How low can we go, CEO of Geo?

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Can you limbo? It is beginning to feel as if the bar is now perilously low to the ground and there are few sane folk left willing to sink to the depths of our apparently less than meagre national ambition to have the "best broadband infrastructure in Europe". (Yes, yes, hollow laughs all round at this seemingly ludicrous (cl)aim that is still being made in the face of so much fact-based evidence to the contrary).

Chris Smedley, CEO of Geo last week answered a few questions for 5tth about PIA, BDUK and the future, after the announcement that Geo were, sadly, dropping out of the BDUK process.

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com



There is not a single factor that is seeing off the valuable players in this game, nor is there out and out disagreement with PIA as a concept, rather it is the pricing and terms that are the issue. But the truth is that if you wanted to blame a single issue then PIA in its current form would be it. PIA has little to offer as a solution as it stands, and it is blowing business plans out of the water for UK broadband for our next generations. PIA needs serious work, or scrapping, so it seemed appropriate with all that is going on, or rather not going on, for a ditty to mark the occasion.



There has already been much said about Geo's departure, BDUK, the wisdom of the current approach of spending the money, PIA etc. For many, this departure by Geo feels like a tipping point. No longer is it just community folk, tech journos, and small players making a noise and querying what is actually being done in our name and with our money. Now the big guys are dropping out of BDUK, rural broadband, national and regional solutions etc and making it quite clear why.

LA: Is the BDUK process rescuable, or are we too far down the line of handing the money to BT?

Chris Smedley: That’s for Government and Ofcom (and maybe even BT) to decide. If BT voluntarily dropped the restrictions on PIA and BDUK quickly developed an alternative to the gap funding model then things could be turned round quite quickly. However, as we have asked for all these things already and been denied them on the basis that there is no demand from industry then I wouldn’t hold out too much hope. That means the much slower process of getting Ofcom to intervene on PIA and fibre leasing which will probably take two years to get clear pricing and fair terms for something we could all use as BT will when they deploy new fibre cables. I have no idea whether DCMS will ask BDUK to develop an alternative to the gap funding model. I think they should. I do find it difficult to see anyone other than BT winning the current pilots or the Next Generation Broadband Wales procurement as things stand.

LA: Chris, you must have done the numbers - what figures make it impossible for GEO? What is the gap?

Chris Smedley: Too difficult to generalise as each procurement was different. The simple facts are that using existing poles and ducts is about 5% of the cost of building a new network. Where they exist, other players simply have to be able to use them or it is impossible to compete against BT. If you can’t do so for the long distances to get to remote rural communities as the current PIA stops us from doing then we end up with a proportionately higher cost base than our main competitor for the longest parts of the network. If you then can’t use the new fibre cable to serve local businesses, the public sector, the mobile and wireless industries or other ISPs for backhaul then somewhere between 50-70% of the potential revenues in your business case are zeroed out. BT suffers from none of these restrictions (and has the lion’s share of the current market anyway) so it is easily going to be able to offer more “gap funding” than anyone else.

LA: What have BDUK said to you to make the decision to give up?

Chris Smedley: They have told us that they cannot address any of these concerns about PIA as they are the responsibility of the regulator, Ofcom. Ofcom have told us they are being considered within the Business Connectivity Market Review. This is currently due to conclude at the end of next year and then we will have to negotiate with BT a new contract – assume two years from now at current rate of progress – well after BDUK’s procurements will have concluded. They have told us that there is no demand (presumably other than us) for a non gap funded framework for bidders. Between them, they made our decision pretty easy in the end!

LA: Do you believe that councils could be illegally funding a furthering of a monopoly in 7-10 years' time through the BDUK procurement process?

