FTTP/FTTH getting closer. Is NZ on the right track?

Forums › ICT Policies and Regulation › FTTP/FTTH getting closer. Is NZ on the right track?

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#333244 22-May-2010 12:17

cyril7: Hi, I sounds to me like your source is mistaken. If we are assuming GPON (which is what TelecomNZ and most other telcos are deploying) then the down link is 2.4Gb/s and uplink 1.2Gb/s, this is shared with upto 32 others, ie there is a passive optical splitter that splits the single GPON feed to 32 users. That 2.4Gb/s is therefore deliverd to all users, however as its a shared 2.4Gb/s then thats a 75Mb/s uncontested bandwidth to each user.

Current ONT's that the hardware on the side of your house that accepts the fibre and provides copper ethernet, only support fast ethernet, hence 100Mb/s max, so there should be no problem in real world use to get that full 100Mb/s with some contention (none really).

As for distance, current PON technologies have a 28dB link margin, so that means a 32way split network can go 20km, if there are less splits per GPON then it can go significantly more. 20km covers a bit area in reality you are going to have OLT's (head end bit) distributed closer than that. Unlike DSL it does not reduce in speed with distance, this is fibre technology.

Into the future there is 10GPON on the horizon which is 10x faster and other technologies past that being looked at.

Obviously this is just discussing the speeds and capabilities in the local loop, what is above that is another discussion.

Cyril

I misunderstood, the restriction on speed is not technical but rather cost and Overall network capacity.

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cyril7

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#333284 22-May-2010 15:29

Yep, as I said, my comments only related to FTTH and the technology itself.

As for the business case to provide greater levels of capacity within the network and its interconnectedness itself, I guess eventually its this aspect that will place one ISP against another, so one assumes they will rise to the occasion.

Within the country I think you will find between Telecom, TCL, Vector, FXNetworks, Kordia and all the other fibre owners that there is more that sufficient dark fibre between all the main city/town POP's waiting to be lit to support the demands of 100Mb/s to each endpoint connnection, the real issue will be the uplink (SXC etal) to the US where the majority of connections end up.

Cyril

PenultimateHop

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#333767 23-May-2010 21:43

Ragnor:
Why can't we just do this:

TV, Voice and Alarm services don't need their own separate layer 3 services/domains and they don't need their own dedicated jacks (ie: a jack for tv, a jack for voice). That way lies madness, complex and inflexible.

Sure. That's entirely possible. I have no problem with it. It works fine (for the most part) and it even happens today.

But let me look at what many Governments, NBN companies, and service providers are thinking:

1. How do you innovate and develop new business?
2. How do you guarantee quality of service? If things are 'Internet' grade you really can't do this.
3. How do you avoid shafting other existing businesses with the NBN initiative? You don't want, for instance, SkyTV to suddenly drop out of the tax base... tends to upset your finance minister.
4. How do you stop the ISP from differentiating their own value-added services (e.g. TV) against Sky or any other operator? This is part of the Net Neutrality problem.
5. How do you enforce your desire for local peering and fastness? Performance guarantees do not exist on the Internet (especially when you cross any kind of network boundary).
6. How do you offer services to people who do not need or want Internet access?
7. How do you offer e-Gov type services where the Internet access isn't guaranteed? E.g. power/water meter monitoring...

The scenarios I mentioned where you have 3 or 4 service providers in one house, coming in via a single fibre access (via a single ONT), is absolutely a real scenario that has been envisaged and talked about in several countries that are going through their FTTH programs. Singapore in particular has regularly and aggressively emphasised they want to see the Retail Service Provider (RSP) market have intense competition and multiple niche players - they were talking of 2000-4000 RSPs, which definitely implies multiple service connections in the home.

I am definitely not saying NZ will follow this model, but I can see it being likely - because the government agencies involved in this sort of planning all tend to attend the same "think camps"; and take each other as examples.

Ragnor: TV providers (when they abandon satellite and uhf) and phone companies can get with the times offer their services over the internet (which will be fast and locally peered).

Actually I've never really understood why any TV provider would want to abandon satellite - it is an incredibly effective mechanism for BTV. Much better than IP.

However, the requirements of a TV provider are quite different to that of an ISP - and you end up with the net neutrality and bitpipe arguments. The ISP doesn't like having to engineer the network to support the TV provider's requirements nor have to constantly upgrade the network to support it for no additional revenue. They may also discriminate against the performance of the TV provider.

Thus the TV operator may choose to become their own network service provider using the FTTH infrastructure.

