Winterbourne Stoke - The Digital Divide

BT Get IT Together - A Little Before Reaching Infinity

2010-10-19T18:00:00.000+01:00

As Ian Livingston reminded me in the course of a somewhat heated email exchange a week or so ago, it is all too easy to have a go at BT when they get things wrong, but sometimes they do actually get things right - and it is a bit unfair never to mention the good things that are going on.

Here is one of those good ideas - BT Get IT Together. It could be the ideal resource for those of you going round drumming up support for BT Race to Infinity. If you go door-to-door, as we are, you will find a lot of folks who are not yet online, are often fearful of doing so and who, with a little help, might be got online fairly easily.

So do take a look...

... and well done BT! You have got something right!

To Infinity and Beyond

2010-10-09T16:14:00.002+01:00

Whilst BT may have obfuscated the Race to Infinity leader board, at least one enterprising individual has managed to pull data from the competition and is reproduving it on the "Race to Infinity and Beyond" website.

Thank you, whoever you are, you have performed an invaluable public service - so I guess it's only a matter of time before BT try to silence you?

To Infinity and Beyond: We Hit the Number 1 Slot

2010-10-07T10:27:00.005+01:00

Imagine my surprise when I checked the BT Infinity website last night. It's a bit like checking your lottery tickets. You know the odds of winning are 14 million to 1 against, but every Wednesday and Saturday, you have a few brief minutes of hope and anticipation before being let down yet again.

Infinity is a bit like the lottery in slow-motion - in other words like our broadband service! Everything happens a bit at a time! If you are really luck, it happens a kilobit at a time and we can but dream of a Megabit at a time. Ooops, I'm rambling again...

This morning, I checked the Infinity website and realised our local exchange in Shrewton was in first place. It was the Infinity equivalent of matching the first number drawn - not a win, but an encouragement. I sang, I danced, I fired off an email to Ian Livingston, the CEO of BT:

I trust you are well. It has been a while since I last e-mailed you regarding the poor broadband in Winterbourne Stoke, but we have been busy in the background and have set up Stonehenge Broadband, a community group, to look at alternative ways of bringing ultrafast (up to 50Mbps symmetrical DSL) to our village and others in the vicinity of Salisbury Plain. We are shortly to engage in a wider consultation exercise with local councils and communities in the Salisbury Plain area to improve the long-term viability of a community based scheme.

Clearly, that approach will cost money and so we couldn't ignore the BT Infinity competition to bring super-fast broadband (up to 40Mbps download, 10Mbps upload - asymmetrical DSL) to 5 communities in the UK that would, perhaps, have fallen into the "final-third" - those communities that BT would deem uneconomical to extend fibre to. BT's Infinity may not be the best broadband that is available in the UK, but for 5 lucky communities who have exchanges with more than 1000 subscribers, it could be achievable at no extra cost. We'd be daft not to try and win it - but it's a great shame that the most remote communities, those on exchanges of fewer than 1000 subscribers, aren't eligible. OK, they can express an interest, but I'm surprised you need yet another survey to tell you that small rural communities see broadband as vital to their future. Perhaps this really suggests that a UK broadband network based on existing exchange structures is outmoded, unsustainable and increasingly irrelevant?

Like many rural communities, we'll play along with the Infinity game - whilst continuing with other efforts that might have a better prospect of succeeding. However, after looking at the BT Infinity website last night, I couldn't resist writing to you. Shrewton, our local exchange, was number 1 in the country when it came to the percentage of subscribers registering on the BT Infinity website (see below). Aren't percentages wonderful!

Of course, the numbers game with this competition is stacked very firmly in favour of the larger exchanges, as they will have an easier job of finding the minimum of 1000 subscribers to be in with a real chance of being in the final top 5. With only 1182 subscribers on the Shrewton exchange, we will have to recruit almost 85% of them to the cause, if we are to reach the 1000 subscriber total. Actually, we'll have to do even better than that because of another twist in the rules which allows you to register an address only once. Of course many rural businesses operate from the owners home and so they have the choice of registering either their business line, or their domestic line, but can't do both.

Still, we can have some fun trying to win and it will raise the profile of Stonehenge Broadband and our efforts.

One thing still puzzles me (not really -it's all fairly transparent) with regard to Infinity, Ian. During the Digital Britain debate, you were adamant that a 2Mbps broadband USO was all that was required in the UK. I suspect BT's position influenced the last government's recommendations for Digital Britain. The volte face with Infinity surprises me - if 2Mbps will be adequate for us country folk in seven years time, why all the fuss about Infinity now? That would make an interesting public debate.

With regards from the depths of the digital divide

Now to be fair, Mr Livingstone responded to this email. In fact he responded very rapidly indeed, as follows:

I am glad to hear of your enthusiasm for BT Infinity.

You might also note the recent announcement in Cornwall showing what public and private partnerships can do as well as places like Iwade.

You misrepresent our views on 2MB. There is a big difference between a minimum standard that will at least allow a functional internet and video service and our aims to drive fibre as far across the UK as possible. Our plans represent one of the biggest private sector investment in fibre in the world available on a fair and equal basis to any CP. That is what we are aiming for and putting our money behind it.

It is of course easy to criticise what isn't being done rather than to comment on all the things that are.

OK, I was labouring the points - but only a wee bit. I'll have to respond to point out that:

I have boundless enthusiasm for FTTH and will only enthuse about Infinity when I have it connected and it works.

As for the 2Mb - I did say it was a 2 Mb UOS - which is a minimum standard - hard to see how that misrepresents a minimum standard. In any event, anyone with any vision is more lkely to view 40 Mbps ADSL as a minimum standard with Gigabit per second connections being desirable!

I agree wholeheartedly with Ian's last point. It is very easy to criticise the failures and not comment on the success stories - which is why I have praised every success of BT's which affect me and why I have drawn attention in this blog to all the success stories that have offered hope to villages like ours - to inspirational folk like Guy Jarvis of NextGenUs, Aidan Paul of Vitesse Networks, the folks at Rutland Telecoms and the broadband campaigners around the country like Cyberdoyle and Lindsey Annison.

And a final question, which some of you out there might be able to answer - what really made Cornwall so attractive to BT?

STOP PRESS: Aww. It looks as though BT are playing with the website and it no longer shows which exchange is in which position. Bah Humbug I say!

The Race to Infinity: Are BT Getting the Message

2010-10-06T18:03:00.004+01:00

I've just checked the HTML version of the BT Infinity website and lo and behold it shows the current leader board. Currently, our exchange is number 2 in the country, but we still have an uphill task to get a 1000 subscribers out of 1182 to sign-up, but we love challenges!

I just hope that BT are paying heed as this develops. It is the rural communities of the digital divide who are in all of the first 5 positions.

If you've read all the information BT have issued relating to the race, they are offering publicity packs to those campaigners in exchange areas who are first to reach 100, 500 and 1,000 subscribers signed up. Now I think this is a wee bit cynical on BT's part as it is going to be far easier to rack up 100 subscribers on a 10,000 subscriber exchange than on a smaller one. This is pretty much guaranteed to ensure that all the publicity goes to the bigger exchanges.

By a similar token, to pass the 1000 subscriber limit, we have to get around 85% of the exchanges subscribers signed up! Another case of BT tilting the playing field firmly in their own favour.

BT's Attempt at Reaching Infinity

2010-10-04T17:32:00.002+01:00

BT has announced its Race to Infinity campaign today. The 5 exchanges with the greatest percentage of subscribers signing up by the end of December 2010 will have super-fast (40Mb) fibre taken to the cabinet.

Of course, most of those exchanges that are the least likely to be economic and get FTTH or FTTC under BT's 'normal' financial model will fall foul of the competition's rule that the winning exchanges have to have 1000 subscribers or more.

Aha - now we are on the Shrewton exchange which has 1,182 subscribers - so we are eligible!

We intend to take every advantage of BT's kind offer regarding publicity, radio broadcasts and the like. As they have given carte-blanche for participants to personalize the publicity material, all the materials we will saturate the local area with will carry the Stonehenge Broadband logo as well!

This could be fun!

Exploding Squirrels and Dodgy Drop Wires

2010-09-06T17:41:00.007+01:00

Apologies for a long gap since the last post, but the reasonable summer weather has kept me away from the keyboard doing outdoorish things. Broadband has taken a bit of a backseat, but with autumn on the way, it is time to take up the cudgel again.

The second reason for lack of activity on the blog was because concerns here in Winterbourne Stoke shifted a little because of a nasty "near-miss" accident involving the Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) electricity supply to the village. You may recall that our broadband problems started shortly after SSE replaced some of the telegraph poles around the village.

It was all a bit half-hearted and dodgy poles in difficult situations were left. It took us quite a while to establish who (SSE or BT) owned which pole, and who to complain to.

The story, so far, is kind of funny in a perverse sort of way. But it, so easily, have had an horrific outcome. As it is, no-one has been killed yet. Our story ends with another BT infrastructure issue that needs resolution - before there is another accident.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin:

Back in June, one of our many local squirrels took a short-cut through my neighbours garden to get back to the woods. Off he went, hippity-hop, hippity-hop, as squirrels tend to do, and found a nice power pole with an 11 thousand volt transformer on it. Our squirrel was not the most intelligent of its kind in the world, but he was the brightest - at least for the brief fraction of a second when he short-circuited the transformer.

A loud BANG!, a flash of light and a small mushroom cloud - no power in the village - and a squirrel-shaped chunk of charcoal was left perched on top of the transformer. Of course, the electricity board came rushing out and took a look, reset the power and discovered that the small explosion had damaged the transformer and it was leaking oil.

Drip-drip - the oil both insulates the transformer and cools it - drip-drip.

Drip-drip - of course, knowing the coolant was leaking, the electricity board did...

...absolutely nothing. The neighbour, in whose garden the transformer was situated, reported the leak - twice. But to no avail.

Well, I suppose Winterbourne Stoke is only a small village. New transformer's are probably very expensive and the cost of a new one is probably going to take years to recover from such a small customer base...

Drip-drip - Well, the weather got warmer and the predictable happened. About a month after the squirrel became a squirrel toasty, there was a whoosh, a loud bang and a fireball erupting into the sky (the photo shows the smoke plume a minute or two later), with flaming oil raining into my neighbour's garden - over his shed, his motor-cycle, his lawn mower, his car...

...close to the spot where he and his wife can often be found on a Sunday, tending the garden, hanging out the washing, playing with the dog.

I should say at this point, my neighbour is a paraplegic, the motorcycle specially built to accommodate his wheel chair...

...and living in the middle of nowhere it took the fire-brigade over 20 minutes to arrive. When they did, an outbuilding joined to the house had just caught fire and the house would have followed soon after.

No-one hurt, tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage done - we were really lucky! If it had happened at night, it can take over 10 minutes to get my neighbour out of bed with a hoist. If the wind had been blowing from its normal direction the flames would have blown towards the house much sooner. It could have been a disaster - and now, it seems, an inquiry is underway.

I don't think anyone here is overly confident that the inquiry will be rigorous, or that appropriate lessons will be learned. It seems that Scottish and Southern Energy may have believed that there was minimal damage to property, that the traumatised householders suffered no ill effects and that had the worst happened, someone might have needed first aid treatment! Hmmm, I suspect even partial immolation in burning transformer oil might require something a little more substantial than first aid! But we were lucky - very lucky.

Downplaying the incident may be why we haven't seen any investigator's from HSE or DECC around the village. A risky business though, as someone might notice.

So - why is this of interest to BT? Well, the next pole along from the transformer is the drop-pole in my other neighbour's garden that BT share with Southern Electric. I've mentioned it to BT several times over the last 2 years as the base of the pole was rotted-out and it was being held up by the power lines. It was so rotten, it moved and tore the drop-wire from another neighbour's roof. To be fair, BT engineers told us they had reported the pole to Scottish and Southern Energy and been told the job was in hand - on more than one occasion.

When the transformer pole was burning, we were concerned that the drop-pole could fall too and it was likely to land on the roof of the home of another disabled villager, or, my immediate neighbour's new car - her pride and joy. No doubt half the village would have lost phones had this happened - but we were lucky.

Well, after 3 weeks, we are now all back on mains power. The electricity board have attached their cables to a brand new pole, the transformer re-sited outside the main village, but BT couldn't send anyone out to remove the drop-wires, despite a couple of weeks warning that the pole was to be replaced. Well, Scottish and Southern realised that simply leaving things as they were was a non-starter, so they wired the old, rotting, pole to the new one for a bit of support.

I guess we will just have to keep our fingers crossed that BT will come out and move the dropwires very soon. The electricity board engineer sucked his teeth a lot as he left. He didn't seem overly confident that the old pole would stay up much longer. We've mentioned it to BT and await developments.

As I said at the start, Autumn is coming. No doubt we'll have a few windy days. I hope that the pole stays up. Well, if I don't update the blog pretty quickly, you'll know what has happened!

All Bets Are Off

2010-04-21T20:21:00.005+01:00

There is an absolutely cracking article on BT's BET (broadband enabling technology) reported in Trefor Davies' blog. Tref is the Chief Technology Officer of ISP Timico - a genuinely nice guy with the breadth of vision to see where broadband in the UK could go, where it should go and how it has to go if the country is to derive any real benefit from the global digital economy.

I mentioned BET in a post last November, when BT had scored something of an own goal after they had installed BET in the exchange at Hambleden, Oxon, but only for the use of their Chairman, Sir Michael Rake. I said at the time that I didn't much rate BET.

It seems I wasn't alone. During a Digital Britain session at BT's recent ISP Forum at the BT Tower it seems that there was absolutely no interest in BET from any of the 60 or so ISPs present at the meeting. Even BT must pick up on that take-home message. The reason for the resounding lack of interest comes down to question of economics. If you need 15 customers in an exchange to make BET viable, it is pretty close to the cost viability of installing fibre.

That leads nicely into the bigger question of the affordability of fibre in rural areas. So far, the view of what fibre costs has been conducted at a very naive level and it no doubt suits some organisations to keep it that way. The reality is that unless a fully comprehensive cost benefit analysis is undertaken, we keep getting bound into an overly simplistic costing model that claims fibre to remote areas is simply unaffordable.

Applying the same model, over a century ago, to piped water, gas supplies, community sewerage schemes and electricity would have resulted in no local or national schemes as it would have bee unaffordable to connect the majority of the population. Thankfully, our forefathers had a clarity of vision that is lost on most in the broadband industry today. They were well aware that a purely supply/demand driven model did not add up. However, they also understood that non-financial benefits and costs had financial impacts. When the true costs of health, welfare and the like were poured into the mix, then suddenly the economic balance shifted and it became nationally unaffordable not to make provision for these new essentials.

It is clear that we need people with equal clarity of vision in charge of the major telcos today. With one or two exceptions, they aren't in place yet!

REIN Returns

2010-04-19T18:43:00.004+01:00

Just when you think you are winning something comes along to cause a setback. For a couple of months now we have seen nothing of the lunch-time REIN event that was causing chaos just before 2pm most weekday afternoons.

In fact, things had settled down to the extent that a few people round the village had noticed a slight increase in speed. In some cases, this was enough to gain them a step on the IP profile ladder and I suspect a couple of folks managed a long enough period of stability that the SNR target dropped by 3dB or perhaps more.

It seems that this halcyon period is over. The REIN returned with a bang this afternoon. How soon it will undo all the gains made over the winter remains to be seen.

At least it has shown us another article of faith in the radio/broadband world is unreliable - or at least the exception proves the rule. Far from our broadband service getting worse over the winter, as most experts claim it should, it has actually improved!

Purdah Puzzles and Poles Perambulate

2010-04-18T09:01:00.005+01:00

We, like other many other rural broadband projects across the UK, should have been told at the end of March about the success, or otherwise of our bids for European Union funding. This funding was being administered by the Rural Development Agencies, but the bottom line is that it is EU money.

Now, over Easter, Stonehenge Broadband received an email from the South West Rural Development Agency saying that:

I am writing in connection with your application in relation to the call
for Rural Community Broadband pilot projects. As you are aware we were
due to announce the successful project(s) before the end of this month.
Now that the general election has been called for May 6th, the RDA is
bound by pre-election period guidance which restricts us from making any
new announcements at this time. We will therefore be announcing the
successful project(s) following the election.

Wait a moment. What has Cabinet Office-imposed election purdah got to do with any of this. Purdah means that Government Departments are not allowed to communicate with members of the public about any new or controversial Government initiatives such as modernisation initiatives, administrative and legislative changes. The rules for the forthcoming election are published here on the Cabinet Office site.

Purdah rules for European business begin on page 39 and nowhere does it suggest that administering EU funds should be halted. It makes you wonder what is going on!

Meanwhile, the telephone infrastructure around Winterbourne Stoke took a further lurch into the digital divide last week - and then lurched a little more! We appear to have been struck by Perambulating Pole Syndrome!

An octogenarian neighbour lost her phone service and when we looked into the reason, it was clear that her drop-wire had been torn out from under the eaves of her house.

Why? Because the other end of the wire was connected to a long-condemned pole that sits in another neighbour's garden. The pole had taken a small step from its original position and now appears to be heading for the church - pulling out the wire as it wandered off.

BT responded reasonably quickly, and Openreach had an engineer in the village after the weekend. The engineer was a bit frustrated as he knew which pole it was and they'd sent him out with a standard cherry-picker which he knew would be of little use. He had to sit around for an couple of hours until the right cherry-picker arrived.