Chris Smedley: I doubt it is illegal for them to choose BT through the BDUK procurement process – although if the European Commission do apply their state aid guidelines as they have said they will then you would expect no project to become operational unless it offers a fully unbundled dark fibre product to the rest of the market. BT won’t do this at the moment. The sad precedent is that when this got explored after the award to BT of the Cornwall project, Ofcom and Government supported a push back against the EU on this point, arguing (successfully) that this was a matter for the national regulator and that the chosen UK remedies were not unbundled fibre but PIA (!) and VULA (BT’s “virtually” unbundled service – whatever that means). We hear worrying noises from Ofcom that they are considering meeting the EU’s requirements for unbundling in the future with “wavelength unbundling”. For us, as a dark fibre operator, this is all nonsense. Optical fibre cables have lots of fibre in them. Unbundling is a simple lease of the sub-divided elements the market likes to buy (usually a pair).

(I'll put an intro to this next question as I have not blogged this yet. During our meeting with Jeremy Hunt recently here in Cumbria, John Colton of FibreGarden, one of the BDUK Technical Trials Pilots, raised the issue for consideration of a State Aid "premium". This would be for those going straight for the jugular and doing FTTH rather than interim solutions.

The BDUK money is currently being divvied up on a technology neutral basis with all solutions receiving the same per household however long the likely lifespan or suitability of the product, but this fails to appreciate that FTTH will need no further investment. The argument for a premium being that none of those communities/providers doing fibre with this round of money will require any upgrade dosh in the future, whereas all other solutions will be doing an Arnold Schwarzenegger impression. If we are to spend this money, surely we should spend it wisely?)

LA: Do you feel that fibre to the home is being penalised more than, say FTTC, BET, wireless?

Chris Smedley: Yes.

LA: On top of PIA costs, there is also fibre tax, and no premium is being paid to those willing to invest in the longer term rather than stop gap/interim solutions. Can this be rectified?

Chris Smedley: Easily by a determined government which REALLY wants to see fibre deployed across the UK.

LA: After Fujitsu making all the noise earlier this year, how do you feel about them being the first to work with BT on PIA? Stitched up?

Chris Smedley: We are still a PIA trialist and will remain so if possible as we are keen in the long-term to make PIA work. I have no idea why they think it is a good tactic to ignore the deficiencies in the current product and praise BT for launching the current limited product. You will have to ask them! [I will!]

LA: How can Geo now help communities (including councils) to ensure that the gap funding generates local profits as well as /instead of those for a private company?

Chris Smedley: We would have been happy to help by developing viable schemes for councils based on an alternative model to gap funding (like FibreSpeed). We wouldn’t ever have accepted the gap funding model. Going forward, we are going to be focusing on our core business and leaving this task to others (if there are any other than BT).

LA: Where do we go from here?

Chris Smedley: That’s now a question for Ofcom and Government, I’m afraid. Look at New Zealand would be my advice.

Many thanks to Chris for taking time out to answer my questions. It is undoubtedly way past time now for a long hard look at what route we are taking to achieve the goals required in this country. When such exciting companies as Geo and Vtesse are no longer available to innovate, inspire and connect the communities who so need the type of solutions that the agile, generous-spirited, imaginative yet profitable telcos (rather than the oil tanker behemoths) could deliver, summat 'as garn wrang, as they say round here.

Fujitsu & Friends, please stick it out. You are pretty much our only hope now to save this country from yet more global humiliation.




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Competition: What would you do with time on your hands?

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Ok then, let's have some real world experimentation for this first competition sponsored by Geo .....

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com


The increasingly boring arguments about why on earth you would need more bandwidth than is available (to some) right now got me thinking. If I could download/upload the large files I need to for work (let alone the ones my kids would like to be able to for entertainment) far faster than today, what would I do with the time that could free up? After all, driving 60 miles to deliver a CD with a few fat files on is getting rather tedious, as well as expensive in fuel at £1.45 a litre.

So, I thought I'd try downloading a gig of data and see how long it actually took. The process is still ongoing as I write this.... Then, I wondered how long it took other people to do, which is where you all come in!

The link below is to a 1 GB file for you to download, and I'm asking that you time that download and post how long it took you. Bear in mind that 1GB of data is not actually a great deal when you consider that most memory cards and dongles are far bigger than that nowadays. I have never bothered trying to download a movie as it is too tedious a process currently (and don't tell me to do it overnight as that's when I work, as you all know), but at a guess this is approximately what a film is.

http://windows.mouselike.org/windows.mouselike.org/share/dump/1gbfile.zip

Here's a stopwatch for you to time it so post your results......how long did it take you?

