Apologies for not reading the whole thread but this seemed a reasonable point to jump in.
| Quote from: Firejack |
| I saw the Gadget this week and I have to say I thought the report on Broadband Speed was a particularly weak bit of reporting. Not sure if others will agree with me but it just seemed to focus on this one issue of "upto" instead of dealing with the bigger picture and why we face the problems we do. |
We are talking about the Gadget show - perhaps to technology what the Sun is to informed and accurate political comment.
Despite being intimately involved in the complexity of modern computer systems, I was actually quite impressed by the Gadget shows feature. The proposition appears very simple - that ADSL is being sold in an unfair and confusing manner. In my view, BT have been using the complexity of the technology to obfuscate this simple proposition and hiding behind wholesale to get away with it. 'Up To' is a very simple way for a largely
ignorant customer base to see through the smoke and mirrors.
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-- Aging infrastructure
-- High Cost of Central Network Capacity
-- Poor technical understanding by customers |
None of this would appear to be the fault of the customer though. The last point is a little debateable but when did you hear an ISP claiming connecting to the internet was anything other than simple? Claiming
it is simple in the sales literature and then claiming
it is not having taken the money is misleading. Very few other industries can get away with such behaviour.
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| Since around 12 months ago I've strongly believed we need a Fibre-To-The-Home solution. |
Fibre to the street maybe. More to the point, who is going to pay for it, fibre is relatively expensive. It may be a better long term solution but since IT became a consumer product time and again consumers prove they only differentiate products they do not understand on bottom line cost. It does not matter how technically superior a product is, or how much better the service may be. Nowhere is this more apparent than the ISP marketplace where companies like Plus are expected to operate on ridiculously tight margins.
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Many experts in the business world are against it because they see no need for 100Mbps connection and I tend to agree for the time being. But the point of getting a FTTH solution is the technology is designed for the Internet and hasn't had to be adapted like ADSL has ADSL suffers from all sorts of complicated technical issues like line length and attenuation which people don't understand or bother to even learn about and is probably the reason the general public is jumping onto this "upto" band wagon.
FTTH offers a release from all these confusing technical terms and would allow companies to sell with confidence 100Mbps to a customer for example and know that is exactly the speed they would receive between themselves and the exchange. |
I would be interested to here how exactly you propose to supply this 100Mbps service? Fibre only describes the barer which is only one component in the physical layer. There are several more components which need to be assembled and two additional logical layers to negotiate before you can assign an IP address.
ADSL is merely the current incarnation of what started out as the 150bps acoustic coupler. It is complicated and fragile for the same fundamental reasons an F1 car engine is complicated and fragile. Unlike an F1 car ADSL just happens to be very cheap to provision.
You can have a 100Mbps fully syncronous connection supplied to your door today. It will be highly reliable because it does not involve pushing the underlying technology to the limits of feasibility - but it will cost a great deal of money to provision.
There is not a networking technology in existance which does not have it's own set of complicated technical issues. The mistake to my mind is not that these issues exist but that customers have been fooled into thinking they do not exist and are left holding the baby when they prove to be an issue.
Up To 8Mbps can be regarded as a claim to provide something for nothing - a scam by any other name.Originally BTW supplied ADSL based on the connection speed obtainable by the customer and selected by the customer. This was a clear and simple way of selling the service. It turned out few people were willing to pay the premium for higher bandwidths - which in reality cost little more to provision. Such customer choice did not suit BTW.
The current pricing model is far more favourable to BTW particularly considering the ignorance of the customer base. Everyone gets provided the maximum possible bandwidth and gets charged for the data transferred over it. This is closer to the model used by transit providers and data-centres but in those scenarios the costs are high enough to justify investment in traffic management.
ISPs like Plus.net have had to bare the complaints resulting from fair usage policies which became essential after BTW changed the pricing model. They have to suffer the burden of trying to educate customers to the complexity of the technology which the customer simply is not interested in (why should they be). They have to invest in traffic management because their customers do not know how to do it. They have to do all these things working on a stupidly low margin above the cost BTW charges to every ISP. What you might take from this is that ISPs that manage to turn a profit are incredibly more efficient than the supplier they have to rely on.
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| The other real issue I've had with the Gadget Show is their attitude of everyone should complain even if they don't know what they are complaining about. It would of been much more helpful if they went out and talked to the experts and put together a useful presentation about where the problems are and then research what each ISP is going to resolve these issues. |
I do not see how ISPs can resolve it without investing in their own local loops.
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| Several times they also have mentioned complaining to OFCOM. Now if they had done any research they would understand OFCOM is a bigger part of the problem then BTwholesale. |
OFCOM has the power to enforce change, simple as that. Whether the complaints are wholly correct is not so important. A suitable level of complaint will force OFCOM to take action to stop them however they are expressed.
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| OFCOM has mismanged the telecoms industry for years. They have forced BTw into opening its network to its competitors. They have forced BTw to keep artificially high wholesale prices on bandwidth to keep prices high and move customers onto competitors of BTw such as Cable from Virgin Media. Then they have also set stupid restrictions on BTw like forcing them to maintain the physical connections of users on rival networks. To me this seems completely insane and almost like the government has forgot they sold off BT to the private sector years ago. I'm all for anti-monopoly rules but not interfering this much. |
BT had a massive advantage when it was sold off. Not quite a 100% share of the market (thanks to Hull telecomm) but just about. Many of those measures imposed by OFCOM only gave BTs competitors a fighting chance against a company which has a history of displaying anti-competitive behaviour. Remember that consumers paid for BTs network and infrastructure over 40 years of paying taxes. It is only right that consumers are given a chance to benefit from competition. Whether such has happened is far more difficult to guage as all the major telecomms providers seem to have made massive mistakes in the UK. Conjecture might lead one to speculate those mistakes were the result of being too greedy and too aggressive in the pursuit of short term profits.
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| Maybe it wouldn't be so hard to like OFCOM if they had any sort of plan for the development of telecoms in the UK but they plainly don't have a clue. |
OFCOM are regulators they are not strategy planners. The telcos are responsible for deciding their own strategies. OFCOM simply prod them to ensure they play fair. Unfortunately the change to reactive development comes along with the profit driven competitive markets. All the infrastructure companies seem to have gone the same way. Minimal investment, maximum profit.
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| What I'd really like to see next year is all the people that matter and are the true experts get together and thrash out a solution and then see some sort of live discussion on say BBC Newsnight to explain whats being going wrong and what is going to be done to fix it before the Internet melts down in this country after overloading. |
What I would like to see is the politicians doing what they are paid to do. At the moment there seems to be a lot of head scratching and shrugging of shoulders - We don't understand therefore we will do nothing. There are a number of major technology corporations getting away with practises that would not be tollerated in virtually any other market sector. We all know that the UK is seen as fair game for inflating prices. These corporations are not going to stop voluntarily. Personally I would be quite happy for them to be informed by way of legislation that they must treat UK consumers fairly or risk losing the business of 60,000,000 relatively well heeled and very polite customers.
So a thumbs up from me to the Gadget show for making a complicated issue very simple. From the length of my post you might have worked out it is something I personally struggle to achieve.
icons to the message. Is was not obvious I meant the term 'meager 4.7Gb' to be intended as sarcastic.