Ragnor: .... Is there some reason we can't do this other than government getting in the way with stupid laws/rules and legacy service providers lobbying to protect their obsolete business models getting in the way?

It's all totally possible. But it just might not happen that way. I'm not entirely sure that the legacies have it wrong either - the Internet is not necessarily the right fabric for delivering all services over.

The L3 scenario is somewhat prettier but at a higher expense to the wholesaler, and with drawbacks to the ISP retailers. However it is somewhat flexible.

PenultimateHop

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#333771 23-May-2010 21:50

Ragnor: I see what you mean but lets say we separate voice, general internet and tv into separate channels (for lack of a better word) over fibre.. then where does it stop? Do we also have specific channels for alarm monitoring, data backup services, other things we haven't thought of yet?

This is typically the model that has been proposed in other locations. Singapore assumes that up to 4 RSPs will be present in the home, each with a discrete Gigabit Ethernet interface.

Obviously you can do all of this over "the Internet" as well; but if you want guarantee performance characteristics then there is a need for multiple virtal circuits with relative performance agreements.

Ragnor: Is there even a CPE device that can actually do that?

Yes.

Ragnor: What about people that have no interest in the tv or voip "channel" services do you still have to pay for that expensive and complex CPE device that really they don't even need?

To flip it around, what about people who have no interest in "the Internet"? ;). Obviously the individual subscriber should have choice (which is, again, what the Singapore model has been developed for - there is an extreme lack of ISP competition and choice in Singapore at the moment).

Ragnor: I guess I'm thinking of Active Ethernet more where you have 1 fibre back to the CO, couldn't QoS largely be a complete non issue given the available bandwidth, I guess I'm forgetting about backhaul but if this is regional based should be a short trip to a peering exchange.

QoS is always an issue regardless of access bandwidth into the home. You cannot scale all of your links infinitely (at least not cost effectively!), there will always be contention for backhaul and aggregation. Not to mention there has always been a desire by service providers to differentiate performance characteristics to extract more value from the end-subscriber.

Ragnor: Isn't the whole point of this FTTH endeavour to tear up the status quo situation where we have extremely contrained backhaul due to underinvestment and profit maximisation of a incumbent monopoly.

Yes - and that new model is as yet undefined and naturally every retailer wants to have their maximum piece - hence a number of accommodations being made in the service specification.

I don't think there is any one correct answer or solution to the problem.

Ragnor

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#333819 23-May-2010 23:27

Co-incidentally I was looking at the Singaporean IDA site the other day. They seem well down the track with their FTTH roll out and their model seems pretty sensible to me.

maverick

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#333849 24-May-2010 06:29

Yep, but the Singapore like Hong Kong service multiple customers in mainly Housing Apartments they have a very small Geographicial footprint, the actual infrastructure is not large because of the size, same for Hong Kong and Japan, Apply that to NZ for the cost for each sub to each house where your servicing possibly a single houshold where in these locations you could be servicing a few hundred.... how do you make a return on investion ROI ?, this is just a few more things to add in to the equation for consideration.

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#334181 24-May-2010 19:07

maverick: Yep, but the Singapore like Hong Kong service multiple customers in mainly Housing Apartments they have a very small Geographicial footprint, the actual infrastructure is not large because of the size, same for Hong Kong and Japan, Apply that to NZ for the cost for each sub to each house where your servicing possibly a single houshold where in these locations you could be servicing a few hundred.... how do you make a return on investion ROI ?, this is just a few more things to add in to the equation for consideration.

BTW, EPON supports up to 32 users per 1Gbps OLT, while GPON supports 64 users sharing a 2.5Gbps OLT. Some of the ONTs are more integrated than others, but should supply POTS + Ethernet as the minimum. Hopefully we will see ONTs in future that supply a local VDSL2/ADSL link, for houses that aren't Ethernet wired or for users that dont want to throw away their legacy ADSL gear.

Multiple Dwelling Units introduce lots of complicated issues that may or may not reduce costs. I havent thought of all the issues yet, but even new buildings like the one i'm in are not prepared for FTTP as well as I expected.

The fibre co is expected to be a Layer 1 provider of dark fibre, but also supposed to ensure "SOS" support of 111 emergency calls. That might be easier for a large building where voice providers can use communal equipment, but might need some kind of failover backhaul (maybe wifi?) for large buildings

Internal building wiring is often using Cat.5 but not installed or tested for Ethernet (certainly the house wiring component), and may only be capable of VDSL. This isn't a big problem unless the fibre co wants to install the Specified Layer 2 Service with all the extra requirements imposed, but adds to the install cost for somebody to get Ethernet to an indoor CPE.

