Virgin Media 10Mbit Upstream Triallists

Any 10Mbps upstream Virgin Media triallists out there?

I understand things are proceeding albeit slowly, and there's a lot of work to be done in some places to get this done, so any feedback from triallists which will, of course, be treated in total confidence would be welcome!

In other news I understand that Virgin are sending letters to their most extreme users - I wonder if this is a precursor to the upstream increases mentioned given they would have some quite unpleasant effects on their local areas on the VM network.

Sorry I've nothing more concrete to tell you, people have totally clammed up!

BT Starting To Care About Upstream?

First I see this quote on a BT webpage:

These FTTP and FTTC products will offer end users the highest upstream speeds currently available in the UK, at up to 10Mbit/s. These speeds are ideal for consumers or businesses wanting to send large files with rich graphics or upload pictures and videos in a fraction of the time that is possible using products with slower downstream speeds.

Then this appears in my email:

This email is to inform you that the Access Charge Change Notice (ACCN) Number - OR151concerning a GEA Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) 10M upstream Product

Which is effective 23/11/2009, will be available shortly via the Openreach Price Notification webpage which can be found at:...

BT are replacing the additional upstream product which increased upstream on FTTC from 2Mbit to 5Mbit with an increase of 2Mbit to 10Mbit.

Same price too, service providers pay BT Openreach an extra 25p/month.

8Mbit of extra upstream for 3 pounds a year. Can anyone say no brainer?

Also I note that BT's fibre to the premises trials will be running at 100Mbit downstream 10Mbit up. Still fairly pants but an improvement on 100Mbit downstream 2Mbit upstream.

So over to Virgin Media, who are apparently trialling 10Mbit upstream on their network at some point, some time soon. They need to do something because right now 50/1.75 seems pretty poor compared with 40/10.

Ofcom's Support For New Infrastructure

Ofcom's ideas of how to enhance infrastructure in the UK is brought nicely into focus by comments from Internal Communications Systems, a relatively small deployer of FTTP in the UK.

'After a fee of £ 10,000 to Ofcom they granted us Code Powers on the condition that we laid 50% more ducts than we required to expansion and replacement for worn out electricity cables.'

Yep force small fibre providers to supply ducting to National Grid plc, who proudly on their website describe themselves as 'one of the world's largest utilities'. There's how to progress broadband UK. Or how to ensure the BT/VM duopoly and BT monopoly in non-cabled areas.

The ignorance of local councils is likewise astounding.

'Four years ago we were invited by the resident of Lyndhurst, Hampshire to roll out FTTH in the Area. We now have a building to deploy our fibre from, but run up against local problems. The local District Council told us BT were doing a great job and would we go away.'

I also wonder how much truth is in this. If it is true it's not nice:

'At a meeting in London of the Government Advisery(sic) Commuttee(sic) sent abroad to study foreign FTTH deployment, I was told that BT had received in one form or another 5 Billion Pounds to provide Broadband coverage.'

Links to the posts mentioning these things are here and here.

So in between Mandelson (no offense to his homosexuality by the way) wanting to take file sharers by the hindmost, and Ofcom happily guarding BT and Virgin Media from the evils of smaller operators who could potentially supply better services to areas that want them, if the district councils don't try and ignore the wishes of their residents and electorate to likewise stick up for BT, it's all looking fantastic for the UK.

I'm looking forward to the advertisement: 'Coming soon, 100Mbit downstream, 2Mbit upstream, and if you file share on it you'll be disconnected and fined 50 grand. Go Broadband Britain!'

Incidentally BT's Ebbsfleet FTTP pilot has 2Mbit upstream whether one takes the 10, 30 or 100Mbit downstream residential option, so I wasn't actually making that bit up :)

I Don't Generally Get Political But...

A few things appear to be going on that are somewhat irritating me.

Firstly let's deal with the unelected de facto Prime Minister Peter Mandelson, one of a number of unelected policy makers with the Brown government. Twice he has resigned from elected office under a cloud.

