EFM - Speed Vs Bandwidth

Speaking of leased lines (sort of), does anyone have an order progressing at the moment?

We've just been hit with Openreach finally admitting they have a huge backlog and pushing our install date back nearly two months. And to say sorry all of the build costs are going away.
 
Yes, we've got a customer with an order in for a 100Mbps bearer, but not due until October I think. Don't know if that has slipped or was the original ETA.

There's a Openreach promotion for covering the initial £2800 of ECC at the moment IIRC - were yours above that?
 
Caged said:
Speaking of leased lines (sort of), does anyone have an order progressing at the moment?

We've just been hit with Openreach finally admitting they have a huge backlog and pushing our install date back nearly two months. And to say sorry all of the build costs are going away.
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Yes, a client of mine in Letchworth ordered a 100mbps leased line from BT back in April. The fibre was finally blown in last week and connected to the NTE, but the Cisco router that BT provide is still not installed or tested. Another 2 weeks just for that. They were promised it all up and running at the start of July. Meanwhile they are stringing along on a 4meg ADSL connection and have no phones as they ordered SIP from BT as well which runs over the leased line.
 
#Chri5# said:
Yes, we've got a customer with an order in for a 100Mbps bearer, but not due until October I think. Don't know if that has slipped or was the original ETA.

There's a Openreach promotion for covering the initial £2800 of ECC at the moment IIRC - were yours above that?
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Yup. About to have £5k of work done for free.

The order was originally cancelled after the first survey and re-done in order for it to count as post-June and qualify for the ECCs priced at the new rates.
 
satanicguardian said:
I am very confused correct, perhaps even more so now but I'll try and follow! :)

EFM uses multiple connections that kinda combine to create the total yeah? So hypothetically you could have either:

1 x single link EFM with 1:1 contention @ 2mbits
4 x aggregated(?) EFM with 1:1 @ 0.5mbits each

Does that work or am I even more confused now? D:

This confusion is purely down to being told different things by different people in various partner companies, I wish I could wipe my mind clean and go from scratch
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I really don't understand where you are trying to come from.

Ultimately 2mbit/sec is very very little to work with for business grade VOIP and internet.

I would agree that you would need a very very effective QoS implementation (ideally supported at both client and provider end) or simply separate out your internet and voice services onto their own lines.
 
Sorry lack of replies, hadn't seen this thread for a while! I've been discussing an upgrade to a 4mbit/s EFM circuit over the 2mbit/s - do you guys think that's more respectable for the usage described earlier?
 
satanicguardian said:
Sorry for slow reply! It was a question but with myself trying to talk it through, although it seems I have been mislead by the people I have asked about this thus far!

Could someone please explain why a 2mb converged, uncontended EFM circuit will be far superior to ASDL for hosting a small business's voip and internet access?

I think I have an idea of it now but I'd like some clarification if someone would be willing to assist? :)

Cheers!
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I forget the exact details but it's an easy argument with ADSL vs EFM. EFM overheads are about 5% and ADSL overheads are about a billion percent :p

In all seriousness, the best you could expect from g992.1/ADSL1 is about 17ms once the superframe has been constructed although I've never had an ADSL line good enough to test this and have only ever seen low 20s.

ADSL2+ is better, with PTM mode, you'll see pings as low as 10ms native.

EFM trumps all. Most of the circuits I see do 2ms end to end, easily. This is anything from 1 liners up to 8 lines.

Also, given how BTOR contractors have a penchant for DISing lines at their leisure, EFM becomes a much easier sell to those on high.

Fibre takes you outside of the numpty loop for most of the accidental outages that needlessly happen on a daily basis.

I did look into EFM for the home (ping whore) but it was mega bucks for even the most basic as I recall :)
 
satanicguardian said:
with 4mbit/s efm we're at £355 a month, which is pushing it to be honest, considering splitting them still to separate lines..

I still don't know if the uncontended part of the EFM will be the bonus they need.. hmm!
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Wow. That's a lot for EFM - is your location terrible? I was quoted sub-£300 for a 4 pair EFM, currently paying sub-£400 for a 20Mbps fibre on 100Mbps bearer. That isn't city centre pricing either.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think you know enough about the product you have purchased if you are 'considering splitting them to separate lines' - I'm not even sure what you mean by that - turning them into POTS lines and ordering ADSL?
 
satanicguardian said:
with 4mbit/s efm we're at £355 a month, which is pushing it to be honest, considering splitting them still to separate lines..

