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[tiffy]

I remember being told by a very well informed user resident in Ireland that Southern Ireland has had vectoring applied on their FTTC system since day one, living in the North, I'am not sure what technology / cabinets they have adopted, must be an Irish forum member around, perhaps someone can advise ?

[kitz]

Mostly true.  Eircom were one of the first Telco's to install the vectoring modules I previously mentioned into their existing Huawei 288 cabs (MA5603). 

They started roll-out in March 2014 which allowed them to claim they were one of the first telco's in the world to deploy (system based) vectoring.    They got beat the previous year by some south american country who used the ECI V41's.   

https://fibrerollout.ie/eir-commences-vectoring-roll-out-boosts-fibre-broadband-speeds-to-100mbs/

[Chrysalis]

I am pretty sure its modem related, I remember it in one of emails I read at the time I was looking into g.inp.
Plus some other people have mentioned it as well such as john, andy and others.

I think with g.inp openreach dug their grave on that one, by allowing people to run whatever modem they wanted and then for whatever reason not kicking the incompatible modems off the network, I expect the reason that didnt happen is probably because openreach and the CP's couldnt decide between them who would fund replacement modems to the customers who were cutoff.

It does seem ECI have indeed rolled out g.inp overseas on M41's, so this is not a global problem.

[tiffy]

@kitz

Thanks for the information & link ref Irish FTTC system, Font of knowledge as always.

Eircom appear to have exclusively adopted Huawei hardware which I suppose was a big factor in their decision to implement vectoring across their estate, noted that even Donegal, usually called the forgotten county in Ireland, physically in the north but politically in the south, was full upgraded, must have been a big cash injection from somewhere, pity BT had not followed the same philosophy.

[kitz]

I am pretty sure its modem related,

Yup agreed - they have strongly hinted this is the case on more than one occasion.   They won't name the modem's though.  The annoying thing is that for those of us using the BCM modems and custom f/w ECI modems it worked fine.

I know there were a couple of Draytek modems which had problems with g.inp and they (Draytek) even offered those affected a £100 discount off purchasing a newer model.   

[kitz]

pity BT had not followed the same philosophy.

Agreed.    But on the flip side it would further divide the country yet again if they installed the modules into all their MA5603s.   
Those Huawei vectoring units weren't available until 2014.    At which point in time almost half of Openreach's cabs were ECIs as most of the cabs installed during the period 2012-2013 were ECI's.  It wasn't until 2014 that Openreach started favouring Huawei again.   I'm not sure about the MA5616s - at first they were also incompatible but from memory I think ejs found something saying that they too could now be upgraded. 

I've no idea of what the lead time between Openreach deciding they were going to need 'x' cabs, placing the order, installation and then to live date is.   Someone like Carl may have a better idea... but for those cabs installed in 2012, I would not be surprised if it would be the previous year when they decided they were going to use ECI's.   There will also be manufacturing time to be taken into account as although a lot of the DSLAMs are modularised, no manufacturer is likely to have circa 8k DSLAMs just lying around waiting to be shipped out as soon as a Telco places the order.

I really think as far as vectoring goes it was bad timing.  Openreach wanted to get on and roll out FTTC and selected what at the time was considered one of the best manufacturers.    Other countries such as Germany and France had been using ECI dslams/msans for years and they did have a good reputation back then for cutting edge technology.   Deutsche Telekom in particular heavily invested in the M41's, but have later swapped out with V41's.     Openreach seem hesitant to do this. If they were going to do so, then it would have been better to do it a couple of years ago.   Now they are more concerned about (g.fast and) fttp.

[Weaver]

Is system-based vectoring a pain because of the requirement for communication back and forth and having to consider a larger set of data? But you get a better, more accurate result and more effective correction because the calculations are based on all the possible signal contributions from every disturber not just a subset of them? Is that what we’re talking about ? Trying to understand.

[ejs]

Regarding the ECI retransmission being switched off back in 2016, Openreach did name the modem chipset manufacturer. I'm not sure if they found further problems since then.

The publicly available Openreach R4000 EIP documents list a "NGA1 512pt DSLAM Upgrade". Lets all assume that will be some of the older large Huawei cabinets being replaced with brand new 512-port models, while ECI CABINETS GET NOTHING.

[j0hn]

512 port models? please do expand
8 x 64?

[CarlT]

Can't be 64s, John, those are being used in the 384 port upgrades and there are only 6 service board slots in the 5603T.

Upgrading to 512 lines would need an entirely new chassis. The 5600T could handle 1024 lines but as far as I know isn't for cabinet mounting.

[burakkucat]

It wasn't until 2014 that Openreach started favouring Huawei again.   I'm not sure about the MA5616s - at first they were also incompatible but from memory I think ejs found something saying that they too could now be upgraded. 

The MA5616s require a separate, add-on,  back-plane for the vectoring engine.

[j0hn]

Sounds like they've got 512 ports in to a cabinet by some method

The publicly available Openreach R4000 EIP documents list a "NGA1 512pt DSLAM Upgrade". Lets all assume that will be some of the older large Huawei cabinets being replaced with brand new 512-port models, while ECI CABINETS GET NOTHING.

512 doesn't divide by 6.
That's why I queried 8 x 64.
Or maybe 4 x 96 ports and 2 x 64 ports.

[CarlT]

Huawei don't seem aware they've a 96 port VDSL-2 service board.

http://support.huawei.com/enterprise/en/doc/EDOC1000060621?section=j061&topicName=vdsl2-service-board

[Bowdon]

I noticed in the thread that people say ECI cabinets can do system based vectoring but because of space can't fit the vectoring card in. So what would happen if they put another ECI cabinet next to the current one and split the lines between the two, then both cabinets would have more than enough space to fit vectoring cards in too? Or have I mis-read the issue?

[ejs]

If the only problem were the amount of physical space in the metal box, I'm sure someone would be able to devise a solution that involves making the metal box bigger. They appear to have successfully managed to extend the other types of metal boxes.

I think vectoring requires fairly high bandwidth connections between the line cards and vectoring engine to get the data to the vectoring engine, which I think tends to be done by plugging all the cards into a system that was designed to do that.

If you have two DSLAMs, then you'd also need to coordinate the vectoring between the two.