Quality Broadband

What is quality broadband? Why do we need it? How does it make a difference? UK Broadband has had a massive take up, with recent figures from OFCOM saying that 57% of homes have a broadband line (http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/cm/cmrnr08/uksummary.pdf) and only 8% of people still using a dial up internet connection. This leads us to the question of how is it delivered, and how can we ensure that we provide a consistent level of service to all customers, across the country?

BT Retail were first to market with a UK Broadband service, the BT Openworld service. You may recall the heady days of the engineer visit, the green frog modem and the 512k download speed – a revolution for those of us who until that point had been on 56k modems and 64k ISDN dial up.

One of the major differences has been the rise of a number of local loop unbundling “LLU”. This is a mechanism whereby an internet provider puts their own equipment into the phone exchange. BT Openreach (the copper access network part of BT) then splits the voice frequencies from the data frequencies on the copper pair to your house, and wires the data across a distribution frame to the “LLU Provider”.

They then connect those wires into a “DSLAM” which aggregates the copper wires and turns them into virtual paths across (typically) a gigabit Ethernet link, which spans the country from the local exchange to London, where you are typically connected to the internet.

However, todays broadband picture is very different, with the Office of the Telecoms Adjudicator putting LLU lines at nearly 5 million (http://www.offta.org.uk/charts.htm#throughput, http://www.offta.org.uk/updates/otaupdate20080404.htm) in June 2008.

Broadband is essentially a large Virtual Private Network, with an L2TP (Layer Two Tunnelling Protocol) tunnel from the DSLAM port, back to your internet providers broadband termination point. Therefore, there are three things which can affect the operation and quality of your internet connection:

• Quality of Copper. How far from the exchange are you, how much interference is there on your line, how good is the copper pair (or is it aluminium!). This then has a direct affect on the upstream and downstream speed of your ADSL line.
• Contention in the Backhaul from your exchange to the internet break out
• Contention on the internet break out (which these days is much less likely)

Sadly, not much can be done about copper wires as installing new ones is very expensive, however, simple innovations like fitting high quality microfilters to your ADSL router, and ensuring your internal wiring is high quality and well away from any electrical interference, can really make a difference to your line speed.

However, the biggest potential area for both improvement and error is the connection from your local exchange back to the internet break out point – typically London, and how overused it is.

For most customers in the UK, their ISP will buy a service from BT Wholesale called “IPStream” and BT lump all of the ADSL connections together in one pool and they try to deliver all of the L2TP virtual circuits to your ISP’s “Central Pipe”. As there is no class of service differential between different customer circuits, if enough customers on a local exchange are using (or abusing) their internet connection, then the backhaul from the exchange will become contended, and everyone, across all ISPs, will suffer a performance down turn.

The best analogy for this is that of a motorway. Typically, during the day time, the motorway is clear and empty. However, at rush hour, all lanes become congested and busy and everything slows down – both holiday makers driving their caravans (consumer traffic) and stressed executives in the fast lane rushing for their meetings (business traffic). There are only two ways to solve this problem:

• Make the motorway wider or
• Get a priority car (with a blue flashing light!)

In broadband terms, this is called “quality of service” and “traffic prioritisation”.

Whilst the BT IPStream network is called “Colossus” for a good reason, there are instances when it does become overloaded – the problem for many is the unpredictability - not knowing when, or how bad it might be.

Other operators take a different view, and Gradwell dot com Limited has partnered with Tiscali Business Services, who have over 1000 local exchanges with their own equipment in them and their own backhaul. Unlike the BT IPStream network, the Tiscali network is designed to cope with contention – which comes in handy in the evenings for managing huge numbers of consumers on the network – however, during the day time the network runs very quietly and is excellent for business customers.

By controlling their own backhaul, Tiscali offers Gradwell the opportunity to provide “premium broadband” – a class of service with a top prority grading, akin to driving a police car – and as the network fills up, the premium traffic is consistently passed across the network first, whilst the other grades of traffic – standard, business and consumer get “squashed” to varying degrees. Secondly, by controlling the DSLAMs, Tiscali are in a position to offer more innovative services, such as ADSL2+, which gives customers upto a 16 megabit internet connection, and most recently “Annex M”, an innovation which allows customers a fast upstream link of 2.5 megabits (sending data from the computer to the internet) which is very valuable for people sending lots of data, such as big file transfers, computer graphics, VPN traffic, etc.

What does all this mean for the small business user? Well, by using alternative methods of controlling the broadband network, internet providers like Gradwell can give customers not only more innovative, faster services, but also a greater level of predictability and consistency – which become essential when deploying sensitive applications such as Internet Telephony/VoIP, VPNs and Media Streaming (e.g. CCTV), and it has been very successful – virtually all of the customers who move to the Gradwell premium services find that quality problems with VoIP and the other applications mentioned which have been experienced previously simply go away.

So what does the future of broadband hold? The word on every body’s lips is “Fibre”. If you are lucky enough to live in the Ebbsfleet valley in Kent you will know BT is trialing Fibre to the Home “FTTH”. Elsewhere, Sky is rumoured to be trialling to the street cabinet “FTTC” as a way of getting closer to customers homes. However, the UK lags in general fibre deployment because thus far, there has been little commercial incentive to deploy a fibre connection to every house, simply because the first company to do it (likely to be BT) would have to then share it with everyone else – and no one would make such an investment under those circumstances.

However, in a July 2008 speech (http://www.ofcom.org.uk/media/speeches/2008/07/intellectconf), Ed Richards, the CEO of OFCOM said “Super-fast broadband is crucial to the UK’s future… We are very clear that if operators are going to make investments in new infrastructure … then they need to know that the regulatory framework will allow them to make and keep a rate of return…”. Perhaps that is the first signal to the UK Telcos that they can make the investment, and that they should do so because the country needs a new generation of high quality broadband.