Posts by ENS 22 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2016
Full Fibre is going to provide at least 1Gbps capable solution. It may be sold as a 100Mbps solution, but it's either Ultrafast or Hyperfast.
Superfast is 10Mbps wet piece of string in BTORs books, 24Mbps in DCMS terms.
The north American plugs and sockets are very compact but the tolerances are very poor, so it's pointless for a device to rely on live and neutral being correctly connected, as the wider blade universally seems to fit into the narrower slot, unless there is an earth pin.
Plus the majority of device plugs are earthless, even if the earthed version is already substantially more compact than either UK or European earthed plugs. If everything over - say 100W - was earthed, that would start to promote a higher standard. Adopting earthed plugs universally on US&CA devices universally would be a better move, as there are knock-on effects of using a ('non-polarised') 2-pin plug as standard. Firstly it drives unrealistic expectations on the size of products containing integrated plugs: if a product is designed to have 2 flat blades protruding, it's more difficult to adapt to larger EU and UK plugs. Secondly, for products with a power cord, there have been many last minute 'gotcha's' when trying to fit an EU or UK plug into packaging designed for a US 2-prong.
Yes, and no.
Foxconn can - and do - identify elements of the design which make it difficult to build, and the guys at Hon Hai are skilled at recommending and communicating how those changes could be made.
To a lesser degree they will comment upon maintainability, since this will affect their ability to refurbish anything that fails QA process, and will have to be passed onto the designer in terms of additional component and labour costs since yields will be lower.
The question is whether the designer is willing to accept and implement those changes, but absolutely the manufacturer has the ability to recognise products which have design errors.
In the York Sky/TalkTalk/CF 1Gbps FTTH pilot, take-up was nearly 20% by the end of construction, and was trending >40%
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2016/10/talktalk-extend-940mbps-ftth-broadband-york-40000-premises.html
https://www.cityfibre.com/news/york-city-case-study/
You can either try and raise value from an auction, or you can raise value by pitching operators against each other to create the most value with their deployments, but you cannot have both.
The 3G spectrum cost far more than the equipment used to operate it, and their running costs, and the replacement hardware and their running costs. Giving out that spectrum with the obligation - and the right - to deploy 'everywhere' would have cost the MNOs less and delivered more value - not to say avoided the spectrum write-downs that resulted in lost corporation tax.
But the rights need to exist. In the 18th century it was fighting mills , in the 19th century it was fighting the building of railways, in the 20th century fighting the building of roads, and in the 21st century it is Wind Turbines and mobile cabins and poles that attract objections.
Central Government guidelines need to be enforceable on local authorities - and quickly - it you want utopia.
"Motorway" is a good way to look at the 10Gbps fibre backbone.
"Dual-Carriageway/Trunk A-Road" is a good way to look at the fibre network.
"B-Road/Unclassified/Dirt Track" is a way to look at the copper network.
"The Ikea Car Park" is a way to look at contention.
Looking at places like Silverstone or Glastonbury, you can instantly see that it's getting out of the car park on to the A43 or A361 that slows and defines your journey, not the M4, M5 or M1 upon which you spend most of your journey. Merge left, merge right, merge, merge, merge onto Purley Way Croydon is the Ikea traffic experience, not time on the A23 or M25. The average person knows the difference and that maximising the motorway or dual-carriageway driving, and minimising the time spent on local roads will improve speeds. Once demanding users understand that copper is like a trip to Ikea, they will want Full-Fibre.
Why change anything? It's called progress. Apart from voice, every police process is running on a handheld these days. 25 year-old technology has not kept pace
Burglary? Report written and signed off with s-Pen on a Note 5. On-scene fingerprinting? USB-connected scanner checked on a smartphone.
So they already have corporate devices for data - and teams over WhatsApp - and Tetra for Plain old Voice. Motorola asks for a £1million a day so it's an easy decision to make commercially to ditch the 'secondary' device.
Now they will have secure ruggedised S8s, highly capable in-car devices, and air-to-ground and a suite of tactical devices for when 95% land-mass coverage is not enough.
And a plus, commercial users will have access to 95% land-mass coverage. It's no good a mountain rescue team's perfect DMR being used to report a body who could have been saved if she had had a signal.
