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The rollout of BT’s new Infinity product is set to gather pace later this year. You may have already noticed new, larger green cabinets cropping up at the end of your street, usually next to (or opposite) the existing, rather tired looking original green boxes. Indeed, BT Retail started advertising the new infinity services as early as mid 2010 - remember the famous BT couple staring in wonder at the meteor shower taking place over Dulwich (or wherever it was filmed)?
BTR released precious few details of the service at the time, apart from the standard “it will change your lives” soundbites, and with good reason: Infinity was only trialling from two exchanges in the whole of the UK, and was nowhere near being considered a full product. Initially, you couldn’t even trial it with BT directly, you needed to trial it through a BT Wholesale partner. Sadly, Fusion’s own product trials produced less than spectacular results, as it quickly transpired that, not only did triallists need to be connected to the correct exchange, but also some of the specific street postcodes that BT advised as “active” weren’t in fact active at all.
Now, however, BT has officially launched Infinity and currently holds a proposed list of nearly 300 exchanges enabled or due to be enabled this year. The standard product promises download speeds of up to 40Mb while the premium service suggests download speeds up to 100Mb. Real world tests so far are showing average speeds of around 60% of the maximum thresholds, but still pretty impressive.
So with this product set to reach 60% of the UK within the next few years, is this the end of business-class National Ethernet?
Let’s look at the FTTC service in detail:
The Product
BT Infinity is a brand name for Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) and Fibre to the Premises (FTTP). Initially, the media seized upon the FTTP service as the headline product but, whilst the idea of a dedicated fibre line reaching into every home and business in the UK is attractive, the practicalities of this, not to mention the astronomical costs involved, soon moved the focus to Fibre to the (green) Cabinet instead. This entails utilising as much of the existing BT infrastructure as possible by blowing fibre (typically 1Gb circuits) from the exchange through BT ducting to each of the green street cabinets where all the surrounding telephone services terminate. From there, some fairly heavy duty (hence the larger cabinets) hardware distributes the fibre signal down the existing BT copper lines over a new ADSL variant called VDSL (Very fast DSL) to each home. The VDSL service can manage very high speeds but only over very short distances, which is why BT couldn’t run this service direct from the exchanges over copper.
Fibre to the Premises takes this initiative one step further by taking a dedicated fibre line (not copper) from the cabinet (or similar) to each property, meaning a more reliable and stable connection, however BT are focusing this provision on new build estates only at present, where there is no underlying infrastructure in place already and BT would need to deploy new services in any case. FTTP will develop as a product over the next ten years or so as more new builds utilise the technology.
So home users have never had it so good but, for businesses, are there potential downsides to FTTC?
The Contention
FTTC is ultimately seen as the replacement to residential ADSL and, as such, availability of bandwidth needs to be shared (contended) by users. Speeds will still remain billed as “up to” and users will get the best experience out of key hours i.e. mornings and up to 3pm, then after 11pm. BT Wholesale have placed some initial speed guarantees against the service, but the ISP’s that BTW sell to will need to keep the services contended on their own network in order to maintain a profit and yet remain competitive in the residential marketplace.
The Caps
Access to, and providing the internet delivery of this sort of service is not cheap. However, the target residential and small business audience will continue to expect to pay roughly what they pay now, albeit for a service delivering maybe three times (or more) the speed they currently receive. Therefore, the residential ISP’s are usually forced to introduce capped services based around bandwidth usage. Most so far are opting for a cap of around 40GB (Gigabytes) per month, which they can retail for up to £35 per month. This may sound generous but, of course, we need to bear in mind that next generation broadband services are targeted at content delivery: how fast can we deliver a product and how high quality can it be delivered?
A single High Definition movie may be upwards of 8 Gigabytes alone. A 3D HD movie may be 20GB plus. Worryingly, the typical future home user may use up their month’s bandwidth allowance after downloading only two or three films!
Put another way, if you manage to download consistently at the 40Mb peak bandwidth, you would use up your 40GB allowance in about three hours.
The Pricing
Once your capped allowance is exhausted, ISP’s usually either throttle a service back or provide an option to buy more bandwidth, priced per GB over the allowance. Of course, an ISP can remove the capped usage model altogether and allot the bandwidth to the customer on their own network if they chose to, creating a completely uncontended, uncapped service. However, there are naturally associated costs associated with this method of delivery, and a conservative estimated cost for an uncontended, uncapped 40Mb service would be in the region of £300 per month.
The Reliability
The most frequent point of failure for any DSL-based service is unfortunately the “last mile” BT copper connection. Most ISPs themselves maintain a very high level of guaranteed uptime on their own network, as do BT when they hand off from the exchange to their wholesale customers, however the copper to premises has always proved to be the weakest link. Due to the delivery method of FTTC (outlined above), BT still need to rely on the copper infrastructure to get the service to property, so the service will still suffer from the same issues related to the basic home user ADSL services used at present.
The Availability
This is by far the most apparent issue with FTTC at present, as BT plans for deployment in 2011 hardly dent the total UK exchange coverage: 300 exchanges out of 5000 = 6% by the end of the year.
This will of course continue to expand over time but, more worryingly, not even enabled exchanges will have blanket coverage across their regions. Due to the physical limitations of running fibre to specific roads, some areas within an exchange’s coverage will simply not get the service.
So is Infinity/FTTC any good?
Yes! It is an excellent broadband product for home users and very small businesses. BT has placed a lot of planning and investment into finally delivering true “next generation” broadband to this customer base and maximised the limitations offered by their copper based infrastructure. However, FTTC is not a replacement for dedicated, uncontended Ethernet delivery.
Let’s look quickly at the issues raised by FTTC above and compare to National Ethernet or Ethernet First Mile:
The Contention
All Ethernet is guaranteed 1:1 contention
The Caps
There are no usage caps
The Pricing
Uncontended corporate level services are bound to be higher than residential based services, but 10Mb, uncontended Ethernet with a premium SLA can be delivered at less than £400 per month. And don’t forget, the uncontended download speed with Ethernet is always mirrored by the uncontended upload speed.
The Reliability
Ethernet is delivered as a “nailed up” connection and backed up by a premium service level guarantee, and there are numerous failover options available to ensure optimum uptime.
The Availability
Ethernet can be delivered almost anywhere and is available now.
The choice is yours. Contact Fusion account managers today to discuss your requirements and help find the best product. |
