They had to act now, otherwise they'd have been in breach of their own contract - under the original booking the Infinity service was scheduled to start on the 27th December and, according to my on-line BT account, that commencement date has remained rock solid, despite the earlier changes to the installation date.

Nick

Or just stop 'em kipping on the job in their cabs, perhaps ?

Nick

All BT Vans have trackers and engineers are constantly managed and monitored to create performance statistics.

In the old days a BT engineer used to get a list of jobs on the morning and if they raced through them they were finished when they were finished.

Now the engineers don't know what they are doing from one job to the next, they are assigned work when they sign off their last job, each job has an average duration that they should hit.

This is why I never meet a happy BT engineer any more.

BT, I believe, have in operation, in some locations, industrial grade wi-fi transceivers (Attached to telegraph poles etc) which connect directly with subscribers modems - remembering that the most modern "N" versions of domestic 802.11 are spec'd at 150 MB/s. No need for all the fannying around with the copper. Just replace it on a street-by-street basis and the revenue obtained from lifting the copper could be used to fund the installtion of the wi-fi.

No. BT decided to keep the copper in place, so that they could continue to run the telephone connections across it and, by reversing their earlier commitment to "Every connection to the network is a node (Including telephones)" , maximise income to the organisation, rather than progress the service for the customers.

Why should the rest of the customer base have to suffer for that corporate decision and because of the all-pervading, self-serving marketing philosphy that "Only new customers get the red-carpet treatment".

Nick

BT, I believe, have in operation, in some locations, industrial grade wi-fi transceivers (Attached to telegraph poles etc) which connect directly with subscribers modems - remembering that the most modern "N" versions of domestic 802.11 are spec'd at 150 MB/s. No need for all the fannying around with the copper. Just replace it on a street-by-street basis and the revenue obtained from lifting the copper could be used to fund the installtion of the wi-fi.

Nope.

The street level wireless was deployed to facilitate a cloud for devices not routers. This was to allow better coverage where 3G was patchy in town centres, and to lower the bandwidth overhead on the 3G network. Totally useless elsewhere and exceptionally selfish too: you'd need street-lights to mount them on and to run data cables to those lights (more digging up roads). Very good in towns (where broadband already exists) but not so good for those living in the sticks. You might think you're the only BT customer worth thinking about, those in rural areas would beg to differ. Whilst you think you have N kit, you're need to make sure the lamp-top units are capable of driving 50 or so N units. Not a cheap solution by any means, and, like ADSL you'd need a trigger level to deploy. Plus, service levels will fluctuate too. I suspect you won't be happy when your service bottoms out because someone has got a pocket jammer. I foresee many many whingy e-mails phone calls to BT, only to discover, weeks later, that it was nothing to do with them. I suspect an apology from you to them would not be forthcoming at that point either.

Plus, for those not directly serviced by BT, (those on LLU) there'll be a parallel service over the existing copper network. Not to mention that would still be needed to run phone lines. If there's a power outage and you fall down the stairs, I suspect you'll be way less than happy that your whizzy whizzy IP-Wireless phone doesn't work when you need to summon help.

The existing ADSL network would remain in place for those on LLU, so why would BT finance the roll-out of a technically limited solution with a low takeup. I suspect you'd also be less than happy if you had to pay for one of the wireless-wireless routers as well. If you think you're gonna get it "for free" from BT, think again about where BT gets the money from in the first place. Remember that you also buy this kit from BT, so if it goes wrong, or you change providers, there goes more money.

It's a nice idea Nick, but one that is technically flawed/limited and financially prohibitive.

"Revenue obtained from lifting the copper"......you think it's going to come out of the ground for free? Unless BT come to some sort of agreement with your local pikeys, the revenue obtained from lifting the copper would pay for the costs of lifting the copper.

Removing the copper would be suicide for the company too. Again, if there's a disruption in wireless (and let's face it, those who actively cover the country in wireless signals always have problems somewhere) you won't even be able to call Ghostbusters!

I think there we have to differ.

Ok spot price of copper may be well down (Can somebody advise ?) compared to when the plans for the Infinity system were being prepared in 2005-2008, but there are long-term cost offsets attributable to loosing the metal. For instance, the insulation on the 80-90 year old cable round here must be completely shot. So that the recurring cost of maintaining that for phones and data must be astronomical and when it gets wet, especially in some low-lying areas round here, service is lost for days. And this is North-West London suburbs in the early 21st century. Go Wi-Fi and you loose all that.

And as regards jamming, surely that could be overcome with overlap and redundancy using widely different channels. But, copper isn't immune to total denial of facility- the copper equivalent usually occurs around here in the early hours of the morning and ends in an off the books financial exchange between some of our Eastern European chums and an accomodating scrappie - they even had some hoodies trying to pinch trackside cabling from the overground part of the underground locally - at six o'clock in the evening.

