WiBe Testing and 3G masts

Tweet

Read more! Just thought: some people doing WiBe testing might not know how to find the location of 3G masts so....


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



Use the Sitefinder site, provided by Ofcom and voluntarily updated by the operators, to locate all masts in your area.

You need to zoom right in to actually see masts on the map, and it may be that in some areas there are far more masts than in ours that the WiBe can see. You are looking for masts in the database operating at 2100MHz range. (Ours is only operating at half power so a message has gone to Three to ask if they might consider turning it up - it would be very interesting to see what sort of connectivity we could get if they did so as I'd be more than happy to ditch my landline in favour of full on WiBe connectivity!)

The WiBe antennas will seek the best signal from the four built-in antennas and lock into that. If the WiBe lights switch from one mast to another continuously, try re-locating the WiBe to get the best signal with least noise.

You can see how many masts the WiBe is finding by logging into the WiBe through a browser (default setting is: 192.168.1.1) and looking at the Admin - Status - 3G antenna test results. This will also tell you the max and min without having to run a Speedtest. So, right now mine is reading Max kbps 3055 and min 1201 with -99dBm.

I know which mast I am coming off as I can only see one here, but the Cell ID doesn't relate to the operator's reference on Sitefinder and I still don't know how to translate Cell IDs, except that I have discovered cellspotting.com in the process, which is a geo-location 'game' I was unaware of!

Just found a Rural Broadband Working Group (RBWG) MiFi in Upper Eden too due to these blog posts so as soon as we get a chance we will do some parallel testing and see how the results stack up.

The RBWG, an alliance between Three, Countryside Alliance, with input from Race Online 2012, is very interesting and there will be a blog post soon with an update on that.

Right, back to testing! Read more!

WiBe Testing

Tweet

Read more! Chris and John have both put up WiBe tests, so I thought I'd pull a few of mine off the phone and share them too.

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



Thanks to Richard Dix at Rural Broadband for this very cute toy.

This is a new build in a village where every single home is sub 2Mbps. Many are still on dial up. The plan was to test a window on each side of the house and the attic to see where the best signal might be. The two sides were pretty similar results, so I've omitted those tests from this post and just shown the west, east and the attic.

Setting up for test 1 just as the sun is setting.

First test.

Second test.

The WiBe in the attic.

Speedtest 1 in the attic.

Speedtest 2 in the attic.

The WiBe reaches for the moon.

Test 1.

Test 2 - it does make a difference if you just let the WiBe settle in, and although it only takes a few moments to get the 3G connection, it can take 10-15 minutes before you start getting improved and consistent results. As it was dark and I wanted to share the results before the iPhone ran out of juice, I packed up my huge bag of tools - 1 Wibe and an iPhone - and headed off to discuss this with the owner of the house. In the milking parlour, where of course all the best discussions take place!

Earlier in the day, I had been out to another notspot on a different mission, and had just thought I'd test the mobile network whilst there. These are the two speedtests and the views around about 20+ homes.

This was near the main road at the bottom of the valley so I headed uphill.

As you can see, an improvement, but not a useful one!

I am in direct line of sight to the Ash Fell mobile mast but it appears to have made little difference.

So, armed with the invertor, I am going back there to see what the WiBe will get en route to a rather infamous notspot in our patch, and a few others with not quite so well-known broadband champions.

I have got about another 50 speed tests to get off my phone too, but they are all showing pretty much the same thing - the WiBe is a great solution for now if you are on dial up or live in a notspot!

I don't have a laptop so cannot film and speed test and log onto the WiBe all at once - Chris and John do all that so check out their posts.

From logging on I am discovering that the best signal strength so far is around 85dBm, with the worst being 107 dBm, but this needs far more experimentation to see if I can improve those simply by positioning. I have been trying to see where the cell ID relates to the sitefinder mast codes, but haven't resolved that one yet. This would help in understanding which mast the best signal is coming from (when there is a choice) and hence positioning the WiBe better, but it's early days yet and I'm sure there is still tons more to discover to get even more from the WiBe.

