2008 is supposed to be the year broadband takes its next step in the UK. Nigel Whitfield looks at the harsh reality

We’ve been waiting a long time for it, but is the next generation of internet access finally upon us?

With BT trialling fibre-optic connections to the home, cable offering up to 50Mbits/sec download speeds and all the mobile networks competing to provide broadband on the go, has the UK finally got a network ready for the 21st century? Or is the fastest access available not to the many, but just a few?

PCW has been looking at the state of broadband in the UK regularly over the past few years, seeing how things have changed, and looking at what’s on offer from the major ISPs. In this round-up, we take a look at what’s really changing - and explore some of the reasons for the state we’re in.

Too good to be true?
Imagine – you move into your new apartment and there’s an Ethernet socket waiting in the living room; plug in your PC, work through the automated sign-up process, and a few minutes later you have a 25Mbits/sec connection, with 5Mbits/sec upload bandwidth.

Or perhaps you’ve chosen a new home that comes complete with a fibre-optic connection, with the possibility of HDTV as well as high-speed internet access. And on the move, your laptop can download at over 7Mbits/sec, for a cost that not so long ago wouldn’t even have bought you a 512Kbits/sec ADSL connection.

Can this really be Broadband Britain in 2008? The answer is yes – provided you live in the right place.

Nevertheless, it’s a welcome sign that the state of internet connectivity is beginning to improve, if not at the same speed for everyone. There’s more good news, in that the state of the infrastructure is finally starting to be considered a national issue, not just one for the individual companies involved. So, how is broadband in the UK changing, and when will it start to affect you?

New technologies
Parts of BT’s 21st Century Network (21CN) are now live, offering the same type of ADSL2+ 24Mbits/sec broadband connection in a Birmingham trial that other operators have offered via Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) in other areas.

The 21CN project is the wholesale replacement of the ageing voice-centric circuit-switched telephone network, where data piggybacks on voice traffic, to a new data-centric packet-switched network based on the Internet Protocol (IP), with voice treated as just another form of data. It’s a major development that will affect how voice and data traffic is handled throughout the UK.

By the time you read this, the trial will be more or less over and, as the rollout of 21CN continues around the UK, any ISP that resells BT’s service will be able to offer the higher speeds. But, of course, to an extent, while the extra speed offered by 21CN will be welcome to many broadband users, it’s not exactly new.

If you can’t wait for BT to upgrade your local exchange, some of the LLU providers may help – O2-owned Be, for example, has announced a rollout of more exchanges that it says will provide coverage to 67 per cent of the UK population, including sites in Wales and Northern Ireland, which haven’t always fared so well in the broadband stakes. There are, however, some more interesting developments.

Internet provider Ask4 is presently boasting the UK’s fastest broadband, with a 25Mbits/sec service that’s delivered simply as an Ethernet point in some new apartment buildings. Plug in, sign up and – for £60 per month – you’ll have a high-speed connection.

There are slower speed options too, with a 2Mbits/sec connection coming in at £25 per month – and since the service is delivered over Ethernet, there’s no BT line rental to pay on top of it. But this service is so far only available in a few apartment blocks and some student residences. So what about the rest of us?

If you’re in a Virgin Media cable area, there’s good news too; the cable provider has been trialling an upgrade in Folkestone, Ashford and Dover that will provide download speeds of up to 50Mbits/sec, with a wider rollout anticipated this summer – though as ever, those who take advantage of the higher-speed connection to download loads of data at peak hours are likely to find their usage capped or their bandwidth throttled.

A more interesting development, with potential for widespread high-speed net connections, is the first few experiments in Next Generation Access, or NGA. Improvements such as BT’s 21CN are aimed at helping the core of the phone network improve, making it possible to bring higher speeds to the local exchange.

NGA is about improving that last link, from the exchange to the home or office, usually by replacing some or all of it with a fibre-optic link.Two acronyms you’ll hear a lot about in this context are FTTH (fibre to the home) and FTTC (fibre to the cabinet, also sometime referred to as fibre to the kerb).