I still don't know if the uncontended part of the EFM will be the bonus they need.. hmm!
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I don't think I understand what problem you are trying to solve :D

Angry boss: THE INTERNET IS SLOW! SORT IT OUT!
You: Sir! Yes sir!

^ Something like that? :)

With regard to your initial question about 8Mb / 1Mb ADSL and speedtests, you're unlikely to see throughput results that match your native synchronisation speeds for lots of reasons. Here's a few:

1. ADSL 'profiles' / e.g. BTs IP profile. On a full ADSL1 synch of 8128 down, I think the profile is capped to 7150 before you start.

2. Broken and banded profiles (this might explain your initial diagram - the line developed a fault and the profile remained at the crippled speed)

3. ADSL overheads (huge subject, I can't even pretend to understand it all but there's lots of them)

4. ADSL stability crutches (interleaving / impulse noise protection - think RAID5 for packets)


All of this stuff chips away at your 'headline rate' - that's assuming you are actually 'synched' at the speeds you've quoted. The line may be so long you are actually synched below 1Mb. This might also explain your initial diagram.


If you're already on EFM and are trying to justify the upgrade to 4Mb based on someone whinging at you from their throne then I would be tempted to probe the provider as to the health of the HSL after clarifying what, exactly, is 'slow' :)
 
Caged - The location is actually in a virgin fibre area, but it's set back from the street in what was once an old builders yard, therefore fibre doesn't reach that far! This is the best pricing we've had - also nothing has been purchased as of yet

I don't know a whole lot about it, but by "splitting onto separate lines", I meant splitting the voip and standard internet onto separate ADSL lines, at the moment I'm looking at having them converged on the one EFM line, 3mb dedicated for internet and 1mb for VOIP.

s0ck - Pretty much, now the company is using almost purely cloud solutions, and now moving to voip, the internet is unreliable, unresponsive and sluggish - we need to sort a solution to allow cloud IT and voip smoothly. Not looking for incredible speeds for streaming etc, needs to handle office 365 (emails and sharepoint hosted) basic browsing and RDP to a hosted sage server + voip.

I understand from what you've put that EFM has a lot less things to interfere with it's QoS and a lot more points of failure?
 
Who's calling the shots? Because implementing a strategy to host Sage offsite and use VoIP when the company can't get (aren't prepared to pay for) any more than 4Mbps is quite frankly idiotic.
 
You're going to have your hands full with all of those apps in the cloud.

The last thing I'd want is an unreliable connection on top of it. BT's metallic pathway is inherently unreliable :(

BT's fibre product, however, is superb and should be top of your list.

If you are pushed down a cheap route because someone has rationalised that codec x will be priority queued and should only use 32Kb/s and web browing will be policed to blah, etc... it's a convincing argument until it's delivered over copper and 'things go wrong' that multiple Openreach visits are unable or unwilling to fix.

This is worst case but far from uncommon. Most of the time the real issue is RFI/EMI and Openreach can quite rightly tell you 'No Fault Found' because... they only rent you bits of string and they will only fix 'the bit of string'.

There are some outstanding OR techs who will go above and beyond and try to polish the strands to achieve the best AC balance (the ability to deflect interference) but they appear to be few and far between.

If you are very close to the exchange this is much less of a problem or if you are relatively close to an FTTC cab, less of a problem. It could be used in conjunction with an EFM circuit to give you a hint more resilience for a smidge more cash.

All of these issues evaporate with a fibre circuit and BT appear to take their fibre products very seriously.

Best of luck :)
 
Hey guys, fibre is a possibility in the area but it's very expensive. You mention about openreach etc not being able to fix it etc. "Apparently", because the EFM is going to be installed and assured by Gamma, there's SLA's in place because they own every part of the infrastructure, limiting downtime?
 
Unlikely - the cables to the premises will likely be installed and owned by BT. And Gamma just had a MASSIVE outage.
 
Gamma are Openreach customers in the last mile, same as pretty much everyone else.

They tried to pass that outage off as a BT issue as well.
 
Have they said why it actually was yet (best guess - 512k routing table?) - we're with a reseller who are hardly forthcoming :(
 
Pretty much a day.

nutcase_1uk said:
Have they said why it actually was yet (best guess - 512k routing table?) - we're with a reseller who are hardly forthcoming :(
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They're not that forthcoming if you actually are a reseller either. It only affected SIP trunks and ADSL circuits for us, leased lines were fine.
 
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