kelvin – ɔimoɈɒ

Your definition of broadband is wrong.

A few months ago I had the pleasure of attending a Deloitte paper launch and the guest speaker was Peter Cochrane. I’d not heard of Peter before but he eloquently (and authoritatively) put forward an argument that I have tried to explain to stakeholders across the province. While it’s hard to get the full effect … Continue reading “Your definition of broadband is wrong.”

A few months ago I had the pleasure of attending a Deloitte paper launch and the guest speaker was Peter Cochrane. I’d not heard of Peter before but he eloquently (and authoritatively) put forward an argument that I have tried to explain to stakeholders across the province. While it’s hard to get the full effect of his persuasive speech, you can view his FTTH @ Last slides at the link above.

His core argument was:

Your definition of broadband is wrong.

Peter Cochrane's Slides — © Peter Cochrane http://www.cochrane.org.uk/

During the talk, he said that if an internet link is not 100 Mbps up and down then it’s not broadband. Many people scoff but they fail to realise several things about the demand for broadband. The demand is there, it’s entirely in the supply that we see the issue.

In 2003, it was exciting to download a 3 Megabyte music file from the newly opened iTunes Store. My broadband was 512 Kbps down, 256Kbps up and it had a reported 20:1 contention. In 2013, my bandwidth demands have increased a thousandfold. I want to download 3.2 Gigabyte movie files from the iTunes Store. But my broadband speeds have increased only by a factor of 10 in a decade. I’m imminently to order BT Infinity but that only can provide 24-80 Mbps (“SuperFast broadband”) and not the 80 Mbps+ (“UltraFast broadband”) that the modern media consumer demands. And that’s just the download speed because idiots have, over the last few years, decreed that download speed is the only important metric.

There are four metrics I measure broadband by:

Upload
Download
Latency
Contention

Upload speeds are just as important (and more important for the media industry) and they tend to still be sub-10 Mbps. Contention on BT Infinity is 50:1 – the opposite of contention is a term called “non-blocking” where everyone paying for access gets the access they are paying for. When Telcos promise a certain bandwidth, they’re actually selling that same object fifty times to their customers and you’re all supposed to share. (The logic being that not everyone will be downloading at the same time). Latency is, for most people in our industry, immaterial though you can feel the effect in online games, video-conferencing calls and other time-senstiive operations. In many cases, the latency is not caused at the “broadband” end but due to the series of interactions between you and your content across the Internet. The delicious irony being that if your upload speed is limited, your latency jumps considerably as your “content requests” are competing with your uploads.

One of Peter’s slides regarding the island of Jersey:

(He goes on to clarify that 3G runs at 14 Mbits, WiFi at 50 Mbps.)

Sweden:

100Mbit for 299kr (£25) a month is the slowest broadband in Sweden. And it goes up to a Gig for £75 a month

Keep this in mind when talking about our “digital platform”. Our broadband needs to improve by a factor of 100 for our consumer markets and for our business markets, probably 100 times that.

KELVIN: A Guest Post

There’s been a lot of discussion regarding the benefits of Project KELVIN, a €30M investment in Northern Irelands telecommunications infrastructure. The issue is that when questions were asked, answers were not forthcoming. David Kirk, ex-AOL, ex-Cisco, steps in with some clarity. Let’s Get a Few Facts Right …, by David Kirk. In November, Matrix published … Continue reading “KELVIN: A Guest Post”

Let’s Get a Few Facts Right …, by David Kirk.

In November, Matrix published “Telecoms Horizon Panel Report; Exploiting Northern Ireland’s Telecoms Infrastructure” claiming “international connectivity now gives us the distinction of being “closer” to the east coast of North America than California.”
Then on December 14th, in a piece by John Simpson in the Belfast Telegraph, an article on the report states

“The new Kelvin direct fibre link from Northern Ireland to the USA offers huge capacity, sufficient for 1 million concurrent 2Mbps users, and reduces the round trip time for contact with the USA from 120-150 milliseconds to 65-67 milliseconds. Operating in milliseconds is itself staggering.”

You’d get the impression from these claims that Kelvin just established Northern Ireland as the telecommunications gold medalist in the 2010 connectivity sprint. Unfortunately, the above statements are meaningless out of context – a fact that a number of telecommunications experts in Northern Ireland have been trying to tell the powers that be for 2-3 years now.

So, let’s step through this slowly.

But first, lest this article is written off as just another negative poke from another naysayer – there are LOTS of advantages to Kelvin, both strategic and tactical, but round trip latency IS JUST NOT ONE OF THEM.

And, I’ll keep this as simplified as possible to illustrate the point.
On a continuous run of fiber optical cable, data is transmitted as light pulses – and travels at the speed of – well – light. Long lengths of fiber optical cable need repeaters (passive repeaters) to get the light longer distances. This will slow the data down, but that’s not the major reason for delay. Two other network topology and routing considerations have vastly more significant delays on data transfer / throughput rates than round-trip delay – hubs and peering arrangements.

