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[burakkucat]

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?

The POTS turn-off in 2025 and the (much later) withdrawal of metallic pairs are two totally different events. After 2025 telephony will be VoIP based.

[Weaver]

Ah, didn’t know that. But that merely pushes things back a bit, doesn’t it. So in 2025 will my neighbours have to get ADSL over copper with VoIP running over it? I’m sure 8km ADSL won’t be reliable enough for telephony using VoIP, given the number of faults aside from connection quality, also a fair number of them don’t use DSL for their internet connections but rather the unreliable local long range wireless network.

I’m assuming that the telephony USO will still exist in 2025, so will there be a lot of copper line users who are forced to get an ADSL connection just for telephony if nothing else ? And then if ADSL won’t be workable for reliable VoIP telephony, then will that force Openreach to go FTTP ?

[burakkucat]

You have asked good questions. All I know is that xDSL technology will be used.

There is already a VDSL2 product (at 500 kbps DS & US) available from Openreach for VoIP telephony.

[Ronski]

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

Well, that makes it circa £30,000 per premises past.

[Weaver]

Thank you for your generous and helpful replies J0hn. Could I ask something :

> every property being covered by OpenReach in the current tendering process

Clarification on this - do you know the details of this ? Is the tender document or the original spec from the government so detailed that it goes down to listing individual properties, or individual villages ? (Because the government needs to know exactly what they’re getting and BT needs to know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing for the money paid.)

If the government misses out properties, then it’s not R100; if BT/OR is allowed to just miss some out then it isn’t R100 either, but the government might think it at least has a pathetic excuse "it wasn’t us, it was evil BT" as if they don’t control what BT does.

[Chrysalis]

You want a faster connection but you're not prepared to compromise on ISP, yet it's very clear it's going to be a long time, if ever before you can get a faster connection via A&A. Meanwhile your wife and her guests suffer on an extremely slow connection. As mentioned before, there are potentially faster options, such as 4G and Starlink (if that covers your location), sometimes you have to compromise.

For me I am going to try VM's giga1 and link it with aaisp's L2TP to keep static ip.  As you said compromising as good as I can.  AAISP are raising the rate limit on the service, I dont know how far though.

[Chrysalis]

As I mentioned earlier, it’s not about speed, solely. Reliability is crucial

In my experience 4G is extremely reliable at my home location including through power cuts, affectively its tied into their voice network, and voice networks have to be kept up.  The question mark is going to be over varying performance rather than the service actually going down.  However I do accept I probably have redundancy in the form I am in multiple tower's range, whilst you may only have a single tower at your location.

[Weaver]

I only have one strong basestation; there’s another near Mallaig possibly, but there are some moors / low hills in that direction, which would be roughly SSW, and it’s also looking straight into the six-foot thick gable-end stone wall.

The problem I have with 4G is that it sometimes, not often, disappears for a couple of days.

[Chrysalis]

I only have one strong basestation; there’s another near Mallaig possibly, but there are some moors / low hills in that direction, which would be roughly SSW, and it’s also looking straight into the six-foot thick gable-end stone wall.

The problem I have with 4G is that it sometimes, not often, disappears for a couple of days.

Could you combine it with maybe 2 of your ADSL lines?  So a hybrid setup?

[j0hn]

Thank you for your generous and helpful replies J0hn. Could I ask something :

> every property being covered by OpenReach in the current tendering process

Clarification on this - do you know the details of this ? Is the tender document or the original spec from the government so detailed that it goes down to listing individual properties, or individual villages ? (Because the government needs to know exactly what they’re getting and BT needs to know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing for the money paid.)

Yes.
ISPReview cover most of the changes/updates to the R100 contracts.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/09/progress-update-on-north-scotlands-r100-broadband-rollout.html

1. Precisely how many premises will be covered under LOT 1?

The contract we have signed with BT is expected to deliver to 59,276 premises. The total number of premises connected as a result of the contract may vary however due to matters beyond our control. For example if a property is demolished prior to a superfast connection being delivered it may be removed from the R100 Lot 1 (North) contract build plan.

2. What proportion of the LOT 1 deployment will be FTTP?

All of the R100 North contract build will be fibre to the premises (FTTP).

3. Is the completion date for LOT 1 still by the end of 2026?

We expect build in the R100 Lot 1 (North) contract to be completed during the financial year 2026/27

The next comment...

If the government misses out properties, then it’s not R100; if BT/OR is allowed to just miss some out then it isn’t R100 either,

It is R100.
As I said previously in the thread, everything I've mentioned regarding R100 Lot1 (where your live) is specific to the OpenReach tendering process.
OpenReach will not be covering every single property.

Later down the line properties that were missed by OpenReach's contract will be served by other technologies as part of R100.

As it stands, R100 Lot 1 being done by OpenReach is 100% FTTP.
You appear to be within that rollout. If that's the case you should have FTTP by April 2027.
I'm confident you will be covered from what I've read.

