Vodafone offering its HFC network in place of UFB rollout?

Forums › New Zealand Broadband › Vodafone offering its HFC network in place of UFB rollout?

1 | 2 | 3

2350 posts

Uber Geek

#1000209 6-Mar-2014 15:07

Chrizvi: the other issue with cable is they only have 2Mb upstream compare with vdsl.. also they would not fix the issue with streaming netflix using DNS because they are tied up with SKY...

would be good if those were fix and pretty sure everyone would join as they align their data cap to 500GB

Thats an issue that i posted here a couple of weeks ago,

They do have faster plans but their 2 main plains are 15/2 and 50/2

50/2 needs to go up to 50/10

scorpiworld

192 posts

Master Geek

#1000217 6-Mar-2014 15:37

Nice try by Vodafone to sweat an existing asset before it is made obsolete by CFH.

RSP's are finding it hard enough to integrate with 4 LFC's at a B2B fulfilment level, let alone a mixed fibre / coaxial network to interconnect with.

VF just needs to on board to fibre with all LCF's just like the rest of NZ's RSP's.

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
79269 posts

Uber Geek

Administrator

ID Verified

Trusted

Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#1000232 6-Mar-2014 16:05

Here' the InternetNZ comments:

InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc.) is strongly opposed to Vodafone’s suggestion, made public this morning, to scrap construction of the Ultra-fast Broadband network in Wellington and Christchurch.

Responding to the idea that the old HFC network be used in lieu of new UFB fibre in Wellington and Christchurch, InternetNZ’s CEO, Jordan Carter, says that it’s a retrograde move that makes little sense for anyone other than Vodafone.

“UFB needs to be rolled out to as much of New Zealand as possible. This suggestion by Vodafone begs the question, why would Kiwis choose to make use of a second-class network when we are already on our way to having a first–class network?”

“From the beginning, we’ve been a huge supporter of the UFB. InternetNZ welcomed Prime Minster John Key’s commitment to the plan in April 2008, and even commissioned research on the cost of a fibre build that was released later that year. Our long-term commitment to a fibre future is well established.

InternetNZ expects the Government to stand strong on its position, which has been that the UFB rollout will continue around the country.

“Minister Adams has been spot on with her comments that regardless of Chorus’ financials the UFB build must go on. We back her and the Government to make good on their election pledge of a world-class network for New Zealand,” said Mr Carter.

“It makes good economic sense for Vodafone to seek to make best use of the HFC network it bought when it took over TelstraClear, but replacing the UFB isn’t the way to go.

“While we support Vodafone and others doing some lateral thinking about how to speed up and improve the UFB rollout, this particular suggestion just doesn’t pass muster. The HFC network can deliver decent speeds, but it’s not future proof – the UFB is, and New Zealand needs to stick with it,” Jordan Carter says.

trig42

5810 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

#1000234 6-Mar-2014 16:07

freitasm: Here' the InternetNZ comments:

InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc.) is strongly opposed to Vodafone’s suggestion, made public this morning, to scrap construction of the Ultra-fast Broadband network in Wellington and Christchurch.

Responding to the idea that the old HFC network be used in lieu of new UFB fibre in Wellington and Christchurch, InternetNZ’s CEO, Jordan Carter, says that it’s a retrograde move that makes little sense for anyone other than Vodafone.

“UFB needs to be rolled out to as much of New Zealand as possible. This suggestion by Vodafone begs the question, why would Kiwis choose to make use of a second-class network when we are already on our way to having a first–class network?”

“From the beginning, we’ve been a huge supporter of the UFB. InternetNZ welcomed Prime Minster John Key’s commitment to the plan in April 2008, and even commissioned research on the cost of a fibre build that was released later that year. Our long-term commitment to a fibre future is well established.

InternetNZ expects the Government to stand strong on its position, which has been that the UFB rollout will continue around the country.

“Minister Adams has been spot on with her comments that regardless of Chorus’ financials the UFB build must go on. We back her and the Government to make good on their election pledge of a world-class network for New Zealand,” said Mr Carter.

“It makes good economic sense for Vodafone to seek to make best use of the HFC network it bought when it took over TelstraClear, but replacing the UFB isn’t the way to go.

“While we support Vodafone and others doing some lateral thinking about how to speed up and improve the UFB rollout, this particular suggestion just doesn’t pass muster. The HFC network can deliver decent speeds, but it’s not future proof – the UFB is, and New Zealand needs to stick with it,” Jordan Carter says.

Looks like a pretty reasonable and reasoned response. Probably means no notice will be taken of it :/

sbiddle

30853 posts

Uber Geek

Retired Mod

Trusted

Biddle Corp

Lifetime subscriber

#1000238 6-Mar-2014 16:11

scorpiworld:
VF just needs to on board to fibre with all LCF's just like the rest of NZ's RSP's.

But what will that cost them from their bottom line? Essentially they've got an asset that for all intent purposes has a minimal value to actually deliver services to a customer.

As those customers decide to move to UFB (even if they stay with VF) they're suddenly faced with paying a minimum of $37.50 per month to Chorus or Enable. Multiply that by the 100k or so HFC customers that VF have any you've got quite a large number.

Sideface

9355 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1000257 6-Mar-2014 16:33

I live in a "cable but no fibre" area of Wellington.
My only options are ADSL2, VDSL2 (no faster than ADSL at my address), and VF cable (which I use).
VF offer 2 cable speeds - 50/2Mbps and 130/10Mbps - and 3 data caps - 80, 150, & 500GB.
All of these options are expensive.
I'd change to fibre in a heartbeat - but that may not be an option for years.

