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[Ronski]

I've stalked Weaver many a time on street view, measured the distance to his cell tower etc, and am well aware of his situation. As I and others have said many a time he could keep one or two lines and use 4G to give his speeds a boost, the 4G connection could even be routed via AA, I forget the term, as my memory is not great, and I'm certainly not very technical minded, and often struggle with the technical side.

[Reformed]

You really do live in a beautiful part of the world, Weaver. Hopefully full fibre can arrive sooner rather than later. 0 ES / SES on that as standard.

Bonding of your kind doesn't work great for real time applications without some extra help.

[Weaver]

Alex, you will be very warmly welcomed. You can fly to Inverness from London, Birmingham, Manchester, maybe Derby East Midlands. You can train it here all the way from London to the Skye Bridge (best) or the Mallaig ferry (scenic, v. slow). The former from London Kings X to Inverness with no changes on the midday train, changes otherwise, change at Inverness for the direct train to Kyle of Lochalsh and The Bridge. Also sleeper overnight train to Inverness from Euston and continue in to Skye in the morning.

To get to Mallaig, and the southern ferry, train from London direct to Glasgow, taxi ride or walk cross town to Queen St Station for the train direct to Mallaig.

[burakkucat]

I'd love to visit but as I have no car it would seem highly unlikely.

Likewise. I even looked into the cost of travelling by train . . . and that was multiple £100's (there and back).

[aesmith]

Because of my use of Zoom I require an ultra high quality internet connection, no ES, no CRCs, no packet loss.

I don't think end-to-end zero packet loss is ever going to be achievable over the Internet. However I use Webex quite a lot and MS Teams less often and both work perfectly well over my 4G connection, as well as the ADSL connections that a couple of colleagues use. I would be surprised if Zoom is significantly more picky. In general audio and video systems are more tolerant of drops than variable latency. I've never considered out of order packets, I imagine they'd be dropped although it's possible the de-jitter buffer could accommodate them.

[g3uiss]

I manage many Zoom meetings on 4G with no issues at all.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Likewise. I even looked into the cost of travelling by train . . . and that was multiple £100's (there and back).

I went to Glasgow a few years back and that was pricey, but at least I could walk from the train station to where I needed to be (though it was a hefty walk).  Somewhere more remote, do Taxis even go into villages, I've never been anywhere that remote to find out?

[Weaver]

I was thinking that the difference in upstream speeds between my various lines is going to cause jitter. But now I think there is no direct end user to end user traffic: isn’t it all indirect? ie goes from source end user into the Zoom server, server creates a new stream of data, and that goes to the destination end user. Is that correct? I’m thinking it has to be like that when for example someone sees tiled pictures of all the participants. Also maybe has to be like that because of firewalls. Unless the Zoom clients know how to do firewall busting? So anyway, the server would see my jitter, not the remote end user, if this idea is right. Is that correct?

See speed difference between my lines below. Note: Line #2 has been taken down because of a current fault and line #4 is similarly faulty too just now. Couldn’t book engineers because Janet has been away in hospital so no one to let them in.

Code: [Select]

Modems:: Live sync rates:
  #1: downstream 2.676 Mbps, upstream 653 kbps
  #2: ?, ? (either modem #2 is down, or is coming up, or link #2 is down)
  #4: downstream 1.418 Mbps, upstream 389 kbps

--
* Estimated combined IP PDU rate totals (*):   
     downstream:  3.621 Mbps
       upstream:  921.58 kbps
--
   
----------------------------------------------------------------

(*) Calculated from: IP_PDU_rate = sync_rate × fudge_factor;
      fudge_factor = protocol_efficiency ( 0.884434 )
                                      × modem_load_factor ( assumed = 1.0 ).
      Assuming: ADSL and ATM, assumed PDU size = 1500,
      DSL overhead bytes = 32 ⧴ protocol_efficiency

----------------------------------------------------------------

[Weaver]

> do Taxis even go into villages, I've never been anywhere that remote to find out?

Yes certainly. But if you wish to visit the whole Island, as it’s so very large, you would definitely need a car; it’s over twenty miles through the mountains just to get to Port Rìgh even, although there are buses. Heasta as you know is remote, so a 4.5 mile walk to Broadford for the Co-op. Or thumb a lift from the many locals on the Heasta road. But Janet has had guests staying, who, contrary to her firm advice in advance, did not have a car, and they weren’t happy, even though they had been warned. There are some fantastic walks from Heasta though, but not easy going in some places.

Flying is far far cheaper than the train. Which is completely insane. Greed of the train companies.

[robwfs]

For those of you concerned about loopholes, etc with R100 (and I'm sure Black Sheep can confirm this) BT/Openreach have confirmed to the Scottish Government that the build program for Lot 1 (ie, Perth & above) will be 100% FTTP. In addition, the timescales stated on the Scotland Superfast site are generally a 12 month period for everything programmed after 2022. This is because it is going to be an extremely challenging and resource intensive build for OR so from start to finish in each particular area will be a fair chunk of time.

From my point of view, I am watching R100 as both an ISP and also as an alt-net participating in the Scottish Broadband Voucher Scheme and it's going to be very interesting to see how the build progresses given the vast challenges that lie in wait for OR. I certainly don't envy their task!

[Weaver]

It’s just like building the whole original phone network 120 years ago, but doing it in a shorter timescale?

And a very warm welcome to robwfs!

That’s a good thing about BT/OR.

But aside from BT, will there be government loopholes in some small print somewhere, or do they genuinely mean 100%?

[Ronski]

I really can't see it being a full 100%, there must be some places just too remote, and therefore too expensive.

Hopefully for Weaver as I think he said there is 30 houses in Heasta, that would make it doable. I'm sure someone at some point costed FTTPod for weaver, but cant remember the six figure price, even if it was just £100K that would be circa £3300 per premises past.

[burakkucat]

I'm sure someone at some point costed FTTPod for weaver, . . .

I seem to recall that CarlT made some informal enquires via his contacts and the figure was around £900,000 plus. 

[j0hn]

I really can't see it being a full 100%, there must be some places just too remote, and therefore too expensive.

Lot1 (North) and Lot 3 (South) of the OpenReach R100 award will be 100% FTTP.

That does not mean every property in Lot1 or Lot 3 areas will get FTTP.
It just means every property being covered by OpenReach in the current tendering process for those areas will be exclusively FTTP.

Other properties will no doubt be missed or perhaps covered by alternative technologies like satellite.
OpenReach won't be deploying FTTC in either of those areas though (or anything other than FTTP).

Lot2 (Central) still has a bit of FTTC planned though the majority is FTTP.

[Weaver]

I’m not doubting what j0hn has said, but I’m confused.

1. Presumably the Scottish Parliament wants 100% then they’ll have to pay Openreach whatever it costs to do it, or break the promise to the electorate. The latter is I assume routine. But the existence of crofting townships ie. villages/hamlets in the highlands and their reachability isn’t a secret and the government knew all this when they decide to make this commitment[?]. So I can’t see that Openreach would care and the more people they do, the more future ISP customers BT will have and thus more income.

2. What will happen to Heasta come 2025 ? If POTS is scrapped, then they can’t make us do telephony via satellite (or can they) and BT will still have a USO obligation to provide telephone service so will that mean FTTP ? Because we won’t be able to keep on using copper lines, no?