Having the right equipment is always a help and it got the job done but in repairing one neighbour's connection, they managed to break another neighbour's connection. Ho hum - so much for progress!

Just to complicate things a bit, the pole also carries the three-phase power supply for most of the village and is owned by Southern Electric and not BT. Southern Electric are now aware there is a problem, having initially mis-identified it as an unused pole(!). In theory, even though the base of the pole is powdering away, it shouldn't be able to fall over as it is being held up by the power lines and one straining wire.

If you look at the photo higher up the page, you can see the jaunty angle the pole is now standing at. You can also see the single cable (3-in-1) three-phase supply that is holding it up!

It looks as though Southern Electric will be out early this coming week to replace the pole, so I guess many of us here in Winterbourne Stoke will have our power cut off whilst that happens. BT will then have to reconnect all their equipment to the pole, which means everyone in our part of the village is likely to lose their phone and broadband service for some period as well.

Wiltshire Council Broadband Survey

2010-03-21T09:33:00.004Z

It is great to see that Wiltshire Council are currently undertaking a county-wide broadband survey. This should give them some hard data to use in planning their Next Generation broadband strategy.

The only downside to this excellent idea is the lack of publicity about it. The survey has been running since February, but I had missed it completely as I don't often have cause to visit the council website. Fortunately, one of the Stonehenge Broadband members spotted it and passed on the information.

Wiltshire Council say:

Wiltshire Council is encouraging residents to complete a short online survey to establish the real speed of their broadband connection.

Previous research has shown that broadband provision varies across the county, and poor or no broadband services can have a damaging effect on the local economy, presenting problems to communities and businesses.

The online survey is part of a broader study, designed to give the most comprehensive and detailed picture yet of broadband speeds and provision in the towns, villages and rural areas of Wiltshire.

The results will be used on a national level to ensure Wiltshire is well represented in two government projects looking at medium and long term broadband provision across the country.

Locally, making sure that Wiltshire is fit for 'digital' purpose is essential to the council and other public sector providers. Moving more services on-line is efficient and effective and will allow the council to reach key customers at lower cost, but it is critical that provision across the county is able to support these initiatives.

Having a robust, fast, reliable digital network is key to building resilience into the local economy. The council is working with the South Wiltshire Economic Partnership who are looking at the demand from rural businesses for broadband services in the south of the county.

Improved broadband services will benefit the county in a number of ways, including promoting home-working and encouraging investment from businesses by placing Wiltshire on the commercial map.

John Brady - cabinet member for economic development, planning and housing said:

"Wiltshire covers a large geographic area and it is very important for the economic success of the county that all residents have access to broadband services. This is an important piece of research that will be used to secure the digital future of Wiltshire".

So, if you live in Wiltshire - please pop along to the broadband survey and help out. It will only take a couple of minutes and is very straightforward. I'll publish the results for WInterbourne Stoke here as soon as I have them.

A Lack of Moral Fibre

2010-03-07T15:05:00.005Z

One of the more interesting concepts to emerge during the DigitalDales Rural Broadband Colloquium in Newark a couple of weeks ago, was that of "Moral Fibre." It was so good it deserves a much wider audience.

Bolstering already fast broadband in urban centres whilst ignoring slow or non-existent broadband in rural areas, the favoured approach of the main UK operators, is, quite simply, immoral. The UK may well have a fibre backbone, but the approach to extending it has, thus far, been pretty spineless. It shows a lack of moral fibre!

What we need is more Moral Fibre, ideally un-taxed to stimulate uptake and growth.

The only fibre should be moral fibre!

STOP PRESS:

Just in case you are one of those folk who never read the comments I though it only fair to give due prominence and plaudits for the person who came up with the broadband concept of moral fibre. Guy J of Fibrestream points out that it was there very own Glen Rewston (www.fibrestream.co.uk) who came up with the concept of "Moral Fibre" at the Colloquium.

Well, Glen, what can we say but brilliant!

Fibre to the home UK - Fibrevolution: New national broadband campaign “The Final Third First” is launched today (Thursday 4 March).

2010-03-04T19:59:00.001Z

If you are living in a rural community, poorly served by broadband, you need to look here, now, and sign up!

Fibre to the home UK - Fibrevolution: New national broadband campaign “The Final Third First” is launched today (Thursday 4 March).: "charles.trotman@cla.org.uk"

Headlands and Hereditiments

2010-03-01T19:33:00.005Z

A curious title for this post perhaps, but it sums up the breadth and diversity of last week's Digital Dales Colloquium held at the Timico HQ in Newark.

Never having been to one of these events before, I was a little unsure of what to expect. I can honestly say that whatever it was I hoped I would find there, it was exceeded by a country mile. Lots of folks from industry, alternative broadband schemes,action groups, local government and of course the community. All of them ready and eager to share their experiences, offer advice and point you in the direction of real practical assistance. This was no talking shop - the folks there want action and many have already demonstrated they can deliver it, in the face of what must have often seemed to be pretty insurmountable odds. So a big vote of thanks to all those who organised the event and those who participated.

As mentioned at the beginning, the agenda was wide ranging and covered everything from the 1601 Poor Relief Act of Elizabeth, to a highly practical approach to installing optical fibre runs in an environmentally friendly way approved by the Environmental Stewardship Scheme. This involved the use of a tremendous device called the Barrowmole - a hybrid between a wheelbarrow and a mole plough - used for installing fibre at high speed.

Lots of critical things came out during the meeting. Not least in Vtesse Networks CEO, Aidan Paul's talk on the inequalities and iniquities of the fibre rates (this is where hereditiments come in - things that can be inherited and taxed!). The fibre rates create a very unequal playing field between the likes of BT and new market entrants. Trefor Davies, Timico's CTO has captured the gist of this discussion on his blog "Fresh IP communications comment... daily!" It makes pretty damning reading.

Charles Trotman of the CLA provide a rallying cry and a focus for political action and lobbying. His talk led on to the general feeling that there needed to be increasing pressure placed on government on a concerted and increasingly co-ordinated front. Cyberdoyle of WrayComCom conjured up a wonderful image at this point, by describing this as something of a "Rebellion of the Yoghurt Knitters."

Lindsey Annison of DigitalDales then gave a very informative rundown of broadband developments in the US and Portugal, as well as some very practical information of funding opportunities which I hope, Stonehenge Broadband will take forward with Vtesse Networks as something of a test case.

There was much, much more besides. Information and actions abounded - the details of which are probably best left unmentioned at this stage. Enough to say that there are some surprises in store!

A couple of final words of thanks. To Tref and Timico for the venue and a taste of what ultrafast symmetrical broadband can be like (my old iBook couldn't really cope with the speed and nor could the speedtester!), to Chris (Cyberdoyle) for the magnificent cakes and, with Lindsey, for "telling it like it is" (If those two ever go into politics the world should tremble!) and to Walter of Ewhurst Broadbanders for showing that it isn't just the youngsters who need a fast and stable broadband service, and it isn't just youngsters prepared to do something about it.

Making the Final Third Happen

2010-02-21T08:50:00.003Z

Next Friday, 26th February 2010, I'm attending the Digital Dales Colloquium on "Making the Final Third Happen" in Newark, Nottinghamshire. The agenda for the event can be found here: http://www.webpr.co.uk/digitaldales/colloquium/agenda.html

The colloquium is being sponsored by Timico,an independent internet service provider supplying business strength IP solutions, which was founded in 2004, and will be held at their Newark headquarters.

Some interesting things are being discussed. Aidan Paul, CEO of Vtesse Networks is providing an update on the current status of the long-running legal challenge to the disparity between the rates charged to BT and to other operators. Charles Trotman of the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) has proposed a broadband collaboration to work together to resolve the rural issue. This forum will provide a chance to hear the proposal first hand and discuss it. Lots of other good stuff as well on funding rural fibre, the US fibre experience and solving the "Middle-Mile" problem.

Equally importantly, it will be an opportunity for like-minded people to discuss common issues face-to-face.

I'm not sure if there are any places left for the colloquium on 26th February, but you can check here: http://www.webpr.co.uk/digitaldales/colloquium/index.html. If not, Digital Dales plan to hold a couple more colloquia later in the year.

More From Europe

2010-02-14T11:17:00.004Z

As promised - a link to the Quadrant European Parliament Radio Report TV article on our Stonehenge Broadband campaign to improve broadband for the village. It is available as a video from ITV's Europe and You:

Click here to see video

Lots of other interesting stuff there on Europe, much of which often slips us by. A great pity, that!

Europe Takes an Interest

2010-01-24T09:08:00.005Z

Sitting in the digital desert of south Wiltshire it's often easy to think that Winterbourne Stoke, and other villages like us around the UK, are very much on our own when it comes to trying to improve our broadband access.

It seems that we may have been mistaken!

During the course of putting a bid together for a small slice of some South West Regional Development Agency funding for rural broadband improvements, we've been in touch with a series of very helpful and delightful people both locally, nationally and now internationally.

Some public "thank yous" are in order for the help, advice and encouragement we have received from these quarters: Vtesse Networks, the Regeneration Manager from Wiltshire Council and the South Wiltshire Economic Partnership in particular.

Stonehenge Broadband, our community broadband group, has also received a little publicity, with radio interviews on Spire FM and BBC Wiltshire Sound. The latter one was recorded by Graham Watson the Lib-Dem MEP for the South West. It came as a bit of a surprise for us to discover that the interview hadn't arisen locally, but had been produced by an organisation called Quadrant European Parliament Radio Reports based in Brussels. They provide a free service, funded by the European Parliament, to independent and BBC radio stations in the UK.

Late last week, they also recorded a video interview regarding the issues here in Winterbourne Stoke and the attempts to improve things. Amazing it worked at all given the speed of connections here and a power-cut that threatened to stop the whole thing altogether. As soon as we have a link, we'll post it.

It's encouraging to know that a small community like ours can create a few ripples as far away as Brussels - perhaps the similarity between the Europarl logo and the Stonehenge circles is more than just coincidence.

Bringing Broadband Out of the Stone Age

2010-01-07T08:31:00.003Z

The last few weeks have been fairly hectic. Some important new information was made available to us and that has prompted a lot of work behind the scenes in order to meet a few deadlines.

So, what has been going on? Well, to put it nice and simply, we now have a formally constituted community group - Stonehenge Broadband - whose remit is to find a way to improve the broadband to Winterbourne Stoke in a way that is fast, stable, future-proof (as far as is possible) and affordable. This is no easy task, but the group has been busy, beavering away over the Christmas period. Paperwork has been produced, alliances forged and lots more besides. We now have a phased plan of campaign to try and win funding for capital costs of new infrastructure and there is a little bit of hope on the horizon.

Since BT appear to have little interest in developing the broadband infrastructure in the area, even in a partnering and cost-sharing scheme it would seem, we have been forced to look for viable alternatives. Inspired by the success of Rutland Telecom in Lyddington and Vtesse Networks activities in Corsham, Wiltshire and Upper Pill and Hatt in Cornwall, we believe we have identified a viable way forward. As a consequece, we are hoping to install a VDSL system for the core of the village, with sufficient spare capacity and flexibility to provide a broadband service to outlying properties in the area and also, if there is sufficient demand, to one or more adjacent villages.

Of course, its still very early days and we may not win funding at the first attempt, but it gives us hope for the future - which is something we have not had for quite some time!

We'll post more on this, as and when things develop - which is likely to be several weeks if not months away. In the meantime, particularly if you are a potential corporate donor or sponsor, we can be contacted via: http://www.stonehengebroadband.co.uk

Special Treatment for BT's Chairman

2009-11-30T19:51:00.005Z

Well it seems that BT have gone and done it this time, judging from a story in today's (30 Nov 2009) Daily Telegraph. Caroline Gemmell writes that villagers in Hambleden, Oxon, are incensed to discover that having waited for broadband for years, BT Chairman Sir Michael Rake, a village resident for less than a year, has been connected up.

A BT spokesman claimed that Sir Michael had been provided with broadband, via a system known as broadband enabling technology (BET), to test its "commercial feasibility."

Oh! Really! Lets see what BT Openreach had to say when they published information about the BET trial.

Openreach has developed Broadband Enabling Technology capable of turning Not Spots (areas where people cannot access broadband) into Yes Spots (areas where they can). It has already been deployed in nine telephone exchanges across Britain - Twyford, Badsey, Llanfyllin, Leyland, Ponteland, Wigton, Wymondham, Culloden and Dingwall.

We’ll soon be asking communications providers with customers covered by these exchanges to provide us with 200 trialists for broadband services running at up to 1Mb or up to 2Mb. If all goes well, another 800 trialists should be connected to 70 more enabled exchanges by March 2010. National availability is planned from April 2010 onwards.

While a market exists for Broadband Enabling Technology*, deployment is expensive.
Given the additional costs, it’s difficult to construct a viable business case for the national deployment of Broadband Enabling Technology.

That said, we fervently believe that this solution could transform the dream of a universally available broadband service into reality. We are therefore hopeful that the costs could be met by the Government’s Digital Britain scheme, or by other sources of external funding.

Several things to note here. The technology provide broadband at a maximum of 2Mbps - it might be a Digital Britain target, but it's a pretty pathetic and unchallenging one. So "old technology giving yesterdays performance tomorrow" might be a better way to describe it.

The BT document suggests that, to use BET, exchanges have to be "enabled". If this is true and I have no reason to doubt BT's word, then I can see no reason why, if the Hambleden exchange has been "enabled" to allow Sir Michael to get his broadband, that the rest of the village shouldn't now be connected as well.

It's hard to see how enabling an exchange to allow one resident to get broadband is in any way helping to establish commercial viability - connecting the whole community might have done so. It all sounds a little lame to me!

Watching The REIN As It Pours

2009-11-18T19:53:00.009Z

I haven't posted for a while as there has been relatively little progress and even less news. To be honest, it gets a little depressing to have nothing but bad news to write about.

This time, although winter approaches and the wet and windy weather has done its utmost to drop broadband speeds across the village to an all-time low, there is good news, of a sort, to report. After almost 18 months of knowing the entire village suffered from repetitive electrical impulse noise (REIN) crashing broadband, today I finally managed to visualise it. Better still, I may have got the best lead yet on how the REIN is causing its effects. Its never really been certain whether the interference was carried on the power lines or on the telephone lines - but after today, I think its pretty clear.

A few weeks ago, I installed a power filter and conditioner to try and eliminate RF interference propagating through the mains supply. It can't prevent the losses of sync occurring after a REIN event, but it has resulted in a consistently better sync speed and bit-loading profile. It has even increased my average IP profile by around 15% - not a lot, but I'll take any extra bandwidth I can get.

If you read my 'other' blog "BT Broadband and How to Survive It," you will have seen that I recently acquired a new toy, a widget called Wi-Spy 2.4i - a spectrum analyser. If you want to read more about what it is, what it does and where to get it, take look here.

To put it simply, what it does is to look at the wireless spectrum used by the wifi side of your router and look for sources of interference that might be blocking particular wifi channels. All sorts of things can cause problems like this - microwave ovens, car alarms and immobilizers, PIR's, street lights and many of the other things that can cause REIN.

The weather was bad today with constant wind and rain - in other words a very likely to have a bout of our lunchtime REIN, which usually hits at around 1350, give or take a few minutes. Sure enough at 13:48 we got hit with REIN, the router resynced and the IP profile dropped from 1250kbps to 500kbps - much as it has done fairly regularly on weekdays for the last few months.

The surprise was that the Wi-Spy caught the REIN event - something the makers were adamant it wouldn't do; but there it is as plain as punch.

If you look at the screenshot above (click on it to enlarge), you will see the read-out from the Wi-Spy. There are two different displays. The lower one shows the current activity across the 2.4GHz wifi band. The hump in the middle is my router on channel 6, showing how channel 6 actually runs over into all channels between 4 and 8. In the upper display you can see two horizontal smears on the right hand side. These are my microwave oven running! The vertical line near channel 13 is my next door neighbour's car alarm - and a good reason to avoid channels 10-12.

The real surprise was the thick horizontal trace that begins when the REIN hits at 13:48. It runs right across the trace from below channel 1 to above channel 14 - the entire range of the 2.4GHz spectrum used by broadband wifi. It also appears to be strongest at the lower frequencies - suggesting, perhaps, just how massive the REIN signal is at frequencies below 2.4 GHz.

The second picture I've attached shows the router response at 13:48 - a complete loss of sync and subsequent drop in IP profile, sync speed and throughput speed.

13:48 is also the time one of my neighbours suffers from TV interference and loss of broadband sync.

So what, you may well ask, we've all known that REIN was the cause of the broadband problems for over a year. That's true enough, but given that ALL the power supplying my router, PC and other bits of kit is now heavily filtered and conditioned, the only other likely sources of the REIN is the phone line.

This is where things may start to get really interesting. Whilst OFCOM has not been overly helpful in respect of broadband issues, they do have a statutory duty to investigate sources of TV and radio interference and would also appear to have parallel legal remedies to enforce solutions. Our next course of action is fairly obvious.

Its also triggered another thought. I've always assumed that the REIN was directly affecting my router and the others in the village. But perhaps, if the signal is on the telephone line, its the DSLAM at the exchange that is being affected and not the routers, or perhaps both. More for OFCOM to ponder I suppose!

