/s down, 1Mbit/s up.
However, g.network allows registering interest.
On exploring their packages, I noticed that all but the top tier is asymmetrical, e.g. 900 down, 300 up.
The same is true for other providers like Hyperoptic, whose 50 down package only offers 5 up, or BT.
By contrast, providers abroad typically only offer symmetric speeds, e.g. the 0.5 / 1 / 2 / 5 Gbit/s packages from AT&T, Verizon or 3BB.
Over copper lines, I understand that physical constraints mean asymmetrically splitting capacity better serves a typical user’s use case.
However, for fibre, there is no such constraint.
So my question:
Why are (true) fibre broadband connections in the UK still offered with an asymmetrical speed profile?
 
Because the majority of the UK FTTP deployments were using GPON and that allows for 2.4 Gbit/s down / 1.2 Gbit/s up. You can read about PON Upstream bandwidth allocation here. XGS-PON or 10G-PON initially allowed for 10 Gbit/s downstream and 2.5 Gbit/s upstream (ITU-T G.987 - 2010) and later symmetric 10 Gbit (ITU-T G.9807.1, approved 2016). However that's all changed now since the majority of the Altnets are deploying XGS-PON with 10Gbit symmetric so most take advantage of that and sell symmetric plans. But they don't have to, it's a commercial decision to better differentiate themselves from the big telcos. At the end of the day most regular users don't really care as their internet use is mostly for downloads. Obviously people on this forum ar generally more technical and tend to prefer symmetric plans if available.

Also worth noting that both Openreach (aka BT) and VM are moving to XGS-PON too as there are now OLT "combo" cards that can support GPON and XGS-PON simultaneously (watch this interview). Whether they decide to sell symmetric plans on those installs is another story. Likely that they will stick with asymmetric plans for now until they have most of their network upgraded to XGS-PON otherwise they have to duplicate all plans and Openreach have a massive GPON installed base they will need to slowly migrate to XGS-PON. But clearly in terms of getting the most ROI of the GPON network it makes no sense to upgrade a GPON user to XGS-PON unless they need multi-gigabit speeds. Maybe the pressure from Altnets will force their hand, who knows...
 
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Because the vast majority of consumer broadband usage is aligned to a requirement that works well with an asymmetric service proposition.
To expand from this, the vast majority of people do not need an upload speed higher than 20-30mbps. Just using the internet consumes extremely small amounts of upload speed where even an 80/20 connection is more than sufficient.

The only people (in the majority of cases) who need much higher upload speeds than 20mbps are generally live streamers, content creators, people sharing large files between their PC and a cloud server, or people who run their own web servers from their home. Those kind of users tend to be the minority of people in the UK (not including business lines), so while symmetric broadband services are totally possible on XGS-PON FTTP networks, most mainstream ISP's are probably not going to bother implementing it (or if they do, they'll make it a business package), as most of them play to the general "culture" that all people need is high download speeds.
 
Openreach EAD is a product that exists to serve those who want symmetrical speeds, and it is very lucrative. The cost price is £300 a month for 1Gbps symmetrical. Why would Openreach sell it on PON when they can coin it in? Yes, for that money you are also getting an SLA that is *far* better than that of FTTC/FTTP. As others have said, not many consumers are deemed to need/want symmetrical. Though I'd take 1Gbps symmetrical over above 1Gbps services any day of the week.

This is why you will never see symmetrical services from Openreach. Pray you get an AltNet if you want those.
 
The regulator should not get involved in telling ISPs what packages to sell.

This is why you will never see symmetrical services from Openreach. Pray you get an AltNet if you want those.

I wouldn't say never, Openreach just don't consider the current set of altnets to be major competitors to them - and I believe most customers on altnets are there for price reasons and not because the service is symmetric.

You're not likely to see Openreach change anything here until Virgin Media do.
 
Thanks @GreenLantern22 - that's some excellent insight.
With increasing cloud dependence (even washing machines are uploading 11GB / week these days...), I doubt the asymmetric model will serve ISPs well much longer.
I remember not being particularly pleased RDPing into remote machines in the 00ies and seeing each character typed out slow motion because my utter lack of upload capacity on the ADSL line - what a relief when VDSL came around.
As working arrangements have become more flexible in the last few years, I imagine most except the most antiquated (or solitary) users will be in a similar situation.
Alas, I hope my friend is going to get an upgrade to VDSL soon at least...
 