Even if the market price of copper is low, you don't have to pay for it to be removed. You can leave it there, disconnected (But alarmed) till the price peaks out or alternatively, remove it as a piecemeal background task over the next 20 years, with the commercial relations between BT and the contractor constructed in such a way that contractors bid for a license to remove the copper in a given area on terms which ensure they keep a susbtantial bit of the total value of the material recovered - in effect, you incentivise them to recover the maximum possible at the lowest cost.

As to digging-up the roads (And pavements) , North Sea Gas in the late '60s and early 70s, cable companies in the the early 90s and, round here, water and gas companies in the early 2000s and we're still alive to tell the tale.

Nick

And the CEO or Chairman can't override that ?

If Openreach can have their charges docked for a "No show" . . . . .

Nick

Nope.

And as regards jamming, surely that could be overcome with overlap and redundancy using widely different channels.

Not quite sure you understand the concept of jamming and what a jammer does.

Overlap will be irrelevant: If your neighbour is sitting next-door with a jammer, how do you think overlap will help you? All you'll see is no service, regardless of how many cells are in your area.

Redundancy kicks in when something fails. How will the system decide that something isn't working correctly? (Remember you need to differentiate between 'not working' and 'switched off' too)

Jammers are not restricted to one frequency or channel.

But, copper isn't immune to total denial of facility- the copper equivalent usually occurs around here in the early hours of the morning and ends in an off the books financial exchange between some of our Eastern European chums and an accomodating scrappie - they even had some hoodies trying to pinch trackside cabling from the overground part of the underground locally - at six o'clock in the evening.

Er, yes, we can agree that cable gets pinched, but I assume you'll be still wanting some sort of service overlap: i.e. not taking cable until the wireless is functioning. Your average pikey isn't too worried about your service. And if the pikeys are nicking it, it has zero value to BT: that won't help your 'cost offset'.

The difference is that (and I'll stick with your reference here) a "copper denial of service" is easy to see and fix........a big gap in the cable (won't take long) - replace cable (ok, could take some time). A jammed denial of service would require you to identify that being jammed is the cause of the fault (fault diagnosis can take time), locate the jammer (not sure how easy that would be), remove/disable the jammer (probably require intervention of her majesty's finest, if they can be torn away from their BMWs and coffee), leave it 6 hours and switch on another jammer.

Even if the market price of copper is low, you don't have to pay for it to be removed. You can leave it there, disconnected (But alarmed) till the price peaks out or alternatively, remove it as a piecemeal background task over the next 20 years, with the commercial relations between BT and the contractor constructed in such a way that contractors bid for a license to remove the copper in a given area on terms which ensure they keep a susbtantial bit of the total value of the material recovered - in effect, you incentivise them to recover the maximum possible at the lowest cost.

Another epically slow return to offset the cost of a wireless network.

As to digging-up the roads (And pavements) , North Sea Gas in the late '60s and early 70s, cable companies in the the early 90s and, round here, water and gas companies in the early 2000s and we're still alive to tell the tale.

Don't really see the relevance here: non-upgradable service (gas won't flow better through anything other than a pipe) and they won't be digging the road up to uninstall their infrastructure. It would be an interesting day to see when the UK says, in one voice....."no more gas for us please"

Just out of interest:

How would you see the lamp-post units being connected to the data back-bone? Another layer of wireless?

What about a system failure/jamming and the emergency services? (mostly the public contacting them)

When "new and faster" wireless comes along, would you still be willing to have a "multi-grade" service, just like the now? (Dial-up, ISDN, ADSL, ADSL Max, ADSL2, ADSL2+, all still exist beside Infinity. 2G, 3G, 3.5G all still exist beside 4G.) That would require new lamp-post units and home units to facilitate the upgrade. (More cost, to be ultimately borne by the customer) There would be an awful lot of unhappy people complaining that they're getting 2nd hand kit to facilitate those who are in "the right place" (e.g businesses in London) to always be getting the latest and best........at that point you're back to square 1........behind everyone else again. That's an expensive way to tread water.

I was just watching the BBC "Click" programme end of year review and they showed an excerpt from a programme, first shown at the beginning of this year, in which Ericson where trialling 1 GB per sec wi-fi from static transceivers in a street to a slow moving van - and how were they achieving that data rate you ask ? By using tx overlap and multiple channels. So whilst not in production, its technically in reach.

In the meantime, BT could implement the well proven homeplug technology to bridge the link between household appliances and street cabinets. The two new devolo units I've now got in house are rated at 500 MB/s and are achieving 493MB/s through 27 year old household wiring. I assume that the cabinets in the street are not exclusively powered from BTs own supplies and therefore draw auxillary power from the mains. Even if the 90 year old mains wiring in the street had a bit more resistance than my household wiring, I bet it could achieve at least 100MB/s.

