[Cerowrt-devel] How is DSL sold and bandwidth managed in the UK?
Fred Stratton
fredstratton at imap.cc
Fri Aug 1 16:43:35 EDT 2014
Perhaps I should add that ADSL2plus services are generally not
speed-limited, as well as being mostly uncapped.
There are exceptions. Free Sky broadband for Sky TV customers is capped
at 2GB per month.
Primus, a Canadian company reknown for cheap offerings, has a capped
option alongside an uncapped one on TalkTalk infrastrucure.
OpenReach offers 40/2 40/10 and 80/10 megabits/s as fibre options.
Competitors tend not to offer the middle option.
FTTH is capped at circa 350/? megabits/s. BT Retail will install on a
per home or business basis from the existing FTTC.
On 01/08/14 20:51, Fred Stratton wrote:
> I shall attempt an answer, probably to a slightly different question
> to the one you are actually asking.
>
> Remember, the UK is a member state of the EU.
>
> Cable cost too much to install in the 1980s, partially causing the
> demise of Nynex. Cable is routed underground here, like most
> services. All cable, which covers most major cities, out as far as
> here in the suburbs, is run by Virgin Media. No price competition.
> Lost a lot of video content to BT and Sky. Probably price competitive
> with Sky satellite TV. Tiered bandwidth offering, comparable to fibre
> in speed, heavily traffic-shaped.
>
> The telecom operator BT has no state involvement.
>
> BT is comprised of two parts. One is BT Retail, which has circa 38 per
> cent of the retail market.
>
> The other part is the supposedly separate OpenReach, which owns and
> maintains infrastructure, and sells services to 3rd parties. AFAIK, BT
> Wholesale also sells telephony services to third parties on top of
> OpenReach services.
>
> Because of its dominant position, the regulator, OfCom, regulates
> OpenReach prices for services to third party service providers.
>
> It is currently investigating fibre prices, on the basis that these
> are too high.
>
> Not all services come via BT. TalkTalk has the most separated
> infrastructure. Sky uses OpenReach fibre backhaul.
>
> Local Loop Unbundling means that there are eight or so different
> DSLAMs in each telephone exchange. Sky and TalkTalk in addition have
> their own non OpenReach voice telephony equipment.
>
> There are two tiers of ISP.
>
> One is composed of the big players. These are BT Retail, Sky and
> TalkTalk. BT Retail have 5 brands operating as separate entities,
> including Plusnet, notable for carrier grade NAT and traffic shaping.
> None have caps or download limits.
>
> These three are focused around content delivery, principally video.
> The service is cheap, with a plug in gateway provided. Contracts are
> generally for one year. Customer service is hopeless. You are paid
> inducements and cashback to change provider. Whilst the ADSL price is
> cheap, the cost of the phone line is steadily ratcheting up.
>
> If the price of a service increases by 10 per cent or more in a year,
> the retail customer can leave the ISP, whatever the contract says.
>
> I am obliged to pay money to a public corporation, the BBC. These are
> a major online video content provider, and the main competitor to the
> three main ISPs for content. These ISPs pay fees to Akamai principally
> to access iPlayer, and complain about it.
>
> The others are the smaller players such as EE, and boutique providers
> like Zen and AAISP.
>
> EE, or Everything Everywhere, are T-Mobile and Orange, a combined
> unit in the UK providing mobile telephony, and internet services over
> the BT network. BT Wholesale, I think, provide and run their
> infrastructure.
>
> Zen and AAISP provide a good service over lines rented from OpenReach
> or TalkTalk. They have customer dervice and respond to faults. They
> cost ten times as much as the big three, because they make their money
> by charging for bandwidth. There are many others in this category.
> Some provide ipv6.
>
> Retail customers find deals through sites such as this
>
> http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/phones/cheap-broadband
>
> The fibre infrastrucure has been rolled out by BT. Fujitsu, and
> Digital Region, a public enterprise, have pulled out or folded.
>
> Sky and TalkTalk currently use OpenReach infrastructure for fibre, but
> are introducing some of their own cabinets as a joint experiment.
>
> OpenReach FTTC uses Huawei or ECI MSANs. I have fibre cabinets 200
> metres in either direction along the road.
>
> CPE for ADSL is customer installed, and is generally a
> TrendChip/Ralink or BroadCom based device with the usual driver BLOBs,
> a 2.6 series kernel, and telnet access.
