Kitz Forum
Announcements => News Articles => Topic started by: WWWombat on April 07, 2015, 04:27:22 PM
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A presentation on How much Bandwidth we might need...
Presenter: Doug Williams, BT Research
March 2015
Video: http://www.bcssouthwest.org.uk/server.asp?page=videoview&event=56
PDF: http://www.bcssouthwest.org.uk/presentations/DougWilliams2015.pdf
Worth listening to, rather than just glancing through the PDF.
The most interesting bit is when the compare their models against actual measurements of the busiest 20,000 fibre-based lines. Page 29 of the PDF.
Three-quarters of these lines seem to be heavy users of video. However, for the top 5,000, video becomes less of a factor.
(I calculate that the fastest 20,000 homes, off an installed base of 3.3million at the time, is less than the top 1% of users. The top 5,000 are less than the top 0.2% of all BT's FTTx lines.)
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Nice little find that, W3. Haven't got time to read the whole PDF, let alone listen to it I'm afraid ........ but if his predictions are true then most of what is needed could be delivered over a good pair of metallic wires with new and improving G.Technologies ??
I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest to find out that I've read it wrong though. ;) ;D
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I think you've read it right.
On the second-last page, his conclusion is:
In 2025
50Mb/s Many people, most days for some of the time
500Mb/s Some people, some days for some of the time
That gets repeated but mis-stated on the final page, but the text I have quoted fits with what is spoken in the video.
In essence, the 50Mbps is enough to fit the sustained demand for what most people will want to do, and fits with the critical nature of that (ie time-sensitive, streaming etc). The 500Mbps is elastic demand, and will shape to what people are willing to put up with for rarer transactions (game downloads, etc) vs what they will be willing to pay for. Some people will not be willing to wait for longer downloads, and will be willing to pay.
Again, from the spoken part, these conclusions seem to have fed into the decision-making on G.fast: That the technology advances are capable of delivering this speed range over copper; therefore this technology is worth included in the "mixed economy" decision process. I imagine that the date of 2025 is a key part of deciding the worth of a rollout.
Your condition is remains true (a good pair), and I'll add the condition of a short pair: that the FTTdp nodes are going to have to be actually installed somewhere nearer the DP, rather than just at the existing cabinets.
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Thank you for condensing the info, W3. It's always been my own opinion that the majority of folk will be happy with circa 50-80 Meg speeds, I would even say (based purely on my own findings), that there are more EU's who have opted for the 40 Meg product as opposed to the 80 Meg option ?
I hope the gentleman in question won't mind me saying, but our very own master scientist (Burrakucat), is happy with his ADSL connection and can't justify the price-hike to receive VDSL speeds, due to his limited demand on the service ??.
Of course we all know there are issues with the MPF's, especially if you are unlucky enough to be on a full D-side made up of this Ali beast. But, most D-sides will be a hybrid of Copper and Ali. However it's cut up, the future G.Technologies will see the very vast majority of these issues put to bed I feel.
My main point on another thread (somewhere ?), and I'm guessing the reason Mr Wombat has actually put this particular thread up, is this incessant demand by some for speeds most of us are unlikely to want to pay for ??!! I will take the stability/maintenance argument of Fibre over MPF as the preferred delivery method, but not the 'Need for speed' argument. :)
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Yeap very happy with 32/7 as i don't stream any movies the odd time i'll watch F1 on Sky Go but thats it and 80/20 would be a waste in this household, being a geek it would be nice to have it and see what i could do with it if you know what i meen.
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I would even say (based purely on my own findings), that there are more EU's who have opted for the 40 Meg product as opposed to the 80 Meg option ?
*Raises a hand*
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Nice little find that, W3. Haven't got time to read the whole PDF, let alone listen to it I'm afraid ........ but if his predictions are true then most of what is needed could be delivered over a good pair of metallic wires with new and improving G.Technologies ??
Yes like motorways, the best use is so a lot of people can move at a reliable 50 mph, not one person at 110 mph.
People think technology it is magic, extensible without limit. As we are running up to the 70 th anniversary of WW2 it is worth mentioning that at the time some MP got up and said " The day the war ends should be a universal holiday and special trains should be run to the seaside" er yes !!
Fibre is a better system, and that means a lot more than faster.
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Just listened to it.. interesting find WWW.
There is a lot of truth in the expansion of bandwidth and our requirements are growing, so in a way it is good that BT are actually thinking ahead.