Mixed Messages for Rural Broadband

2009-10-24T08:06:00.006+01:00

In an article in today's (Saturday 24/10/09) Daily Telegraph, Urmee Khan, the Digital and Media correspondent reports that the Government has pledged to ensure public funding is made available to fund 'superfast' broadband in rural areas. Khan cites Stephen Timms, the Minister for Digital Britain, as saying: that the slow and increasingly inadequate broadband service in rural areas is "socially and economically unjust."

Timms goes on to repeat the oft-quoted mantra, that: "Broadband is no longer considered a luxury - it has become an essential service delivering social, commercial and economic benefits..."

Contrast that with an article by Charlie Brooks in yesterday's Telegraph Online Technology section.

In this article, Brooks suggests that the Conservative's view of 'superfast' broadband provision is diametrically opposed to that of the government and that they favour acting as mere 'facilitators' rather than actively driving. The bottom line, alleges Brooks, is that the Conservatives will not implement the "50p per line" levy proposed by Digital Britain. BT, of course, are hardly likely to install fibre to areas they perceive as uneconomic.

I guess this could become an interesting and divisive election issue.

Meanwhile, Brooks observes that the rural areas of Britain are now falling behind that war benighted country, Rwanda, when it comes to 'superfast' broadband delivery. Rwandan president Paul Kagame will soon have completed a plan to deliver fibre optic cabling to every village in the country. Impressive is hardly the word to describe it, particularly given the trials and tribulations of war, genocide, disease, starvation and poverty that Rwanda has gone through in recent years.

Perhaps whichever party wins the election next year should invite President Kagame to advise them on broadband policy and implementation for the UK!

Interesting New Speed Test

2009-10-20T20:39:00.004+01:00

Broadband comparison site Top 10 Broadband have created an interesting new speedtester. The novel feature is called Broadband StreetStats which enables you to compare your speeds with those of your neighbours - and pits ISP against ISP.

Give it a go, the more data collected, the more influential such an approach is likely to be.

I would suggest ignoring the first test result and press the retest button. For some reason, the first time you run the test there is a little blip of speed in the last couple of seconds, which gives an unrealistically high reading. The retest looks to be more reliable.

UPDATE 1: I'm very impressed by Top 10 Broadband. They left a comment on the blog (see below) to say they had fixed the glitch that was causing a speed blip at the end of the first test. I've just run it again and it seems to be fine now. I still need to benchmark it against a couple of other tests to see how it fares.

NextGen 09 - The Community Broadband Network's Annual Conference

2009-10-13T20:03:00.009+01:00

If you have an interest in, or are already involved with Community Broadband or Next Generation Broadband, there is a very useful conference coming up in a months time.

The Community Broadband Network's annual conference, NextGen 09, takes place in Leeds on 16 and 17 November 2009. The line up of speakers looks first class, starting with the Rt Hon Stephen Timms MP - who took over from Lord Carter as Minister for Digital Britain during the summer.

Sadly, I'm not going to be able to go - too many prior commitments - so maybe next year in 2010?

What may be of particular interest to you is the ½ day workshop on the nuts and bolts of building projects: Fibrecamp Britain. This session on 16 November, led by Daniel Heery of Alston Fibermoor, the nation’s most can-do advocate and builder of rural broadband networks, will focus on delivering community-based NGA solutions.

The cost to attend this ½ day workshop is £50 plus VAT. For this you also have the opportunity to listen to Jeremy Hunt, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport who will deliver a keynote and there will be an official conference drinks reception after the workshop. Another workshop option is Digital Region Hands-On, which will provide a practical session for those contemplating larger projects on what one of Europe’s largest fibre projects looks like on the ground. You can of course also opt to attend the full conference and rates and the agenda are on the website here: www.inca.coop

You can register here: http://www.regonline.co.uk/Checkin.asp?EventId=774751

During the conference you will find out about the new Independent Networks Cooperative Association (INCA) - the trade body for the growing patchwork of local next generation broadband projects. INCA is making good progress gathering support from public and private sector organisations working to make next generation broadband a reality throughout the country. During the conference INCA will announce progress on the Joint Operating Network - JON - that aims to sew the patchwork together.

It is a vibrant agenda with plenty of room for discussion and debate. If you can make it to Leeds, you should.

If you need further information, contact Marit Hendriks, a Director of CBN at:

info@broadband.coop

Rural Broadband - Support From Prince Charles

2009-10-11T10:36:00.005+01:00

In an article in the Daily Telegraph on Saturday 10th October 2009, Prince Charles made an impassioned plea for greater consideration to be given to the broadband needs of rural communities, farms and businesses. It is clear that the Prince has been well-briefed on the problems already facing rural broadband users and the implications this has for the rural economy in the future. His reference to rural areas as being 'broadband deserts' is very close to the mark.

Prince Charles does not seem to be merely commenting on the issue, but rather seems to be taking a much welcomed pro-active view. He indicates that those captains of industry associated with his Rural Action Programme share his concerns and want to take action. This initiative is being led by Mark Price, the Managing Director of Waitrose.

The Prince's comments have been widely welcomed across the growing community of those seeking to improve rural broadband access. Adrian Wooster, the Technical Director of the Community Broadband Network, pointed to the dangers of short-term solutions to this issue which might not be robust enough to provide for future needs. Others highlighted the lack of a credible national broadband policy and the slow rate of construction of fibre-optic networks in the UK.

It is encouraging to note that the Prince's article was published as the Daily Telegraph itself launches a campaign for improved broadband access in rural areas - another most welcome development.

Elsewhere, hot on the heels of the Lyddington Experiment, a highly innovative approach to overcoming the problems of broadband in rural areas undertaken by Rutland Telecom, comes news that the village of Ewhurst in Surrey, is looking towards a similar solution.

We watch developments in Lyddington and those planned for Ewhurst with great interest. We are a little way behind Ewhurst in our planning and for Winterbourne Stoke, being a much smaller village, the financial implications will be much more of an obstacle to overcome. As things progress, we will continue to share our experiences with friends in Ewhurst, so that we can all benefit from lessons learned.

What has begun to happen almost by accident, and it is something we are keen to extend, is a sort of "virtual twinning" of rural communities across the country. Individually, we may only be small rural communities, but together we become a much larger and ultimately more powerful voice.

So, Winterbourne Stoke twinned with Ewhurst - on the edge of the digital divide in the Broadband Desert! It conjures up an interesting image!

If you are from a rural community slipping into the digital divide, or from not-spots and grot-spots in urban areas, get in touch, we are happy to share information and ideas where we can.

A Welcome Development

2009-10-04T11:31:00.003+01:00

As mentioned in the previous post, the idea of a community project to try and improve the broadband situation here in Winterbourne Stoke was put to the Parish Council at their last meeting. The case made was as follows:

1. Winterbourne Stoke has an aging and poor telephone/broadband service, largely the result of under-investment in infrastructure by the GPO in the 1970s and not helped by poor maintenance by BT since. Many villagers have broadband problems and low speeds; some also have long-standing telephone problems.

2. The national average broadband speed was around 3.6 Mbps (3600 kbps) in June 2009. Over the last year, information gathered from round the village suggests the average here is around 750 kbps – or 21% of the national average. We are part of the 11% of the UK population that currently cannot get speeds in excess of 2 MBps

3. The Digital Britain report noted that 2 Mbps is about the lowest speed necessary to run several of the current applications over broadband – this includes VOIP telephony and TV over the internet. It is also worth noting that many government forms can now ONLY be filled in, and returned, electronically, and a 2 Mbps connection is all but essential to do this.

4. Whilst the Digital Britain report recommended that the government should seek to ensure that all of the country had access to broadband speeds of at least 2 Mbps (2000 kbps) by 2012, most commentators believe that speeds of 20 Mbps will be essential by 2012. To put this in perspective, Several ISPs are already offering connections of 24 Mbps in the UK, Virgin are offering 50 Mbps. In South Korea, speeds of 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) are increasingly common.

5. Some people may argue that their service is “fast enough for me.” This may be true, at least for the moment, for those who use it only for the occasional email and some light web-surfing; but they are a minority. The low speeds in the village are already giving problems to school-children, and others, following educational programmes on line and for those trying to use their connections for business purposes. VOIP telephony is unusable for many in the village and even fewer are able to use video facilities, or receive TV by internet. Increasingly, fast broadband access is not a luxury, it is a necessity.

6. It is worth noting that everyone in the village with a broadband service, with one or two exceptions, is already paying for a service they do not get. We are throwing money away and getting little in return.

7. Over the next few years, more and more services are going to require that the public has access to fast broadband. Of particular importance to communities like Winterbourne Stoke are things like tele-medicine, tele-learning and inexpensive video and audio communication. All of these will improve the quality of life for villagers, give them better access to services and save them money. A fast broadband service would enable more people to work from home and would be an incubator for new small business development – something Winterbourne Stoke and the vicinity needs – if it is to survive as a community.

The Nature of the Problem

8. Our problem, in a nutshell, is that there is an old and defective aluminium cable running between the village and the Shrewton exchange. BT claims it would cost £180,000 to replace the aluminium cable with copper and are unwilling to do this on economic grounds. In any event, replacing the old aluminium with copper is not the answer, as it would still give us a slow connection with no room for future expansion or improvement.

9. BT is highly unlikely to install fibre to Winterbourne Stoke, the best solution to our problem – and even if they were to do so, it could be another decade before this might happen.

The Solution

10. Several other villages around the country have already realised the importance of broadband accessibility to the community and also the fact that BT are not going to help them. They have started community broadband projects and are already achieving remarkable results.

11. Such projects are not cheap and for Winterbourne Stoke to be a financially viable proposition, we would need to tap into whatever sources of grant aid, at county and national level, that we can. Clearly, this is most likely to be successful with the backing and endorsement of the Winterbourne Stoke Parish Council.

12. To this end, we are proposing the following outline plan:

• forming a Winterbourne Stoke Broadband Committee;
• formally approaching Internet Service Providers, with a track record of similar rural projects, to get outline costings;
• developing a business case for the provision of fast broadband to the village – to include assessing the level of buy in and commitment within the village and the near vicinity;
• applying for grants and other financial support;
• subject to having a viable business case, commissioning and delivering a fast broadband capability for Winterbourne Stoke.

The Parish Council agreed to support the idea in principle (perhaps not too surprising as many of them have poor broadband connections) and we are now in a position to move forward. This is only a first step and there is a long way to go before we are likely to be able to achieve anything concrete, but we have to start somewhere.

Clearly, this is not going to be straightforward. An ideal solution would be inexpensive, avoid a monopoly situation and allow real customer choice (being on a Market 1 exchange without local loop unbundling is arguably already a monopoly situation), and provide the opportunity for expansion and upgrading in the future. Inevitably, compromises may have to be made and the trick is going to be in judging which compromises we can live with and which we can't.

Meanwhile on the BT Openreach front - absolutely nothing - not a hide nor hair seen of them. Seemingly, there has been no further work in the village for a few weeks now. It looks like the only way to get progress is to keep the pressure on them continuously. Ah well. So be it.

A Tentative First Step Towards a Community Broadband Project

2009-09-13T09:02:00.006+01:00

After several months reviewing the possibilities for improving broadband and telephony services here in Winterbourne Stoke, we are about to take a tentative first step towards setting up a community broadband project.

We've been impressed by what a few other villages around the country have been able to achieve for themselves, with the help of some competent, versatile and imaginative Internet Service Providers who have seen a niche market and have found a business model that works.

It's quite apparent that waiting for BT to upgrade the existing infrastructure is likely to be an exercise in futility - unless they wake-up to the fact that remote communities around the UK don't expect "something for nothing" - although they would grab it with both hands if it were offered. No, communities are prepared to accept some extra cost, undertake work themselves where they can, in the hope they can provide themselves with a robust and future-proof communications capability.

A month or so ago, I wrote to the Director's Office at BT, suggesting that perhaps if other ISPs had found a sound business model for community broadband projects, BT, with their obvious economies of scale, ought to be able to achieve something similar and be able to develop a profitable adjunct to their existing business. The reaction? A deafening silence - no response whatsoever.

Well, on Thursday 17th September, the intention is to formally launch our own village broadband project with a presentation to the Parish Council about its aims and intentions and with the hope of eliciting their support in identifying and accessing grant aid and other support at local, county and national level. It is only a small step, but a very necessary one before we can really get things under way.

Meanwhile, broadband problems continue with intermittent REIN strikes during the week. Openreach, or at least their sub-contractors, did return briefly to the village to clear a few branches, but no sign yet of any more substantive work being done on the worst bits of the village cabling and condemned drop poles.

UPDATE: Friday 18th September - It seems that the "deafening silence from BT" was because things hadn't got through to them - not their fault. I'll resend that over the weekend.

An Odd Week - and No Openreach

2009-09-06T18:40:00.005+01:00

A bit of an odd week on the broadband front. After almost two weeks when the lunchtime REIN failed to strike things were beginning to look up. My IP profile had risen from 1250kbps to 1500kbps and had been high enough for long enough to make a drop in the SNR target a distinct possibility.

Of course it couldn't last and didn't. Torrential rain on Thursday seemed to have no effect at all and everything looked fine on Thursday evening when the router switched off. It looked good on Friday morning to, but then REIN hit at 1345 and the IP profile dropped to 750kbps. Throughput rose at around 2230, but it wasn't until next morning that the IP profile also responded. The good news is that I got the 1500 kbps IP profile back and not the 1000 or 1250kbps that I was expecting. I guess we will see what the next week will bring.

What last week didn't bring was Openreach. I had been quite upbeat in the last post given the work Openreach had been doing. I thought there was a chance they would replace our really dodgy drop pole that carries street light and a 3-phase cable besides. My neighbour is getting quite concerned about this one, as the wood at the base of the pole is crumbling away. If it wasn't for the ivy...

Openreach Invade!

2009-08-29T07:50:00.005+01:00

Ok, I'll admit I was more than a little cynical when I had my last email exchange with Bob Challacombe, Openreach's Director for Midlands, Wales and the West regarding the state of the telephone infrastructure in Winterbourne Stoke.

Having raised the issue of the broken door of the village PCP (green cabinet) and the ancient and fading A1024 fault tags on BT poles around the village, Bob certainly got things moving quickly regarding the PCP and it was fixed and sealed within a couple of days. Openreach also came into the village and removed some of the A1024 tags and, to be honest, I thought that would be that and a few more years would pass by before anything was done.

Well, I was wrong - very wrong. When Bob Challacombe said that he would follow-up on the outstanding issues, he really meant it. When I got back to the village yesterday afternoon, there had been a veritable invasion by Openreach/McNicholas. Two cherry-pickers and a pole-drilling truck all but blocking the road - but I'm certainly not complaining about that! A new drop pole had been installed, fittings replaced and reattached, branches cleared from cables and drop-wires and things generally tidied up. It looks as though they had worked on at least three or four poles. They even tidied up when they left.

So, it's another big thank you to Bob Challacombe and the local Outreach engineers, who are beginning to restore some confidence in BT's care for the telecom infrastructure in this area. Whilst it won't solve the fundamental problem with aluminium cabling, any improvement helps a little.

It will be interesting to see if Openreach come back next week to replace the condemned drop pole and the remaining one carrying an A1024 tag next week. Both are in very awkward settings, so I expect a little more effort and ingenuity might be required to tackle them.

Some Interesting New Possibilities

2009-08-16T16:13:00.017+01:00

Over the last year, a lot of time and effort has been expended, by us and BT Openreach specialist engineers, in trying to localise the source of the repetitive electronic impulse noise (REIN) that so badly affects the broadband connections in Winterbourne Stoke. None of these efforts have worked and ideas of where to go next were running a little low.

Quite by chance I noticed a posting on the Kitz Broadband Forum from someone with what seemed to be an identical problem to ours. Curiously, his RouterStats traces were absolutely identical to the one here in the village and the timing of the REIN was also identical to ours, but the effects weren't quite as serious.

Putting all that together, it seemed likely that he might be experiencing eactly the same REIN events as us and must live in our general area - so I got in touch. It turns out that guess was correct and he lives in Enford - about 12.5 km NE of Winterbourne Stoke.

This seems highly unlikely to be just a coincidence and almost certainly the events monitored in Winterbourne Stoke and Enford have a common cause - which can be virtually any type of electrical device (see http://btbroadbandandhowtosurviveit.blogspot.com/2009/04/things-that-can-affect-your-broadband.html). In this case, it almost certainly has a common source.

Whatever the culprit is, over the last year we have been able to establish the following:

It switches on or off at around 0130 most nights (but can be as early as midnight, or as late as 0330).
It switches on or off at around 1350 - but usually only Monday to Thursday, rarely on Friday and never at weekends.
It may also do something at around 0800 and 2000 on some days.
The event at 1350 doesn't happen during public holidays (eg Christmas, New Year and Easter). All of which points to this being caused by a commercial concern rather than a domestic premises.

A look at Google Earth shows three rather interesting facilities lying close to the direct route between the two villages and which have line of sight, or pretty close to it, with both of them (see map at head of post - click to see it enlarged). They are: Wiltshire Grain Limited, SERCO - the international service company, and Qinetiq's Larkhill "Bustard" site. A more detailed view of the area can be seen in this view. The diagonal yellow line is the direct route between the two villages.