We've load balanced the WiBe with the satellite to get maximum backhaul into the Cyberbarn till the fibre goes in and it's pretty good because I can switch between the two quite simply now to demonstrate both means of getting online to visitors. Which after all was one of the reasons for the Cyberbarn's existence!

Next step is to get the VoIP phones working in the Cyberbarn so we can demo VoIP over both WiBe and satellite, but there are only so many hours in a day, and I've been given the most awesome GIS mapping software and fibre network planning tools today (Cheers Mike!) and they are vying with the WiBe for attention....more on those soon.










Read more!

How bad is IT?

Tweet

Read more! I'm hoping that some of the truth around the absolutely shameful behaviour within the UK telco industry is about to out.....

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



Whoever you are, wherever you live, it can no longer be hard to avoid that our telcos are behaving on a par with the banks. Ripping everyone off, banking phenomenal profits, whilst providing a degraded service that is only debatably fit for purpose.

Today, I spent the day staring at a phone that couldn't find a network. I wasn't close to a landline, but as soon as I was, I rang Orange. Undoubtedly they have the recording; until then, I'll paraphrase.

"My phone won't work, at all. It has been cr*p all day and I need a connection asap or an alternative."

"Your mast is white".

"Sorry? Does that mean it's offline?"

"We-e-e-ell, it means I can't actually find it right now ....can you put your phone on 2G?"

"2G? You think I'm in a 3G network area? We don't have 3G here, even 40 miles from your HQ in Darlington."

"Ah, no, but all will be well in February. A massive upgrade is due to all your masts, including the T-Mobile ones."

"So, I might get a connection again in February?"

"Honest, it'll be great in February. Just put your phone manually onto 2G now and all will be fine then."

"In February?"

"Yep".

"What about now?"

"There's a mast {here - unknown dale} - that's sort of online. Must be the upgrade."

"I've never heard of it. How far is it from me? Are all our masts down locally?"

"Well, the one in Kirkby Stephen is white, Maulds Meaburn is a bit low....Um, they're all off."

"There is no way I could even see those masts from here anyway, what about locally?"

"They are local."

"No, they are not. We have hills and forests that are in the way....."

"Oh, how about {names 5-10 different places that are within 50 miles}...?"

"No way can you see those from here....". [I've surveyed thousands of miles in Cumbria, Yorkshire and Lancashire, line of sight for FiWi....]

"But they're...sort of working....it must be this upgrade to 3G. It'll all be fine later in February".

"What about tomorrow? I need a phone."

"All I can tell you is to put your phone, and your neighbours, on to manual 2G, find the best network [he suggested T-Mobile - which Orange own] and then stick with that until we upgrade."

"So, when will our mast be fixed?"

"Well, I have to say this is a bit tongue in cheek, but the repair date on your mast is currently unknown".

"So....tomorrow?"

"Um, I don't know. Really. My best advice is stand on the highest chair you have got..."

I hung up.

You know when you realise the person you are talking to on the helpline has no chance of making as much sense of the data as you, and you have no chance of seeing it? You just give up. I can't blame the operator, but I can blame the networks.

Do you know what? Your consumers are not morons? Don't treat us as such.

Meanwhile, BSkyB buy the Cloud, O2 offer nationwide wi-fi, most mobile networks in rural areas cannot download an app let alone use it; I hear it's as bad in London if you are an iPhone user. (But where is the news on that?) The country spends its life trying to pay over the odds connection charges to help lines for support issues, whilst getting nowhere. And we think it's ahem...normal?

Want my opinion? OK. Here goes....Not a reader? Start at "Everything old is new again" and read this about BskyB's acquisition of the Cloud. The Cloud (Niall Murphy) was one of my early event speakers and sponsors, before most of you had heard of wifi or broadband.

Our networks are fooked. They cannot provide the service required TODAY, whether wired or wireless.

It is time for a hats on the table summit where people TELL THE TRUTH and find the right solutions for UK plc comms. Because, otherwise, what is going to happen is that someone, somewhere, will put together a femto cell deal or similar over wifi that takes the lot of you greedy, difficult, mobile operators and telcos out at the knees. And if it doesn't happen from within industry, it will come from the grassroots people who are utterly and totally fed up with your shenanigans.