[Alex Atkin UK]

It is R100.
As I said previously in the thread, everything I've mentioned regarding R100 Lot1 (where your live) is specific to the OpenReach tendering process.
OpenReach will not be covering every single property.

Indeed, sadly "The Scottish Government has committed to providing superfast broadband access for all" doesn't mean all by one technology/provider.

Its really frustrating that its all about speed with zero consideration for reliability/consistency it seems.

[robwfs]

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

So the Government aspiration is 100% but they have always known that the main R100 program wouldn't achieve that. This is why the Scottish Broadband Voucher Scheme came about as a subset of the R100 program, to allow smaller providers to fill in the gaps. And to be fair, they've been pretty generous with the funding on this - as a provider we have access to £5000 per property that isn't getting covered by the main program to bring a minimum of 30Mbps. And we can pool those properties together up to a maximum of 100 properties in a project.

One potential plus which may help is that SSEN have said they are going to make it easier to get access to their infrastructure so we may soon be able to get our fibre onto their power poles, etc although we'll see how easy they actually make the process.

[Black Sheep]

As far as I'm aware, there's an extensive programme in place to get all OR plant removed from electric poles.

It has been mentioned right at the very top, that the practice should never have been allowed in the first place, from a H&S point of view. One of which I wholeheartedly agree with. There's nothing worse than ascending your 'blue ladder' to erect/repair a wire, especially in the rain. There's obviously safety distances involved between the electric conductors and the OR wire, but it's only approximately one metre.

No amount of awareness around the laws of physics, can stop your mind playing scary tricks on you.

[Weaver]

Black Sheep is scaring me. Do the electricity board guys where - I don’t know what they’re called - Faraday cage-type suits with wire in them, or something ? Some vague memory that is no doubt all wrong.

> Could you combine it with maybe 2 of your ADSL lines?  So a hybrid setup?

Yes good point. I thought a lot about this; someone else said no, and I agree now I think about it.

I already have a disaster 4G wireless router (Solwise). I have AA/AQL/Three 4G on all iPads, and all-you-can-eat EE 4G on Janet’s iPhone which we can uses as a router if disaster strikes.

But the problems as I understand it with combined 4G and DSL are :

1. MTU difference - I would have to go down to the lowest common MTU after IP is tunnelled through L2TP and accounting for reduced IP MTU in 4G devices, eg the 3G dongle is only IP MTU 1440 [!], so whatever the 4G dongle is. I think the Solwise router is IP MTU 1500, not sure. My iPad 4G has a reduced MTU I think.

2. Latency mismatch. Someone else warned me about this in an earlier thread. The 4G latency from my iPad via AA 4G in to AA is ~95 ms, pretty horrendous, so not the same as the 45 ms I get with DSL, so there could be some weirdness with packet reordering possibly when DSL and 4G links are bonded into one pipe?

[Mind you, due to bufferbloat and/or link hogging, I can get spikes of 500ms+ as recorded by clueless.aa.net.uk on the CQM graphs, which show latency. I will try to fix that by slightly reducing the max load on the links downstream to 98% instead of 100% and maybe even down to 95% if needed. The ‘modem load factor’ upstream (my term for the fraction of max possible IP upstream rate per modem when taking away all DSL protocol overheads, ie max_IP_rate = modem_load_factor * us_sync_rate * 0.884434 for my situation) is set to 95% in my Firebrick config, which should, I hope, sort out the upstream bloat, by keeping the ingress queues into the modems down to a modest max amount.]

I thought BT was rumoured to be combined 4G/5G and DSL or maybe FTTP ? I think they would need a special tunnel protocol, a TCP-like tunnel to fix the MTU limitation and prevent any 4G packet loss. I know that TCP is verboten for use as a tunnel transport for eg TCP within it, but I think I could design something suitable given time and a lot of false starts. Something that would fragment things at L4 not L3 and be L4-transports-aware, so understand TCP and common UDP-based transports, maybe my beloved SCTP too; could even use that as the outer tunnel carrier, as it understands messages iirc rather than carrying a byte stream.

When we have a big lightning storm, it knocks out the 4G basestation. So we have no electricity and no 3G/4G for failover from DSL, which can get knocked out by the lightning. Surely they’re got a UPS and a generator? Basestation operators to be shot if not - what about emergency calls to eg ambulance / police? Maybe emergency services sometimes use mobile phone network out here, although I seem to remember something about special separate emergency services’ networks years and years ago. (TETRA was it way back when?) I don’t know if such as police rely on eg EE out here?

—
Thanks to J0hn for that extremely clear and helpful post!

[Chrysalis]

I wouldnt bond the 4G with ADSL.

Instead just have 4g as the higher priority, it doesnt need bonding for performance, it will out perform the ADSL easily.  Then if and when the 4G goes down the ADSL kicks in as your backup, this way you maintain connectivity whilst at the same time have much higher performance during the periods the 4G is online.

Lower latency is nice but its importance at the low capacity you have is below the throughput capability.

For specific traffic if you have a personal preference for the ADSL you can flip the preference on your routing to favour ADSL where throughput isnt important.