Resignation Number One

In December 1998, it was revealed Mandelson had bought a home in Notting Hill in 1996 with the assistance of an interest-free loan of £373,000 from Geoffrey Robinson, a millionaire Labour MP who was also in the Government, but was subject to an inquiry into his business dealings by Mandelson's department.^[10] Although Mandelson alleged he had deliberately not taken part in any decisions relating to Robinson, he knew he should have declared the loan as an interest, and he resigned on 23 December 1998.

Resignation Number Two

In January 2001, it was revealed Mandelson had phoned Home Office minister Mike O'Brien on behalf of Srichand Hinduja, an Indian businessman who was seeking British citizenship, and whose family firm was to become the main sponsor of the "Faith Zone" in the Millennium Dome. At the time, Hinduja and his brothers were under investigation by the Indian government for alleged involvement in the Bofors scandal. On 24 January 2001, Mandelson resigned from the Government for a second time,^[16][17] insisting he had done nothing wrong.

Of course, in the first case Mandelson cliamed to have done nothing wrong. In the second an 'independent' enquiry found he had done nothing wrong. Not really the point though.

Following this a few other controversies relating to possible misuse of political power, and it seems as though he can't help himself.

On 16th August The Independent reported that after an extensive lobbying campaign Mandelson had taken a strong interest in file sharing, with potential sanctions including removal of internet access and a 50,000GBP (57,3000 Euro, 81,900 USD) fine.

On 17th August The Daily Mail reported Mandelson had suddenly taken an interest in file sharing after spending dinner with David Geffen a record executive and film producer. It also reported that 'an insider' within one of Mandelson's many departments reported that he had previously shown no interest and suddenly following this dinner became very interested in legislation criminalising file sharing. Mandelson's spokesman naturally claimed that it was not discussed. It is reported this legislation will form a considerable part of new legislation to be presented to Parliament next month.

25th August the BBC reports that while file sharing was originally considered to be worked on within the Digital Britain report with measures due for implementation by 2012 the timescales are now considered by Mandelson's department to be 'too long to wait'.

Clearly nothing untoward about any of this. Not at all.

Just how stupid, Mandelson, do you think we are? Much as those of us who either have an IQ above 10 or aren't benefitting from your policy would love to get shot of you thanks to that coward Gordon Brown appointing you to government because he couldn't hack it and needed to hide behind you you're not subject to any kind of balances and checks, your immediate underlings being 50% unelected also, and it's not like we can vote you personally out as we didn't vote for you in the first place!

So this is democracy?

It Appears ISPs Underestimate Upstream Too

In a hotel, on a Swisscom 15GBP a day wireless connection.

This is an 802.1b connection, and its' performance is, err, less than ideal.

Download Speed: 1964 kbps (245.5 KB/sec ) Upload Speed: 47 kbps (5.9 KB/sec )

That they are kindly proxying DNS and their DNS resolver is hopelessly overloaded doesn't really appeal either.

Your ISP's DNS resolver requires 3500 msec to conduct an external lookup, and 3300 msec to lookup an item in the cache.

This is particularly slow, and you may see significant performance degradation as a result.

It seems that some ISPs underestimate upstream, and this is the business service too. The standard service is 12GBP a day and limited to 256kbps with a 500MB transfer limit. This is supposed to be unlimited but isn't, 250MB/session upstream cap, and the downstream is throttled to 2Mbps while the upstream is throttled to 48 - 96kbps, and runs off DSL which I've probably just paid a week of subscription for.

Thank goodness for money back guarantees if unsatisfied. For 15 quid a day I'd be expecting a tad more than 2M / 96k with ports blocked and an upstream limit. Call me demanding and all that but... :)

ISPs, ISPs, Where Art Thou ISPs?

As ISP watchers in the UK will know BT are trialling a VDSL2 based FTTN service, presently at 'up to' 40Mbit downstream and 2Mbit upstream, with the trial moving to a massive 5Mbit upstream later. This is followed by a commercial rollout which is in progress with commercial exchanges beginning to be released August 2009.

