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[kitz]

stumbled upon this BT document from 25th July 2013 which is a transcript of a conference call.

hmmm..  do I get a hint that the prospect of Sub Loop Unbundling (as called for by Sky) could possibly be hindering any progress of vectoring?   I think most of the regs on this forum are aware that one of the issues with vectoring is that all lines on the card have to be treated the same... and whilst the ECI cabs are capable of vectoring at the line card level, difficulties can arise with mapping - which means SLU is out.   Unlike the Huawei dslams, the ECI dslams dont appear to be able to be upgraded with a hardware vectoring module, which leaves us wondering how BTw will deal with the ECI cabs.    The future prospect of any SLU without doubt will affect vectoring . 

Reading between the lines, I somehow get a feel there is a slight 'poke' by Ian Livingstone in his final paragraph at 'the regulator' not to hinder any BT progress on vectoring,  by what the LLU providers may or may not want to do in future.
Anyhow read it yourself.

Liv Garfield

On vectoring, one of my favourite topics, so delighted to have a question on it. We believe this is a really great technology. It's something we've been trialling in the labs for a good, decent period of time. We are now heading into live field trials.
We've actually placed orders going down the line that all new cabinets will have vectoring on them, so we're firmly committed to this. It's less I guess a lab technology and more a real life thing for us going forward. So what you will be looking forward to, if you've not been a fibre cabinet lucky person up 'til now is that when you do get your cabinet near you, you'll get a vectored cabinet, which means that we'll be able to secure even greater speeds in the future.
I think we're comfortable that although we will need to continue to talk about standards, we will need to make sure that we get the technology right. We're very comfortable that we've made numerous changes in our technology roadmap on fibre over the last couple of years, and we've managed those well. And I think we're comfortable that there is strong European support for vectoring, and we look to make sure that we follow that support models to make sure that we can get into a good place, and live.
And I think time windows and time-wise, we believe that we will looking into, as I said, go live with trials imminently in the field and much bigger scale next year. Obviously, the major I guess debate that continues, as we've seen by Deutsche Telekom, is what happens with the SLU line. I think we believe that what we've seen in Germany is a good model whereby if you do vector an area that you accept that you've got a compromised situation there with SLU. That's something that we're in discussion I guess in the UK about.
The guidance that we all received from Ofcom's recent documentation is that they are supportive of vectoring. They're also supportive of SLU. So I guess it's about working out how the two coincide, and we'll be looking to understand that. I think vectoring gives fantastic benefits in areas for customers, so I think there's a good argument that vectoring should be encouraged and supported.

Ian Livingston

Yes. To put it in context, vectoring can make 100Mbps plus a reality for people, and people just couldn’t consider this could be achieved from fibre to the cabinet. It was just a couple of years ago people said we need fibre to the premise to get to three-figure megabits per second. And also, as take-up increases, it also will ensure the performance is good.
So it is very important that actual delivery of vectoring is in no way held back by people saying that one day they might do something with a cabinet, and I think from a UK national interest point of view, that's what I would imagine the regulator would want to see a way to achieve that.

Theres a lot of blah blah blah about BT Sport, but also some interesting snippets about FTTC roll out, and a little bit about increased faults on FTTC lines.
- the full document can be viewed at
http://www.btplc.com/Sharesandperformance/Quarterlyresults/PDFdownloads/Q1_2013-14_transcript_FINAL%5B1%5D.pdf

[NewtronStar]

Liv Garfield

if you've not been a fibre cabinet lucky person up 'til now is that when you do get your cabinet near you, you'll get a vectored cabinet, which means that we'll be able to secure even greater speeds in the future.

What I read into this is only newly installed cabinets will be vectored enabled 

[guest]

SLU isn't going to happen, not even in the artificial competition environment of the UK. It simply cannot be allowed to happen. Regulatory things will have to change to prevent it happening.

BT/UK govt/most of the EU have bet the farm on vectoring* as the cost of retrofitting fibre to existing properties is fairly high. For example some properties in the UK from 60s to 80s have the old armoured cable under them rather than ducting so they'll need poles putting up etc.

For the average VDSL2 circuit its not that much of an issue to have 20% of alien xtalk emitters in the bundle provided they are ADSLx rather than VDSLx. The resources used to de-emphasise the alien emitters isn't that much of a problem given its less than 3MHz spectrum in that instance.

However while ADSLx alien xtalk isn't such an issue on VDSL2 in terms of consuming vectoring resources it does have a seriously detrimental effect on resources when using phantom mode** which is in almost all instances a lot more cost effective than BT's FTTPoD and is likely to be the stopgap for a lot of people (who can't get fibre) before g.fast.

g.fast will be where a lot of the UK is heading in the next 15 years, although that'll take a lot longer than elsewhere in Europe.

Oh and what I mean by "vectoring resources" is basically power efficiency - the ultimate intent being that the customer equipment (CPE) powers the g.fast port on the box on the pole/in the pavement/cabinet.

*there are so many FTTC cabs deployed & so much subsidy paid out (throughout Europe) that nothing else makes financial or engineering sense frankly other than in ultra-dense urban areas.

** http://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof21/Maes-Gfast.pdf page 5 for those curious. It uses two phonelines & a load of hideous maths

Edit - Eircom are somewhat gobsmacked at the results of vectoring from what I hear. Then again there wasn't much in the way of real LLU in Eire so it does pretty much what it says on the tin - and on a UK loop.