The first of those is pretty self-explanatory – the connection into your home will be by a fibre-optic cable, providing much faster speeds than other connection methods.

And it’s not science fiction – at a new development in Kent called Ebbsfleet Valley BT has committed to a trial where 10,000 new homes will have direct-fibre connections, providing them with 100Mbits/sec connections.

Pricing is yet to be set, but the system is due to go live in August 2008 – and it’s something that could be rolled out in future to other new-build developments. But as BT told us, it doesn’t anticipate huge amounts of internet data being downloaded – in its view there aren’t that many compelling uses for such a fast connection right now.

Instead, it thinks the main use will be for delivering things such as high-definition TV, with a 100Mbits/sec pipe allowing several different HD streams to be viewed in different rooms simultaneously. At the home a device called an Optical Network Terminal (ONT) connects to the fibre, and, as well as an Ethernet connection for data, can provide other connections for telephone and video services.

Sadly, while FTTH is a great technology, there are problems that mean it can’t be used everywhere in the UK. In many cases, though, FTTC is an attractive alternative.

In this system, the links to the local junction boxes – those familiar, green street cabinets – are replaced by fibre, bringing the high-speed connection much closer to the home, and making possible something known as VDSL, or Very High Speed DSL.

Essentially, this is a variant of the ADSL and SDSL that most users are used to, but since it’s running over much shorter cables, far higher speeds can be reached, up to around 50Mbits/sec.

Investment problem
Fibre is undoubtedly one of the most future-proof ways of delivering connectivity at the moment – but there’s a potential problem. BT Openreach, which owns the network, is a privatised company, like the rest of BT. As such, it’s expected to create a return for its shareholders.

Under the current regulations, though, if BT rolls out a new service on its network, then it’ll be expected to make it available wholesale to all comers – so just as any ISP that resells BT’s ADSL service will be able to resell services on the 21CN network later this year, so they’ll be able to resell any services built on a future BT FTTH network. And that’s just what will happen around August in Ebbsfleet.

For BT – and for the rest of the country – this presents a thorny problem. What’s the incentive for BT to invest billions of pounds upgrading the local network to fibre when it will have to allow other companies to come in and profit off the back of that investment?

It won’t be a small investment either, with some figures suggesting £10bn for fibre to the local cabinets, which would support VDSL, and £15bn for fibre to the home.

It’s an issue on which Ofcom consulted last year, and the Government has even suggested it may be necessary to provide public investment to prevent the UK from being left behind.

In some parts of the UK, investment in broadband is already coming from the public sector, with projects such as Nynet in North Yorkshire providing services to other public-sector organisations via a fibre-core network, with a mixture of DSL and fibre, and some wireless links planned for more remote areas.

South Yorkshire has a similar project, called Digital Region; both benefit from development funding from central government and the EU. But that funding’s only available in certain areas. So, until the broader issue of who will upgrade the whole of the UK’s local network is solved, it looks like fibre to the home, or to the local cabinet, is likely to be something found principally in newly built developments.

The rest of us will have to soldier on with our copper wires or cable modem connections. And, of course, if we’re to have high-speed internet access, investment isn’t just needed in the ‘access’ section of the network.

As we’ve already seen, BT’s upgrading its whole network as part of the 21CN project, but individual ISPs have to invest in internet capacity too – and as the connections into the home get faster and faster, there’s an ever-increasing likelihood of a difference between what it’s theoretically possible to send to your home, and what you’ll see when you’re surfing.

Congestion and consolidation
The bandwidth gap is one problem facing ISPs and their users, but it’s not the only one. Many people feel their internet connection just isn’t as fast as it should be. With many people on services that promise ‘Up to’ a certain speed, the reality is that most users receive far from the maximum. A survey in January by website Broadband Expert logged around 18,500 speed tests, with an average of 2.95Mbits/sec.