Usually a space in the basement is prepared for communications services, but not all buildings will be ready for powered communications equipment. Somebody also has to negotiate costs of access and power supply with the bodycorp, plus check that security amd space etc is sufficient and deal with objections from the bodycorp. There may be prevailing attitudes to be overcome.

Body corps are likely to demand power metering or networking of communal services, which adds to the cost.

The fibre co can only sell distribution links into an MDU that support the Layer 2 equipment used by its retailers, but faces higher costs if running new fibre ducts through areas with a high density of existing underground networks. So fibre co cant sell to the individual subscribers in an MDU, only to its retailers.

Time to find a new industry!

webwat

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#336157 29-May-2010 23:10

Thinking about the CFH requirement for local fibre co's to provide emergency 111 services... Is there a cheap ONT that can supply only POTS to the household? I presume Telecom wouldn't be interested in keeping phone lines going forever in case a customer gets disconnected when they cant pay their provider.

Time to find a new industry!

Rubicon

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#336712 31-May-2010 18:10

webwat: Thinking about the CFH requirement for local fibre co's to provide emergency 111 services... Is there a cheap ONT that can supply only POTS to the household? I presume Telecom wouldn't be interested in keeping phone lines going forever in case a customer gets disconnected when they cant pay their provider.

If the Fibre Co has an obligation to provide emergency telephone services, it seems unlikely that they would go to the effort of replacing a standard ONT (presumably 1-2 RJ11 POTS, 4 RJ45 Ethernet connections) with a POTS-only ONT. I imagine the value of the recovered ONT would be less than the cost of a technician's visit. The technician would probably need internal access to the premises to replace the equipment, which may be difficult to obtain if the customer is upset about being disconnected.

The Fibre Co may simply regard their ONTs the same way that a Power Line Company treats electricity meters - disconnect the service, but leave the equipment in place. In this regard, the Fibre Co may charge the cost of the ONT up-front as part of the installation cost, even though they retain ownership of the equipment.

As for supplying emergency phone services, it should be relatively easy for the Fibre Co to run a PBX system which allows the user to dial 111, even if they no longer have a phone number assigned by Telecom. Presumably, the Fibre Co would receive compensation from the Government for running such a service.

richms

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#336867 1-Jun-2010 01:45

They would also need to have some form of provisioning system so that if the ISP had suspended service the ONT was reconfigured to provide voice service over the fiber co's vlan/whatever back to their softswitch, all while keeping physical address information up to date.

There would also be the problem that without a phone number, there would be no way for emergency services to call back etc, and they would also have no account holder information to know who was calling etc.

I vote that turned off means just that. No reason to give people who just want a phone for emergencies a free ride.

Richard rich.ms

Cymro

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#336908 1-Jun-2010 09:16

Rubicon:
As for supplying emergency phone services, it should be relatively easy for the Fibre Co to run a PBX system which allows the user to dial 111, even if they no longer have a phone number assigned by Telecom. Presumably, the Fibre Co would receive compensation from the Government for running such a service.

Hmm, how about when the power to the property is out?
Wouldn't any sort of IP based voice require battery backup at the ONT or CPE to guarentee 111 calls?

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#336976 1-Jun-2010 12:06

Cymro: Hmm, how about when the power to the property is out?
Wouldn't any sort of IP based voice require battery backup at the ONT or CPE to guarentee 111 calls?

Yes, an ONT would require a UPS system to function correctly in the event of a power outage. The Premises Wiring Code of Practice and the information at the Brightspark website both assume that an ONT would be provided with a UPS system. See Maverick's post at the top of page three for links.

cyril7

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#336981 1-Jun-2010 12:14

Its of interest to note that in Aus the NBN specs are offering the UPS as an option only.

Cyril

Ragnor

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#336992 1-Jun-2010 12:58

Time to rethink the need for mandatory 111 for premises when everyone has at least one cellphone and Telecom/Vodafone/2degress are supporting network fallback for 111 calls?

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#337126 1-Jun-2010 18:50

Ragnor: Time to rethink the need for mandatory 111 for premises when everyone has at least one cellphone and Telecom/Vodafone/2degress are supporting network fallback for 111 calls?

it possibly is - but right now restrictions on 111 services are tougher than ever, as we've seen in recent months by the comments from the Minister.

The TCF developed a new 111 emergency code that will have some significant implications, particularly for some VoIP providers who should right now be supply customers with stickers to plaster on their phones advising them that they should not rely on these for 111 services.

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