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The regulator should not get involved in telling ISPs what packages to sell.



I wouldn't say never, Openreach just don't consider the current set of altnets to be major competitors to them - and I believe most customers on altnets are there for price reasons and not because the service is symmetric.

You're not likely to see Openreach change anything here until Virgin Media do.
I agree on the regulation side but disagree on Altnets not being competition to BT. BT was sleeping and banking on G.Plus until the threat from the Altnets was too big to ignore and they had to react. While VM beat them on speed the cable modem technology is ancient and has limited lifespan. Latency is high, network is unreliable and gets saturated often and a lot of people hate VM since they a real pain to deal with. Of course BT will complete their FTTP upgrade and keep a lot of customers but the damage has already been done. A lot of people like myself will end up with 3 FTTP networks serving them and that’s going to push prices down as competition kicks in. At the moment Altnets can be a hit and miss but consolidation is inevitable. With that you will expect 1-3 Altnets to become large enough to seriously challenge the duopoly of BT/VM and keep them in their toes with plan features and prices.
 
Really? I pay almost £1000 per year on Internet, sure I pick a custom provider, I pay more for Internet than Water, I think I deserve more than 120 up. This is unreasonable and a failure of regulation imo
Regulation is not to say what products should or shouldn’t be sold. The market drives that. At the moment there isn’t much market for that. I think it will eventually come as it will become standard like free minutes/sms on most SIM only plans.
 
Thanks @GreenLantern22 - that's some excellent insight.
With increasing cloud dependence (even washing machines are uploading 11GB / week these days...), I doubt the asymmetric model will serve ISPs well much longer.
Not sure appliances participating in botnets is a use case ISPs are wanting to support or will make much money from 🤣

The asymmetric offerings continue to hold up fine. I've seen graphs from ISPs that offer nothing but symmetrical services and the graphs remain very heavily skewed downstream. The main consumer of upload a while back was torrents and cloud services still haven't caught up with them for bandwidth consumption.
 
I've seen graphs from ISPs that offer nothing but symmetrical services and the graphs remain very heavily skewed downstream.

~500 homes on a symmetrical service: Last 7 days, outgoing on the core link is 20% the level of incoming data. AND the upload/outgoing includes a foss (free open source software) mirror host skewing the data higher than it otherwise would be.
 
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If you want to optimise your network then you design it to meet the network traffic. You only allow redundancy when there is insignificant overhead.

The move from GPON to XGS-PON or 10G-PON simply provides more capacity and provides more flexibility but it doesn't change the underlying design which is asymmetric.
It is also not just the access method. ISPs also have asymmetric peering simply because residential is mostly consuming content so connections to the significant content providers is also optimised.

If you need high upload it will infer that you are likely to use symmetrical peering or transit routes which are more costly.

Altnets may offer symmetrical but are mainly basing that on the fact that only a few users will actually use it, it is likely to be used in burst mode and will be restricted by whatever they are talking to. If you ask for a business SLA you are likely to get symmetrical at a lower speed product.

My view is OR will utilise XGS-PON to offer SME business symmetrical and may change the ratios for consumer but will keep to prudent network design as will ISP networks.
 
Upstream peering and transit connectivity at the service provider edge is not asymmetrical.
 

I didn't say they weren't competition, I said BT likely don't treat them as a competitor yet because there's only really CityFibre that have a large enough footprint to be doing wholesale deals with ISPs that have the budget to do the same levels of marketing that BT, Sky, TalkTalk etc. can manage.

I also think the driver of subscriptions with altnets for the majority of subscribers is down to it being cheaper than what they can get with an Openreach provider, the people seeking the service out because it's symmetric are an absolute minority and probably post on places like this.
 
