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[Chrysalis]

You know what, I just can't be bothered anymore, EJS you seem to pick holes in a lot of things I post - I'm not an academic, I not fantastically clever, I not very could at constructing strong arguments, and BS just sounds like a broken record.

I agree with you Ronski.

I think we both agreed on this a couple of years back on TBB also when we were discussing the possibility of a "partial" vectoring rollout, and I predicted it could happen because BT are thick skinned so can take the bad PR from it.  Although this lack of vectoring has gave them pretty no bad PR, seems all the media sites are in their pockets.

There is been what you might call financially astute and there is also been just tight.  BT is the latter.

They could e.g. probably do all the following with little risk of going into financial ruin as the cost would be small compared to their turnover.

Switch out all ECI cabinets to hauwei.
Enable g.inp and vectoring everywhere.

There is also the following options which would probably hurt their balance sheet but still low risk.

Deploy g.fast node's away from cabinet.
Copper rearranging to get people connected to their nearest cabinet.

All these options are a far cry from the extreme nationwide high risk FTTP rollout.

Multi vendor approach as well as other ways BT work just increases the postcode lottery with them.  BT will cry its out of their control when its themselves making decisions on what technologies to deploy.

ECI cabinets dont still have g.inp which is a technology which is nearly a decade old.
Vectoring is approaching half a decade in itself.

The answer is very simple why we see this approach.

To rollout a product that is variable and only runs at its marketed capability for a fraction of the users ultimately is more efficient use of short term capital expenditure, in other words gives the CEO a bigger bonus.
A product which would give everyone the same consistent service would ultimately cost more and also raise the level of expectation, bad for CEO bonus.

Some companies will go out their way to make the marketable specs of a product affect the least amount of customers possible that they can get away with as it is more profitable practice.  This applies to all sorts of industries such as financial with advertised APR's as an example.

[GigabitEthernet]

I agree with Ronski too. It's incredibly tiring having the same boring arguments re BT trotted out over and over again. We get several posts a day from Black Sheep from BT, essentially BT propaganda and when it's criticised, I personally feel that some here are made to feel stupid.

I've made no secret that I don't like BT and I think I've given logical reasons as to why. I would like to have a rational debate but it just seems as though BT is some amazing God-like entity who can do no wrong.

[ejs]

It's incredibly tiring having the same boring arguments re BT trotted out over and over again.

Yes, I think it is too. By which I mean the arguments along the lines of:
There is some technological improvement that could be done to provide a better Internet connection. BT are the worst company ever for not doing it.

If you're buying yourself a computer, you're free to spend as much of your money as you like getting the top of the range of every component, it's your money. If you expect someone else to buy you a computer, would you expect them to ask what it's going to be used for? Or would you just expect them to buy you a top of the range computer, just because you say you need a "decent" computer? Yet people wouldn't even discuss what a USO broadband connection should be usable for, so how the hell is the USO speed supposed to be set?

And the money for whatever technological improvement you want for your broadband is presumably going to come from all customers, and/or taxpayers.

It's not going to be much of a debate if you're not supposed to comment on what other people say.

The anti-BT lot is also pretty much just propaganda, it's now being simplified down to saying that because FTTP is better than copper, we should do whatever these other companies want done to BT.

[S.Stephenson]

I would have been dissatisfied with even 80/20 so I put my money where my mouth is and got a 2nd line.

I've given up on ECI improving at all and am lucky enough to be in range of G.Fast although I'm very likely to have moved by then, and line length will be extremely high on my list.

[Weaver]

Ignitionnet wrote:
> I always remarked that if you needed to look at such stats before you see a 'problem' it obviously wasn't such a problem anyway. Real issues get noticed during normal usage.

I see your point. But for me, discovering anomalies from stats is valuable as it can sometimes discover a nascent low-level problem, one which could develop into something critical. Spotting oddities early saves a lot of time, because waiting for something to really seriously break often means a lot of unnecessary down time, as things can't get fixed at the drop of a hat.

Protocols such as TCP and low-level features such as error-correcting codes and interleave cover up what's really going on, and a physical-layer error is no less real because software successfully covers it up, from the point of view of getting ahead of potential issues. Speed loss caused by low-level problems is insidious and we don't need it.

[Black Sheep]

I agree with Ronski too. It's incredibly tiring having the same boring arguments re BT trotted out over and over again. We get several posts a day from Black Sheep from BT, essentially BT propaganda and when it's criticised, I personally feel that some here are made to feel stupid.

I've made no secret that I don't like BT and I think I've given logical reasons as to why. I would like to have a rational debate but it just seems as though BT is some amazing God-like entity who can do no wrong.

The posts I put on from BT, are hopefully there to bring some fact-based information as to what is going on in the big scheme of things.

Of course, there is always going to be little bit of spin/propaganda involved, that's the nature of business is it not ?? But ...... if the CEO releases a statement saying we have spent 'X' amount of cash on 'x' amount of DSLAMS or baked potatoes or whatever  .......... then the figures will be factual ..... not made up, not someone's opinion, not a biased report .... just pure fact.
The 'spin' (if any) will most likely come at the end with how they hope to proceed in the future .....

Now then, if you or others don't like these snippets of info ......... a) debate them ...... b) ignore them.

Please, do not be surprised if I do sound like a <quote from Ronski> "broken record" ..... because I work for the bl00dy company and see and hear first-hand most of what is happening. They are not a bunch of conniving t0ssers with no interest in the EU, as some on here would have you believe.