I've written to all of them to see if there is anything about their operation which might, just conceivably, be the source of the REIN. Given that this could be any piece of electrical equipment, of any size, from a cordless phone to a large piece of industrial equipment, this is a pretty tall order. That said, I hoped it might get them thinking.

Nick Brown, the Store Manager at Wiltshire Grain responded very quickly to the request for information. He noted that:

...[Wiltshire Grain] only use mains electricity to power motors the only motors we have running at night ( apart from the harvest period) are fans and their timed operations are not the same as the times you state...

He also pointed out the existence of the two other sites, neither of which had registered with me before. I was so intrigued, I popped up to take a look at the area. I also did a bit of research. There's not much information on SERCO activities at their site and Qinetiq don't exactly advertise the existence of theirs. However, before Qinetiq was created, the site belonged to DERA (the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency) and using the Wayback Machine, I was able to see what the site was doing back in 2001.

They looked to be doing some interesting things back in 2001, and one of these grabbed my eye immediately - electronic countermeasures or ECM. Now that raises all sorts of possibilities about our broadband being interfered with by ECM trials or some dodgy ECM test equipment. Of course, that was back in 2001. What is going on today?

In a report written for the MoD in 2008, entitled: "Final Report: Defence Demand For Spectrum - 2008-2027" the authors note that there will be: an ongoing need for electronic counter-measures (ECM).

Where wireless devices are used as triggers, adversaries normally use commercial systems such as mobile phones. Defence will increasingly wish to reflect IEDs and ECM in training and the fact that the threat will exist in civil bands means that the Services will not be able to disrupt them routinely whilst training in UK and will instead rely on some form of emulation.

Clearly, this is very, very important work indeed. It still seems to be going on - but not necessarily at the Qinetiq site, but if it is, might it be causing unforseen problems? If it isn't, perhaps they have the equipment and expertise to work out where it is coming from?

UPDATE 1: Now, there's a turn up for the books. Having written to Wiltshire Grain, SERCO and QinetiQ yesterday, today's daytime REIN event - which has been consistent at 1350 on days we see it, underwent a time shift and appeared at 1100. Could we be getting close to the source? Was someone playing around today to see if we would notice?

UPDATE 2: I'm not sure what happened with the REIN on Tuesday 18th August, as the kids had turned off the router, but judging by the restart speed, I suspect there was no REIN. There was definitely none today, 19th August. Now that is odd - the first time we've not had lunchtime REIN since Easter and it happens this week, after mentioning potential sources. Hmm!

UPDATE 3: Well, Thursday was diabolical with some villagers losing broadband access completely during the afternoon. Others simply had their speed dropped to dial-up levels. Friday, no sign of REIN. All in all, one of the oddest weeks in nearly a year!

UPDATE 4: Friday 28th August - No lunchtime REIN at all since last Friday - a whole week clear. Something has changed, but what? We've also had responses from SERCO and Qinetiq, both saying that they had no equipment that could possibly be causing such a problem. I guess the difficulty is that if there is an intermittent fault with any piece of equipment, it might not appear to be faulty, unless you happen to be there when the fault condition happens. What we need is a means of DF'ing the source and tracking it down!

The CLA's "Staying inTouch" Petition

2009-08-06T09:50:00.008+01:00

The CLA (Country Land & Business Association) has been actively fighting for all rural areas to have effective and affordable broadband since 2002 when they firstly forced BT to introduce trigger levels and then lobbied, successfully, for a national rural broadband roll out in 2005. The CLA also produced an excellent contribution in response to the interim Digital Britain report - the final version of which can be found here.

I have written several times about the centrality of broadband access for the future health and development of the rural economy and for those who live in the countryside, and it is clear that all those working towards improving the situation, and narrowing the digital divide, need to work together as much as possible. The CLA are a significant voice in these efforts and, as you will note from the points above, have already made substantial progress.

On 4th August 2009, the CLA launched the 'Staying in Touch' petition as a voice against rural 'not-spots.' The CLA write:

High-speed internet access will be essential in years to come for all businesses – rural and urban – and those communities that do not have it will be at a severe economic and social disadvantage.

The CLA has said time and time again that Government investment is an essential prerequisite to rolling out broadband to all. This is a fair first attempt at trying to resolve the digital divide but more needs to be done if those in remoter parts of the country are to have a future in digital Britain.

If you think the Government should do more to provide effective and affordable broadband for all rural areas, please sign our petition.

It will be formally submitted to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation & Skills Lord Mandelson by CLA President Henry Aubrey-Fletcher in October 2009.

If you are concerned about rural broadband access and the future of the rural economy, please sign the petition and make your voice heard!

Openreach Keep Their Promise

2009-08-03T07:28:00.006+01:00

Over the weekend, Bob Challacombe, Openreach's Director for Midlands, Wales and the West, made good on his promise to get back to us regarding the A1024 tags on various bits of equipment.

An engineer has been out and has checked not only the tags on the drop-poles and the PCP, but has also looked at the other poles and equipment around the village. Bob noted that the A1024 process used by Openreach is used to focus on defective plant. Most relate to infrastructure defects, but more often than not these are not related to the actual serviceability of the network itself. That is a helpful distinction.

The bottom line for the equipment round the village is that two of the A1024 tags were out of date and should have been removed once the defect had been rectified. One of the Openreach drop-poles is decayed and is part of their replacement programme and second decayed pole, owned by Southern Electric, is also set to be replaced by them (Southern Electric). Finally, the overhead cable on a third pole needs to be lifted. As Bob says, none of these should affect the quality of service.

Bob noted that the door of the PCP was faulty and due to be replaced by contractors. However, I'm not sure if this hasn't been overtaken by events. The replacement bolts added on Friday appear to have done the trick and the box is sealed again.

As I explained to Mr Challacombe, on a poor connection, any minor issue can have a massive impact and one which is out of all proportion to the apparent severity of the fault. A 1Mbs drop in speed for customers normally receiving 7Mbps is probably going to pass unremarked by the majority of them. A similar drop in speed for customers only receiving a 1Mbps service is going to be noticed by all. For people trying to run businesses which are reliant on good broadband and VOIP access, as some are here in Winterbourne Stoke - any break of service or drop in reliability can cost money.

There are still a couple of minor outstanding issues, but I'm sure these will also be resolved. So, thank you Bob Challacombe for for checking these things out. This certainly seems to have spurred on the work, particularly on the PCP. Sealing the PCP has already made a significant impact on broadband speeds, which have started to rise again. When you have poor broadband access, any small improvement is worth fighting for.

For Want of a Nail

2009-07-31T19:46:00.006+01:00

I thought it only fair to be as quick to post when things go right as I sometimes am when things go wrong - so here it is. Openreach have been back in the village today and fixed the problem with the Winterbourne Stoke PCP; pictured in its now closed state above.

You may recall (and if you don't, the back story can be read here, here and here) that the A1024 tag described the defect as follows: "Unable to secure pillar requires new shell"

Now, you'd be forgiven for thinking, as we did, that this was a fairly serious and terminal problem for the PCP - requiring the outer cabinet to be replaced. Clearly a big job too, as its taken almost 5 weeks to fix.

It turns out that all Openreach needed to do, and could have done in a few minutes at any point since they discovered the fault on the 29th of June, was replace the two defective securing bolts, one of which is pictured above.

Picking up the bolt from where it had been discarded in the grass reminded me of that centuries old allegory - substituting Bolt, Connection, Broadband, Our patience, and Business, as appropriate:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

...and if the meaning is a little opaque these days, then in the modern vernacular:

If you can't be arsed, it can only hit your profits in the end.

I know we are only a small village, with a small customer base, but five weeks to replace two bolts...

...I'm speechless!

It's the Blue Wire!

2009-07-30T19:53:00.012+01:00

Well, well, What a surprise. Openreach have been back in the village today. They've certainly been working in the PCP, as there are bits of blue wire scattered at the foot of the pillar, along with one of the securing bolts - which no longer appears to work. They've also replaced or tightened the cable tie that is the only thing now securing the door of the PCP. A pity it wasn't done a few days ago, as the wet weather has certainly taken its toll on broadband across the village with the recent torrential rain.

I had an email from one of the villagers last night, suggesting we bailed out the PCP! Given the weather forecast for August, it might be an idea if Openreach fitted a self-bailer or pump if they aren't going to replace the pillar anytime soon.

Openreach had also ventured deeper into the village and removed the A1024 tag featured in the last post on this topic. There are no signs of any work actually being done, mind you, and no-one has yet said they saw any Openreach engineers actually working on the drop pole, but the tag has certainly gone. Hmm! Forgive me for being a little cynical...

That said, the high altitude A1024 on another drop-pole is still there, so perhaps Openreach engineers did take a look at the pole and couldn't fix the fault. The other possibility is that they couldn't even find the A1024 in order to remove it, or maybe they didn't have a cherry-picker with them today.

Well, I and others in the village look forward to hearing from Bob Challacombe, BT Openreach's Regional Director, when he makes good on his promise to give us an update on the access network fault history.

Meanwhile, our broadband goes from bad to worse. In the last week, my IP profile has dropped from 1250kbps to 500kbps. Pitiful on an up to 8Mbps service and other villagers have been experiencing the same thing. Take a look at a RouterStats output of the S/N margin for today and you'll see the REIN spike hit at around 13:45 this afternoon. 9 losses of framing, 1 loss of signal and BLAM - loss of sync and another cut in the IP profile. The bit loading graph below makes it perfectly clear just what is happening to the ADSL signal - a total loss of the frequencies in buckets 86 up to the 130 or so where I would normally expect to see some bits.

...and the lower of the two bitloading graphs shows how things look the morning after. The router has been switched off overnight for around 3 hours in order to miss the major REIN spike that nearly always happens between 0130 and 0330. The sync speed has recovered to pre-wet weather levels, but of course the IPprofile has not.With a little bit of luck and a continued spell of dry weather, it might start to rise again. I might even get an IP profile of around 1Mbps at around 2300 tonight if there are no further losses of sync this afternoon. Another wet day and the IP profile may drop to 256kbps or even 130kbps! Such is life in the depths of the didital divide.

Plans for the "A1024 Competition" continue apace. Ideas are developing, prizes have been selected...

Ofcom's UK Broadband Speeds 2009: Research Report

2009-07-29T21:20:00.005+01:00

Ofcom published its long awaited UK Broadband: Research Report on July 28th 2009, with research conducted by Ofcom's technical partner, SamKnows.

It's a fairly beefy report, coming in at over 100 pages, with an annex that is almost the same size. Despite this, I would urge anyone with an interest in broadband and the future of Digital Britain, and rural communities in particular, to download it and have a look. If you either don't have the time, energy or heart to tackle it, I've reproduced the Executive Summary below so you can see the headline points - and pretty damning they are too.

Just for fun [?], I took one of the figures from the Ofcom report and overlaid figures for Winterbourne Stoke on to it (click on the picture at the top of the page to enlarge it). This puts our situation into a national context - Winterbourne Stoke is amongst the worst of the very worst broadband 'grotspots' in the UK, given our line length.

1 Executive summary
Background

1.1 Ofcom‟s primary duty under the Communications Act 2003 (the “Act”) is to further the interests of UK citizens and consumers in carrying out our functions. In addition to securing the availability of a wide range of electronic communications services including broadband services, encouraging investment and innovation in relevant markets and the availability and use of high-speed data services, we must have regard to the interests of consumers‟ interests in respect of price, quality and value for money. Our duties include the requirement to carry out research into consumers‟ experiences of the way services are provided and to publish and take account of the results of our research.

1.2 Broadband speeds are an important factor in determining consumers‟ internet experience. Broadband is typically sold by its advertised „up to‟ speed, while consumers can also get information on the maximum speed their line is capable of supporting. However, there is currently a lack of robust information on the actual speeds that are delivered.

1.3 To address this issue, and to gain a better understanding of broadband performance in the UK. Ofcom, in association with technical partner SamKnows Ltd and market research company GfK NOP Ltd, set up a panel of more than 2,500 UK broadband users, of whom over 1,600 connected monitoring equipment to their router and provided performance data during the six-month period from November 2008 to April 2009. We ran over 60 million tests over the course of the research and we believe that the integrity of our hardware-based technical methodology combined with the scale of the project and the sophistication of the statistical analysis makes this research a makes this research a step change from other research into broadband speeds in terms of providing a robust analysis of the variables that affect broadband speeds.

1.4 We also asked 2,128 panellists for their views on their broadband service, including speeds, which we were then able to relate to the performance they received.

1.5 This report sets out our findings.
Broadband performance matters to consumers

1.6 Our results show the importance of broadband speeds to consumers: While a large majority (83%) of our panellists were satisfied overall with their broadband service, speed was the single biggest cause of dissatisfaction among those who were dissatisfied. More than one in five consumers (21%) expressed dissatisfaction with broadband speeds, compared to 16% who were dissatisfied with value for money and 13% with the reliability of their connections. Over a quarter of consumers (26%) said that the speeds they received were not what they expected when they signed up for their broadband service. Consumers who received lower actual speeds said that they were less satisfied overall with their broadband service. Average broadband speeds in the UK are significantly below headline speeds

1.7 Broadband is often advertised and sold on the basis of headline speeds (e.g. „up to‟ 8Mbit/s). However, a number of constraints on broadband performance, including distance from premises to the exchange, congestion on ISPs‟ networks and the general internet, and home wiring, combine to make actual speeds significantly lower than headline speeds: Our research found that in April 2009 average broadband speeds in the UK were 4.1Mbit/s, which was equivalent to 57% of the average advertised headline speed. (We found little change in performance month to month for the duration of the research). Actual speeds were significantly lower in the peak evening hours. Average speeds between 8pm and 10pm were 3.7Mbit/s. This is equivalent to around 90% of those between 9am and 5pm on weekdays and around 77% of the average maximum speeds received at any point during the day (which we call the maximum line speed). Of those customers on headline packages of more than 2Mbit/s, 17% received average speeds below 2Mbit/s (the speed which the Government‟s Digital Britain report has said should be universally available by 2012). Eleven per cent never achieved a speed in excess of 2Mbit/s. This is consistent with the analysis within the Digital Britain report which has estimated that 11% of all lines are currently unable to deliver a 2Mbit/s service. Access technology and network capacity underlie variations in performance

1.8 Our research found that the actual speeds delivered by different ISP packages varied significantly.

1.9 Our sample sizes were sufficient to enable us to compare the „up to‟ 8Mbit/s services of the eight largest DSL operators alongside the „up to‟ 10Mbit/s cable broadband service offered by Virgin Media. Our results showed the following: On average, customers on Virgin Media‟s „up to‟ 10Mbit/s cable service received speeds over twice as high as „up to 8Mbit/s‟ DSL customers. Among „up to‟ 8Mbit/s services, those delivered using ADSL2+ were, on average, significantly faster than those using ADSL1. Access technology alone, however, is not the sole factor in determining broadband speeds: we found that Plusnet (which predominantly uses ADSL1 at present) produced similar speeds to ADSL2+ „up to‟ 8Mbit/s packages, while speeds delivered by AOL Broadband (which uses ADSL2+) were slower than those delivered by Plusnet. Consumers subscribing to ADSL2+ services of „up to‟ 16Mbit/s or higher received average speeds of around 8Mbit/s – nearly twice as fast as subscribers on „up to‟ 8Mbit/s ADSL2+ services. Speeds delivered by ADSL2+ services of „up to‟ 16Mbit/s were similar to those delivered via „up to‟ 10Mbit/s cable.

The fastest speeds within our sample were delivered by Virgin Media‟s „up to‟ 20Mbit/s packages, although the average speed of around 13Mbit/s was significantly lower than the headline package speed (we did not have a sample of Virgin Media‟s „up to‟ 50Mbit/s customers).

1.10 The other main factor affecting broadband speeds was the capacity of ISPs‟ networks. All consumers experienced a slowdown in actual speeds during peak evening hours (8-10pm). But there was typically less of a slowdown where consumers received their broadband through operators which employed local loop unbundling (LLU). This may be a reflection of higher backhaul capacity. A notable exception was Plusnet (which uses BT Wholesale services), where customers on average experienced less of a slowdown than customers with most other operators, including those using LLU.
Measures other than download speed also affect broadband performance

1.11 As download speed is one of many factors which affect performance we also researched other metrics such as upload speeds (the time taken to send information over a broadband connection), latency (the time it takes a single packet of data to travel from a user‟s PC to a third-party server and back again), packet loss (the loss of data packages during transmission over an internet connection) and jitter (a measure of the stability of a connection). Our results were as follows: In general, the pattern for these performance metrics was similar to that of download speed, with poorer performance for packages with lower headline speeds, and poorer performance in the evening. Average actual upload speeds were 0.43Mbit/s, or less than 10% of download speeds. Even on DSL packages with headline download speeds of 16Mbit/s and more, and on cable packages of 20Mbit/s, the average upload speed was less than 0.7Mbit/s. The average performance of web browsing, latency, packet loss, DNS Domain Name Service) resolution and failure rates and jitter, for all access technologies at all headline speeds, were sufficient to have no significant detrimental impact on the overall consumer experience of using most internet applications DSL services offer significantly better performance than cable services on jitter. However, this is unlikely to have a significant effect on the user experience for most internet applications, although for some online games jitter is a very important measure as the stability of connection can be paramount.
Conclusions and next steps

1.12 This research report is a representative snapshot of the current state of broadband performance from November 2008 to April 2009 and we have noted the limitations of the research. The broadband market is changing rapidly, driven by consumers‟ growing demand for faster broadband. Operators, in turn, are continuing to invest in their networks in order to make faster broadband available. Therefore the results set out in this report will not necessarily reflect the future performance of networks and providers.

