VDSL2 is great, but fibre still the ultimate goal

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Posted Fri 30 January 2009 @ 3:08 p.m. by Louis van Wyk

While welcoming Telecom’s planned roll out of super-fast VDSL2 broadband technology, TUANZ believes that fibre to every New Zealand home, business, farm, school and marae is still the ultimate goal.

In a media statement released today, TUANZ Chief Executive Ernie Newman said fibre all the way to every customer’s premises must remain as the aspiration for New Zealand.

He also reiterated TUANZ’s call for a national digital architecture that would ensure a common nationwide sense of the shape of New Zealand’s telecommunications infrastructure 20 years out.

“It is really important in a small country that there is a common understanding of the end goal so that limited investment funds are put to optimal use, and the risk of stranded investments is minimised.”

TUANZ especially welcomes Telecom’s intention to offer the VDSL2 service to its wholesale customers, as this will enable residential customers to select from a diverse range services and packages through a variety of suppliers.

“Fibre to every New Zealand home, business, farm, school and marae remains the ultimate goal. We look forward to learning the detail of the government’s plans in the near future, but meanwhile Telecom’s announcement will be a welcome step.”

Categories: Fixed line carriers | ISPs | TUANZ policy | Vendors

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9 comments

• Neil says:

  Hi Louis
  
  In Telecoms press release thay suggest that most customers will receive up to 50Mbps down and 20Mbps up on VDSL2+.
  
  You suggest that Fibre tp the home is the nirvana for Telecommunications.
  
  My question to both you and Ernie, and I have asked this question a number of times in this forum, is:
  Exactly what services will I be able to receive over Fibre to my house that I will not be able to receive over VDSL2+ running at 50Mbps? (or ADSL2+ running at 24 Mbps)
  
  Why should the New Zealand government, meaning you, I, people on low incomes, etc, fork out $1.5 Billion and encourage the spending of Billions more when this question has not been answered.
  
  I would love to support the TUANZ view of fibre to the home but neither you or Ernie will answer my question.
  
  Until you do so, I suspect that there is an alterior motive for the TUANZ, and the industry's, position.
  
  I do not mean to be confrontational but I have asked this question at leat 4 times so far and no one has answered it. Due to the lack of response, I suspect that there is no real answer.
  
  I wait in anticipation that this time there will be a response.
  
  Regards
  
  Neil

  Added: 30 January 2009, 3:36 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Simon says:

  Completely agree with you Neil. Tuanz need to get its priorities sorted. Spending billions to move from 50Mbps (VDSL2) to 100Mbps (FTTH) simply doesn't make sense as it will not enable any critical new services or deliver value for money in terms of benefits for the country.
  
  A mantra that 'faster is always better' is simply not good enough. Tuanz should be focusing on the benefits to be gained from promoting uptake (only 20% of users have a broadband connection), moving users off dial-up onto broadband (45% of internet users still use a dial-up connection), and making sure that families are able to actually access a computer in their homes. The step change from tackling these issues will be far greater than any incremental benefits that may arise from moving residential users from 50Mbps to 100Mbps.

  Added: 30 January 2009, 10:40 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Telecommando says:

  A couple of questions for those who take Telecom press releases at face value: Can you name any Telecom supplied broadband technology that works as promised? and can you name any point where Telecom's broadband technologies keep up with consumer applications and demand. More and more people are starting to use video applications to communicate (Skype, Google Talk, iChat, MSN etc) these all put demands on the upstream link plus we are going to see more downloading of large (1GB+) files in the form of complete software packages, movies etc. DSL's of all flavours struggle in these roles for many reasons. Why xDSL is fraudband by another name.
  
  Lets start on the positive side of the ledger. Fibre.
  
  Single Mode Optical Fibre produces a guaranteed outcome over any distance
  between 50m and 120km on rationally priced equipment.
  
  The current hot point is 1Gbps beween 2-20km, with an easy upgrade to 120km.
  Performance is unchanged due to distance. Performance is not degraded by
  distance, prototcol, framing or any other artifact. Performance can be enhanced
  by use of jumbo-frames.
  Curiously, there is exciting activity in the optical 100Mbps space, with very low
  cost optics to satisfy 500m to 20km metro fibre activity.
  
  Downside. Hard to obtain dark fibre over distance unless you are a network operatorxDSL (in this case VDSL) is quoted as "50Mbps downstream, 20Mbps upstream".
  However these performance figures are typically derived from a 1km nice new roll of
  copper in the test lab, with no joints. A real world, 3km run of copper from the exchange
  with a couple of cabinets, and multiple joints, and a small hedge traversal, and a grotty
  pole joint, is likely to produce something like 9Mbps upstream and 2Mbps downstream.
  (Hence the term "fraudband", cannot deliver advertised performance.)
  
  (With fibre, if the lights come up, you get full speed, no ifs or buts).
  
  But wait - theres more, the DSLAM typically is connected via a 155Mbps STM-1 port
  using 48 byte packets, (so we immediately have protocol shifting and packet fragmentation.)
  It then goes into the RAN (in Telecom NZ case a Juniper ERX) where it is gated and groomed
  for delivery to the individual ISPs. Sure, you can change the ATM ports from 1 x STM1 to 2 x
  STM 4, but if you are trying to make profits in the telco business, restricting the DSLAM ports
  saves money at the expense of performance.
  
  VDSL, over open access copper, to a DSLAM with multiple Gigabit ports for onward transmission
  (thus avoiding ATM and PPPoE grottiness) might be a viable contender, and providers who have
  installed equipment directly in the exchanges MAY be able to get significantly better performance.
  