I was thinking that the main wireless tx/rx wi-fi that would be used would sit on a short pole next to each street cabinet and have a power and range to cover 200 yards. So that, in my NW London suburban street, with 100 houses, 50 on each side of the road, which is just about 350 yards long you'd need two of these wif-fi units and you could support this with solar power repeaters (With a integral night-time/emergency battery) fixed to each lamp-post whose main purpose would be collect the wi-fi signal outgoing from households for onward transmission to the cabinets - lamp posts are about every 300 feet down my road - wiki says 802.11g can propagate 300ft outdoors and N 600ft. It just so happens that the existing cabinets are positioned at each end of my road and houses are set-back no more than 40 feet from the pavement, so households could be given a "Super N" unit with an enclosed aerial to fix to a strret facing elevation of the house and wamo, connection @ 150MBps at least.

What do the senior management at BT do all day, that is apart from continually running Excel projections of their end-of-year bonuses -for their own amusement, not ours.

Nick

Edited 23 December, 201213 yr by Clunkclick

:zzz:

I was just watching the BBC "Click" programme end of year review and they showed an excerpt from a programme, first shown at the beginning of this year, in which Ericson where trialling 1 GB per sec wi-fi from static transceivers in a street to a slow moving van - and how were they achieving that data rate you ask ? By using tx overlap and multiple channels. So whilst not in production, its technically in reach.

...and very easy to break.

http://www.electrosm...=591&CAT_ID=131

£120 deals with your overlap and multiple channels concept easily.

In the meantime, BT could implement the well proven homeplug technology to bridge the link between household appliances and street cabinets. The two new devolo units I've now got in house are rated at 500 MB/s and are achieving 493MB/s through 27 year old household wiring. I assume that the cabinets in the street are not exclusively powered from BTs own supplies and therefore draw auxillary power from the mains. Even if the 90 year old mains wiring in the street had a bit more resistance than my household wiring, I bet it could achieve at least 100MB/s.

Best you examine a cabinet then Nick. The mains power is provided through a UPS and filter. (Note what a filter does.)

And using those type of units..........you're providing internet over wires, as if happening now. You're not moving forward here, just an expensive treading water exercise, again.

I was thinking that the main wireless tx/rx wi-fi that would be used would sit on a short pole next to each street cabinet and have a power and range to cover 200 yards. So that, in my NW London suburban street, with 100 houses, 50 on each side of the road, which is just about 350 yards long you'd need two of these wif-fi units and you could support this with solar power repeaters (With a integral night-time/emergency battery) fixed to each lamp-post whose main purpose would be collect the wi-fi signal outgoing from households for onward transmission to the cabinets - lamp posts are about every 300 feet down my road - wiki says 802.11g can propagate 300ft outdoors and N 600ft. It just so happens that the existing cabinets are positioned at each end of my road and houses are set-back no more than 40 feet from the pavement, so households could be given a "Super N" unit with an enclosed aerial to fix to a strret facing elevation of the house and wamo, connection @ 150MBps at least.

I look forward to your whinge about your bill going up when this is implemented to 20% of the houses in your road.

WiFi ranges? You really believe those figures? Those are quoted for a football pitch in a vacuum. Not the real world. NW London has some lovely, sturdy, well-made houses, fantastically thick walls. Signal has to get out as well as in for a network to function/

You have two cabinets in your road already? No? More expense to put in another cabinet. (Thats your bill going up again.)

You have some epic ideas Nick, but sadly, they're still technically flawed and financially untenable.

Missed a few questions at the end there too Nick.

You may well be right.

But I'd lay my money on a wireless based premises to cabinet link for BT within five years - the alternative is too costly to contemplate both for BT as an organisation and for BT's declinning customer base.

The 802.11ac and ad signalling standard is due to be approved/implemented early next year (Amazon are stocking the domestic routers already) perhaps that will become part of any Infinity upgrad eavoiding the requirement to utilise any sort of cable, copper or fibre, to the premises. If you read my previous post, I did say the premises receiving aerial would have to be on the outside elevation - there are plenty of UHF aerials and satelite dishes mounts on premises round here. I would have it relatively easy to add a minature wi-fi unit on those or any where on the outside of the house -on a window as a flat element, on barge-board, next to the front door bell-push.

As regards an electricity supply cable based premises to cabinet link, I would have thought that the data could be extracted from the cable before it hits the UPS and filters and fed into the fibre cabinet separately.

Also most of the telephone connections to houses in my street are flown from telegraph poles. So you've already got a BT powered and toll-free mounting point for any wireless repeater. That's the case with most of the 1930s estates in London. My house is the minority exception, being of post WW2 in-fill development the telephone connection was made underground.

Nick

Edited 24 December, 201213 yr by Clunkclick

Done and dusted.

36 MBs down and 7.5MBs up.

Very impressed.