>
> CPE for VDSL/FTTC is the official network endpint for fibre, rather
> than the wall plate. The boxes provided are either Huawei HG612, or an
> ECI equivalent.
>
> These are cut down gateways without wireless, configured as VDSL2
> 'modems'. The HG 612 Is Broadcom based and has been unlocked. I have
> used one on an ADSL2plus line. Source code is available, even some
> Broadcom code released in error by Huawei. The ECI box is Lantiq
> based, and blogic has had OpenWRT running on it. There are
> configuration problems with uboot, so this not stable.
>
> This partly answers your question. Note also I have said nothing about
> mobile internet.
>
>
>
> On 01/08/14 19:12, Dave Taht wrote:
>> uknof list:
>>
>> There has been a long discussion on the cerowrt-devel list about
>> how/when/ and where to get bufferbloat related fixes into the head
>> ends and CPE, and it's confusing as to who can and what sort of
>> devices controls what,
>>
>> The uk seems to have a vibrant dsl based isp market all getting stuff
>> from BT.
>>
>> How does it work in Britain? I am under the impression that there are
>> a lot of HFSC + SFQ based rate limiters there for various classes of
>> service
>>
>> See below for some open questions on the role of the DSLAM, the BRAS,
>> etc...
>>
>> Or see "the ideas on how to simplify and popularize bufferbloat
>> control" thread:
>>
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/cerowrt-devel/2014-July/thread.html
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 2:04 PM, Sebastian Moeller <moeller0 at gmx.de
>> <mailto:moeller0 at gmx.de>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi MIchael,
>>
>> On Aug 1, 2014, at 06:51 , Michael Richardson <mcr at sandelman.ca
>> <mailto:mcr at sandelman.ca>> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > Sebastian Moeller <moeller0 at gmx.de <mailto:moeller0 at gmx.de>> wrote:
>> >> No idea? How would you test this (any command line to
>> try). The good
>> >> thingg with the ping is that often even the DSLAM responds keeping
>> >> external sources (i.e. hops further away in the network) of
>> variability
>> >> out of the measurement...
>> >
>> > With various third-party-internet-access ("TPIA" in Canada),
>> the DSLAM
>> > is operated by the incumbent (monopoly) telco, and the layer-3
>> first hop
>> > is connected via PPPoE-VLAN or PPP/L2TP.
>>
>> So they "own" the copper lines connecting each customer
>> to the DSLAM? And everybody else just rents their DSL service and
>> resells them? Do they really connect to the DSLAM or to the BRAS?
>>
>> > The incumbent telco has significant
>> > incentive to make the backhaul network as congested and
>> bufferbloated as
>> > possible, and to mis-crimp cables so that the DSL resyncs at
>> different speeds
>> > regularly...
>>
>> I think in Germany the incumbent has to either rent out
>> the copper lines to competitors (who can put their own lines
>> cards in DSLAMs backed by their own back-bone) or rent
>> "bit-stream" access that is the incumbent handles the DSL part on
>> both ends and passes the traffic either in the next central
>> office or at specific transit points. I always assumed
>> competitors renting these services would get much better
>> guarantees than end-customers, but it seems in Canada the
>> incumbent has more found ways to evade efficient regulation.
>>
>> > my incumbent telco's commercial LAN extension salesperson
>> > proudly told me how they never drop packets, even when their
>> links are
>> > congested!!!
>>
>> I really hope this is the opinion of a sales person and
>> not the network operators who really operate the gear in the
>> "field". On the other hand having sufficient buffering in the
>> DSLAM to never having to drop a packet sounds quite manly (and a
>> terrible waste of otherwise fine DRAM chips) ;)
>>
>> >
>> > The Third Party ISP has a large incentive to deploy equipment
>> that supports
>> > whatever "bandwidth measurement" service we might cook up.
>>
>> As much as I would like to think otherwise, the only way
>> to get a BMS in the field is if all national regulators require
>> it by law (well maybe if ITU would bake it into the next xDSL
>> standard that the DSLAM has to report current line speeds as per
>> SNMP? back to all down stream devices asking for it). But I am
>> not holding my breath...
>>
>> Best Regards
>> Sebastian
>>
>> >
>> > --
>> > Michael Richardson
>> > -on the road-
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
>> <mailto:Cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net>
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Dave Täht
>>
>> NSFW:
>> https://w2.eff.org/Censorship/Internet_censorship_bills/russell_0296_indecent.article
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
>
>
>
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