I've said it before ...... they don't get everything right ..... with a company this size you never will, but to see certain individuals constantly slating the company I work for with nothing more than their ideology as to how they would run a FTSE100 company, gets damned tiresome at times. If 'you' truly believe you are the answer to everything then get in touch with BT ..... I'm sure they'll welcome you with open arms !!

[Chrysalis]

Weaver interesting you brought up TCP.

As soon as http/2 got made official, google moved on from it to QUIC which they use on sites like youtube, QUIC transmits over UDP.  The gains are that overheads associated with TCP are gone, but of course UDP is not resistant to dropped packets.

[ejs]

I thought I'd better download and at least skim through the report. It says half of the 80% FTTP coverage by 2026 could be done by the Altnets, so that's good news then if you don't like BT.

And it's all in aid of:

the world is on the cusp of a new digital revolution

It's all for smart cities, smart grids, driverless cars, the Internet of Things... So how necessary all this FTTP is may depend on how much you believe in a load of new technology being about to revolutionise everything that everyone does.

[Bowdon]

It would be good if fibre lines/pipes (not sure what to call them) came down the main roads and then people could be given an offer.. pay a big lump sum of a couple of thousand to bring fibre to the house, then pay the usual prices for FTTP.

I thought this was the way G.fast was going. But without nodes its going to be a big gamble if enough people close to a cabinet want it. The people close are probably getting the full 80/20 already. While the people away, were the nodes were supposed to go, are getting 10/1.. so the people most in need of wanting faster reliable speeds won't get the opportunity to get them.

The Have's will become smaller and the Have not's group will grow bigger.

But ultimately this comes down to money AND a lack of competition. I'm sure there is going to be a point when rival companies will catch up with BT / OR and will have to invest in regular FTTP (not restricted to new builds). At that point I suspect we'll have a burst of progress.

[niemand]

I see your point. But for me, discovering anomalies from stats is valuable as it can sometimes discover a nascent low-level problem, one which could develop into something critical. Spotting oddities early saves a lot of time, because waiting for something to really seriously break often means a lot of unnecessary down time, as things can't get fixed at the drop of a hat.

Fair enough. I generally have too much on and little desire to do such things. In between the day job supporting and occasionally helping rearchitect WAN acceleration and Software Defined WANs and the stuff on the side, an MSc in Information Security, I tend to have little desire to play with IT for fun unless very interested.

I run TBB BQM and have a bandwidth usage monitor on my home server but only look at them when there's a problem.

[niemand]

Weaver interesting you brought up TCP.

As soon as http/2 got made official, google moved on from it to QUIC which they use on sites like youtube, QUIC transmits over UDP.  The gains are that overheads associated with TCP are gone, but of course UDP is not resistant to dropped packets.

QUIC has per-packet error correction and aligns the block boundaries of the cipher being used with the UDP packet boundaries so a dropped packet can be retransmitted and the cipher stream continue. No three way handshake, QUIC deals with loss and detects congestion. QUIC was primarily invented to speed up session start time, something Google have been working on for a while with their attempts to push data through a TLS connection before the handshake had completed.

Some light reading below.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RNHkx_VvKWyWg6Lr8SZ-saqsQx7rFV-ev2jRFUoVD34/edit#heading=h.mtr200oibue9

[ejs]

But ultimately this comes down to money AND a lack of competition. I'm sure there is going to be a point when rival companies will catch up with BT / OR and will have to invest in regular FTTP (not restricted to new builds). At that point I suspect we'll have a burst of progress.

That's what the report is about. The report claims that half of the 80% FTTP coverage by 2026 would be done by the rival companies, if the recommendations in the report are implemented. The report also says that the rival companies are, collectively, already ahead of BT / OR for FTTP coverage.

[stevebrass]

And it's all in aid of:
It's all for smart cities, smart grids, driverless cars, the Internet of Things... So how necessary all this FTTP is may depend on how much you believe in a load of new technology being about to revolutionise everything that everyone does.

Indeed. Prediction is very difficult especially about the future. When BT was sold did anybody foresee the way telecoms was going? Or was it seen as just a way of capitalising on a cash cow?

If the need for a connected UK had been seen then perhaps a different decision might have been made. The Beeching cuts of the 1960s are a classic example of getting it wrong.

As it stands now we have a model of trying to control a private enterprise, a model that consistently fails. Energy companies? Rail Track? Southern Rail? Various health contracts?

I don't think that we would have our current road network, electricity grid, gas grid and telephone grid if governments had left it to the market. You can have 240v but oh dear you can only have 189v. What do mean you want water 24/7? Why is nobody rushing in to plug our projected power gap, except for foreign governments?

I am convinced as I have noted in another thread the Govt needs to invest in the civil engineering side of this then let the private sector compete to use this state owned capacity. By the civils I mean just the ducting. If companies want to run mice with messages up and down them then let if that is what works. With apologies to all mice lovers.

I count myself as an end user with a interest in the technology but no real competence. I get 15m down and 1m up. That works for me but it might not in the future. Who really knows.

[Chrysalis]

QUIC has per-packet error correction and aligns the block boundaries of the cipher being used with the UDP packet boundaries so a dropped packet can be retransmitted and the cipher stream continue. No three way handshake, QUIC deals with loss and detects congestion. QUIC was primarily invented to speed up session start time, something Google have been working on for a while with their attempts to push data through a TLS connection before the handshake had completed.

Some light reading below.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RNHkx_VvKWyWg6Lr8SZ-saqsQx7rFV-ev2jRFUoVD34/edit#heading=h.mtr200oibue9

thanks, so they have overcome the UDP issues then, and yeah they wanted to get round the tcp handshaking process.

[niemand]

Wasn't that difficult. My employer did it nearly a decade ago