How does fibre work?

@KIA

Very true, and yes I was exaggerating. :) I'm sure you get the point though. :) I was going to go into a long diatribe, but decided to do some quick research first.

This site reveals that a 100Mb/100Mb leased line in London will cost £550/month, and that's only because this year the prices have been forced down; in the past I've seen prices as £1600/month for a 10/10 leased line. The price of monopoly, I believe.

As an example. and assuming best speeds, an equivalent bonded or load-balanced VDSL setup from Plus Net Business (5 lines) would cost £187.50 per month, and would yield 380Mb/100Mb. True, you (probably) don't get a 1:1 contention ratio and you don't get the super low latency available on fibre optic links, but you'd be paying 34% of the price. Don't worry, I'm aware that bonding has its own issues. :)

There are also companies like Easynet and Fluidata, who offer bonded FTTC along with SLAs and 1:1 contention ratios. True, they don't go all the way up to 1Gb/s (or even 500Mb/s), but most SMEs, unless they are in the media business (or some other market with a need for bulk data transfer) don't need those speeds anyway.

What they do need however, is decent upload speeds and low enough latency to sensibly support things like video conferencing and remote off-site backups, without paying through the nose for it.
 
I don't really think there's much of an overlap between companies who would buy a leased line grade product and those who would pick a 'consumer' alternative if it were available.

Companies that need a guaranteed connection and can calculate how much money they would lose for a connection being down go with a product with an SLA, everyone else goes with whatever's available - preferring something cheap and terribly slow over paying for anything better.

The picture you're painting implies that there are organisations who have an expensive leased line and jump ship to FTTC as soon as it becomes available because they suddenly decide they don't need dedicated bandwidth, 24x7 support and guaranteed fix times. I think these sorts of companies wouldn't have been on the expensive service in the first place.
 
Caged said:
The picture you're painting implies that there are organisations who have an expensive leased line and jump ship to FTTC as soon as it becomes available because they suddenly decide they don't need dedicated bandwidth, 24x7 support and guaranteed fix times. I think these sorts of companies wouldn't have been on the expensive service in the first place.
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We deal with this a lot. Try justifying paying £400 extra a month to a company who needs ~10mbit to a site (FTTC vs. Fibre). There are arguments for increased reliability, bandwidth contention and SLAs, but in the real world? It's not often that important.

FTTC is also a nice step up from ADSL backup connections, or even a redundant path backup fibre connection.
 
Caged said:
The picture you're painting implies that there are organisations who have an expensive leased line and jump ship to FTTC as soon as it becomes available because they suddenly decide they don't need dedicated bandwidth, 24x7 support and guaranteed fix times.
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Nope, quite the opposite. For many companies, leased lines are quite simply out of reach, for the bandwidth level they need.

Caged said:
I think these sorts of companies wouldn't have been on the expensive service in the first place.
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Exactly this. Even with the new price reductions, £500+/month is a lot of money for a small business, money they don't have or can put to much better use elsewhere in the business.
 
BT or other ISP's really need to start investing money into bringing faster net into the country side. I live 4 miles from a town and yet can't get over 2mb.

There is no reason why they can't invest money into providing wireless broadband using mast's already in place from mobile providers. A good 5 GHZ PTP link to a mast could easily provide people in the country side with a nice 15mb + connection which is a lot better than a 2mb ADSL connection.

4G/5G might be coming, but if the ping, price and download are crap then there's no point moving over to it.

I am currently planning a wireless PTP from town into the house which will carry a 80mb/20mb FTTC connection.
 
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Yamahahahahaha said:
We deal with this a lot. Try justifying paying £400 extra a month to a company who needs ~10mbit to a site (FTTC vs. Fibre). There are arguments for increased reliability, bandwidth contention and SLAs, but in the real world? It's not often that important.

FTTC is also a nice step up from ADSL backup connections, or even a redundant path backup fibre connection.
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That was sort of my point, I don't think that FTTC is eating into the leased line market because the people that currently pay a hell of a lot of cash for a leased line don't do it lightly. They have requirements that aren't served by a cheaper alternative.
 
