(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-ukAssociated 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-trickWithout 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), 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 were starting to become available there. However, I can't find it any more
However, I did find
this old Australian article, 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.