  But overall, because a customer now expects crappy performance out of xDSL, then there are
  significant financial benefits to the service provider to let performance degrade, as you can then
  obtain many more users over a given infrastructure.
  
  One way out of this "poor performance" morass might be to put speed-test sites in all
  the large city internet exchanges, and work on the principal of fee for service is (example)
  $80 for quoted 10Mbps up, 2Mbps down, but the actual speed test provides only
  3.5Mbps up and 1Mbps down, the bill is pro-rata the performance (now $23).
  
  That would provide an incentive for some improvement in the ratio of price performance.
  
  This discussion does not address "datacaps - Size of data, eg 10Gigabytes" being confused
  with "speed - 5Mbits/second" which is another area permitting confusion.
  
  Finally, it is not TUANZ's role to promote uptake, that is the job of the highly paid marketing departments at the Telco's and ISP's the fact up take is low is down to them, specifically, pricing, performance, and datacaps. Why would TUANZ as a user body want to be complicit in NZ users continuing to be poorly serviced? The future is clearly end run fibre, to put VDSL in perspective it is theoretically offering (but unlikely to deliver) the speeds my office LAN ran at 15 years ago!

  Added: 31 January 2009, 12:24 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Jane says:

  I think it is important to have a vision of what we would like, rather than what we believe we can achieve – only if we have big dreams will we succeed in reaching our goals. So yes, I can see the argument that says that fibre is too expensive and if we had it what on earth would we use it for…. but if we think like that, it will condemn us to incremental perpetually mediocrity brought about by incremental change.
  
  If you start with the end in mind, you will have a realistic chance of getting there. I’m actually not advocating that we rush off and replace every piece of copper with fibre and spend $1.5bn doing it. But there are plenty of opportunities where we can make choices and sometimes do things differently if we know where we want to get to. So if we have a vision that users will have high quality fibre access to information, education and health services then maybe as a country we start making the right decisions when we have the chance.
  
  VDSL2 is an excellent incremental improvement on ADSL, but we should be realistic about the expectations from copper. It simply cannot deliver the performance promised unless there are short runs and good quality copper pairs. So it is unlikely to deliver to deliver 50Mbps downloads, but great if it does.
  
  What would we use these higher speeds for? We are doing things today that we never thought of just 5 years ago. We upload movies to YouTube, we download tunes for our iPods, and we share photos with Flickr, Facebook and Bebo, stuff that we didn’t imagine until the applications arrived. Who is to say that in the future we won’t apply for passports via retina scanning, upload our own medical data or receive our education through the screen in our living room?
  
  All I know is that we are at a crossroads and any new infrastructure build needs to be done for the long term; the copper network has done a good 50 years or more. If we are looking for our needs for the next 50, it would be best to assume that it will need a heck of a lot more capacity than we can imagine today. Start with the end in might and where it is economic use fibre rather than copper if nothing else but to future proof the investment. The tragedy would be to invest $1.2bn in upgrades to copper and discover 5 years down the track it simply wasn’t enough.
  

  Added: 31 January 2009, 4:36 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Heaven can wait says:

  Well Neil and Simon, I suppose you believe that the Earth is flat too!
  
  Let's start thinking about the future and not the past. It's sheer arrogance to presume to know better what is best for end users. We've been held back for too long by just this sort of "superior" attitude. Go for it TUANZ - you're on the right track if we want to move NZ forward!

  Added: 31 January 2009, 5:27 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Knocker says:

  Fibre is bunkum - obviously - a waste of public money!
  
  Just like building a road, and then a railway, between Wellington and Auckland. Like I said at the time - nobody needs roads and railways. There's a perfectly good track along the beach and you can be there by horse in less than a week. And you'll be much fitter.

  Added: 1 February 2009, 2:47 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Peter says:

  Currently today I get 4 Mbps on ADSL2+. My throughput is rarely above 50% of this for long periods so the DSL technology is not really a limiting factor. Most PCs would struggle to get > 4 Mbps (certainly pre-Vista)
  
  I am looking forward to replacing this with 100M Fibre so my throughput utilisation drops to 2%. Or maybe GigE Fibre at 0.2%
  
  I still want fibre because I am a geek and it will eventually be futureproof. But I still agree with Neil. Current ADSL2+ technology supports HD Video, Remote Working, YouTube and almost everything people say is needed to drive the economy. The reason why those applications are not deployed today is no one knows how to make enough money from them to pay for the cost (and don't expect HD Video over internet to be cheap if you want it reliable and real-time - not that I have ever seen the economic benefit of HD channels)

  Added: 2 February 2009, 12:38 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Benvinido says:

  Like "Heaven can wait" it's about building for the future, and before long, it does come around. Can you imagine the big Cities in New Zealand with just two car lanes? Try the Auckland harbour bridge, sorry it just wouldn't work. Hence as computers and technology around us changes and improves, so do the highways that run these current and future data services on. Fibre is for now and the Future.

  Added: 5 February 2009, 4:19 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

• Clunking Fist says:

  Maybe what Telecommando says is correct (I really have no clues about framing, artefacts, jumbo-frames, protocol shifting and packet fragmentation). But it all seems to be from the point of view of copper from exchange to the home. I thought Telecom are going for cabinetisation, where fibre goes to the cabinet and then the copper only has to go a short distance from the cabinet to the home. Telecommando, does that change the points you raise? Does cabinetisation preclude later extending the fibre all the way to the home?

  Added: 5 February 2009, 5:23 p.m. Flag as Spam  |  Flag as Offensive

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