He was talking about requirements for 2030 which is 15 years ahead. 15 years ago most people didnt have broadband & the BT adsl campaigns hadn't even started. Back then, the internet was mostly the 'WorldWideWeb', now it is so much more. Its impossible to see into the future but I can for sure see our reliance on the Internet growing.
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(Oops. This turned out to be long)
My main point on another thread (somewhere ?), and I'm guessing the reason Mr Wombat has actually put this particular thread up, is this incessant demand by some for speeds most of us are unlikely to want to pay for ??!!
I am generally interested in that question of need vs want. In trying to distinguish between the hype of something easy to label as "future proof" (by people who are too lazy to work out what the future actually is), and the output from people whose very job is to try to make decent estimates of that future.
The recent PR from BT about G.fast, to me, has a hint of a suggestion that, for a lot of brownfield copper, for most people, this might be the end result - that G.fast *is* the final solution. It is therefore *very* interesting to hear from someone who must have played a key part in the management decision about whether G.fast/FTTdp is a solution with a long-enough shelf life to make it worth including in the deployment mix.
Ironically, this presentation seems to have been delayed for around 6 months - I was expecting the BCS to put a video up last year, and was rather disappointed they didn't. Getting it now means we see the data knowing that it has fed into Gavin Patterson's decision on G.fast.
As for the costs...
I read an interesting analysis a couple of weeks ago that reckoned doing FTTdp now followed by FTTP in 2023 would cost the same, with appropriate discounting, as just going for FTTP now.
Report: "Exploring the costs and benefits of FTTH in the UK"
http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/exploring-costs-and-benefits-fibre-home-ftth-uk
Associated Report: "Ultra-fast digital infrastructure in the UK: are we missing a trick?"
http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/ultra-fast-digital-infrastructure-uk-are-we-missing-trick
Without resorting to anything as scientific as numbers, this too seems to reach the conclusion that there is nothing out there yet that needs anything faster than we can already supply - so we should monitor the people who are likely to be in the vanguard of "new apps" to detect a hint of when something is about to come over the horizon.
Going back to the video/PDF I started with, and the graphs for the busiest 20,000 lines. That data is, in effect, a current snapshot of the vanguard - the people using their lines to the limit. The question Doug asks is most relevant: Are they rare users doing things that are perfectly normal (for them)? Or are they normal users doing rare things?
I would even say (based purely on my own findings), that there are more EU's who have opted for the 40 Meg product as opposed to the 80 Meg option ?
When TBB publish their speedtest statistics over all lines (such as the graphs in this article (http://blog.thinkbroadband.com/2014/12/detailed-analysis-of-november-2014-speed-tests/)), you get a feel for the distribution. The upstream graphs, especially, give a good indication of the cutoff points between technologies and packages.
In VM, it looks like around 10% go for 150Mbps, and a further 10-15% go for 100Mbps.
In BT Retail, it looks like two-thirds go for the cheaper 40/10 package, though some will be limited by distance, rather than pure choice; around 15% take 80/20 packages, and 30% take 40/10.
For Sky, the split is much worse: Around 24% have taken FTTC, but only a couple of percent bother about the higher package; similar stories show for TT and EE. I suspect these three ISPs manage to account for the most cost-conscious part of the market, but low marketing of 80/20 may play a part here.
Zen has a much more even split. Is this price? Or the type of subscriber they have?
Plusnet has a different split too, but they offer a product with a 40/20 split, so the stats look a little different there.
From a different angle, I did read something recently that suggested subscribers in Korea were dropping back to 50Mbps packages from 100Mbps ones, just when gigabit packages (http://www.slideshare.net/Netmanias/20141218now-giga-internet-service-available-from-all-the-korean-big-3-operators) were starting to become available there. However, I can't find it any more :-[
However, I did find this old Australian article (http://www.abc.net.au/technology/articles/2011/06/23/3251936.htm), that showed some interesting patterns of Korean subscriber behaviour when facing different price options, over the 2007-2011 timeframe.
It's always been my own opinion that the majority of folk will be happy with circa 50-80 Meg speeds,
I can't help but agree with you.
He was talking about requirements for 2030 which is 15 years ahead. 15 years ago most people didnt have broadband & the BT adsl campaigns hadn't even started. Back then, the internet was mostly the 'WorldWideWeb', now it is so much more. Its impossible to see into the future but I can for sure see our reliance on the Internet growing.