Obviously, the purists would say that you shouldn't do anything else whilst trying to download it to give a proper indication of how long it takes to download a gig, but that's not how the real world or most people's computer use functions, is it? Oh, and if you go over your download limit for the month, don't blame me!

Now, I have some prizes here for the best answer in the first of two competitions we are running, very kindly sponsored by Geo.

The quiz question is this: if you had a faster connection eg 1Gbps so this file would take a remarkably short time to download, what would you do with the time freed up by having a mega connection?

The best answer will win some ace Geo goodies, including the Geo Rubik Cube which I am now very fond of and don't even vaguely want to part with! Get downloading and thinking up your answer.

GO!
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Thinking Down and Dirty

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Read more! Last week, courtesy of Jazz at @geonetworks, I had an interesting trip down the sewers within sight of the Olympic Stadium in East London - probably the closest I will get to the Olympics. Here follows some info, photos and thoughts from that trip.......

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com



We met outside a rather posh hotel in Liverpool Street and during that brief wait, I found myself talking to @superglaze aka David Meyer, who some of you may know from ZDNet. I thanked him for getting the answers I had asked for from JANET about why they had upgraded their core network to 100Gbps. Those answers from JANET are well worth a read if you think a USC of 2Mbps is sufficient......

We took a taxi to Bow and prepared ourselves for the descent into the unknown. White suits, rubber gloves and a rather funky pair of fisherman's socks, all encased in waders. A safety briefing from our inimitable guide, Rob, who I suspect should have his own radio show, and we were hooked up to clamber down the ladder into one of the two barrels which had been closed off for our visit and other maintenance work.

Superglaze gazing downwards....

Once in the barrel, we could see the four ducts coming in from street level. (My iPhone packed up as a camera at this point so further underground photos can be found on geonetwork's Flickr stream....)

These four ducts have 144 cables in each - as should *any* ducting being laid in 2011 and beyond, with 288 in each duct in areas like Docklands and other high density areas. 1 is used for customers and 1 is used for testing. The other two are there for upgrades and to check for degradation faults.

Geo networks has 107km ([Corrected from 50km] of ducting laid in London and 3000km [Corrected from 2000] across the UK. Those ducts are tested against everything you can think of - rats, beer cans, sewage etc. (The ducts are that diameter because rats cannot get their jaws round them to gnaw!). The ducts are laid about 5+ feet up the walls of the sewers to keep them out of the way of "rags", high water level, and jetters. Jetters are like high pressure water jets which come in to clear blockages, and also drag any blockages back along the sewer to remove it, which means loose lay - as H20 have attempted - can be an issue as the fibre can get caught in the machinery. The cinders which we crunched over on the floor turned out to be tarmac which has washed down the gutters over the years. (I suspect it would be preferable not to recycle it, but there's a challenge for someone if we run out of oil to make tarmac to fill in potholes...!)

When choosing where to lay the ducts, Geo first use maps of their network, maps of other networks, and Google Earth and Streetview to analyse the best route above ground. Within the sewers, ducting is usually laid on the opposite side to manholes and entrances to avoid any possible accidental damage. So, in the sewer we were in, the ducting was laid down the right hand side as all further manholes were on the left in the 4 miles to the main processing plant. At the time we went below, across the entire London Geo network, there was a mere 4m of ducting which required re-affixing to a wall. Normally, there is a 4hr time limit to fix customer problems but Geo has had 100% uptime since the vast majority of it was laid in the last 5 years.

Rob told us about Santos, which sounds remarkably like Google's infamous TISP fibre April Fool; but this is a serious solution. The plan is to bring fibre to homes and buildings by bringing the fibre not to the nearest manhole in the street, but through the sewers into the basement etc of the building and then breaking out. This is a particularly great solution for towerblocks etc.....However, rural folk have not been forgotten and there are plans for fibre sewer entry through mini sewers rather than these enormous sewers we were standing in.

