Vodafone offering its HFC network in place of UFB rollout?

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trig42

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#141257 6-Mar-2014 11:29

See here: http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/30020945/scrap-ufb-rollout-says-vodafone

Seems Vodafone is saying save some cash, use our cable, we will wholesale it - In areas it is already laid (CHCH and WGN). Seems Crown Fibre approached TelstraClear back in the day and they were not interested, but Vodafone is interested now. Seems sensible if other providers can wholesale the access and people can get the UFB experience and price from whoever can offer it.

Thoughts?

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#1000046 6-Mar-2014 11:39

IMHO if it's offered at the same wholesale rate as CFH Fibre with the same speeds / specs, and the install / assure costs for both Subscriber end and Handovers are similar then why not. Not sure how you would deliver voice services over it, but I presume that would then be wholesaled TelstraClear copper voice service (as they include a 2 pair copper with the Coax in the overhead drop) or a VoIP service using a retail provider RGW.

But how you fulfil, assure DOCSIS is a very different beast than a pure L2 service delivered over a 10gb QinQ handover.

Beccara

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#1000048 6-Mar-2014 11:40

I'd like to see how they plan to offer BS4 circuit's

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sbiddle

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#1000059 6-Mar-2014 11:49

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.

DjShadow

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#1000060 6-Mar-2014 11:50

Wouldn't it mean the Cable network would need to be expanded?

trig42

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#1000061 6-Mar-2014 11:52

I guess my concern would be if that CFH took up VFs offer, proper fibre may never happen in these places.

They should probably just keep on rolling - once complete the country will have a decent infrastructure to expand upon.

Also, how many of the homes VF say they already pass have already had Fibre run past them too?

niallm90

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#1000062 6-Mar-2014 11:53

It makes sense for them to utilise it in the short term however I think they should replace it with fibre once other regions have it.

In my last 2 houses we had cable available but didn't use it because the plans where much more expensive to ADSL. I always assumed that this was because you are sharing the bandwidth with your neighbours so if you had lots of people on it it would not be able to cope.

deadlyllama

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#1000063 6-Mar-2014 11:56

Do they still refuse to provide service in MDUs?

The house in Mt Cook we moved out of ~4 months ago couldn't get cable because it was 1m lower than the house next door, so the cable would cross the boundary/street/whatever at too low a height. We were 3 or 4m from the road.

Cable never provided 100% coverage in the streets that Saturn/TCL ran the network down. That's not acceptable for UFB.

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sbiddle

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#1000065 6-Mar-2014 11:59

deadlyllama: Do they still refuse to provide service in MDUs?

The house in Mt Cook we moved out of ~4 months ago couldn't get cable because it was 1m lower than the house next door, so the cable would cross the boundary/street/whatever at too low a height. We were 3 or 4m from the road.

Cable never provided 100% coverage in the streets that Saturn/TCL ran the network down. That's not acceptable for UFB.

There are MDUs with cable.

Any such problems with overhead leadin's will apply regardless of the technology - HFC, copper or fibre.

Chrizvi

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#1000067 6-Mar-2014 12:01

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

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#1000090 6-Mar-2014 12:33

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...

As a wholesaled service each ISP would provide its own DNS. I presume that DOCSIS can easily handle more than 2 Mb/s too.

Chrizvi

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#1000101 6-Mar-2014 12:46

Behodar:
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...

As a wholesaled service each ISP would provide its own DNS. I presume that DOCSIS can easily handle more than 2 Mb/s too.

I was referring to smartDNS like unblock or getflix... this wont work atm with voda cable due to proxy...

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#1000103 6-Mar-2014 12:50

Right, but when wholesaled you won't be using Vodafone's proxy unless you choose Vodafone as your ISP.

sbiddle

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#1000117 6-Mar-2014 13:07

It is worth noting that over the years a number of ISPs have resold wholesale services over cable, and there are still a couple who continue to do so today.

plambrechtsen

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#1000126 6-Mar-2014 13:27

And InternetNZ gives their view:

“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

pchs

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#1000184 6-Mar-2014 14:38

sbiddle: It is worth noting that over the years a number of ISPs have resold wholesale services over cable, and there are still a couple who continue to do so today.

Xtreme network's in Wellington, and Snap, although I don't believe Snap ever built a retail product, I've only ever seem them installed for Business customers.

They are handed back as layer 2 so you will get the wholesalers bandwidth, and thus avoiding the TCL NZ/AU routing and you would also get the APE/WIX routes too.

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