Slashdot Mirror
Top UK Cable Firms Scrapping DSL
jeffreyporter was one of a number of people who sent in the
BBC story that's running about the hold-up of DSL in Britain, and the situation with the companies investing in it -- but the cable modem companies are quite pleased about this.
I'm one of the lucky few who actually has a high speed link via a cable modem. Even if I did want a DSL link, I can't even get an estimated date of when it would be available in my area. To make matters worse, BT cannot easily install DSL to anyone who has a IDSN link, they need to disconnect this first before they can even check to see if the line is suitable for DSL.
This has the unfortunate effect however of removing a lot of the competition that cable modems should otherwise have, which means there is little or not competition in the UK at the moment for high speed home internet connections, which in turn means we are paying more than we should, so it is in everyones interest for DSL to roll out as soon as possible and by as many people as possible.
The Cable Companies should do more infastructure work before they load even more users onto the systems. I had my Cable Modem installed Monday by Telewest (Blueyonder). It's great when it works (40k/sec), but it needs to work first. The hardware link is fine, but i'm buggered if i've managed to keep an IP level connection going for more than 30Minutes before it craps out and i have to wait another 30 Minutes to get a connection again. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
Now, i havn't had it long enough to say that this is a recurent problem, but my mates who have Cable Modems from the same company have also had problems, and Telewest themselves have admited that some of their routers seriously suck. They say they're in the process of replacing them, but god knows how long that will take.
The same thing happened when they introduced their Surf Unlimited package in Febuary, so i am expecting the service to get better. I'd just like it sooner rather than later, and before they overload the system so much with new users that it stops working completly.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Well, people are only seeing the edge of this argument. I think to bring people up to speed on how this situation developed is too big a task to take on in a reply to a post on slashdot, but basically, here is a brief synopsis. OK, it's quite long, but it's still only 10% of the story.
BT were privatised many moons ago, and were given the responsibility to handle the UK's telecoms infrastructure as they had done before when it was a government-owned entity. The regulator Oftel was setup to ensure that BT did it's job properly and also allow the new cable players (Nynex, etc.) get a grip on the market, and to ensure everything was nice and competitive. After some years, the cable companies were starting to realise that to provide cable service in a country like the UK was prohibitively expenisve. There are still some towns where the roads date back to Roman times, the majority of housing is not laid out in the relatively straight-forward grid-ish system US cities are laid out in, costs were high, uptake was low, etc. So they all came together under the banner of Cable & Wireless. The only other major company in the field even today is NTL.
Meanwhile BT had got DSL working in the labs, but realised that the cost was too high to deploy at that time, and anyway, they owned the exchanges, the cable companies hadn't got the infrastrucutre to sort it all out, etc., etc.... Oftel steps in and say "Oi! What are you doing about high bandwidth solutions for end users and allowing for a competitive local loop?", to which BT said "Well, we're going to install DSL over the next few years, and we'll let providers re-sell DSL services over our network. We will invoice them for the line, and the customer will still be free to choose which carrier they wish to use for voice services".
Oftel came back with "Not good enough. Unbundle the local loop and let the other guys into your exchanges to install their own equipment!" to which BT responded in their best McEnroe impression "You can not be serious! These exchanges cost a fortune to maintain, the system will lead to chaos if we have to let anybody in, the security will go to pot, and the whole damned thing will turn into a huge mess. Anyway, we want to keep control of the local loop". Still, Oftel persisted, and BT grudgingly agreed, after they were permitted to charge accordingly for use of exchange floorspace, and for moving lines across.
They started by rolling out DSL to about 25% of the population. I've got it through Easynet on the corporate plan. Unfortunately, when we looked at this as a provider, we realised that BT had stiffed us. The only way to offer cheap services is to commit to minimum order requirements. Therefore, providers have to pay a fortune for simple IP routing between the customer's premises and the NOC. There are hidden charges everywhere, and it's stifling the business. Regardless of this, a group of companies started hassling BT for ULL (Unbundling Local Loop) so they could put in some nifty SDSL hardware and start getting things moving. I know of a guy who went into negotiations that went something like this:
Provider: "So, how much is it to put our equipment in your local exchange? What's the rent, charges for moving lines over, etc.?
BT: "Looking at your current plans, for such-and-such an exchange, we're talking about £1 million for the next year"
Provider: "£1 million? For a year? What about the charges after that?"
BT: "Oh, sorry. Did we say £1 million? We meant to say £5 million."
Provider: "£5 million for the year?"
BT: "That's right, £10 million"
Provider: "You just said £5 million!"
BT: "No, we just said £20 million. We're quite clear about the price - it's £30 million".
Provider: "This is getting silly now!"
BT: "No it isn't, £50 million is a great price!"
Provider: "How did we get from £1 million to £50 million in such a short space of time. Can we see your breakdown of costs please?"
BT: "We have always maintained the cost for this exchange to be £60 million. We don't do cost breakdowns, sorry."
Provider: "I'm going to complain to Oftel"
BT: "They fully support our pricing policy and think that £75 million is a fair price to pay..."
etc ad infinitum...
So, you see, BT is in charge and not doing a very good job. Apparently they originally expected a total national market for DSL services of about 4,000 customers. Now that there areover half a million people pleading to get DSL, who knows. I'm one of the lucky ones that gets 2Mb/sec to my home/office paid for by the company. When we looked at the prices at first, we did consider setting up as a proper DSL provider, but then you realise it's all smoke and mirrors.
I use Wireless.
www.tele2.co.uk is great, they put an antenna on my roof.. I have right now a 512k line for £39 per month. They are also releasing a new deal, unlimmited internet bandwidth at 156k for £9.99 a month.
this is available only in certain parts of the Uk, but they are moving quickly.
the performance is great, and it put's a smile on my face knowing I am not paying a 'last mile tax'.