Sideface

toadeny

21 posts

Geek

#1000263 6-Mar-2014 16:47

Chrizvi: the other issue with cable is they only have 2Mb upstream compare with vdsl.. also they would not fix the issue with streaming netflix using DNS because they are tied up with SKY...

would be good if those were fix and pretty sure everyone would join as they align their data cap to 500GB

I am on one of the older warpspeed branded plans and have 130Mb/s download and 10Mb/s upload. I get those speeds to the telstraclear speedtest servers. The rest of the internet is a lottery. :)

Lenovo

Shop now for Lenovo laptops and other devices (affiliate link).

wongtop

563 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1000282 6-Mar-2014 17:20

Personally I don't see that it would offer a great deal of real world performance improvement over the FTTN with VDSL2/ADSL2. The cable part of the system is shared bandwidth, so I'd be interested to know how this compares with the shared bandwidth on fibre, which to my recollection is 2.4Gbps.

scorpiworld

192 posts

Master Geek

#1000288 6-Mar-2014 17:33

sbiddle:
scorpiworld:
VF just needs to on board to fibre with all LCF's just like the rest of NZ's RSP's.

But what will that cost them from their bottom line? Essentially they've got an asset that for all intent purposes has a minimal value to actually deliver services to a customer.

As those customers decide to move to UFB (even if they stay with VF) they're suddenly faced with paying a minimum of $37.50 per month to Chorus or Enable. Multiply that by the 100k or so HFC customers that VF have any you've got quite a large number.

From an internal VF view I agree, using what you already own makes great business sense.

As another RSP trying to supply a customer in that area, I would have to assume that means entering into a whole sale agreement with VF?

Technically not possible under CFH rules with VF being a Retail provider.

It's the different equipment required I jumped at. I know LFC's particularly the smaller ones are trying really hard to keep the on board process for RSP’s as similar as possible, adding another type of network isn't good to all RSP’s bottom line.

Sideface

9355 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1000526 7-Mar-2014 08:49

On Stuff yesterday: "Govt rejects Vodafone UFB plea"

I found the footnote to this interesting:
UFB residential fibre connections:
Orcon About 6000
Snap Internet More than 4000
Telecom About 4000
Vodafone 2000 to 3000
CallPlus/Slingshot several hundred

Source: Company statements

Sideface

nickb800

2716 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1000552 7-Mar-2014 09:48

If VF was willing to wholesale its HFC on CFH terms, then why not push HFC areas of Christchurch and Wellington to the final year of the UFB rollout?

HFC isn't the technology of the future, but it's probably sweet for the vast majority for the next five years. Can't we look at the country as a whole and prioritize resources (particularly financial) to the urban areas stuck on ADSL2+ or sparse VDSL coverage?

Of course its probably too late for any of this as Chorus/Enable have already signed with CFH and probably started overbuilding the HFC network already

Sideface

9355 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1000559 7-Mar-2014 10:00

nickb800: If VF was willing to wholesale its HFC on CFH terms, then why not push HFC areas of Christchurch and Wellington to the final year of the UFB rollout?

Now is the logical time to upgrade Christchurch to UFB, whilst everything is being rebuilt.

Sideface

nickb800

2716 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1000566 7-Mar-2014 10:07

Sideface:
nickb800: If VF was willing to wholesale its HFC on CFH terms, then why not push HFC areas of Christchurch and Wellington to the final year of the UFB rollout?

Now is the logical time to upgrade Christchurch to UFB, whilst everything is being rebuilt.

You'd think so, but aside from SCIRT coordinating road/water/wastewater/storwater rebuild, it seems that Enable are doing their own thing anyway

pchs

185 posts

Master Geek

#1000576 7-Mar-2014 10:13

Some other issues around this would be

A large part of the cost of building the network is the leadin to the house rather than the network along the street, this presumably would be the same no matter if its coax or fibre.

the HFC network has lots of cabinets that need power, so in a powercut it causes outages, with GPON all the cabinets are passive, and every CO that needs power has a backup generator (For Enable anyway) GPON can actually be more reliable than POTS as many Chorus FTTN cabinets with voice MUX's also only have battery backup, in the case of a major event if you have a generator at your house then you can keep up your GPON and Phone service indefinitely.

In Christchurch (not sure about Wellington) a large amount of the HFC network deployment is on power lines, whereas the fibre network is being deployed below ground, so the fibre network will be more reliable, very little if any fibre was broken in the earthquakes.

webwat

2036 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1001616 9-Mar-2014 11:54

sbiddle: How ironic. It wasn't long ago Newbury had essentially pulled the plug on HFC. Sounds like Rusty trying to build a business case to try and get further money for it to avoid it simply being scrapped because there is clearly plenty of money to be made from it as an asset if they only got the basics right such as delivering HFC products that at least matched the product offerings you can get over a copper connection.

Yes HFC is a great product and yes it's got 20+ years life left in it with plenty of room for significant developments in speed, especially with channel bonding.

At the end of the day however it's not fibre and shouldn't be treated as a replacement. It can't offer the same performance and to deliver benefits from things such as channel bonding to deliver 1Gbps going forward node sizes need to be significantly reduced. There would need to be significant investment from VF into the network to deliver anything close to what UFB can deliver.

Yup, its not "ultrafast", susceptible to congestion, and cant be patched directly as dark fibre or point-to-point for business customers. Its great as a competitor for UFB (especially since its not owned by the UFB monopoly) but I don't think Voda is interested in structural separation to do it - a prerequisite for UFB.

Time to find a new industry!

1 | 2 | 3