" suggest the cost of installing and provisioning fibre-to-the-mast (FTTM), is significantly higher than doing the same for homes, because with FTTM, all the costs fall onto a single connection, whereas with FTTP/FTTC there is a significant amount of shared infrastructure and thus costs can be apportioned."
You are conflating cost, return on investment and a host of other items here.
Bottom line, BT will quote you around £10K install plus £6-8K per year to supply 1Gbps fibre. So there is a great return on supplying 1 single line of fibre in the ground.
On the flip side, you are going to do a whole lot more digging to connect homes, and then you are relying on a host of individuals to each cough up a few hundred pounds each year, with 'free install'.
But: In 20 years time that fibre will still be delivering. 20 years ago I had 40-42Kbps on dial-up, which people tend to forget when talking about their needs "today"
Your average council has around 50,000 lamp-posts, street signs and miscellaneous street furniture, all paid for by you, without any oversight on either where they will go, what they look like or if they are value for money.
Mobile operators have to decide the value for money by themselves, then councils will apply their view of 'what it looks like' and then block it. Where they do deploy (perhaps 50-200 per council) they pay planning fees and annual 'rates' into the Council coffers.
So who is raping the countryside, the council as 'custodians' or the corporations??
This is a 'regular' albeit smaller coverage mobile site with regular backhaul. I got 117Mbps on an S6Edge there last summer.
So it's not a boast, it's part of the future where we look at mobile sites the way that we look at pylons and telegraph poles, just part of our infrastructure street scene.
Once we can get fibre to all these locations remaining locations can either be covered by tactical higher-cost fibre or strategic radio backhaul from fibre-fed locations.
Remember that in the last 6 months we have seen plans to serve 7 million homes with fibre, and that might mean passing 10 million lampposts and telegraph poles which could be connected, and we only need to use a few % of these....
Do you get to vote on when/where a new lamp-post, stop sign, traffic light or no-entry sign goes? No, the city decides autonomously where to put them, what colour, height etc. The city does not review the need for its own street furniture one-by-one with citizens, giving them the opportunity to vote/veto/support them.
London has 500,000 streetlights, 6000 sets of traffic lights. With over 60,000 streets, there's around 200,000 street name plates and several million Stop/Give Way, Humps Ahead, (No) Parking, 1-Way, 2-Way, Speed Limit, Bus/Cycle Lane, Directions etc all installed without so much as a by your leave.
That's just one large city. Other cities and jurisdictions will differ - there are approx 150 Million wooden telephone poles in the USA.
So a typical 5G Small Cell will be the size of a typical speed limit sign, why should you care where these are placed when you do not care where speed limit signs or 'No Parking signs are placed?
Rolling out G.Fast to a Cellular Site will meet the current 4G requirements (barely) but will need to be upgraded to a fibre if it's planned to support low-latency (e.g Autonomous car signalling) 5G services.
So fibre is needed anyway, and starting a G.Fast deployment will soak up cash and resources for 30-48months deployment. The cow just gives out more cash.
Put out fibre ubiquitously today and you are limitless and future-proofed.
BT will (incorrectly) argue that G. Fast is sufficient for internet and for 4G cell sites.
We need fibre 'everywhere' to eradicate a number of issues brought up by commentators on lack of BH for '4G' sites.
BT cannot possibly argue that copper can support <1ms latency and >>10Gbps that 5G will be able to offer, so supporting 5G is inherently supporting FTTP. Having 5G sites supported by 10GE fibre means fibre on every street corner, offering a real choice. I don't buy the unsubstantiated assertion that 5G will be a 'realistic 50 Mbps' Even the most ambitious 4G demo has been 2Gbps, 5G has been demo'd with vehicular mobility at >1Gbps and with Ped A mobility at >20Gbps. If you pick 1% as typical, you see 20Mbps as today's 4G benchmark, and 200Mbps as indicative 5G capacity.
Remembering a decade ago, we were watching VGA over DSL and mobile networks, now we are watching 1080P, and even 4K. I am on the 3rd generation of handset that can support 4K video-shooting, but could certainly not stream this on UL. So argueing that supporting 1080P is satisfactory 'today' is a pointless signpost for 2025 where a rock-solid 35Mbps may well be the benchmark for streaming 4K Up and Down.
""Ehr, anyone actually knows how it does cost deploying an unlicenssed network? And, has anyone compared it to the deployement of NB-IoT solutions?""