(I was writing this part as Kitz wrote her reply, but it fits as a good response)
We are in our own kind of vanguard in this family. We've made full use of the opportunities of having always on, fully available broadband, in the proper sense of the "internet" rather than just "WWW" - it started in 2000, and first allowed us to develop (over 5-6 years) into working from home more and more - which meant for a great amount of time at home as the kids grew. More recently, it has allowed us to move halfway across the country and still keep the same jobs. Incredibly fortunate (I don't think we realise quite how lucky) but incredibly liberating. And none of it needs the absolute heaviest speeds. Decent speeds, and decent quality, are enough almost all the time - with occasional moments where patience needs to be a virtue.
Even now, with teenagers with ipads for school (my daughter is the heaviest user of bandwidth in this family), and streaming HD TV sometimes, we have no need for full speeds. Cost-wise, we can justify 80/20 packages over 40/10 (but the lower speeds would work OK), but we can't justify spending on more. If I needed to go for VM, it would be a 50Mbps packages, possibly squeezed to 100Mbps because of their low upstream speeds.
We are most certainly doing the kind of work, using the kind of economic opportunities, that politicians want "broadband" to open up for more people. None of that needs the speeds for streaming multiple 8k videos.
What lies beyond this?
The problem is that the nation's peak volumes currently come from doing things that could have been easily predicted in the mid nineties - higher definition TV, and playing games. That we can't really see applications more demanding than same ones (but as even higher definition TV, and bigger games) with concurrent users, suggests that ... perhaps ... the next 20 years won't develop into an all-out need for speed. Perhaps...
My guess is that we will hit more of a plateau, as more "ordinary" users of the internet catch up. I also guess that the plateau will be in the region of 50-100Mbps. To achieve that, we need to make faster speeds available to the fringes and slow-spots, rather than faster speeds to the centre of urban areas.
I hope the gentleman in question won't mind me saying, but our very own master scientist (Burrakucat), is happy with his ADSL connection and can't justify the price-hike to receive VDSL speeds, due to his limited demand on the service ??.
Hehe - we'll convert him sooner or later. Even if we have to cut the E-side to do it ;)
Of course we all know there are issues with the MPF's, especially if you are unlucky enough to be on a full D-side made up of this Ali beast. But, most D-sides will be a hybrid of Copper and Ali.
Most D-sides a hybrid of copper and ali? Most D-sides include Ali? Or do you mean that where Ali appears, in most cases it is as a hybrid?
Anyway, I agree that, at some point, this extended reliance on the D-side (through FTTC and FTTdp) means that extra work needs to be put into ensuring that D-side is worthy of relying on.
Of course, with the current "mixed economy" for fibre, it might turn out that deploying FTTP is cheaper than fixing a length of Aluminium, or a length of bad copper. We (ie BT management) shouldn't be scared of this.
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Most D-sides a hybrid of copper and ali? Most D-sides include Ali? Or do you mean that where Ali appears, in most cases it is as a hybrid?
My apologies ….. it was confusing when read back.
I did in fact mean generally, where there is a section of Ali cable in the loop there will also be a mix of Cu as well. Of course, there are always exceptions whereby the entire D-side will be Ali (Thankfully on my patch, few and far between), but we do have one such locality that is quite affluent, (Middle class and upwards would be how I'd pitch it) and for the love of God Almighty, we have reached the end of the road with what we can achieve over this sub-standard wiring, coupled with heavy cross-talk !!
Vectoring is their only olive branch for now, but that is how DSL is touted …… 'A best-efforts product' due to the laws of physics and legacy cables.
As has been mooted many, many times and again just recently on similar threads ……. there are winners and there are losers. That is life on the whole, it's just some individuals don't seem to understand that and the fact that BT are a share-holding, profit-making company.
<And so the debate will continue icon>. ;)
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I'd estimate we (family) probably use around 300GB per month on streaming alone. That's Netflix, Sky Go, Youtube etc. The other Sky stuff which can be downloaded to the box is seperate to that.
Add to that normal usage (games eat a lot now) & I'd say our average usage on Sky is 500GB/month minimum.