1.13 However, we believe our research is a valuable and important step in understanding the key factors that currently affect broadband speed and performance and it has some important findings of interest to consumers. We have also separately published a consumer guide on factors that we think consumers might wish to consider when buying broadband services.

1.14 The research has given us valuable insights into consumers‟ perceptions of and experience of their broadband services. The survey and performance results suggest that ISPs need to do more to ensure they are giving their customers enough information about the services they provide and the types of factors that may impact on the actual speed they will receive.

1.15 We will consider the results of this report, in particular in respect of the Code, and also consider whether there are any implications for how broadband services are advertised and promoted to consumers.

1.16 Reliable and current information benefits consumers by giving them the information they need to make informed decisions about their services and it provides important incentives to operators to invest in their infrastructure to ensure their services meet the needs of consumers.

1.17 We therefore plan to repeat this research in the future in order that we can take into account the changing broadband market. We will discuss with stakeholders how we can best update the research to ensure that reliable and timely information on broadband performance continues to be made available to consumers.

Village Quiz

2009-07-25T22:04:00.004+01:00

We had a village barbecue and quiz tonight. The "Old Fogies" team, of which I was a member, came 3rd. Our only deep discussion of the night concerned which Jimi Hendrix track made number one in the UK. We struggled a bit, but then, the Isle of Wight Festival was a few years ago!

Of course, the correct answer was Voodoo Child (We got the answer wrong!).

The only really sad thing about all this is, that most people here in the village don't have a fast enough connection to stream this amazing guitar playing!
BT - you are keeping us from our heritage!

Pride and Prejudice

2009-07-25T10:25:00.018+01:00

So, BT Openreach are the 'Proud Guardians of the nation's local access network' are they? Call me a little cynical and prejudiced if you like, but sometimes I am 'challenged' by the claims BT make, as some of us slip deeper into Digital Britain's digital divide.

In my book, a true guardian of the nation's local access network would be doing just that: protecting the network, maintaining it, developing it and improving it. What is the evidence that Openreach are doing that here in Winterbourne Stoke? Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting there's an issue with Openreach engineers or other BT staff. What really concerns me is Openreach as an organisation; and it's a concern that many BT Group staff will voice in private. Openreach seem to have little idea about the outstanding problems on the network whose guardianship their mission statement claims to take such pride in

You certainly can't point the finger of blame at individual Openreach engineers for this. They can only respond to faults they have been instructed to fix. If Openreach management systems either fail to record a fault, or fail to follow it-up in a timely fashion, then that is a management issue that Ian Livingston and others on the BT Group and Openreach boards should be getting a grip of.

Now in my last post, I pointed out a couple more of the BT infrastructure problems around the village. Today, I went for a wander to see if the PCP cabinet had been replaced - after all, it's only been reported as being faulty for the last month. Unsurprisingly, nothing had changed. Neither had the A1024 tag high on a neighbours drop-pole been touched. Unfortunately, that one is too high and too faded to see how long it's been there.

I took a short-cut home through a field and happened to glance back towards the road along which the telegraph poles run. Guess what? Nailed to the back of one of the poles was another fading A1024 tag (as always, just click on the picture to get a blow-up view). Given that the bottom line of the tag clearly says: "Remove label and return it to your manager on completion of the remedial work," I have to assume that the remedial work in question remains outstanding. Perhaps it is no coincidence that one of the worst broadband connections in the village is fed from this drop-pole. Perhaps if Openreach fixed it...

...well who knows.

Clearly, nailing this A1024 to the back of the pole was not the smartest thing to do. I mean, it doesn't really give the many Outreach engineers that visit our village much of a chance of noticing it as they drive by, and reporting back to their manager that it still hasn't been fixed, now does it? It's even worse than nailing it so high up the pole that you'd have to climb the pole to read it - even if you spotted it in the first place!

In the spirit of co-operation with Openreach, here is a photograph of the front of the drop-pole to help them find it. I'd like to have given them a bit more information, but unfortunately, Openreach seem either to issue substandard permanent markers to their engineers, or this A1024 tag had been there for quite a while. Standing close to it, I could not make out any writing at all and I began to wonder if anything had ever been written on it. However, a little bit of photo-enhancement helped, but not enough to make the A1024 completely readable.

The serial number begins 198 and ends in a 3 and the Openreach engineer who reported the fault appears to be GXW3 or GXW8. The nature of the defect is completely unreadable, as is the UOC. As for the date, well it looks like the 5th of March or the 5th of August 2007, or 2008. It could even be '68, but I think even Openreach might have got around to sorting it out at some point over the last 41 years!

Now, every week, the regional directors of BT Openreach produce a 'Weekly Service Performance and Lead Time Forecast Summary Report.' I think it would be a really good spur to action for Bob Challacombe, the Regional Director for Openreach's South West District, which covers Winterbourne Stoke, and the other Regional Directors, if they were obliged to produce a weekly statistic on the number of unresolved infrastructure issues. As both a customer and shareholder of an organisation that claims to be the proud guardians of the nation's local access network, I think it's important that they have the opportunity to demonstrate that custodianship publicly.

UPDATE 1: I thought it only fair to send a link to this post to Bob Challacombe. In it, as well as asking for things to be fixed I suggested that "Openreach might like to sponsor a competition to find which rural community has the greatest number of unresolved A1024's per head of population, or the longest standing unresolved A1024."

Mr Challacombe's response was: "I will ask someone to look at any infrastructure issues and come back to you. I will also look at the access network fault history to see if there is work we can and should be doing do to improve things."

OK, a small step forward and I appreciate the response, but I still like the idea of a competition, so more tomorrow!

UPDATE 2: Definitely like the idea of a competition, I just need to think a little more about how to run it. But the idea of trying to find the rural broadband grotspot with the most unresolved A1024 tags, and the oldest A1024 tag should be quite revealing - a bottle of bubbly for the winners, perhaps.

UPDATE 3: Presumably, 'our' PCP is based on PC100 strips, which makes it vulnerable to the ingress of water and damp. Not a good idea, then, that the crack in the door is facing the incoming rain. It's also likely that this half-size PCP is obsolete, meaning that something else will have to be fitted. Well, at least that's a good opportunity for Openreach to be forward thinking in how they might replace it!

HOT TIP: If you want to complain about Openreach issues directly, look at the link to the Weekly Service Performance and Lead Time Forecast Summary Report above for the name of your regional Openreach director and email them. Weekends are best! Their email addresses follow the standard form of: fred.bloggs@openreach.co.uk

Cabinet On Its Last Legs

2009-07-19T14:38:00.006+01:00

I suppose the headline is a fairly commonplace one at the moment, but for once this one has nothing at all to do with Gordon Brown.

It seems that our GPO-era Primary Cross-Connection Point or PCP - known to most of us as a 'Green Cabinet' or 'Cab' has died. Mind you, looking at the colour of it, it looks to have died some time ago and is now turning from a bilious green colour to more of a cadaverous, greeny-brown, colour.

For the technically minded, BT define a PCP as: "Part of the line plant, in the form of a metal cabinet at the roadside, that enables flexibility between the main cables from the exchange and the smaller cables to individual streets or premises." Cutting through the pretentious twaddle, it's a box full of wires, a little like this one.
The PCP marks the divide between the main cable from the exchange and the small cables going out to the various properties round the village.

In the case of the Winterbourne Stoke PCP, and to paraphrase Monty Python, it's not pining, it's passed on. This PCP is no more! It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late PCP. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace.

If it hadn't been concreted into the ground it would be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-PCP.

Rather than giving it a toe-tag, BT have attached a A1024 fault label to indicate work needs doing. You can click on the photo to see it in detail, but what it says is:

Serial No: 11403---
Defect: Unable to secure pillar requires new shell
Name: - of engineer
OUC(?): BCRC26
Date: 29/06/09

So basically, this 20th century chunk of cast-iron heavy engineering has simply worn out, presumably through over use and needs to be replaced. The black plastic tie is all that is holding the door closed, but is hardly sealing it shut. Given the rain we've had lately, I hope everything inside is water proof - it will need to be.

The tag also tells the engineer to use only permanent marker when filling it out. This may be because the tag is likely to be around for some time, exposed to the elements before anyone is likely to be around to fix the problem - at least judging by the other A1024-marked items around the village like the one here:

I guess this one might have been filled out in indelible ink, but there doesn't seem much information left on the tag now.

I'm beginning to wonder if BT use the A1024 in lieu of actually doing anything concrete like a repair. I suppose we will have to wait months now for something to be done, but wouldn't it make sense for BT to replace the existing PCP with a remote mini-DSLAM, while they have the chance. Better still, replace it with an equivalent for fibre!

A Tale of Two Dropwires

2009-07-18T08:05:00.007+01:00

A few weeks ago, one of my neighbours, a BT Broadband customer, reported that both her broadband and her telephone had become unusable. Like all of us, she has a long-term problem with REIN which causes routers to lose sync with the DSLAM at the exchange at least once every 24 hours; more frequently in wet or windy weather.

She, like several others of us, also has a long-standing phone problem that I've written about before. Basically, it's almost impossible to hear a caller if one villager makes a phone call to another.

This time though, the problem was a little different. Phone calls within the village can be made, but one or both parties can't hear the other. Long distance calls aren't as bad, but recipients often complain of low volume, whilst we can hear them reasonably well. Most people have no clicks or other noises on the line and BT tests always show that the line is OK.

My neighbour's specific problem was as follows. The line, from the drop pole pictured above, suffered all of the above problems, but she was now get noises on the line. Some of these were irregular clicks and another irregular noise that sounded like someone sucking their teeth. Underlying these irregular noises was a very high-pitched whine that came in regular pulses - about 1-2 seconds on and 1-2 seconds off. It was right on the limit of my hearing, but my younger neighbour heard it clearly.

Self-help measures like changing the phone (to wired, not DECT) made a small difference to the sound volume heard in local calls, but didn't stop the line noises. A DECT phone wired to the Master socket sounded like a jet engine running at full throttle in the background.

As a phone call progressed, the irregular noises built in intensity and within a minute, the broadband connection lost sync and wouldn't regain it. Even rebooting the router, or returning it to factory defaults failed to have any effect. Openreach engineers came on several occasions, played with a few things and the broadband recovered, but two different HomeHubs (a 1.5 or 2.0) would lose sync and not regain it as soon as a phone call was made, or if the router was simply left on overnight.

All the obvious things were tried by Openreach, the "pair" was changed (the original pair was found to be unbalanced - it took them 2 years to work that out despite several Openreach visits during this time), there was a "lift and shift" at the exchange, all internal extensions were disconnected, the Master socket was replaced, etc, etc.

Finally, Openreach took a look at the dropwire, which was damaged. Once they had sorted this out, the router regained sync and seems to have been reasonably reliable since - in other words, back to its normal slow speed. The underlying phone phone problem within the village has improved slightly, but is still there! Interestingly, the A1024 Openreach fault tag is still nailed to the drop pole.

Now the only reason Openreach persisted with this case and partially solved it was because the fault had been escalated within BT to the staff in the Director's office (In extremis contact BT CEO Ian Livingston at ian.livingston@bt.com). I don't believe it would have been sorted out, as it hadn't been in the course of Openreach engineers visits over the preceeding two years, if Openreach had been left to their own devices.

Now here's the rub. While all this was going on, the only other neighbour (a Virgin Broadband customer) connected to the same drop pole, had lost their broadband connection at exactly the same time, but their phone was fine. They were in the throes of trying to get this sorted out via the Virgin helpdesk and, fairly predictably, getting nowhere fast. None of the usual self-help measures (filters, restarts, etc) had worked.

However, once the dropwire problem to the first customer had been fixed, replacement of the broadband filters and restarting the second villager's router got the broadband connection back again.

This raises a rather worrying possibility and one I've not seen mentioned anywhere previously. It looks as though a phone/broadband fault on one telephone line could cause a broadband fault in other lines connected to the same drop pole. If the person affected doesn't have broadband and hasn't noticed noises on their phone line, or has and just ignores them, then finding the fault may prove a little difficult.

The big lessons here are to go and talk to the neighbours if you have a phone or broadband fault and try to get the fault escalated by your ISP/BT if you don't seem to be getting anywhere - but read this advice first.

A Year Goes By

2009-07-02T20:30:00.004+01:00

Well, would you believe it. Today is the first anniversary of REIN in Winterbourne Stoke. Exactly one year since I first reported, what I thought was going to be a simple problem, to BT. Little did I know then exactly what was wrong, little did I appreciate that the problems I had were replicated on just about every broadband connection in the village.

A year ago, I had little idea of the arcane nature of the DSL broadband system, its sensitivities and vulnerabilities. Like many, I'd taken all this for granted and whilst I could accept that in a rural area I might get slower speeds than in a large urban area, I hadn't really appreciated that things could get worse - much worse.

Well, over the last year, I and the rest of the village have learned more about broadband than any of us ever wanted to know. Along the way, I've been in touch with some really good folk who have tried to help. Some of these were just ordinary members of the public who had similar experiences, others came from different parts BT.

On the downside, I also had contact with others in BT who I can only describe as "unhelpful" - either by virtue of their unwillingness to do anything whatsoever, or because the information and advice they gave was, quite simply, incorrect or untrue. Like many others, I was taken in at first by some of the flim-flam, but the more I read and the more good information I was given, it soon became easier to spot the misinformation. On the whole though, the majority of those with whom I have had dealings, have genuinely tried to help.

What have we learned over the last year? Well, perhaps the most important thing has been the parlous state of much of the UK's telephone infrastructure outside of the major metropolitan centres. We are, all too sadly, not alone and some are in an even worse predicament.

We've learned more about the iniquitous way broadband is charged for in the UK. What other commodity could you buy that was sold in an "up to" quantity? We've seen how this effectively means that rural customers are subsidising those in the urban areas - by paying the same price for so much less.

We've learned how the artificial separation of BT Openreach from the rest of BT, creates a recipe for disaster for all broadband customers in the UK, regardless of their ISP. But we've also experienced first hand how the chinese walls created between Openreach and the other parts of BT, disadvantage BT Broadband customers more than most. By striving to be scrupulously fair to everyone else, it appears that BT becomes unfair to its own customers.

We've learned that whatever the future of broadband in Winterbourne Stoke, we are going to have to fight to get it. We've started this fight already and we are looking at a range of possible alternatives.

We contributed to the Digital Britain review and had two papers taken for consideration during the review process and we will be involved in the follow up actions resulting from the final Digital Britain report.

There are a range of ongoing discussions with industry, NGOs, government departments, academia and others - both nationally and internationally; all of which are designed to stop Winterbourne Stoke's slide into the digital divide, and hopefully begin to take us forward on a number of fronts.

So, a year on, why don't we just give up and accept things as they are? Well, that would be way too easy. Although this began, we thought, as a simple broadband repair issue, we've grown to realise that this represents just the tip of the iceberg. Access to fast broadband is not only essential for the future of the UK economy, it is essential to every part of the UK economy - urban or rural. Without such access, rural opportunity, rural wealth creation, health, education and the very future of rural communities will be at risk.

Put simply, it is not a case of giving up; we can't give up and in some ways we've only just begun.

We are not just going to go away.

We may not have succeeded in finding a solution this year, and we might not succeed next year, but we will find a way forward.

We are not going to go away!

INCA and the Community Broadband Network

2009-06-26T19:59:00.006+01:00

A couple of days ago, I was pointed towards a link at www.samknows.com, which Adrian Wooster, the Chief Technology Officer for the Community Broadband Network (CBN), had written on getting fibre to rural locations. I first got in touch with CBN a few months ago and had a few email exchanges with them. It was their suggestions that ultimately led to the creation of this blog.

I think you might be pleasantly surprised by what Adrian Wooster had to say. One issue in particular caught my eye and that was the cost of installing fibre. He says:
“The figures BT works to when it says it will cost £30bn to give fibre to the country rely on quotes for road works to lay cables at £125 per metre whereas we have been able to put people in touch with contracts who work to £4.50 per metre,”

OK, what would those costings mean for Winterbourne Stoke? Well, according to BT, the aluminium cable that is at the heart of all our broadband problems is 3361 metres long - most of it running under fields and not roads. Applying the BT figure of £125/metre for fibre installation, the cost of a fibre backhaul to Shrewton would be the staggering sum of £420,125 - and that is without the cost of providing a new fibre termination at the Winterbourne Stoke end and whatever new equipment might be needed at the Shrewton exchange. That works out at a minimum of £5,250 to bring fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) for every home in Winterbourne Stoke. No wonder BT CEO Ian Livingston said the figures I had got from the Digital Britain report were incorrect!

But wait a minute, if we use the figure of £4.50/m which Adrian Wooster claims to have achieved, then the cost of replacing 3361 metres of aluminium cable with fibre comes out at £15,125. This equates to under £200 per household. Even with the cost of new terminations suitable for fibre, it seems a viable proposition. Fibre to the home (FTTH) also begins to look viable, with costings like this. I'd be most interested to hear Ian Livingston's reaction to an estimated price difference of £405,000!