Of course, the headline speeds quoted for DSL services are based on short links to the exchange, and the speed falls off the longer the wire you’re connected to – but most ISPs fail to explain that all but a few people will get much slower speeds than the headline figures in the ads. It’s an issue that prompted a campaign in 2007 by PCW’s sister magazine Computeractive.

Largely as a result of this campaign and the accompanying petition to the Government, Ofcom is now considering whether or not there should be guidelines put in place for broadband advertising, in line with the proposals from Computeractive.

But it’s not just the issue of raw line speed that’s causing problems.

As one ISP that we spoke with pointed out, early adopters of broadband might have been told they had a 50:1 contention ratio on their line, but with relatively few people connected, they often enjoyed much better performance than that.

As more people have switched to broadband, enticed by lower prices, contention is becoming an issue once more – especially with the rapid growth of services such as the BBC’s iPlayer. Consolidation in the industry is having an effect too, with the bulk of the UK’s broadband now in the hands of a relatively small number of players, including BT, Tiscali and Carphone Warehouse.

Even brands that many considered a cut above the rest in the past are now part of much larger outfits, often losing the personal touch and technical expertise that made them popular choices for the more technical user. Pipex, one of the first ISPs in the UK, has now been subsumed into Tiscali, for example, and many of its users have expressed concern at being moved over to the latter’s LLU service.

Smaller outfits, such as Nildram, had already been taken over by Pipex and are now essentially just a brand for marketing. While you might hope that larger ISPs would benefit from economies of scale and be able to invest in greater bandwidth for their users, sadly that’s not always the case.

As we were told by one smaller ISP, with the UK’s broadband market being taken over largely by big firms competing on price and offering bundles that include telephony too, there’s a race to grab market share at whatever cost – and that may not leave much cash for investing in things such as Next Generation Access or upgrading external bandwidth.

As many readers will agree, it hasn’t left much left to invest in technical support or quality of service.

While a very few ISPs do aim to sell on speed, or quality of service, the larger players are concentrating on convergence – providing services such as BT’s Vision, with TV via the broadband connection, or Unique from Orange, where a special mobile phone can switch to making calls via the broadband link when you’re at home.

There are clear advantages to both these types of idea – video content can be provided from within the ISP, reducing the need for external bandwidth, and telephony doesn’t use up much capacity either – and both have a high perceived value to the customer.

As the market consolidates more, it’s likely that broadband connections will be sold on the number of things – video, VoIP (Voice over IP), seamless roaming, Wifi access – included, rather than on speed alone.

A typical small ISP that spoke to PCW, Wizards, told us that while there’s still a market for ISPs that can do more bespoke solutions, or offer better handholding, it’s not an easy one – and without other services such as consultancy to offer, your business plan is often at the mercy of BT and the way it prices its wholesale services.

Remarkably, Wizards told us that for the first time in years it has started to be asked about leased lines by their customers. Before the days of widespread DSL, a leased line was a typical way for a small business to connect to the net – but it could cost hundreds of pounds a month for even a 64Kbits/sec link.

These days, it’s rather cheaper, but you could still spend around £4,000 per year on a one megabit connection, giving you guaranteed bandwidth and – most importantly for some businesses that have suffered long and expensive failures of ADSL and SDSL services – a service level agreement (SLA) guarantee, that won’t leave you without a connection for days or weeks.

We’d be interested to hear from readers whose ISP has been bought out by a larger outfit, and whether your service changed as a result – email us at letters@pcw.co.uk.

Mobile broadband
When we last looked at mobile broadband, 3 had just announced its new service, and while both Vodafone and T-Mobile had data packages, the cheapest of them only just scraped in under the £30 mark – three times as much as the most basic offering from 3. O2 and Orange, meanwhile, stood out for monstrously uncompetitive rates on data.

As we predicted at the time, things would only get better and most of the networks have reduced their prices – all except O2 now offer mobile broadband packages with a 3GB data allowance for £15 per month.