Yes, it's at least 10 times larger.
~80% of the cost of deploying the sites is fees, concrete, steel and antennas. The electronics cost around 20%, and therefore the actual cost of the equipment being installed has a relatively small impact on the total NW spend. Lets say that you need 10,000 sites, and they cost you £50K each: then you would spend £500M baseline and still it would be £400M even if someone gave you the equipment for free. With longer range and lower capacity, perhaps you can deploy 2000 £50K sites for £100M.
On a simplistic level we can say that HW and SW are therefore each 10%. One feature might attract a significant premium, but arguably £1000 per site would be a lot, in which case you are looking at £1000 x 10,000 or £10M.
So with a low cost LPWAN NW you are looking at £100M for nationwide coverage, and <£10M as a NBIoT SW solution.
What's the surprise here?
They say that it is cheaper to deliver than LoRa or SigFox. Now they are actually delivering. Shock.
By putting the infrastructure in place quickly, they neuter one of the key 3 benefits of LPWAN, namely that NW infrastructure is already in place. Next they need devices, and by deploying the NW, they are triggering chipset and OEM development by providing a marketplace. Market offering will follow and this is where they will be judged.
The surprise will come when NB-IoT shows its party trick in a year or 2 and the knowing 'Aaahhh!'s start.
Like antennagate (blame the user) and many bugs at multiple iPhone launches which were blamed upon RAN vendors until the fixes appeared in iOS release notes?
Do people also forget about iPhone 6 and 6+ bananagate and smaller numbers of iPhone batteries exploding? Yes they do.'Perfect' is always the result of the application of a small filter.
""Samsung ... moving into Apple's space because it sees Apple has established a product, a market, and Samsung wants some of that. It happened before to Apple, and Microsoft almost put them out of business.""
To quote the Bourne Supremacy "You talk about this stuff like you read it in a book".
'The market' was tiny (and we are talking history now, this evolution is from 8+ years ago not suddenly this summer) and grew massively since Samsung (and HTC and Sony etc) entered it, and it is this healthy competition which has grown the market so large and so profitable. Competition has served all vendors well. A single source market would be a larger share of a smaller pie. Personally I want the flexibility that Android offers (customisation and HW vendor choice) but YMMV.
Re-Use: Where the same resource is used time and again.
Sand-bagging: Where the resource is reserved for exclusive use of one party whether it used or not.
I'm not sure what your point is, you want 400MHz+ unlicensed spectrum to be left empty so that you can use it in future for Wi-Fi?
If you are so hung up on "sensibly mandated coverage and capacity by regulators" (for cellular operators) then why aren't you crying for Wi-Fi providers to be required to provide free 300Mbps service nationally?
What is your definition of 'minimal investment'? UK MNOs will typically spend around £1Bn per year on expanding capacity and coverage. The US Operators are at a run rate of $10Bn's per annum.
""I've never understood why there is such a huge complaint about paying line rental:""
The issue is both the size of the charge, and the fact that you have to pay £17.99 in the small-print after you have been told that you are getting a FREE introductory offer. Instead you are paying a fee designed to move BT profits to OpenReach (ubiquitous charge for DSL consumers) from Retail (significant market share but not ubiquitous).
. The cost of the copper infrastructure has been paid for a long time ago.
. The cost of the voice component of the phone line has been paid for a long time ago.
All that remains is the cost of the FTTC (which you are paying the Broadband Fee for) and OpEx.
If you want to see how this will work with Market Forces only, perhaps take a look at Canada, where around 20-30% of the population struggle to get affordable internet access. When government efforts on both sides of the Atlantic are aimed at connecting (most) citizens at 3-5Mbps, what hope do we have of market forces creating 1Gbps fibre everywhere to support 5G?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/12/keep_the_pressure_on_the_telcos_canada/
Of course governments can invest in 5G with favourable regulatory regimes/spectrum awards etc, but they need to look at the RoI too.
Where are the government surveys showing the net gain to society if 95% of fender-benders can be eliminated with autonomous cars, adaptive traffic management etc? Where is the TCO analysis of cars running nose to tail at 90Mph, and requiring $10Bs less investment in new asphalt, concrete and steel for road-building? But Telcos are not going to put in the fibre and cellular infrastructure to support this unless they know where their revenue stream is coming from.
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