As part of the process for BT Openreach in developing this product they'd have consulted their customers, and the largest of these would sadly have been BT Wholesale who would presumably have had the greatest input into the product. This doesn't really answer though why other customers of theirs haven't made a touch more noise. BT Wholesale will certainly be the largest customer but other ISPs who are going to be using their existing LLU connectivity to hook directly into the BT Openreach FTTN network could perhaps have shouted louder.

Then there's those who will be buying the FTTN connectivity from BT Wholesale who will be reselling the product to them via the current ADSL backhauls. These guys seriously needed to shout some more. BT Retail are the largest customer here, and the only reason one can give for them not shouting would be that they were under instruction not to tread on Wholesale's shoes.

This FTTN product will for a large amount of its' initial rollout be a total exercise in futility from the retail point of view. How are those selling this in areas where Virgin have cable going to be selling this? They will almost certainly be having to charge more to compensate for the much increased burst bandwidth utilisation so one would expect them to be competing on speed, except Virgin will have faster downstream and upstream even if Openreach go to the 60Mbit maximum they mentioned Virgin have the capacity to go to 75 with a matter of keystrokes and a new configuration file.

VDSL2 can go right the way to 100Mbit symmetrical at short distances, such as the 30 metres I would be away from the MSAN. BT Openreach crippling this down to 40/2 and 40/5 makes very little sense, especially with their now few years of experience with ADSL Max and allowing DSL to rate adapt as high as it can go. The DLM systems are certainly a known technology to BT and exist in the field already, there is no viable reason for BT to restrain speeds to heavily, especially on upstream. Upstream is simply the only direction in which VDSL2 can beat DOCSIS 3 cable at the moment.

A rather lowly rated US telco, Qwest, have released their VDSL plans. 40/5 as standard, 40/20 for a few extra bucks a month. More noteworthy from the POV of this blog is that they will also be allowing their customers on their 7, 12 and 20Mbit downstream products to take a 5Mbit upstream. This would be the same upstream that Openreach are offering as an absolute maximum and that, at first glance from those of us on the outside, the rest of the ISP world is perfectly happy with. Does anyone have any explanation for all of this?

Simply - if other operators weren't screaming loudly at BT Openreach for a 'VDSL Max' service they were doing themselves and their customers a disservice. If BT Wholesale's customers weren't screaming at them to push Openreach to supply a 'VDSL Max' service they were doing their own customers a disservice. If BT Retail weren't screaming at Wholesale they are abusing the concept of structural separation as not pushing for the very best wholesale products for their use goes against their concept of being purely a retail face to BT with no concerns for the other parts of the business beyond purchase of wholesale products and services from them. If BT Wholesale were receiving the requests but ignoring them, and therefore have the power to set the tone of Openreach products, structural separation is a waste of time.

Incoming politics bit - If structural separation is a waste of time one can only suggest Ed Richards stops contemplating his political career after Ofcom and deals with this issue, it makes a mockery of Ofcom as a telecomms regulator and seriously enhances both the Conservative party's case for Ofcom to be gutted and the popularly held view of them as being a strongly New Labour organisation where they send their chosen to feast at the public trough. That said one would have to suggest having a former PM's advisor heading their agency and a previous head of it before that with a long career in PR being a former Labour activist and presently high ranking non-elected official in the cabinet and life peer makes that reputation very difficult to shift.

Money Where Mouth Is

I have read and duly noted this press release from Virgin Media informing that 10Mbit upstreams will be trialled.

I know that my area would be potentially problematic, and I'm curious as to if they'll be tackling not so nice areas, and of course there's my natural cynicism but if the press release has been done it usually means that the money is going to be put up.

So... if VM can get this area running, reliably, on a 10Mbit upstream before the end of 2009 I'll donate 50GBP to a charity of one of my VM contacts' choosing. Why that date? Bonded upstreams are expected next year, so they can 'cheat'. To do it this year will need some serious work and serious investment.

I will also shut up about them on this blog. I've commented on wanting to see 10:1 or better ratio, 5:1 is exemplory considering cable technology restriction.

In other news the 50Mbit deployment is the fastest such deployment I'm aware of. Amazing work by all those involved getting over 12 million homes covered by DOCSIS 3 overlay within a year.