O2 – perhaps hoping to wow people with the iPhone instead – offers a ‘Webmax’ tariff with 3GB of fair usage for double the price, with a USB modem that’s more than twice the size of compact models available from other networks. When it comes to speed, Vodafone and Orange both claim speeds of ‘up to’ 7.2Mbits/sec, with 3 claiming 2.8Mbits/sec.

But it all depends on exactly where you are in the UK; even on the networks that offer higher speeds, it’s worth checking coverage carefully before parting with your cash – especially as the best prices are often for 18- or 24-month contracts. You may very often find that speeds will drop back to 1.4Mbits/sec or even lower.

While most of the networks are working on expanding their coverage, if you want something to while away the evenings on a visit back home from the big city, you’ll find coverage is still patchy and that, rather than price, may determine the network you’ll have to use.

Also worth watching out for is HSUPA support, which all the networks should have to some degree by the end of this year – it boosts the upload speed to as much as 1.4Mbits/sec. Another welcome bit of news is if you don’t want to be tied to a contract, you don’t have to be ripped off, either.

Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone all have ‘daily’ tariffs, where you just pay when you use the modem; Orange charges £8.23 for a day’s access, with a 1GB download limit, and £58 for the USB modem. On T-Mobile you’ll pay £99.99 for the modem, and £4 per day for 1GB, while Vodafone charges £175 for its USB modem and £9.99 for a day, with a 500MB download cap.

3 offers a slightly different pricing structure based on top-up vouchers, where you pay £99.99 for the modem and then for £10 you can buy 30 days’ pay as you go access, with 1GB over the 30-day period.

If you need mobile access for a few days at a time, it can be cheaper than the alternatives – and it’ll include roaming on 3 networks in Ireland, Austria, Italy and Hong Kong – but heavy users might prefer the per-day limits and charges of the other networks.

But whatever option you choose, be careful if you roam abroad: remember the widely publicised case of the chap who ended up with an £11,000 bill for a mobile download of a TV show, due to the download resuming while he was on a business trip in Germany, where he incurred a £4.99 per MB roaming charge.

Where next for Broadband Britain?
Mobile broadband may be improving, and wireless links such as Wimax will continue to roll out – albeit at a very slow pace – but when it comes down to it, if you want a really fast broadband link, you need a fixed physical connection. As projects such as BT’s Ebbsfleet trial, Ask 24’s residential services, and the wider rollout of ADSL2+ show, faster connections are coming – but so is the crunch.

Before internet users in the UK can all have the really fast network connections that some of these trials offer, there needs to be a dramatic change in the way internet connections are regulated and funded.

Without substantial investment – and that means ensuring companies are allowed to benefit from their investment too – there’s a real chance the fastest internet connections will remain the province of those fortunate enough to live in new buildings or areas targeted for special projects.

Ultimately, that means Ofcom – and the Government – need to think hard about a lot more than just the poster speeds advertised by ISPs.

Moving on up to IPv6
“The world is running out of internet addresses! We won’t be able to add any more computers to it!” You might have heard that cry before. Last time round, it was fixed by the introduction of a new way of assigning addresses, called CIDR, that means an organisation can just be given eight IP addresses if that’s all it needs, or 512 – rather than either 256 or 65,536.

And CIDR has helped the internet carry on with its current core traffic protocol, Internet Protocol v4 (IPv4), for longer than some imagined. Most home users, and many companies, now use Nat (network address translation) to give them private addresses on their own networks, conserving public addresses even more.

But, as one of the internet’s founding fathers, Vint Cerf, warned last year, sooner or later we’re going to have to upgrade. That upgrade is to IPv6, a protocol designed some years ago, but still waiting to find widespread use. In February 2008, the internet’s core name-servers – the systems that turn a name like www.pcw.co.uk into an IP address – finally had IPv6 addresses added to them.