What can we do about this? Several things, the most immediate of which has been to get involved with Adrian Wooster and CBN's new venture - INCA, the Independent Networks Co-operative Association. I've already approached them on behalf of the village. We will see where that takes us.

Mind the Gap: Digital England - a rural perspective

2009-06-24T20:30:00.010+01:00

Yesterday, 23rd June 2009, the Commission for Rural Communities published 'Mind the Gap: Digital England - a rural perspective'

"This is the rural contribution to Lord Carter's Digital Britain report.

Among other issues, the report highlights the importance of broadband to rural communities. Broadband internet is now considered to be the ‘fourth utility’ and rural households are now more likely to have broadband connections than those who live in urban areas.

However, lack of broadband provision or poor speeds mean that many rural areas risk being left further behind as Next Generation Broadband is rolled out, unless solutions can be found".

Source: Commission for Rural Communities

Even if you have not been able to read the whole Digital Britain Report, I would strongly urge you to read this contribution to it. There are some very useful graphs and charts that compare the availability and speeds of broadband in rural areas compared with their urban counterparts. It really makes you appreciate how deep the digital divide has already become and how much deeper it is going to get before 2012.

It becomes increasingly apparent by just how much disenfranchised rural broadband users are subsidising those in urban areas, by paying similar monthly charges for substantially poorer access.

Perhaps it's time rural inns and pubs started selling beer in quantities of "Up to 1 pint". Rural customers would receive a brimming glassful, urban customers would get a mere dribble in the bottom of their glass. All would be charged the same price irrespective of how much they actually received. We could try something similar in rural petrol stations, with petrol and diesel prices charges for quantities up to 1 litre!

I don't think it be long before the someone cried "foul" at such apparent "unfairness" - but really, what is the difference? Perhaps we ought to try it and see?

I'd be very interested in any thoughts you might have, having read the report.

A Gold Star for BT!

2009-06-22T18:51:00.005+01:00

I know I am often very hard on BT here on the blog, but just occasionally something happens that is out of the ordinary and restores a little faith in BT. For the last few weeks, one of the villagers has been having severe problems that were over and above the usual REIN issue with broadband in Winterbourne Stoke.

Although Openreach engineers had visited, any improvements they had made at the exchange had only been transient. To cut a long story short, BT are now going the extra mile to try and sort out this particular problem; effort which is much appreciated by all concerned.

So, credit where credit's due. Thank you BT!

The Digital Britain Report - What It Means for Winterbourne Stoke

2009-06-17T20:20:00.008+01:00

Well, Lord Carter and his team published the Digital Britain Report yesterday, 16th June 2009, on time and with much fanfare. You can download all of it, or just parts of it from here.

I have to confess that in my last blog, I had very low hopes for what it might contain. I have to say, and this might come as surprise to many, I was pleasantly surprised. This was a big, timely and important review that has long term implications for the economic well-being of the UK. Parochially, it has great importance for the future of rural Britain - and the possibilities of new forms of working in rural locations.

The Core Facts Arising from the report are as follows:

1. Universal access to today’s broadband services by 2012
2. Next Generation fund for investment in tomorrow’s broadband services
3. Upgraded mobile networks
4. National Plan to improve Digital Participation
5. Robust legal and regulatory framework to combat Digital Piracy
6. Support for public service content partnerships and revised digital remit for Channel 4
7. Funding options for national, regional and local news
8. Programme of Digital Switchover in Public Services

If all these can be achieved, in the timescales that have been proposed, it will be a massive achievement. So, we have the report. What me must see now is action!

Now it is a big and beefy report and there are many aspects that will impact on the village. For the moment, I have focused on the provision of broadband.

The key thing here is the provision of 2Mbps broadband to virtually every home in Britain by 2012. It's anticipated that this will be a technology neutral mix of fixed and mobile broadband, with priority being given to "not spots". The technology neutral approach should encourage innovative solutions that will be compatible with next generation broadband.

The report recognises that this is not sufficient to reap the full benefits of a digital economy and so introduces plans for the "Next Generation" of higher speed broadband infrastructure. This is planned for roll out to two-thirds of the population by 2017. The report also recognises that the provison of Next Generation infrastructure to the final third of the country will not be an economically attractive proposition for broadband companies and so they have proposed a 50p/month surcharge (the Next Generation Fund) on all phone connections to raise £175M/year to finance the Final Third Project. Of course, this surcharge may increase in the future.

It's not clear yet if, how and when Winterbourne Stoke might benefit, and clearly it is unlikely to be clear for a good while yet. So we will still be looking for interim and longer term solutions on a self-help basis. The one development that offers us the best hope, buried deep in the report, is the following statement:

"...there might be value in a comprehensive inventory of the UK’s Ducts,
Poles, Lit Fibre, Unlit Fibre, Used and Unused Wavelengths to establish the
complete picture of what infrastructure is out there, what is actually being
used, what is likely to be used and therefore what could be used for a future
UK NGN rollout..."

With one of the largest bundles of unlit fibre in the country running through the heart of the village, we might be in with a chance!

As a humorous aside to all this, the report carries a graph (click on it for detail) that illustrates the cost of providing fibre-to-the-home (FTTH). It's a very odd graph if you look at it closely and it appears to say that it will cost £2,000 to connect no-one to FTTH, and roughly the same price per property to connect 60% of the population. Now my simple maths (with tongue firmly in cheek) said, if it is commercially viable to spend £2,000 to connect each property to FTTH, then it ought to cost around £160,000-£180,000 to provide FTTH to every property in Winterbourne Stoke and be financially viable! Exactly the same cost that BT had suggested for replacing our aluminium cable.

Hmm, I couldn't let that one go, so I fired off an email late yesterday evening to Ian Livingston, and he responded within minutes. His reply, at least in part equally tongue in cheek, suggested that the figures might be wrong. BT figures for replacement costs - surely not, my count of houses - maybe a couple out, or the Government report - well, their track record isn't exactly good. He went on to suggest that if it was such an attractive proposition, other ISPs might be queuing up to take on the new business, or perhaps I might want to develop it myself. Failing that, we could wait till 2017. It's good to know he has a sense of humour - in arduis fidelis! Now here's an idea Ian, let me have the £180,000 you don't want to spend on replacing our static infrastructure, I'll find a future-proof alternative, get it installed and let you have the change - what could be fairer than that?

One of the good things about contacting Ian Livingston is that it sometimes results in a follow-up phone call from a lovely lady called Rosary, asking how things are going with broadband in the village. Everyone who has a problem with BT should meet their very own "Rosary". If they did, BT's reputation for customer service would be second to none. She's a credit to the organisation and a real trier, and when she says she is going to do something, she usually delivers - and gets genuinely frustrated when she can't. Ah, it's all a con, I can almost hear you say - smooth-talking at its best! Actually, no. You learn a lot about the people you are dealing with when you make use of a Subject Access Request under the Data Protection Act. Rosary is the real deal!

The Digital Britain Report

2009-06-14T19:36:00.004+01:00

The Digital Britain Report is due to be published on Tuesday 16th June 2009. We will see what it brings, especially for disenfranchised rural communities like Winterbourne Stoke - but I wouldn't hold your breath!

Last week, Lord Stephen Carter announced that he was quitting as a Minister once the Digital Britain report had been completed and there are rumours of him crossing the floor of the House of Commons to take the Conservative whip. All will unfold in time, I am sure.

Kijoma Pricing and Other Info

2009-06-08T22:12:00.006+01:00

Someone asked about pricing of the Kijoma broadband service. Here is the list from the Kijoma website. Just click to enlarge it.

Bill Lewis, the MD of Kijoma, also noted that they are running a system successfully over at Portsdown - in an area with high radar and radio activity that prevents conventional approaches. Encouraging news.

Kijoma Broadband - Another Possible Solution

2009-06-07T10:49:00.004+01:00

I recently received a response from Bill Lewis of Kijoma Broadband to an enquiry I had made about the service they might be able to provide. Early days yet, but it looks promising. Watch out for further news on this topic when Kijoma have conducted their initial checks.

Thank you for your enquiry on our website, my initial response to whether we can provide a service somewhere is yes, as we have yet to have to say no to anywhere we have connected.

We will do some initial checks on our maps for the area there and see what we can do for you, have you any idea of numbers? , locations (post codes) of these potential subscribers?.

The trickiest question to answer at present is .. When.. , The demand for our service is considerable at the moment in the areas we cover so we wouldn't be able to do anything in the short term for your area but can certainly crowbar you into the schedule for later in the year if there is a definite request for service there.

We may even be able to visit in the meantime , with short notice if we gain a big enough gap in our current scheduled installation work.

A bit about Kijoma:-

Kijoma provide broadband using interference free wireless technology (not WiFi or mesh), our technology allows us to provide very high speeds over considerable distances with a low capital and environmental cost.

Kijoma was formed in the year 2000, and is an entirely private company with no external investors, loans or other finance. Our entire system is owned and operated by Kijoma, the only 3rd party companies we deal with are our hosts in London and local aerial installation contractors when required.

Kijoma came top 5 in the best wireless ISP awards at the ISPA's 2008 along with T-mobile and Vodafone,We were beaten by Vodafone. (the category covered mobile and fixed services). The ISPA performed tests on our network for 6 months, hourly.

I will get back to you with the result of our initial checks as soon as we have had chance to look at it.

Major Service Outage Affecting Shrewton Exchange

2009-06-07T10:40:00.005+01:00

After another dreadful week of slow broadband speeds, this morning we suffered a total failure of broadband in the area:

SHREWTON MUX 001 & MSAN 301 : LOSS OF SERVICE
Update Number 1
Detected 07/06/2009 08:41
Started 07/06/2009 08:35
Anticipated Clear Time: 07/06/2009 10:35
Area Codes 01980

The exchange was failing to provide IP addresses, although RouterStats clearly showed a connection path back to the exchange. For once, things were rectified fairly quickly and the Shrewton exchange was back in operation ahead of the estimated time. As of 1200, the BT website is showing that the fault has been resolved.

Thinkbroadband Survey

2009-06-04T16:30:00.009+01:00

Thinkbroadband, a really useful site for information on all things broadband in the UK, is undertaking a national survey to identify broadband "not spots" and "slow spots". It would be worthwhile anyone with slow speeds visiting the site here and registering your speed.
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Source: broadband notspot

Thinkbroadband have also introduced a new tool that will be of help to anyone who wants to monitor their broadband usage.

The tbbMeter allows you to see how much your computer is sending to and receiving from the Internet in real time. It also shows you how your Internet usage varies at different times of the day. It does not record what you do on the Internet (i.e. it doesn't know what web pages you visit).

This tool will help you to manage your usage to avoid incurring excess bandwidth fees or find your broadband provider slowing you down due to exceeding your monthly usage allowance.

Source: thinkbroadband.com

Wireless Broadband - A Response From Vodafone

2009-05-25T18:52:00.005+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote to the CEOs of all of the UK's major mobile broadband providers - 3, 02, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone, to ask if any of them had plans to improve the mobile phone access in Winterbourne Stoke from 2G to 3G.

One of the CEOs, Guy Laurence of Vodafone, passed the request on to Vodafone's Regional Environmental and Planning Specialist responsible for this part of the county - Richard K******.

Richard wrote:

"I have responsibility within Vodafone for any enquiries relating to existing or proposed radio base stations in your area. As you may know, Vodafone and Telefónica O2 have recently announced an agreement to share mobile network assets across selected European operations, including the UK.

The infrastructure sharing initiatives are broadly expected to enable both companies to

• Offer enhanced quality of service levels within the network footprint to improve customers’ mobile experience as well as support the delivery of services such as mobile broadband to a greater number of customers across a wider coverage area

• Reduce the environmental impact of the network by lowering the number of sites required by each company

• Reduce network operating costs

• Continue to manage their traffic independently

• Jointly build new sites where opportunities exist

However, as you can imagine, such a wide-ranging strategic programme takes time to put in place, and as yet, our two companies are still examining where our shared resources can be used most effectively to benefit our customers and shareholders.

We are therefore currently assessing network deployment across the UK, and whilst I understand from our regional planning team that there are currently no plans to improve Vodafone coverage in this area, it is too early to say what provision may be made in the future given our recent announcement".

So, not the overwhelmingly positive response we might have hoped for, but there is still the tiniest possibility that the Vodafone-O2 Telefónica tie-up might have something to offer in the future. At least Vodfone took the trouble to respond, for which many thanks. Surprising too, in a way, as Vodafone don't have a mast close to the village - unlike O2. Orange and T-Mobile.

We will see if any of the other companies respond.

BT Speed Prediction Blues!

2009-05-20T20:15:00.007+01:00

The other day, for a reason I can't remember, I decided to check the speed BT would offer me if I was a new customer, based on my postcode and phone number. I was a little surprised by the result, as it indicated my line would only support a fixed speed of 512 kbps and ADSL Max at 500 kbps. This is in stark contrast to what I was told a couple of years ago when I first signed up to BT broadband. Then I was told I should get speeds of around 2Mb/s. Not "up to" 2Mb/s, around 2Mb/s - an important distinction.

My initial reaction was that I had, after all, complained about my connection, and BT had discovered the fault lay in the several kilometres of aluminium backhaul between the single street cabinet that serves Winterbourne Stoke and the exchange in Shrewton. Perhaps BT had reduced the "expected" speeds to every line across the village in a similar manner?

I decided rather than speculate, I'd better check exactly what was going on and the results are shown on the schematic on the right. Just click on the image to see a larger view. Again, the results came as something of a shock. The results cover 8 separate post codes and each telephone line was checked by postcode + telephone number. The schematic suggests the following points:

- in 5 out of the 8 postcodes there was a big variation in the predicted speeds of different lines;

- 2 postcodes were each represented by a single connection, so no inferences could be drawn;

- only in 1 postcode, my own, was every line predicted to get the same speed;

- those connections furthest from the street cabinet had the highest predicted speeds, whilst many of those connections closest to the street cabinet had some of the lowest predicted speeds;

- the middle of the phone network in the village showed a wide variation in the predicted speeds, with the highest being 8 times higher than the lowest.

- the oddest examples are two properties that each have separate domestic and business lines. In one, despite being the closest property to the street cabinet, the domestic line shows it cannot receive broadband at all, whilst the business line can. In the second case, there is a 4-fold difference in the speeds of the two lines.

- by and large those who have reported faults to their ISP's have lower predicted line speeds than those who haven't reported faults.

Now the IP profiles people actually get on their broadband connections bear little relationship to BT's predicted speeds. The better connections can be two to three times faster than BT's predictions, whilst the worst connections in the village can be only a third, or less, of the predicted speed. This leads on to another interesting finding. Those who have reported faults and whose predicted line speed is low, frequently have an IP profile higher than the predicted speed. The converse is usually true for those who haven't reported faults.

OK, BT do say that these speeds are only indicative, but what affect will they have in practise? Bear in mind that the Shrewton exchange is a Market 1 exchange, meaning that BT is a monopoly supplier, with no local loop unbundling. BT Retail are also the ISP for around 50% of the village.

Given the problems many folk have been experiencing with their BT broadband, it's a reasonable bet that some will decide to find another ISP when their contract is up for renewal. When they approach the new ISP, the ISP will use the same speed prediction tables, provided by BT, to indicate the "best" line speed the potential new customer might achieve. Now here's the rub. Those who have reported a problem are only likely to be offered a service at the predicted speed by a new ISP - lower than the speed they are now getting from BT.

Those who have not really been affected by low speeds, perhaps because of their internet habits, will be offered a connection, by a new ISP, at a similar speed to that they believe they are currently getting from BT.

I leave it to you, the reader, to decide what might be going on here. Well, you and OFCOM.

The final part to this sorry tale is the letter on the right, sent to a customer in the village a few weeks since. Again, click on it to see the detail. You will note that the letter quite clearly states that "Your line can support a maximum broadband speed of about 2500kbps" Note, it does not say, "Up to 2500kbps".

Now that is odd, because BT's own figures for the line this connection is on suggest it can only support a maximum speed of "up to" 2000kbps. Hmm, something odd going on here too, maybe. Again, I leave it to you and OFCOM to decide just what.

Oh, the real crunch comes when you consider the actual IP profile of this line after the settling in period - 350kbps! "Up to 2000kbps", "about 2500kbps - really!

What Are The Alternatives To Fibre?

2009-05-16T16:28:00.008+01:00

Over the last few months I have been giving more and more thought to the issue of fibre and the alternative ways a good and future-proof broadband service might be delivered to Winterbourne Stoke. These thoughts were given renewed emphasis by the less than encouraging noises coming out of the Digital Britain Summit in London last month.

The diagram at the head of this post, taken from the Digital Britain interim report, gives an idea how the review team saw broadband provision in the UK. It illustrates quite nicely the difference between the "middle mile" and "last mile" of the network and a fairly conventional view of how broadband services are currently delivered to homes and businesses in the UK. It focuses on copper and fibre links for the middle mile of the network, the bit between the exchange and the green cabinet in the street and shows copper, coaxial cable and wifi as alternative last mile solutions. The diagram mentions satellite broadband, almost as an afterthought, and omits fibre between the cabinet and home entirely. This got me wondering what other technologies were out there, that were available now, that might offer us a better prospect for broadband and other digital services in the future.

