Vocus and Vodafone: fibre unbundling

Forums › New Zealand Broadband › Vocus and Vodafone: fibre unbundling

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#2181068 15-Feb-2019 18:13

yitz: ^ was that not part of the argument Telecom made against unbundling? Yet they were okay with lower the price to compete with HFC in Wlg/Chch. The Commerce Commission have their methodologies and they even allowed the price of copper to be set above what they calculated.

I think it is a good thing there is a head start this time and we have parties expressing interest. If copper unbundling had occurred earlier say in 2001 we would have had more competition and ADSL2+ much earlier.

Copper unbundling and UFB unbundling are not comparable. As Chorus are not an ISP. Chorus only provide a connection between your house and your ISP.

And today, Spark and Vodafone are actually major competitors to Chorus. Via providing mobile data and fixed wireless connections. Remember how slow and expensive mobile data was back in 2005?

And then there was the dirty tricks that Telecom used to do. Lowering their prices only in areas where there is competition, which destroys the business case of competitors. Refusing competitors the ability to wholesale voice and ADSL access back in the jetstream days. Meaning you had to separately pay your ISP and Telecom just to get ADSL. Which was done to encourage people to use Xtra instead.

I remember signing up to Orcon back in the day. And marvelling at the fact that I was now able to get ADSL, while only recieving 1 bill from Orcon.

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yitz

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#2181073 15-Feb-2019 18:36

I agree with full structural separation that this time we are in a lot better position. Being able to buy high speed gigabit broadband internet for $99.95 and putting support behind the traffic requirements of streaming 2.8 Tbps for the RWC is great (hopefully no glitches there). The benefits that have followed with past unbundling, operational and structural separation do not happen overnight but are realised over several years so it's good to have that extra certainty that one day if a provider wants to run a service that cannot be supported over existing wholesale inputs whether technically or commercially then L1 unbundling is all ready to go and they will not have to fight for it.

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#2181078 15-Feb-2019 18:57

yitz: I agree with full structural separation that this time we are in a lot better position. Being able to buy high speed gigabit broadband internet for $99.95 and putting support behind the traffic requirements of streaming 2.8 Tbps for the RWC is great (hopefully no glitches there). The benefits that have followed with past unbundling, operational and structural separation do not happen overnight but are realised over several years so it's good to have that extra certainty that one day if a provider wants to run a service that cannot be supported over existing wholesale inputs whether technically or commercially then L1 unbundling is all ready to go and they will not have to fight for it.

Find me a mass market service that requires more than 1gbit of service and unable to work within the current product offerings from the LFCs and you may have a point.
When you get to the point where you are just shifting bits without any QoS as this is mass market after all.
A layer 2 service doesn't need to be complicated and LFCs already offer multicast and Vodafone is the only one to take up the opportunity to build their own Video on Demand with a dedicated box.

I just don't see the use case other than for business offerings which are very niche as it would only cater for a very small proportion of total connections across the whole country.

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#2181084 15-Feb-2019 19:10

sbiddle:

yitz: You can argue about cabinetisation but that wouldn't have happened (or certainly not as soon) if we had had widespread unbundling in urban areas by 2004/5.

You're right - and what would have been incredibly bad.

Had unbundling been established cabinetisation would have never occured because as an industry nobody would have agreed on it. While that may not have affected the timeframes for a UFB rollout, it would have ensured that slow copper connections would have been the norm right up to today.

So basically would have put is on a level footing with Australia pre-nbn, when we had cabinets and they did not. It took NBN to basically remove their unbundling of the copper to get gear into the ends of the streets over there. I think how copper played out in AU is a great case for unbundling being something that should never happen.

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#2181124 15-Feb-2019 22:10

richms:

So what happens when you want 2 unbundled services in one property? Chorus wouldn't even talk to me about a second fibre lead in to the shed unless it had a separate title. Will they get over that and pull a second cable run? Can 2 pairs of fiber go thru a single microduct?

We had a site where they blew a 6 core in the standard microduct

They had to pull out the existing 2 core

Isnt 6 core standard now?