When the figures of what was being carried through each duct were provided, I did debate whether I could become a 'sewer rat' and just live down there. 80 wavelengths each carrying 100Gbps, giving a total of 8 terrabits per second - so near and yet so far! 2 years ago, there were a mere 32 wavelengths of 10Gbps each. The IEEE is keeping everyone on their toes by ratifying new standards so the fibre within reach (no, you just wouldn't want to!) was G.652 metro for short hops and in rural areas you would use G.655 for longer hops.

There are no joints within the sewers where possible, and once we got to the huge metal bulkhead door and the false bottom floor maneouvred by chains, you could fully understand why! At that point you began to understand the power of the 'water' that would soon be flowing back where we were now standing.

The engineering within the sewer was astounding. That false bottom and the bulkhead were Victorian and still fully functional, although Rob hammered it home that raising that false floor to drop raw sewage into the Thames was probably treason - definitely a "Here's your P45" offence anyway.

Sir Joseph Bazalgette , who designed the sewers by assessing London's waste problem, guestimating the size London might grow to within the lifespan of the sewers and then doubling his estimates, was a bloody genius who, as Rob pointed out, did not have civil servants, limited budgets, accountants, or quantity surveyors saying, "Those 2p bricks are too expensive, let's use cheaper ones" as he would have today.

Bazalgette's foresight and generosity in diameters and overflow systems works today. Whilst he never foresaw high-rise buildings, nor the phenemonal sprawl that London has 'enjoyed', Bazalgette's approach to raw sewage should be applied today in next generation network planning and build.

We are only going to do this once, and we should be doubling the most generous guestimates of data need, as Bazalgette did with sewage. C'mon, are we so dim as to ignore Victorian engineers who were the envy of the world?

Possibly the worst part for me was seeing the completely numb metal plates that have been placed over the incredible arches the Victorians built to ensure that the overflow level is raised to ensure it will be far higher during the Olympics and will not flood the River Lea, which is part of the Olympic waterway. Future generations will look at these and wonder at a generation who seemed to have little pride in their engineers, and were held hostage to a lack of joined up thinking, profits and built-in obsolence.

The barrels we were standing in sit atop a duplicate set of barrels for the overflow system - a double-barrelled set up! Makes you look at drains in a totally different way once above ground - it's very much an 'iceberg' - far more below than at street level. The arches and walls begin at a height of over 4 ft from the floor and only once the water level passes these walls does the overflow cascade into the lower levels. Each arch is a triumph of Victorian brickwork, now hidden under 21st century cost-cutting exercise.

One of the other Victorian 'niceties' of the system were snow shutes built into the roads. Down these were shoveled snow by the road cleaners, thereby removing it entirely from the London road network, unlike today where the place seems to grind to a halt if an inch of snow falls.

We learn about the install process - plan route, install plastic hangers for the duct, fit duct in gentle curves to ensure no breakage of the glass fibre, blow fibre, connect customers. It all seems so simple. And we know it is, when you remove the chancers who do not have the ethics of our forebears who left a legacy for us in railways, canals, sewers etc. We hear about this current failure to enhance ours and the next generations' lives in a disturbing way....

Often, when planning a route through the sewers, the Geo and Thames Water teams find themselves up against sections of sewer where bombs fell during the 2nd World War. At the time, because obviously, there were other things going on above ground that needed attention urgently, a wall was built around each end of the destroyed section and a pipe shoved through to keep the sewage flowing. In the 60 intervening years, we have done little to nothing to fix those sections of sewer barrels.

Our moral fibre appears to be lacking. Are we building 'best networks' for the next generation, or 'best networks for profits"?

All in all, a highly enjoyable day courtesy of Geo and I will find out the name of the Geo gent who introduced me over a glass of water afterwards to the concept of "From POTS to PANS" - Pretty Awesome New Stuff, which has had me thinking far too much!! (I think it was from Intel some 10-15 years).

It all highlighted why we need to learn the lessons from the past.

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