Caged said:
That was sort of my point, I don't think that FTTC is eating into the leased line market because the people that currently pay a hell of a lot of cash for a leased line don't do it lightly. They have requirements that aren't served by a cheaper alternative.
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Try telling that to BT. I think the main reason SMEs even look at leased lines is simply to get a symmetrical connection (or at least a high enough upload speed). I was recently reading an issue of Networking Plus (industry publication) and Dido Harding of Talk Talk, (check this link) directly accused BT of holding back on FTTC and FTTP in order to protect their leased line business.

“Rolling out super-fast broadband to business would cannibalise leased line business for BT” Dido Harding CEO of Talk Talk
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“BTs protection of the leased line market for example their unwillingness to supply fibre to business parks” Margaret Hodge
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This is likely the reason that even FTTP with its 220Mb/s download speed still only has a 20Mb/s upload speed. If FTTP and FTTPoD were offered with 100/100 or 200/100 to business parks, who'd bother with a leased line unless they really needed low contention and SLAs?


teaboy5 said:
BT or other ISP's really need to start investing money into bringing faster net into the country side. I live 4 miles from a town and yet can't get over 2mb.

There is no reason why they can't invest money into providing wireless broadband using mast's already in place from mobile providers. A good 5 GHZ PTP link to a mast could easily provide people in the country side with a nice 15mb + connection which is a lot better than a 2mb ADSL connection.

4G/5G might be coming, but if the ping, price and download are crap then there's no point moving over to it.

I am currently planning a wireless PTP from town into the house which will carry a 80mb/20mb FTTC connection.
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BT won't do it because others in the industry are better equipped to do that sort of thing, I think. The likes of O2 have been in both the fixed line and wireless markets for years, and it was O2 who bought the lower frequency (i.e. longer range) 4G spectrum.

I suspect O2 are looking at providing 4G fixed wireless Internet access for rural locations; it's certainly an underserved market and a large amount of infrastructure is already in place.
 
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parityboy said:
Words
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I think 'cannibalise' is a bit strong, it's almost as if the guy from Talk Talk doesn't really understand the differences between the products that his company sells.

I'm still not convinced that people who have leased line budgets and leased line requirements are opting for FTTC and products like it because it's cheaper, in my experience the business that can have FTTC do, and if they can't then they struggle along on an ADSL line. Taking away the FTTC option wouldn't see them buy a leased line product.

My experience of the SME space is that they much prefer to whinge about BT than purchase a leased line, even if it's obvious that whatever they have currently doesn't manage to keep up with their demands.
 
Got connected today, only took 25 min for Engineer to sort it (from Kelly Communications), 10 mins later Zen activated my line. Netgear router admin is painfully slow, but the internet itself is absolutely awesome. Downloaded Dishonored and Arma 2, Arma 2 OA, and a load of Dayz mod's all at the same time within 2 hours!

I was quoted 42 down and 6 up, but it is running at 60 down and 10 up. I really hope the DSLAM does not interfere with this and put me on Interleaving as if it does the speed will half and only an engineer visit can fix it :(

Youtube actually works properly now!
 
Caged said:
I think 'cannibalise' is a bit strong, it's almost as if the guy woman from Talk Talk doesn't really understand the differences between the products that his her company sells.
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Fixed.

Caged said:
I'm still not convinced that people who have leased line budgets and leased line requirements are opting for FTTC and products like it because it's cheaper, in my experience the business that can have FTTC do, and if they can't then they struggle along on an ADSL line. Taking away the FTTC option wouldn't see them buy a leased line product.
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Of course not, because leased lines are too pricey. That's the point. Nobody who can already comfortably afford a 100/100 leased line is going to dump it, but do you seriously think that someone who is looking for a 100/100 connection (and just needs the upload bandwidth) is going to

a) Go buy a leased line at £500-600/month plus installation fees or

b) Go buy a 100/100 FTTP line at possibly 1/3 of the monthly price (plus installation fees) if it was on offer?

Specifically with FTTP and FTTPoD, BT could easily offer symmetrical business packages if they wanted to - other countries can and do, using the same technologies, and make such products available to both businesses and residential customers. Even FTTC is capable of 100/100 operation. From Wikipedia:

DNA Oy offers symmetric 100/100 Mbit/s VDSL2 connections at least in the Oulu area for €60 per month.
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BT don't, and there's very obviously a reason they don't.


Caged said:
My experience of the SME space is that they much prefer to whinge about BT than purchase a leased line, even if it's obvious that whatever they have currently doesn't manage to keep up with their demands.
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A lot of people whinge about BT, and mostly with good reason. :)
 
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