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lNomNoml

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#2181128 15-Feb-2019 22:26

Won't we run out of capacity on the undersea cables?

raytaylor

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#2181140 15-Feb-2019 22:58

lNomNoml:

Won't we run out of capacity on the undersea cables?

CDN

Its the new multicast

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#2181157 16-Feb-2019 06:31

raytaylor:
lNomNoml:

Won't we run out of capacity on the undersea cables?

CDN

Its the new multicast

And traffic is only growing NZ-AU where the TGA cable went in with some crazy amount of capacity when the current SCCN still had plenty of spare capacity.
Plus there is the other Hawaki cable so capacity will never be an issue for a country of 5M.

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#2181160 16-Feb-2019 07:45

BarTender: Plus there is the other Hawaki cable so capacity will never be an issue for a country of 5M.

And noone will ever need more than 640KB of memory ;)

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#2181246 16-Feb-2019 14:14

Ge0rge:
BarTender: Plus there is the other Hawaki cable so capacity will never be an issue for a country of 5M.

And noone will ever need more than 640KB of memory ;)

Internet usage to the NZ-US flat-lined about 2 years ago. NZ-AU has still been growing albeit at a slower rate than usual.

And capacity across SCCN and TGA has been exponentially growing over the last few years due to infrastructure upgrades at each end so the cables were not even close to capacity from my understanding.

The growth areas were Netflix, YouTube and Akamai delivered content that when I was at Spark exceeded international traffic back in early 2016 and continued on a linear growth until I left so I doubt much of that has changed with the ongoing migration from copper to UFB.

Now I know Spark are busy putting CDNs directly connected to the BNGs to cater for the ongoing growth.

I also forgot to include that Netflix/YouTube et al are also making significant improvements with video compression and squeezing more out of their deployed CDNs so are able to support more streams with lower bitrate with the same picture quality on existing equipment. So CDNs that had 4x10GB interfaces in a LAG were estimated to have a maximum throughput of sub 30Gbit due to cpu/memory limits were now looking to support closer to maximum line speed. The new compression algorithms were released early 2018 and I think caused around a 20% drop in traffic.

And NZ's population is still growing but slowly and the number of total broadband connections is growing at less than 1% per year.

But yeah sure whatever with your nonsense argument.

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#2181250 16-Feb-2019 14:25

Until there is another use case that needs even more data then I don't see any problems running out. Even going to 8k video wouldnt be that much more than 4k at the moment, since streaming stuff is compressed down to within a mm of becoming unwatchable in most cases.

Non streaming uses like backing up a computer etc is typically limited by the software and hardware, not internet connections. So that will take spinning rust being replaced with massive amounts of nvme connected flash storage in a typical consumer NAS before people will start to make signigifantly more data than at the moment.

Sure some people will have a use case for it, but adding more capacity to most users just means that their bursty usage becomes more concentrated into shorter faster bursts of data. Like windows update downloading in 10 seconds instead of 5 mins like it did on copper etc.

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decibel

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#2181320 16-Feb-2019 19:04

and how many ISPs can you choose from if you are connected to Vodafone's HFC system?

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#2181341 16-Feb-2019 21:07

decibel:

and how many ISPs can you choose from if you are connected to Vodafone's HFC system?

I'm not sure what that really has to do with this topic.

While there is only Vodafone now, for much of the life of the HFC network (up until the DOCSIS3 deployment) there were up to around half a dozen providers who offered service over the HFC network.

decibel

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#2181363 16-Feb-2019 22:03

sbiddle:

decibel:

and how many ISPs can you choose from if you are connected to Vodafone's HFC system?

I'm not sure what that really has to do with this topic.

While there is only Vodafone now, for much of the life of the HFC network (up until the DOCSIS3 deployment) there were up to around half a dozen providers who offered service over the HFC network.

The topic is unbundling and while Vodafone has always seemed keen on getting better and better access to other peoples copper or fibre, when I lived in Lower Hutt, there was only one choice of ISP on the HFC system.

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#2181406 17-Feb-2019 00:13

I know Xtra and ihug used to resell cable connections, but not anymore. In fact I think TCL stopped that while they were still in existence. But this doesn't really have any relevance to fibre unbundling - they were reselling the cable service, not installing their own equipment anywhere.

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