We need mobile comms not to feed money into your pockets, but to STAY ALIVE, to keep our businesses running, to track our kids, to share village news, to COMMUNICATE. WE don't need you purely so you make your profits. It's so simple. Get IT.

Read more!

Using existing infrastructure

Tweet

Read more! This country is littered with ducts, poles and masts. All of them can be shared. There is no reason not to do so. However, there are some bloody stupid games going on to prevent it. It is your turn to tell me why that may be so and how we stop it....

I'll give you a few starters for ten about the games being played.

NB: I could write this post for three days and not cover the half of it. Feel free to comment below, or email me ldotannisonatgmaildotcom, if you wish to see more added. I haven't attributed some of it as a matter of respect. You can guess who said it if you wish...and I'll bet you will be wrong!

BT have left old copper in the ducts to block them.

Really? Why? (Ho hum). Questions were asked and as we pay these guys, I'm not anonymising this response from BIS (formerly known as the Department of Trade and Industry). It doesn't answer the question but it raised plenty more:

It is worth pointing out that duct and pole access on its own would not provide straightforward options to deliver NGA, and there are limitations which will need to be overcome before this option is achievable. For example, in a survey carried out as part of Ofcom’s work on NGA, of 31 paths between the metro node and the exchange, Ofcom found that all had at least one section where there was very little unoccupied space. This means that, even with duct access, communications providers would probably need to build new duct in at least some locations. However, on the other hand, duct and pole access could reduce the cost of market entry, be deployed quickly and make good use of existing infrastructure, which is why Ofcom is currently assessing its viability.

Who assesses what is currently in ducts, or on poles and masts, and, when it belongs to a private company (e.g.BT) but is in a duct/pole/mast laid/installed with public money way back when, who decides whether or not that existing plant is actually a) doing anything e.g. live b) of any value or c) blocking progress? Or do Ofcom just rely on the answers given without looking/digging for the actuality?

For us this last set of questions raised a huge issue. Do Ofcom take everything they are told at face value? Or do our taxes fund decent research and evaluation to generate the required evidence for regulation and decision making? We'll leave you to decide for yourselves, but if you want a clue, visit your local planning office and ask key questions about a 'controversial' planning application.

85% of UK is within 1km of BT fibre.

This was said too many times at our ABC conferences for you not to know that Peter Cochrane said this! PC has never really defined the fibre connectivity available to 85% of the UK - dark, lit - but it makes you wonder how much of the figures 'claimed' for FTTC in the latest BT announcements are based on money spent a long time ago, not recently.

As an example, at the very first broadband event I organised in 2001/2, in Hawes, Wensleydale, we caught BT laying fibre in ducts a few miles away, literally hours before the event where a BT keynote speaker was due. (Bear in mind, this was possibly the very first national broadband event in Britain and our BT speaker was coming from Cornwall - think ActNow etc.)

I phoned the CEO of BT at the time for answers. He was quite nice though utterly fed up with me, I think. A nice chap. Pierre Danon (like the yogurt) I think it was. It was a long time ago, so I will not quote him, but the answer in simple terms was, "Yes, we have been laying fibre to exchanges recently, even in remote places like the Yorkshire Dales e.g Cotterdale, Hawes, and the guys you saw near Bainbridge. I can't imagine why the engineers told you they were cleaning grit from the ducts....."

When I asked for access to that fibre in the middle mile, I received a non-committal answer (i.e "no") which I reported at the event - it is on video, and I have it here. Sadly, in 2010, accessing the middle mile is no easier, though my parents and grandparents paid for it and if the upgrades were viable at the very beginning of this century, well, no-one can tell me that money hasn't already been recouped. Again.

Every switch has a fibre feed and many mobile masts do too.

In 2005, a senior exec from O2, whilst sitting next to someone who became a BT OpenRetch Board member, at one of our DTI events in London, queried my question about whether his network would be interested in sharing excess backhaul from rural masts for community networks. "Do we have fibre backhaul to masts?" I think my look of surprised anguish at his ignorance was the prompt for the BT guy to respond, "Um yes. She is right, you know. You could consider it."