--------------------
Well to be honest I am not that surprised.
:(
There are a number of things that hold up broadband access in the UK but the main one is Local Loop Unbundling (the last mile from the exchange to people) if owned by BT. Now OFTEL, the regulator is working to undo this but even though it should happen in the next 12 months BT are still dragging their feet by saying "there isn't enough room" in the exchanges. It isn't however all doom and gloom. There are cable companies like blueyonder and ntl trying to get cable out. Also there are a few wireless companines. But if you are like me and live in the sticks there isn't much help. For someone outside the UK you can get a good overview at broadbandhelp.com. Even though there are now quite a few ISP's offering DSL BT is still providing the bandwidth and of course it is their best intrests to take their time
Cheap UK and US VPS
The 'home' system users a USB based interface, with closed specifications. Drivers are only available for Windows 95, 98, ME and 2000, so Linux, Macintosh, BeOS, NT 4.0 and other users are not able to use it. It is made worse by the fact that the USB device exceeds the USB specificaation regarding the amount of current it draws.
The 'business' system is OS independant, requiring a UTP network connection instead.
Oftel, our telecomms regulator, has done absolutely nothing constructive about this mess.
Other privatised industries are just as bad. Our railways are an utter shambles.
I'm getting to the state where I'm ashamed to be British.
I've been a triallist since BT first started their closed public (1000) adsl testing, and recently changed to another ADSL distributor. Of course I've paid a lot of attention to the status of DSL availability and plans here over the past two years, and can tell you...
the article is exaggerating the problem greatly.
Definitely, there _is_ a problem with the availability of DSL here, as there have been delays in its launch for almost a year, and demand has overwhelmed the (poor) supply from BT - a note for those unaware, BT is the only company able to provide ADSL, and resells it through other companies as well as marketing it itself.
The five companies mentioned in the article, with the exception of NTL, are of little to no consequence in this arena, and nowhere near the size of larger ISPs (Demon, Easynet, etc) who are offering DSL services and have no plans to back down. NTL is in fact a cable company who has been performing cable modem trials over the last year, so their interest in DSL is unlikely to be more than academic.
The demand for broadband here is phenomenal, and so many companies (probably approaching 50 by now?) are offering DSL that this will continue. Sure, it is still expensive here (i pay around $2000 a year, including taxes, for a 2M/256k line, 20:1 contention, fully routed with 15 IPs. However, having to pay for local phone calls ere i was racking up around $150 a month for 56k access as it was...), and demand exceeds supply, but wasn't this the case in the USA when it was launched? Couple that with getting our appetites whetted by hearing about it for so long, and this is of course what happens.
Fross
I'm not very familier with the situation in the UK but in Holland it is good proof why a monopoly is a bad thing(tm).
I work for one of the big CLEC DSL providers in the USA (Covad - perhaps the only one in about 3 months....)
I can state out loud, scream it from the treetops, and sign my life away as to the one reason DSL companies (both in the US and the UK and probably elsewhere) are having such a big problem:
The Monopoly Regional Telephone companies are being assholes.
That's the jist of it. The ILECs (or RBOCs, or just "The Telephone Company") are making it as miserable and as costly as possible for anyone else to install DSL in their COs.
All the ILECs here in the US consistently take far longer than need be to fix problems with loops (the wires from CO to house), run down normal problems in COs, install basic equipment in the CO, etc. Of course, they'll whine about being understaffed (oh, but you just laid off 30% of your wire techs? OF COURSE YOU'RE UNDERSTAFFED!), or that there's no room in the CO (but they're busy plopping in new equipment of their own...). In many places, they require that CLEC have the ILEC's people install anything into the CO, and require only their people to make changes. Of course, they happen to be fairly slow about this stuff...
I'm to the point where I'm seriously pissed off. The FTC/FCC in the US (and I'm assuming OFTEL in the UK) need to start seriously levying fines on the ILECs until they get their shit in gear. Right now, the ILECs are just making it miserable for the competition, simply because they can get away with it, and know that they have the $$ to do it later, while delays will kill their competition.
Fundamentally, I think the only real solution is to strip the local loop ownership from the ILECs. That is, force them to spin out a company that actually owns the "last-mile" physical plant (including COs), but doesn't do any telecom. That way, this new company has equal incentive to provide good service for everyone, ILEC and CLEC both.
I thkn that's the biggest flaw in the TeleCom Act of 1996 here in the USA - not forcing the ILECs to give up control of the local loop before allowing them into other areas. Hopefully, we can fix this soon, but for now, they just fucking piss me off, the wankers.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Starband is offering high latency, high bandwidth 2-way satellite access, and a bird should be in geosynch over europe fairly soon. This means no modem connection, true 2-way to satellite communication.
The problem is that all packets have to travel 44,600 miles one way. At 186,000 miles/sec that means a .24 second delay one way, and a half second is added to any ping.
Internet gaming is out, but e-mail and surfing will rock.
I spent a couple of hours on the phone with a very clueful guy who runs their tech support. He said that they dont mind linux (he runs it himself) or server hosting. The upstream bandwidth is limited to about 50K, and a popular server would probably be frowned upon, but a personal website wouldn't be any problem.
Also, since this is mostly owned by Gilat (an Israeli company) there should be European coverage pretty quickly. According to my source, Gilat has planned on 3,000,000 people in the US using the service.
Anyway, there are 3 options.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
As we say in london, Bollocks.
NTL does offer cable in a lot of areas though, and for just £20 a month (or £24 including box rental)
And according to the FAQ it works with Linux (uses DHCP), its just not supported. The only downside is its limited to 512kbps downstream.
Official GOD FAQ.