When I looked, I found a wide variety of possible solutions that at least offer some hope for the future and that mean we are not totally reliant on BT providing a fibre middle mile infrastructure in the future. I also found companies and NGO's who were interested in promoting such alternative solutions. Over the next few weeks, I'll look at some of these possibilities in detail, but for now, here is a taster of what is to come.

The basic problem in Winterbourne Stoke is the middle mile, in our case a decaying length of aluminium cable that is the worst possible carrier for a broadband signal. BT Openreach have refused to replace this with copper on economic grounds and would not even consider replacing it with fibre. Is there an alternative?

Well, as it happens, yes there are. One of these is offered by an innovative UK company called Wavesight. Wavesight’s WAVEMAX wireless bridges enable ISPs to deliver broadband to rural communities where the cost of traditional cabling is prohibitive - just like Winterbourne Stoke. Being wireless, WaveMAX can be installed far more quickly and cost effectively, enabling more rural communities to enjoy the same connectivity as those in the cities - closing the Digital Divide. We pointed BT's CEO Ian Livingston towards Wavesight some weeks ago as a possible means of solving problems not just here but in rural communities across the UK - we are still waiting for an answer!

Could we do without terrestrial broadband entirely? Well, there are more alternatives in the pipeline. Satellite broadband is taking off, so to speak. There are several companies now offering this for home and small business use and two in particular seem to offer real possibilities: Avanti Communications who are offering a range of products for home, community and business use and who have been involved in some groundbreaking work providing satellite broadband to communities in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and Tooway, a satellite broadband system from Eutelsat Communications.
At present, the broadband speeds on offer, up to 2Mb/s, are already better than the 0.5 Mb/s that BT are now indicating their network is capable of (funny how that keeps dropping!). Both companies are indicating that they will be offering speeds of up to 10Mb/s within the next couple of years.

Finally, we have the "Big Five" mobile broadband companies. All of them are offering mobile broadband either under monthly contract or as PAYG. If you are in an area with HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access aka 3.5G - but you already knew that!) access, this is already offering speeds of "upto" 3.6 Mb/s and in some cases up to 7.2 Mb/s. Unless you live close to a wifi mast your speeds will be less than this, but they are normally comparable with broadband here in Winterbourne Stoke. It is worth noting that some pundits are even predicting that mobile broadband will outperform home, fixed-line broadband by 2010. Certainly, the technology offers the potential of speeds of up to 100Mb/s.

At present, although we have O2, Orange and T-Mobile masts within 1km of the heart of the village, none of them appear to be HSDPA-enabled, or if they are, the village is lying in a shadow area. Either way, we've written to the CEOs of these companies to try and establish their plans as they relate to this area. Will HSDPA be offered? We'll let you know if and when we get any responses.

Lots of food for thought there. All of the technologies have potential benefits and all have some drawbacks. Some will improve greatly in the next 2-3 years. The question is, which would be the best solution, or solutions, for Winterbourne Stoke and other rural communities in a similar fix?

Read more over the next few weeks.

The Cherry Picker Returns

2009-05-14T06:59:00.005+01:00

A sharp-eyed villager has noticed that the cherry-picker on a white van was seen again in the last couple of days. This time it was over at Airman's Cross on the A344. The first time it was seen on the A303, it was estimated that the platform of the cherry-picker was around 15 metres above the ground. Interestingly, if you look back towards Airman's Cross from the Druid's Lodge turning, you would need to be about 15 metres above the ground to see the Airman's Cross Junction.

We've still no idea what is going on, so if anyone sees this truck again, it might be worth asking anyone with it. Perhaps someone already has, or knows what is going on? If so, please leave a comment.

WiFi Issues - BT Take First Prize!

2009-05-10T12:59:00.005+01:00

I did a survey of wi-fi across the village yesterday, using an Edimax wifi detector, a neat piece of kit that combines a wifi detector and adapter into a single item. Ideal when you are travelling and want to find a wireless access point but don't want to turn on your laptop or other wireless enabled device.

The Edimax provides details of the SSID, if it's broadcasting, channel, security type and signal strength. This allowed me to produced the map of wifi coverage above. Inevitably, this is a very simplistic view of what is really going on and the reality is much more complicated and beyond my drawing skills to capture. It's also limited by how many sites where I took readings gave me results for a particular router. This was restricted, to some extent, by only taking readings from public rights-of-way. Consequently, some of the routers are almost certainly putting out wifi signals into areas I simply couldn't access and there will be dead-spots within these overall footprints.

Broadly speaking, the area covered by each broadband router is governed by the wifi power output of the router, the channel it is operating on, where in the house the router is placed, the type of house construction, topography of the area and a host of other factors. In some cases, the signal barely gets outside the house - for instance, many of the smaller footprints are BT HomeHub 1.0s and BTHomeHub 1.5s. In others cases, a single wifi signal can cover a large section of the village. I'll point out just three of the most interesting cases from across the area surveyed.

The outright winner in the distance stakes is a BT HomeHub 2.0, a "draft N" device. This gives some credence to BT's claims for range for this device. If only BT could sort out the plethora of connectivity problems, wifi issues and update the defective firmware, the HomeHub 2.0 would be a good router option. This was clearly a "good" example of its type and was pumping out a usable signal along a 300 metre section of the road. Of course, you would need a very powerful laptop adapter to make use of it!

The runner-up was a Netgear DG834G wireless G router in the same part of the village. Given their all-round reliability, reputation for hanging onto sync on very long and poor lines, compatibility with diagnostic software like RouterStats and sheer robustness, I'd have to recommend them as being pretty close to the ideal router for conditions like those here in the village.

The third router, a Belkin54G, put out a useable signal over a very wide and almost circular area.

When you see how the signals overlap, you will begin to understand why the survey was done in the first place and why it's important to pick the right wifi channel to use to prevent conflict with your neighbours router. Many of the networks in the densest areas of wifi coverage were using the default channels 1 and 11. Clearly it might be worth changing some of these to reduce the possibility of interference. If you were to do so, you would ideally go up, or down, at least two channels (1 to 3, or 11 to 9), or even more as each channel runs over into the adjacent one(s).

BT Chaos

2009-05-08T20:17:00.006+01:00

Earlier in the week, one of the villagers had a problem with their BT HomeHub. It was nothing serious and should have taken a matter of seconds to diagnose the original problem and about as long again to fix it - all that was really required was to turn everything off, then turn everything on again in the right order - router first and then the PC. Well, it would have been quick were it not for the BT Helpdesk and the dreaded BT scripts.

Now my neighbour, whilst computer literate and involved in online publishing, is not particularly familiar with home networking, and so was completely at the mercy of the BT Helpdesk. After a couple of hours of them asking my neighbour to do completely pointless tests, most unrelated to the problem that had been reported, the Helpdesk then surpassed itself by getting her to do a "factory reset" on the HomeHub; instantly trashing her home network. It was only at this point that the Helpdesk rather unhelpfully mentioned that she would now need an RJ45 cable to connect her PC to the HomeHub by ethernet to allow her to change the settings from the factory defaults. All very well, but this was a totally wireless setup - not an RJ45 in sight.

Result, a day of frustration and lost productivity. All of this was avoidable had the Helpdesk only listened to what was being said, understood anything about the product they were supporting, and provided some useful advice. Things might have been easier if the phone connection had been better, but BT have consistently failed to locate and rectify a long standing fault.

All's well that ends well. It took under 10 seconds to diagnose what the original fault had been and the consequences of BT's "helpful" suggestions and it took only a few minutes more, including the walk home and back to get a cable, to return the HomeHub and the network to its former state. But no thanks to BT.

UPDATE: A few posts ago I mentioned that a neighbour had been made a somewhat outrageous offer by BT to renew his contract. It seemed to good to be true and so he had asked for the offer to be made in writing - which BT had promised faithfully to do. Two weeks on and the postman still hasn't delivered it. Hmmmm!

Possible Solutions - Loop Extenders

2009-05-05T20:49:00.004+01:00

It's very easy to simply complain about the problems we face as Winterbourne Stoke slips ever deeper into the digital divide. But a lot more is going on, in the background, which will be reported here as it matures. That covers everything from cases with Otello and Ofcom, possible technical solutions that might overcome the need for fibre entirely and other measures that might buy time by providing a reasonably fast and reliable broadband service for the village.

One approach is a fairly inexpensive widget called a loop extender. The picture at the top of the screen shows what the Widearea AER800 1p looks like when it arrives - and yes, the manual is in Mandarin - or is it Cantonese?

The lower picture shows the main working part of the AER800 1p.

Loop extenders are widely used in China, the US and Australia to extend the range of broadband coverage and to provide higher bandwidth to current users. They are placed towards the middle of the cable run between exchange and user and work by repeating the signal received, acting as a sort of amplifier.

Needless to say, we raised the issue of loop extenders with BT as they seemed a possible solution to our specific problems and might also be of value in other rural communities with similar issues. BT kindly took the time to respond to the enquiry, suggesting that they had tested them in the past, but that they tended to introduce interference into the adjacent phone lines. Not a good thing at all. BT suggested that this might have been down to differences between the UK and other phone systems. We wondered about this, both how different the telephone systems actually were and also, if these devices were as prone to introduce interference as BT suggested, why on earth telcos elsewhere in the world still used them. So we did the obvious thing and spoke to contacts in the US telecomms industry.

The feedback we have had so far suggests that first generation loop extenders could introduce unwanted noise into telephone lines as BT suggested, but noted that things had moved on in recent years and the products were now much more versatile. Neither could our US contacts see any insurmountable difficulties in using them in a UK situation.

We've fed these points back to BT and await any response with great interest. In the meantime, has anyone got a good Chinese-English dictionary?

REIN Ruins Another Bank Holiday

2009-05-04T17:38:00.000+01:00

I spoke too soon. After 3 days when the 13:30 REIN event didn't happen, today it did, with a vengeance. Having nursed my router for three days to try and get my IP profile raised from 500kbps and succeeding in getting it up to 1000kbps - the last crash took me back to square one. I dare say others round the village are now in the same boat - apart from those who have IP profiles stuck at 135kbps.

REIN Stops Play

2009-05-02T19:35:00.004+01:00

It has been another bad week for REIN in the village. More people have been commenting on the massive loss of synch they have been suffering at around 1.30 in the afternoons. For some its just a temporary inconvenience, for others it's yet another crash in the IP profile and a few more days of very slow speeds and the possibility that the DSLAM might then increase the speed again.

I tried to capture it today, with RouterStats, and typically nothing happened at 1.30pm. But, just as I was thinking we had escaped, crash, the REIN hit at around 4pm.

The two traces at the top of the page show the effect very nicely. The first trace is the downstream (Rx) synch speed. At around 4.00pm it suddenly dropped from around 1400 kbps to just 800kbps. It stayed there for a few minutes and then the router was manually reset; the synch speed then rose to 1500kbps. In the lower trace you can see the downstream (received - Rx) noise margin. This dropped suddenly and without warning from around 13 dB to zero and the router lost synch. The router recovered and the noise margin shot up to 17dB, where it stayed until the router was manually reset, when it dropped to its original level. Unusually, the IP profile stayed at 1250 kbps throughout - but then dropped to 500 kbps an hour or so later when the DSLAM at the exchange reacted.

So, what caused this? Well, we have no idea and BT gave up looking months ago. But we may have just got a new lead. One of the villagers has noted that when he loses his broadband in the early afternoon, his wife complains of TV interference during her favourite TV program - Doctors - it happens at exactly the same time as the loss of synch, but doesn't affect every TV in the house in the same way. If anyone else out there has experienced anything similar, we would love to hear!

Re-Fixing the Plumbing

2009-05-02T08:18:00.003+01:00

Back on Wednesday 29th of April, I noticed a letter from BT CEO Ian Livingston in the Daily Telegraph. His letter referred to things he had said at the Digital Britain Summit earlier in the month, but these looked somewhat different to what had been reproduced here - points that had come from the "official" blogger from the Digital Britain Summit team. If you recall, the live video and audio feeds for the "Fixing the Plumbing" session failed on the day and few Press reporters were able to attend the event. However, the audio from the session was later published on the Digital Britain Discussion site and more recently, the transcript of the session has been published

I was anxious to be fair to Ian Livingston and set the record straight if I had got the points he had raised wrong. I was prepared to sit and listen to the whole audio recording again, all 50 minutes of it, but with a current IP profile of 500kbps that would have been well-nigh impossible. So I re-read the transcript.

In his letter to the Telegraph Livingston claimed that at the Digital Britain Summit he had said that:

"...applications which require speeds of 100Mbps have not yet been developed..."

Er, no Mr Livingston, what you said was "So the reason why didn't we go quicker actually there wasn't an application for our customers".

He goes on to suggest he said that: "...the BBC iPlayer requires speeds of around half a megabit" whereas what he actually said was:

"To receive good iPlayer it requires under a megabit per second".

Now if you have a reasonable broadband connection, the difference between "around half a megabit" and "under a megabit" may sound like splitting hairs, but for the large and, judging by BT's own customer forum, for the growing numbers of customers with falling broadband speeds it may make the difference between receiving the service and not receiving it.

Finally, Livingston's letter suggests that he said that: "...high definition TV requires about 7Mbps...". Well, again, no he didn't. What he actually said was: "...fibre to cabinet will give you, 60 meg its increasing all the time that's enough today for 6, 7, high definition TV streams coming into your home...". This suggests that it requires 8.5Mbps to 10 Mbps to deliver HDTV. Again, an apparently trivial difference, but one that would suggest more people could receive broadband HDTV than actually can.

It may be that Ian Livingston's letter reflects what he was meant to say, what he intended to say, at the Digital Britain Summit. But it wasn't what he said!

REIN - A Few Self-Help Measures

2009-04-27T20:01:00.005+01:00

Repetitive (or random) electrical impulse noise (REIN) is the bane of broadband connections here in Winterbourne Stoke, although in our case it's usually anything but random. In fact, it's usually highly predictable and the worst of the four events of the day usually happens between 0130 and 0300 every morning. This regularity gives one slight glimmer of hope in maintaining synch and thus not suffering from a drop in IP profile.

Simply connecting your router through a time switch can make all the difference, with it switching the router off around midnight and on again around 0400 in the morning. Of course, that makes something of a mockery of claims for "always on" broadband, but for most people it might be the best option. Of course it doesn't suit everyone and we do have a few night owls who can't use this approach.

The other thing that you can do to try and reduce the impact of REIN is to try and get rid of anything that might help introduce radio frequency (RF) noise onto the telephone line. The most notorious of these is the bell wire in the BT Master socket. Whilst it used to perform a useful function in the days of steam-driven telephony, it is now redundant and serves only as a large aerial to introduce noise onto your phone line. The answer is fairly straightforward - disconnect it. Comprehensive instructions for doing just that can be found here on Jarviser's website.

If you don't feel confident in doing this, then providing you have the right sort of BT Master socket, you should think about fitting a BT iPlate. This does a similar thing by isolating the bell wire. It also carries an electronic widget (a common mode choke) that might also help to reduce the impact of REIN. You can buy them from the online BT Shop for £11.74, but Broadbandbuyer offer them for only £8.14. If you hunt around, you may even find them at a better price. They are certainly worth trying and they do have a beneficial effect for many people - but I would suggest leaving it connected for a week to be sure of the effect it is having.

BT in Wonderland

2009-04-26T16:36:00.005+01:00

I bumped in to the villager who had been negotiating a new contract with BT yesterday. I'd assumed from our last conversation that he had decided to renew at a much lower cost, but it seems the deal is not yet done. However, he did tell me that the BT staff member he spoke to had made some pretty odd statements; especially given the state of the broadband connections here in Winterbourne Stoke.

When I heard what he had been told, I immediately assumed that whoever he had spoken to must have either been from a parallel universe, or had been consuming quantities mind-bending chemical substances so unlikely did BT's claims sound. As a child of the 60s, the BT offer reminded me of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" - a song modelled on "Alice in Wonderland" - and hence the link to a You Tube video. Please note - no sound for the first few seconds. The vision conjured up by the line in the song:

"Tell them all a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call" - just seemed to sum everything up. Enjoy!

Well, the villager was so surprised by some of what he heard from BT, and so doubtful of its veracity, that he wisely asked to have everything in writing before he committed to a decision. If he does eventually get this all in writing - and BT fail to deliver on their promise, it's likely to create quite a stir with OFCOM. Perversely, if BT succeed in delivering, it is also likely to create a stir with OFCOM.

So what did BT tell the villager that might have this result? For that, dear reader, you will have to wait awhile - at least until the BT offer is here in written form - if they honour their promise to provide it.

Mystery of the Week

2009-04-24T21:17:00.003+01:00

I'm not sure what was going on earlier today, up by the entrance to Druid's Lodge Farm off the A303, but a group of vehicles were parked on the verge. There were a couple of cars, a white van and a blue truck with a cherry picker on the back. The cherry picker had its boom extended to full height - the people who saw it reckoned it was around 15 metres above the ground and the chap in the basket was carrying what appeared to be a piece of electronic equipment. From the direction they were facing, I've estimated the line-of-sight that must have been involved, using Google Earth. That is shown in the top picture.