What else is going on in this space? Well, if you really need to know how bad it is, read the BT Pole Dancing info or read the lunacies of the proposed pole sharing agreements from BT for NGA which would permit BT to put any community network using their plant on a 3 month death sentence, even weeks into a 20-50year project.

When people such as Cyberdoyle talk about joined up thinking, solving simple problems such as this is what we mean. Whoever you are, reading this, and I know now just how many and varied are the readers of this blog, then please take 2 mins to contemplate how you could add to the joined up thinking model that will make the UK a digital nation rather than the Digital Grand Canyon.

Please allow me to finish on a high note. There *are* ways to do this right.

I spent quite a lot of time with the Scottish Exec earlier in this decade. Scotland, sadly, hides its light under a bushel much of the time in the tech and broadband arena. This is why, after hearing a SE speaker at the Ally Pally "Need for Speed" event who was onstage just before me, the Scottish ABC Conference in Aviemore happened in 2004, as well as the Dumfries & Galloway events etc.

This is my version of the story I was told all those years ago. For me, it highlights collaboration, co-operation, vision, as well as use of existing infrastructure. Despite it being Burns Night, I will resist writing the following in dialect!

The Highlands & Islands were suffering from a lack of mobile coverage. No-one wanted lots of mobile masts over what is undeniably an amazing and beautiful landscape - I know it well, now. And there are of course only a few people at the end of that particular connection.

HIE (the 'Regional Development Agency' for that area of Scotland) summoned the mobile operators to a round table meeting.

HIE offered assistance to get planning permission etc fast tracked and masts part-funded and installed, as well as adjudicate any issues where there were blackspots if the operators would co-operate and share masts, infrastructure etc in order to deliver choice to those in the Highlands and Islands.

I was never present at those meetings but I was told this story by someone who was. His opinion was along the lines of 'If only it was this bloody simple everywhere.' The operators chatted, site share agreements were dealt with in double fast time, (they all had to get on board or it was a lost market to them), and the HIE watched their community connected with the widest choice of services and providers, at least cost, without destroying the landscape.

It is that bloody simple.

Read more!

Fibre bandwidth coming to a mast near you?

Tweet

Read more! Some years ago at an event at DTI about community networks, there was an out-of-session discussion between O2, OpenReach and myself about sharing excess bandwidth from mobile masts for backhaul to rural and remote community networks.

The fact that there might even be spare capacity, or that many masts are fed by fibre seemed to come as a surprise to the O2 rep. Now, it seems that in the light of a huge ramp up in consumption of mobile bandwidth (smartphones, dongles, mobile advertising etc), over the Pond there are moves afoot to increasingly feed mobile masts with fibre.

It is likely that similar is happening or will happen soon here. The need to broker that bandwidth between the different occupiers of a mast should surely be a job for COTS? It makes sense to run one fat pipe to each mast to provide for the aggregated bandwidth requirements of each operator. However, it also adds an ideal opportunity to consider the bandwidth needs of others in the locale of that mast and to cater for that as well, thereby reducing the costs for all involved.

Whilst it would clearly trespass on the plans of mobile operators to provide broadband via dongle etc to those in the vicinity, and would require (finally) deals to be struck about the currently ludicrous costs of siting equipment on and access to masts, it could bring next generation broadband much closer to many, many people in the UK. Whether delivered by wireless (eg Wimax etc) or as a closer break out point for fibre backhaul to a community, the opportunities would seem too good to ignore from this approach.

Mobile broadband, as we have said before, has its place. But NOT as the primary mechanism for delivering next generation access. This can be delivered far more efficiently and effectively by bringing fibre as close as possible to the punters and communities, and then using wireless to cover the first mile or inch.

This is FiWi, a term we have been banging on about for ages and are still waiting to see adopted by the masses!

There is also a "FiWi Pie" side of it too i.e. there are potentially win-wins all round with this approach: Those flogging fibre backhaul stand to see more capacity required at each mast thereby generating more revenue, the mobile operators get cheaper backhaul for all their offerings, the mast owners get a cut from additional equipment sited on masts, and communities get affordable backhaul that is not being priced per inch.

Or, we can keep trying to rip each other off and go nowhere fast. I prefer the FiWi Pie approach!

Read more!