Now apart from school hols that is pretty much all between 4pm-midnight so that works out as.... 5Mbps or so. Add in enough to minimise latency caused by link congestion & you're looking at a minimum of 10Mbps downstream to be close to acceptable now. Upstream varies depending on leechers/streamers :D
Edit - It rather depends on whether the (BBC) license fee is decriminalised or not - and the inevitable subscription fee - as to how much bandwidth UK people will require in the short-medium term. For the moment Sky* are the outlier in that estimate as they are the ones investing in the core network - they have more (lit) bandwidth than BT between Birmingham & London.
*"Holy Grail" for Sky is to not have to rely on satellites for delivery of adverts programmes.
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With all due to the guy what people need isn't what anyone should be catering to, but what they want.
None of us need cars that can reach over 70mph or accelerate quickly.
None of us need broadband over a few or at most a couple of tens of Mb per second if it's managed properly.
I personally rather like buying a 36GB PS4 game and being able to download it quickly, rather than it being quicker for me to walk from the suburbs to the centre of the city, purchase the disk, walk back, and install it, despite my being willing to pay far more than I do for my Internet access.
I'm a huge fan of companies supplying what the consumer wants, assuming the consumer is prepared to pay for it, not what the company think they need. That is just plain arrogant.
I should insert the disclaimer that I have been turned off by anything BT say on this matter since they hiked up install price of FTTPoD and, contrary to the Openreach CEO's comments on an investor conference call which is a huge no-no incidentally, doubled monthly rental too because they're too incompetent to install FTTP in a timely and cost-effective fashion and had to put a brake on what little demand they did have.
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That would be nice :)
That's quite a price hike:
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20271204/xDSL/fttpod1.png)
What was their official reason for that?
I wonder if FTTPoD has dedicated backhaul out of the cab...? If not, I wonder what priority FTTPoD traffic is given over FTTC :P
Can't have your native fibre customers whinging when speedtests don't show >300Mb :)
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Well openreach dont need a reason there is almost non existant competition in the FTTP space, but if they did I expect it would be related to low demand and high cost to deploy.
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I think 25Mbps will be enough for a few years. There is less and less downloading going on and more and more streaming.
4K is just coming onto the market and that will be fine with 25Mbps. We're not going to be going any higher resolution for quite some time.
How often do you watch more than one 1080p video at once? I bet rarely. I can't see this changing with 4K.
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Multiple teenagers in the house and one or both parents? I bet it's a lot more common than you think (and quite possible multiple people watching the same thing simultaneously!).
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Jelv, beat me too it :)
Send from LG G3 via Tapatalk (Typos & bad formatting are free)
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Multiple teenagers in the house and one or both parents? I bet it's a lot more common than you think (and quite possible multiple people watching the same thing simultaneously!).
But at 4K? 25Mbps would handle 2 or more 1080p streams easily.
In this house we have got 4 people in total. We all use iPlayer, Sky on Demand, etc. and 6Mb certainly isn't enough but I can't imagine us ever using more than 20Mbps at once - I know downloads scale to the available bandwidth but you get my point.
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Gentlefolk,
It's worth noting that BT sometimes supply FTTH at an asynchronous speed of "Up to 80 Mbps download" I think for around £50.00 per month.
I believe there is some requirement for reasonably fast speeds maybe up to 150 Mbps download and with nearly similar upload speeds as well. I have assisted a number of families with teenage children who are giving their parents a lot of grief as they can't all skype / watch content / download software updates simultaneously etc. etc.
See the picture below of my estimated download time for a 2 G BYTE software upgrade on a VM 152 Mbps service, although I suspect these times are extended by internet contention somewhere.
I can see a need for more synchronous speeds as cloud computing and video conferencing increase. However probably far more important in most users' requirements is far higher reliability without endless arguments that a service is still within the low arbitrary estimates provided at purchase time. This aspect is just as important for those still on very low speed ADSL services too. E.g.
1. THREE bonded ADSL2+ services on one 20 pr cable running at 3.06 Mbps, 3.79 Mbps and 2.26 Mbps respectively and costing a small fortune too !
2. An ADSL service quite ridiculously offered VDSL at 80 Mbps but only running at 1.28 Mbps down and 0.51 Mbps max up.
3. Ditto at 0.44 Mbps down and a max of 0.51 up
4. Ditto at 1.53 Mbps down and a max of 0.51 up
5. An ADSL2 service running at 2.13 Mbps down and 0.94 Mbps up.
6. A VDSL2 service running at 3.80 Mbps down and 0.94 Mbps up.
Kind regards,
Walter