Round trip delay data, in this case, is the time to transmit from a Hibernia node, to another Hibernia node. This has NOTHING to do with the actual delay, transfer rate or throughput that an actual user may experience. The REAL impact of data transfer / throughput will depend on the “last mile”, i.e. what connectivity any user has to its ISP and which other ISP’s are peered.

For example, I am on Time Warner Cable in Palm Springs. To send an email to my neighbor who is on Comcast means that my data has to travel to the nearest peer exchange where Time Warner and Comcast have a peering arrangement, i.e. agreed to allow data to travel over each other’s networks (reciprocity).

Basically, it is impossible to predict generic data transfer / throughput rates from backbone round time delay, and making non-sense statements like “closer” just illustrates that the folks making these claims either know how facile the arguments are, or simply just don’t have a clue about networks and data transfer / throughput rates. A simple challenge to this claim would be to ask for the end-to-end transfer / throughput benchmarks.

By way of analogies:

Basing claims on round trip delay is like saying that a car’s speed is only dependant upon the revs of its engine. A Porsche would be delivering around 400hp and in 3rd to 4th would be doing 100mph and a Prius can only deliver 100hp for a top speed of, maybe 95 mph.
A slower (in terms of processor cycle speed) PC will print faster on a printer connected to a USB 3.0 connections, in comparison to a faster PC printing to the same printer but connected via USB 1.0.

To make these claims that are being thrown about will incur laughter from knowledgeable network engineers and discredit the REAL benefits and advantages of Kelvin. Perhaps the folks that are pumping out these claims should be listening to the folks that understand?

For the cost of a bulb, multi-gigabit broadband

From the BBC Every community in the UK will gain access to super-fast broadband by 2015 under plans outlined today. … Explaining why the government had abandoned the plans of the former administration that promised 2 megabits per second broadband for all by 2012, he said: “It’s silly to hang your hat on a speed … Continue reading “For the cost of a bulb, multi-gigabit broadband”

From the BBC

Every community in the UK will gain access to super-fast broadband by 2015 under plans outlined today.
…
Explaining why the government had abandoned the plans of the former administration that promised 2 megabits per second broadband for all by 2012, he said: “It’s silly to hang your hat on a speed like two meg when the game is changing the whole time.

He added: “What we’ve said is that just giving people two meg is not enough, what people use the internet for is changing the whole time.”

A recent study by the regulator Ofcom revealed that fewer than 1% of UK homes have a super-fast broadband connection, considered to be at least 24Mbps.

I ranted a little today for a change in the way that Northern Ireland deals with its broadband.

Northern Ireland has a fibre ring, which contains dozens of fibre pairs, all belonging to different carriers. Some of them are lit, some of them are dark. But it’s the dark ones that interest me.

This map, from Eircom, shows the basic layout.

Why am I interested?

Well, let us say I want to send a 1 GB uncompressed digital video file (equal to about 5 minutes) to my server in Pittsburgh. My current upload speed is 0.38 Mb/s which would mean the transfer would take about 6 hours to do the transfer. Not bad for around 3000 miles.

But let’s say I want to transfer it to a post-production house in Holywood, a mere 2.6 miles away? It’ll take around 6 hours to do the transfer – however I can load it onto a USB drive and bring it to the Picturehouse in about 10 minutes. By bicycle.

And that’s a load of crap.

Because no-matter how good our upload speed is – and yes it is important as we consume more and more digital media – if we are to become content creators rather than just consumers we need faster uploads.

So, my proposition is for our government, for InvestNI, for NIScreen, for Momentum/Digital Circle to get involved and light up one of those dark fibre pairs. That’s the cost of running a few LED bulbs and a few repeaters.

Then install wireless repeaters in every city at the local POPs. And get high speed connections into that ring via wired or wireless; a 50 Mbps wireless link is not expensive to run.

This ring doesn’t need to go to the Internet, though carriers should be able to sell their internet service portals across the ring. The point of it is to provide really fast access between points on the ring. So provide that, without throttling anything on the internal network.

If you can’t pass fibre into each home, then each POP should have a regional office hub (belonging to the Local Enterprise Agencies, the Libraries, InvestNI) which provides direct access to the ring. Make it so that it’s a five minute journey to these hubs and then the upload can be loaded directly onto the ring, transferred to a datacentre on the ring or direct to a POP at the other end, ready for receipt.

The aim here is not to compete with commercial offerings. Indeed there is nothing commercial about the offerings we are presented with. The aim here is to provide a use for the existing ring which will work to the benefit of digital creative companies and provide increased opportunity for ISPs to sell their services.

It’s my belief that government should provide the basic infrastructure for commerce. Whether that is money, music or uncompressed high definition video. And once the substrate is in place, commercial interests can ply their wares across the ring.

Yes, I am deliberately simplifying everything except the costs, which are incredibly low. This solution means the ring will be useful to everyone and there would be reduced reason to locate your business in Belfast or Derry, when Armagh or Irvinestown has the same access.

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