I wondered what sort of view they must have had, so I played with angles and knowing the spot height at which the cherry picker was located and the estimated length of the boom, I was able to come up with a representation of what the chap at the top might have seen. That's shown in the lower picture - you can just make out some of the farm buildings, the Bell Inn and the Stonehenge Filling Station, together with a few of the houses at the northern end of Church Street.

If the cherry-picker had been a few metres taller, more of the village would have been in view - or at least their roofs would have been. That really got me interested in knowing what was going on. Was it an unusual sort of road survey for the A303, a TV/radio signal survey, a mobile phone survey, or perhaps BT Openreach looking for a novel way of improving the broadband access for the village. Hmm, the people who saw this didn't mention any flying pigs, so my money is on anything but it being BT.

Does anyone else have any suggestions - or perhaps you know what was going on? Click on the images to get a better view.

Plumbing the Depths

2009-04-22T21:01:00.004+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, a neighbour mentioned that his company was going to pay for a second telephone line to be installed at his home - BT Business Broadband - and that BT had said he would get a much faster connection than with his existing BT Home Broadband connection. That wouldn't be too difficult, as last time I got speed test results for his home connection, it was 201 Kbps (down) and 180 Kbps (up). My neighbour needs the new line both for a VOIP link to his company and for general business access to the internet.

I warned him that the second line was unlikely to be any faster than his original one - after all, it connects to the exchange through the same decrepit length of aluminium cable as every other phone line in the village. Any minor speed gains would probably result from the use of a different router, but he shouldn't expect a 10-fold speed increase.

Needless to say, the day came, the new line was installed - and despite the paperwork saying his line would support a connection with speed of 2.5 Mbps - no speed increase.

Another example of how the BT plumbing isn't broken!

The second BT story of the day is another villager whose BT Home Broadband contract was coming to an end. He received a phone call from BT suggesting he renew his contract, get an upgrade perhaps which would give him a better, faster connection. He pointed out that given the level of service he had received over the last year, he was more inclined to move to a new ISP than renew his contract with BT.

Well, the outcome was, he negotiated a new price for a BT renewal. Much, much lower than he had been paying. A lesson for us all there I think!

Fixing The Plumbing

2009-04-21T21:59:00.003+01:00

The Digital Britain Forum has now put up the video of last Friday's Digital Britain Summit Session entitled "Fixing the Plumbing". It's 50 minutes long, but I haven't yet had the time to sit and watch it all. What did strike a chord was BT CEO Ian Livingston's opening comment on "Fixing the Plumbing".

He said: "The plumbing isn't broken"

I think there would be more than a few people here in Winterbourne Stoke, and many more around the country, who would beg to differ on that rather fundamental issue.

The reality here in Winterbourne Stoke looks a little bit more like the speedtest result below! Now remember, the plumbing really isn't broken!

The Digital Britain Summit

2009-04-17T18:52:00.004+01:00

The Digital Britain Summit took place earlier today, 17 April 2009, in London. As an example of where we have got to with digitisation, it seems it was a bit of a disaster - the video feed was virtually inaccessible and even when it could be received was jerky and the sound quality, abysmal. It seems that this was fixed by the afternoon. It was particularly telling that one of the main sessions that failed to reach its potential audience was entitled: "Fixing the Plumbing".

This was perhaps the most important session of the day, to those of us in the digital divide. Ian Livingston, the CEO of BT, seems to have made a couple of bizarre points, which, if they have been correctly reported, leave me with little confidence that BT should be have the lion's share of the future of the national communications infrastructure under its control.

Livingston is reported as having said: "BT hasn’t dragged heels and have been developing speed and reliability of network. 2 mbits per second service would be good enough for the vast majority of current internet use. Regulatory issues can slow down progress, eg old legislation around copper wire which don’t apply to fibre. Important for UK that whoever builds a network, must be available to all. No monopoly on content and applications."

The Digital Britain interim report carried the table at the head of this post to give an idea of what sort of bandwidth is needed (click on it to enlarge). These seem to be the sort of things that many people are trying to do now, not what they might want to achieve in 2012, and 2Mbps is about the lowest speed that starts to make todays internet use viable. BT themselves will not let you have their BT Vision product unless your broadband can reliably support a minimum speed of 2Mbps. So Ian Livingston's comment that: ..."2 mbits per second service would be good enough for the vast majority of current internet use", is either risible, or belies a dated understanding of the market in which BT now operates and might operate in future years.

On the plus side, if he sticks to his guns, I expect to see Openreach engineers in the village on Monday, replacing our aluminium cable with fibre, as clearly BT have been wasting money installing 20Mbps broadband in urban areas when 2Mbps is "good enough for the vast majority of current internet use"

Later in the discussion, Livingston responded to the question: "to what extent is fibre to the home required"? by saying:

"Fibre to cabinet gives a substantial provision at the moment. But future applications may need more. But there is no point developing even faster speeds when the applications are there that need it. Based on customer demand. Competition has provided UK with good levels of access, monopoly not the way to go in the future. Developing technologies need to be open".

I think there must have been an omission in the original record, but what Livingston seems to have meant in the third sentence was not: "..there is no point developing even faster speeds when the applications are there that need it" but "...there is no point developing even faster speeds when the applications are [not!] there that need it".

If this interpretation is correct, then Livingston will kill any prospect of a competitive Digital Britain. What hope then for the poor disenfranchised rural communities? If the interpretation is wrong, then perhaps BT might wish to clarify what Ian Livingston actually said, or meant to have said?

Mobile Broadband

2009-04-14T18:59:00.004+01:00

It's been suggested that mobile broadband might be the solution to our problems, but I know a few folks in the village have tried it, myself included. I mean, with one mobile mast less than 1km from the heart of the village you might have thought that should be nice and straightforward. Well, it might be, if it wasn't for the topography. Typically, most of the village lies in a shadow area, so whilst you can connect occasionally, more often than not you can't. Even if you are lucky enough to get on line, the "up to 7Mbps" claims look a little thin - dial-up download speeds seem more realistic at present. Of course, that could change.

When you look at the mobile broadband reception areas from several of the UK suppliers, they look a little like the picture above - the red areas should get mobile broadband. Wonderful if you want to drive out of the village, or carry your laptop on a hike.

The State of the Phone Infrastructure

2009-04-10T18:25:00.010+01:00

It was only when it became apparent that the whole of Winterbourne Stoke was afflicted by REIN, that anyone began to take any interest in the telephone infrastructure that supports broadband. When you begin to look, you start to see some interesting things.

Like this shot of a broken phone line to a then disused cottage.

Or this one of my drop pole. Honestly, there really are two phone lines in that

morass of power cables somewhere. The base of that pole is even more interesting as it is marked with a red letter "D" to warn it is unfit to climb, or is dangerous.

The "DP" means that this is a BT distribution point. The other marking,"71C", is an electricity company marking - showing that this is a shared pole.

Other poles are in need of remedial work. This one, for instance, has a little yellow plastic tag nailed to the pole. It has "A1024" printed on it, which I am reliably informed means that it's a report of work that needs to be carried out. It's just above where the lower light socket joins on, about 15ft off the ground. I've no idea how long its been there and I wonder if BT still do?

Then we have some strange objects fastened to the pole. In this case, the rather phallic object halfway up the pole on the left is a BT telephone line joint. This one was sort of dangling in the breeze when photographed a few months back - but BT have now fixed it properly.

And finally, we have that icon of the General Post Office, the Primary Cross-
Connection Point (PCP or cab) an iconic piece of street architecture pre-dating BT.

I've got to confess that when you start to look at this in any detail it looks, well, it looks a complete mess. It's hardly surprising that with this quality and age of infrastructure we are struggling to get high quality broadband. The real surprise, I suppose, is that we can get any form of voice or broadband service at all.

With thanks to Mick Mills and Kavan Brown of the BT Community Forum for advice on the meaning of the BT pole codes.

A Wordle of Broadband in Winterbourne Stoke

2009-04-07T22:16:00.007+01:00

A Wordle is a toy to create a "word cloud" from a piece of text. It gives increased prominence to the most important ideas and words. Here it is being used to capture the most important issues on this blog.

If you want to have a play with Wordles yourself, you just need to visit the Wordle site.

Phone Problems

2009-04-04T20:19:00.006+01:00

Winterbourne Stoke lies at the end of a 5km piece of ageing aluminium cable, rather than the 'copper' BT often talk about. As far as broadband is concerned, horrible REIN problems every day cause routers to lose sync with the exchange. This leads to decreasing IP profiles, lower speeds and generally disgruntled broadband customers. We are too small a community for BT to care about and replace the cable. It would be very expensive and BT would never recover the costs.

Now, here's the other issue. Several of my neighbours have long standing plain old telephone system (POTS) problems that BT claim don't exist. When we make long-distance calls there are relatively few problems, but when we make local calls - say to next door - the recipient frequently can't hear the caller - sometimes neither side can hear each other. We often stand in the garden, clutching a useless phone, and shout at each other! Ah, the joys of living in the country.

What I think is happening is as follows. In a long distance call, the signal goes out over the aluminium line to the exchange, onto the BT backbone and eventually, via a second exchange to the recipient. The recipients speech follows the path in reverse. Both outgoing and incoming signals use the bad aluminium section once in each direction and suffer one bout of attenuation from it. However, when we make a local call, the outgoing signal goes back to the exchange, suffering one bout of attenuation, then suffers a second bout of attenuation on its way back to the recipient. The same is true for the return half of the conversation. So, local calls suffer twice the attenuation from the aluminium backhaul than do long distance calls.

Now the path between the two callers isn't a physical path. What I mean is that the analogue voice signal is carried back to the exchange and joins with other incoming lines at the Main Distribution Frame (MDF). These are then connected to a piece of kit called a Remote Concentrator Unit (RCU) which converts the analogue signal to a digital one. The RCU also acts as a switch, but I'm not clear about what happens next on local calls. The RCU might simply switch the local call back down the same RCU, or, like other calls, send the digital signal on to a third bit of kit called a Digital Local Exchange (DLE). The DLE might feed the local call back to the originating RCU and then back over the 'last mile' to the subscriber, having been converted back to an analogue signal.

In the case of long distance calls, the first DLE feeds the digital call onto the main network backbone and onto a remote DLE, another RCU where it is converted back to an analogue signal, and finally on to the receiving subscriber.

The difference between these two possibilities may be quite profound, but I've not been able to find anyone who can tell me which view is correct for local calls.

I am beginning to wonder is just where, when BT make tests, do they make the tests from? Is it just between the phone and the top of the nearest pole? Do they go back as far as the nearest PCP (Primary Cross-connection Point)? Or, do they go back as far as the exchange and the RCU? If they do go back as far as the RCU, do they just test the signal to the subscriber, or between the two subscribers who have been involved in the failed calls?

Experience suggests that the last two possibilities are unlikely. How then can we ever prove to BT that there is a problem?

The Myth of Copper

2009-03-23T22:06:00.004Z

In these days of Digital Britain and BT's 21st Century Network (21CN), there is much talk of replacing the 'old' copper infrastructure with fibre. Unfortunately, a portion of the BT infrastructure isn't even copper, it's aluminium.

The reason for this pre-dates BT, back into the 1960s in the days of the GPO. During the Rhodesia Crisis when Ian Smith declared UDI, and before the prosperous Rhodesia was turned into the backward Zimbabwe by the madman Mugabe, copper prices shot through the roof, as sanctions impacted on Rhodesian copper mining and exports.

In a bid to save money, the good old GPO, never anticipating the telephone network would ever be needed for anything other than voice communications, cut costs by installing aluminium cables. Unfortunately, Winterbourne Stoke were the recipients of 5km of underground aluminium cable between the exchange in Shrewton, the next village, and the street cabinet here. Normally, underground cable is set in a duct to protect it from damage, but again, in an effort to cut costs, only the first 2km were placed in a duct and the rest simply buried in a trench. Now aluminium cable, and particularly the joints, are very prone to oxidation, made worse by the ingress of moisture - so you might be forgiven for thinking that just stuffing the cable in a ditch was a spectacularly dumb thing to do.

You might even think that BT would have tried to replace this decaying infrastructure when they took over and copper prices fell. Well, you might think that, but BT clearly didn't.

As far as broadband goes, aluminium is the worst news possible. The resistivity of aluminium is about 50% worse than copper, meaning much greater attenuation and thus lower bandwidth (speed) at any given distance from the exchange. Throw in a few oxidising aluminium joints and its a miracle even voice telephony works.

Well, actually it doesn't work that well. But more of that next time...

How It All Started

2009-03-22T16:06:00.008Z

Between 2006 and late June 2008, most broadband consumers in Winterbourne Stoke received a slow (900kbps to 1400kbps), but generally reliable, broadband service from a number of different ISPs:

* BT Broadband
* Virgin
* AOL
* Zen
* Orange
* Waitrose
* Talk Talk

A few villagers had longer term phone and broadband problems, some of which had been reported to their ISPs and/or BT if it was a phone fault. These had remained unresolved. Following the replacement of power poles and lines in the village in June 2008 by Southern Electric, one villager noticed a major and recurring problem with his broadband connection and reported it to his ISP on 2nd July 2008. We did not know if the replacement of the power poles and lines was a cause of the problems subsequently identified, or simply a coincidence of timing.

The symptoms of the problem were:

* a loss of synchronisation between the villager’s broadband router and the BT equipment at the Shrewton exchange – this happened every night between midnight and 04:00 in the morning;

* The BT equipment sensed the loss of synchronisation and reduced the bRAS/IP Profile (the maximum speed at which the broadband will operate) each night;

* The bRAS/IP Profile continued to drop until it reached the minimum possible speed of 135kbps – roughly 10% of the original speed;

* When reset by BT Wholesale to the original level, the bRAS/IP Profile continued to drop;

* As a consequence of the low speeds, many internet services were unavailable or unusable.

The problem was reported (to BT Broadband) a second time in mid July and the problem was escalated and passed to BT Wholesale. Two visits by BT Openreach failed to find the cause and none of the 'repairs' achieved anything positive. During one of these visits, the BT Openreach engineer noted that a likely cause of the problem was the poor quality of the underground telephone line between the BT exchange in the next village and the BT distribution cabinet in Winterbourne Stoke. This was an aluminium cable (not copper) and prone to developing poor joints.

Lack of progress led to two things, checks were made around the village to see if others were suffering similar problems and also, in an email discussing concerns about rural broadband as a national issue, to raise the issue with Ian Livingston, the CEO of BT. It soon became apparent that virtually every broadband connection in Winterbourne Stoke was detecting the nightly fault and that about half the connections were being degraded severely.

Research around the village quickly showed that the likely cause of this problem was “Repetitive (or random) Electrical Impulse Noise” (REIN), although it took some time to convince BT to send out a specialist REIN engineer – who came during the day – at a time when over a month’s monitoring of the line by BT and the villagers showed the REIN would not occur. REIN can be caused by a variety of faulty electrical equipment including street lights, pumps, switches, Sky TV boxes, etc.

Villagers made every effort to find the source of this problem themselves – by looking for electrical devices that might be switching on or off in the early hours of the morning. We were even able to persuade Salisbury District Council to turn off the electrical power to a local sewage plant as an experiment to see if this was the cause. The Highways Authority were also contacted in case there was a possibility that traffic cameras on the A303 might be causing the effect, and the street lighting engineers were asked to look at their equipment. None of this activity has identified the source of the REIN.

After collecting further data on a daily basis and passing this to BT’s Technical Management Centre (TMC) in Leeds (a very, very helpful group of people), BT Openreach were eventually persuaded to send out a two-man REIN team late at night on 12 September 2008. They were able to witness the REIN event for themselves, both on their own equipment and on a second broadband connection which showed an identical fault at exactly the same time. These engineers investigated further and discovered that there were REIN events at roughly 6-hourly intervals, 24/7. Most of these were too small to switch broadband routers off, but those after midnight seemed particularly strong and likely to do so. Since then, it has been noticed that routers do lose synchronisation with the exchange, particularly in wet or windy weather.

More villagers reported their own faults to their ISPs and attempted to get the problem escalated to BT Wholesale, with limited success, but it appears to have taken over 3 months for BT Wholesale to begin to link these faults as elements of one and the same problem. Needless to say, despite several further visits by engineers to the village, to look at various broadband setups, the problem was not resolved.

Throughout September and October 2008, various experiments were conducted in order to eliminate the REIN problem – at the suggestion of the BT TMC and with the help of one of the villagers. These included:

* Removing bell-wires from broadband faceplates;
* Fitting new Cat 5 modem cables;
* Fitting ferrite cores to cables;
* Fitting the BT iPlate (a new device said to help in such circumstances).

One thing the experiments demonstrated quite clearly, was that if the REIN were to be eliminated, most villagers could receive broadband at a speed of 1,400 to 2,500 kbps; significantly higher than most have previously had.

By mid-September we were advised that “BT Wholesale had costed the replacement of the cable at £180,000 and that these costs would have to be met by the ISPs and that this simply wouldn’t happen as the ISPs would never recoup the costs from the number of connections in the village”.

By the time BT gave up on trying to identify and fix the problem in December 2008, the only suggestion they had made by way of a “solution” was to cap the speed of affected lines to 500 kbps. In other words, to reduce the speed to one third of the June 2008 levels. This would have effectively 'concealed' the REIN event from the consumers, but done nothing to improve the situation, so we felt this proposal was entirely unacceptable