Problem is, in my case, is that there is no viable competition and it's affecting productivity. I want to be able to upload 50GB of imagery faster than 120Mbps and I can't afford a ludicrously expensive leased line. All of my European colleagues have cheaper symmetric XGS-PON, My Swiss colleague has 25G symmetric PON, his speeds are eye watering compared to what we can get the UK. There is no reason why this shouldn't exist in the UK. There needs to be operator oversight imo.
I would compare us more to Germany which compared to us is massively behind on their fibre rollout
 
Thanks @GreenLantern22With increasing cloud dependence (even washing machines are uploading 11GB / week these days...),
A bit off topic, but I've read that it turned out to be an incorrect interpretation of the data involved.

Back on topic:

I have a symmetric 8Gbps connection (YouFibre).

None of the major commercial services can support an upload anywhere near the limits of even a 1Gbps connection, including YouTube and cloud storage like OneDrive/Dropbox/Google Drive.
 
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Problem is, in my case, is that there is no viable competition and it's affecting productivity. I want to be able to upload 50GB of imagery faster than 120Mbps and I can't afford a ludicrously expensive leased line. All of my European colleagues have cheaper symmetric XGS-PON, My Swiss colleague has 25G symmetric PON, his speeds are eye watering compared to what we can get the UK. There is no reason why this shouldn't exist in the UK. There needs to be operator oversight imo.

Do any of those countries regulate what products should be offered? I don't think they do, the only one that to my mind comes close is Switzerland saying that the incumbent had to provide access to their fibre network as dark fibre which meant everything was laid as a point-to-point topology.

If you can find someone willing to sell you the Openreach 1000/220Mbps service then that should be cheaper than a leased line.
 
Problem is, in my case, is that there is no viable competition and it's affecting productivity. I want to be able to upload 50GB of imagery faster than 120Mbps and I can't afford a ludicrously expensive leased line. All of my European colleagues have cheaper symmetric XGS-PON, My Swiss colleague has 25G symmetric PON, his speeds are eye watering compared to what we can get the UK. There is no reason why this shouldn't exist in the UK. There needs to be operator oversight imo.

I think your issue is more about Openreach than anything else. The decision was made a while back for the UK to have infrastructure level competition and it's too late to row that back by going NBN or dark fibre now. The UK simply can't afford it.
 
Problem is there isn't open networks, many users including myself are stranged to one provider.
Which provider are you confined to? Open network has a couple of definitions, one being bitstream access as Openreach provide, another dark fibre access which sadly is really rare. The UK's open consumer access networks are all bitstream.
 
As said 99% customer base download far more than upload so now need for a symmetrical services. As speeds increase people need to be educated about what it is you are being offered on a residential circuit I was one of these. I had to chase up OR to get our cul-de-sac added to FTTP that they managed to build right past. From my experience IT work circuits were PTP with dedicated bandwith and symmetrical circuits. I read fibre and assumed that was what I would be getting to my home.

When researching, asking questions on here I became aware of the GPON, how it works and why it was chosen. The fact is it is the best offering to be able roll out faster and wider to homes.

The weird thing is once the Gigaclear get to my girlfriends rural dwelling (not long now we're assured) that uses PTP and symmetrical speeds.

If you really need symmetrical speeds, then probably want it uncontended, then you probably need service guarantees, SLAs, etc. So then the right thing is a business line.

As technologies change people think they need all this bandwidth but in reality they seldom do. Whether it is fibre broadband? Network switches. People on here looking for switches with ports that are greater than 1Gbps. Not really needed. Data is bursty and I'd be very surprised if a residential setup ever get near 1Gbps. Another example, Unlimited data on a mobile contract? I had unlimited for years, but to be honest since I switched to 30GB a month I haven't got near to that limit. Helps I have FTTP at home.

I mean fair enough people buy things overly spec'd for what they need. An expensive divers watch that's never been under water ever? I have a fast diesel limited to 150mph, but never been near that in it. That's fine that's your individual decision.

Things like what technology to use by OR or and Alt Net is a commercial decision - costs, speeds, speed of roll out - made based on what works for the majority.

One could argue about future proofing, but how the Internet works, means the need will always be asymmetrical. Unless that was to change to a P2P sharing type setup where you get the data from where's nearest, and all copies of whatever are constantly updated and being shared?

Lunchtime meandering chat. Thanks for reading my rambling thoughts.
 
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