It’s a small but significant step; before then, if a computer running IPv6 wanted to look up a domain name globally, rather than on a private network, it would have to send its request via the old IPv4 protocol.
So, with the name servers working for IPv6, and major operating systems ready – Linux, BSD, Vista and Mac OSX all support it – is IPv6 ready for prime-time?

Not yet; outside trials, there’s still not much widespread deployment of IPv6, though it has been mandated for US federal agencies this year, and other organisations around the world are likely to follow. So far, the number of IP networks running IPv6 is less than five per cent.

So, in the short term, home users don’t need to worry; if you have to buy new kit, make sure it’s ready for IPv6, but there’s no need to throw anything out for a few years yet. If you do want to experiment, however, some ISPs such as Andrews & Arnold offer IPv6 as an option now.

Click for a technical background on IPv6 or find out more about the IPv6 Taskforce.

Korea can. Why can’t we?
Take a look around online, and you’ll often find people pointing out that other countries have cheaper and faster internet provision than the UK – and it’s true. But, sadly, that doesn’t mean we can necessarily have the same, and there are some important factors that are often overlooked.

In many parts of Europe, cable television is more prevalent, and passes more than 90 per cent of homes, giving easier access to the network and greater economies of scale. In the UK, the comparable figure is 50 per cent – and the cable industry has only come together as one in the past two years, after starting out as a huge patchwork of organisations; on the continent, consolidation happened sooner.

But cable’s not the only reason – it turns out that two of our key British obsessions also count against us in the broadband stakes – houses and mortgages. Places such as Korea, where just about everyone who wants it can have blisteringly fast broadband, aren’t like the UK. With our old housing stock and dislike of living in flats, 80 per cent of British properties are houses (according to the Office for National Statistics).

In London there are more purpose-built flats, but it’s still only 32 per cent. Compare that with Seoul, where flats were just four per cent of housing in 1970, but had grown to 53 per cent by 2006. Installing a high-speed link to an apartment block means one fibre can serve hundreds of homes, rather than just the one that would be the case for a typical house, or a handful for a small converted house.

And our desire to own properties makes things complicated too; it’s much easier to install high-speed broadband services, such as those from Ask4, at the construction stage, along with all the other utilities, but our slow rate of building means that’s only just starting to happen.

And while you can install connections as part of a refurbishment, as Ask4’s Jonathan Burrows explained: “That’s much easier when the whole building is owned by one company. Otherwise you have to make a separate legal agreement with each occupier.”

So, while it may well be true that some countries are doing better than we are when it comes to provision of high-speed broadband, it’s sadly not an issue that can be looked at in purely technical terms.

The bandwidth gap
As users clamour for faster broadband, ISPs are starting to have a problem on their hands. Already some have made a fuss about the BBC iPlayer, and the amount of capacity that it’s consuming, and things can only get worse from here. Contention isn’t something we hear about too much these days, but it’s going to bite with a vengeance.

Many ISPs have kept ahead of the game so far, investing in bandwidth as common speeds have crept up from 512Kbits/sec to 1Mbit/sec, then 2Mbits/sec. But going from there to the 24Mbits/sec of ADSL2+, or the 50Mbits/sec and higher that fibre might offer is a different proposition – especially when you consider the ISP has to buy uncontended bandwidth to share between all its customers.

Ultimately, there’s a big problem – even with 50:1 contention, an ISP with 10,000 users each with a 50Mbits/sec connection needs 10Gbits/sec of bandwidth to keep them all happy – and that’s a real issue, both technically and economically. So, as end-user speeds creep up, ISPs will have to either raise their prices, or look at providing a lot of content from within their own networks.

For many, that’s going to take the form of video on demand, HDTV and similar services.

Expect the emphasis not to be on the raw speed of the internet connection you have available – even if you have 50Mbits/sec, you’re not going to find many servers that will let you download at that speed, when they’re coping with other people too – but on the ability of the connection to seamlessly provide you with entertainment, telephone and similar services at the same time as you’re browsing or downloading.

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