Engineer was in and out, including a visit to the roadside cabinet (300 yards up the road), in under the hour.

And with no extra holes having to be drilled through the cavity wall.

Uswitch say the nearest competitior in the post-code area is virgin @ 21MBs.

Heartily commend and recommend BT.

Nick

Slightly slower than my sky fibre. :-) glad you got sorted in the end

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2

Heartily commend and recommend BT.

Nick

I'm glad I was sat down when I read that.

Bit slow for me this evening.

Don't use the upstream much.....

....not bad for a 100Mbit connection I suppose.

I'm glad I was sat down when I read that.

Bit slow for me this evening.

Credit where credits due. The fact that they slightly cocked the installation process doesn't detract from the qualities of the service when up and running.

It's nothing short of miraculous, that by just using good signalling software and hardware they get these sort of data transmission speeds out of the copper cable in my road. That said, Infinity doesn't allow you to see the comms stats in the OpenReach modem, so I don't know what the percentage of dropped packets is . . . at the moment.

Anyway, the cable must be at least 70 years old, probably cloth-covered,undoubtedly using copper less pure than today's crop and employing a twisted-pair construction that was unaware of the discoveries to come regarding cross-talk minimisation now incoporated into Cat 5 and beyond. One some occasions when |I use the landline phone over the same connection, the hiss, crackle and pop is something you have to hear to believe, indicating to me that there must be some water penetration. If the data on the recently publicised Bombsite UK database is to be believed I don't think the shockwaves of a couple of WW2 bombs going-off not 300 feet away could have done the cabling much good either.

Nick

Edited 26 December, 201213 yr by Clunkclick

Copper cable - there's life in the old girl yet!

Still think wireless will be deployed in the next five years? :p

copper is a dedicated p2p link.

Wireless is a shared bandwidth solution (usually).

I think they'll blow fibre to the houses before they go wireless.

Copper cable - there's life in the old girl yet!

Still think wireless will be deployed in the next five years? :p

I'm not expert. I don't know with any degree of certainty.

But I understand that some in-building cat 5 cables of todays vintage can be shot within 4-5 years and that the usual life expectancy is 10 years with gentle treatment.

God knows what happens to cables buried in the earth. I think that most buried cables have a life expectancy of 50 years and flown ones about 100 (Though I don't think BTs flown aluminium (Installed in the 1970s onwards) from subscriber to street telephone pole will last that long). Taking an extreme actual example, wiki says that one of the metal transatlantic telephone cables still in service dates from 1956 - I would imagine that's a much harsher environment. So, I would say, that in specification terms the cabling local to me is well past its lifting date.

However, there must come a point where either the insulation on copper cables breaks down to such an extent, through age and degradation by the environment, that the lost packet overhead makes the current service (VDSL2) unviable or where BT can't increase the download rate beyond a certain point by virtue of the physics of the medium and therefore are unable to keep up with the competition and have to adopt another medium. I would have thought that cables dataing from the 1930s are well past their projected viable life now and there could be a cliff edge in performance drop-off which is fast approaching.

Also, Wiki says the spec for VDSL 2 + is up to 100MB/s. So that might respresent the limit over copper at the moment. Are there any further signalling standards which can top VDSL 2 + over copper ?

And i note that the Openreach Modem I received is warranted for 6 years . . .

It is possible, within that time frame, BT are going to have to decided to switch medium. Especially, if they are committed to keep up with the cable companies, which, as you've said, are already trailling 1GB/s service in your locality.

Extension of the FTTC by taking Fibre to premises, oddly might be cheaper if flown fibre cables are technically possible and allowed rather than undergrounding everything.

FTTP by underground fibre would be a massive under taking - similar to North Sea Gas and in today's economic environment they may not be able to fund it themselves without a sizeable up-front contribution from the customer -that would definitely limit their competitiveness.

It may be this decision is so onerous that they've just kicked it into the long-grass for the next CEO to do and/or hope that by this time Openreach has gone fully independent.

Nick

Edited 26 December, 201213 yr by Clunkclick

Actually I think BT will need to start being serious about upgrading the network sooner rather than later, especially if you believe they want to keep up with cable........

http://recombu.com/digital/news/virgin-media-investigates-10gbps-docsis-31-connections_M11115.html

Good luck in keeping up with those speeds over WIFI too.

Impressive !

Even employing Moore's Law and anticipating that the current fastest storage media available on the retail market will be capable of read/write @ 1 GB/s in 18 months, you'd have to have a small data centre's worth of planed and raided drives simultaneously feeding streamed high definition hollographic TV into every in room in order to make a dent in that capacity.

I'd be interested to know where the Virgin marketeers get their domestic data download requirements to justify the scale of that capacity.That said, its only 8 years away . . . . .

And Vigin's co-ax to premises is now half-way through its lifespan.

Nick

Edited 5 January, 201313 yr by Clunkclick