Ben's Talk3G Blog

There's a theme that has driven me all my life. At nursery school I'd connect together all the toys. The staff said this wasn't a problem in itself, but it did become problematic when, post connection, I'd disallow any of the other children to play with them. Paper cups and string. Fairy lights were amazing to me; all those little bulbs connected up together. When a friend, for reasons that still escape me, was given a pager by his parents I was truly misty-eyed and, admittedly, incredibly jealous - this ugly little chunk of device was connected! But to what? AaaaAaaah.

The theme is connectivity, and since mobile phones happened my craving and curiosity has been, perhaps to my detriment, largely satisfied. At least that was the case, until I moved 16 months ago to a total mobile phone and broadband not spot, which I fondly refer to as the communications black hole. No one gets phone signal here. I find it mildly amusing watching my visitors panic and then head out to the garden waving their mobiles in the air trying to get a signal. Amusing until I remind myself that these people, struggling to go a few hours or days without their phone, know nothing of the pains of never having signal... ever.

But I wasn't worried. Vodafone had the Access Gateway (Sure Signal) for mobile, and seven years previously I'd done the whole satellite thing with the ill-fated Aramiska service. I say ill-fated, it was ill-conceived and ill-operated, and doomed from day one, but I wont go into that. Satellite would be my worst-case secnario, and if I could do it then I could do it now. Wiring tweaks and gismos would stabilise an ADSL connection and WiMAX would ride to my rescue providing a cheap, fast connection to the outside world where none existed before.

To start with things were going well. The ADSL did stabilise. At 256k, to be precise, and despite Eclipse Internet quoting me speeds of 2mbps when I ordered that magically became 256k once it had been observed that this was the maximum achievable without the modem LEDs doing the conga every five minutes. As it turns out, Vodafone Sure Signal will actually work over such pitiful speeds, so looking at my iPhone I can pretend that I'm standing outside Kings Cross basking in super-dooper-high-speed 3G. Unfortunately 'pretend' really is as far as it goes - yes, a call will work for a while, but eventually it'll degrade, and if someone else dares to touch the connection it'll naff off altogether. At least I can text... though FishText works great over WiFi and a lot of my friends use it meaning I've got a Vodafone-free two-way texting solution that still uses my Vodafone mobile number. Comes in handy when the ADSL goes away for the weekend - yes, it's stable-ish, but it still takes more time off than I do.

There are other issues with such low bandwidth. Mac OS X updates frequently weigh in at close to 1GB. World of Warcraft updates can be closer to 4GB. Even iOS updates are hefty. Videos wont stream. For things like these, 256k is about as useful as no Internet connection at all.

But all was not lost! OrbitalNet, the guys behind VFast wireless, which operates in this area, were scouting around finding the best way to get thundering megabytes of throughput to the property. Zipping in from Canterbury, Ramsgate, wherever - the answer was coming. Coming right up until it, quite literally, disappeared into thin air.

Living in the woods, it turns out, is a bit of an issue for wireless. Oak trees grow mighty large, and hacking them down for one's Internet fix is a bit of a no-no. Not only that, but repeaters would need to be installed at various locations on other people's property. Everything got bogged down in complexity and pretty soon no progress was being made at all.

Which brings us to BT. British Telecom. Purveyor of Her Majesty the Queen's finest (well, oldest...) copper network to the great unwashed. Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) may be coming, but it's not coming fast enough, if at all, to my neck of the woods.

I first asked BT to quote for a fibre installation back at the end of 2009. After all, fibre runs to my office a whole 7 minutes down the road, with no installation excess, so how expensive could it really be to get it to my new abode?

Answer:
Survey £350.00
Blown Fibre 2607 metres B end Fibre £10428.00
Tubing 25 metres 1545 metres (External) £5407.50
SOFT SURFACE 118 metres 35.00 4130.00 £4130.00
FOOTWAY 637 metres 80.00 £50960.00
CARRIAGEWAY 236 metres 140.00 £33040.00
SMALL FOOTWAY BOX (UP TO 104) 7 750.00 £5250.00
EXTERNAL WALL (PER HOLE) 1 £330.00
TRAY OR TRUNKING 2 x 40.00 £80.00
Total Excess Charge Costs
£ 109,975.50

Cha-ching! No, your eyes are not playing tricks on you. Yes, there are actually charges for digging up the pavement and the road in there! This, then, was not an option, and discounted immediately. BT did come up with a little plan for using nearby mobile masts to route connectivity wirelessly to, or at least near (no signal, remember), the premises, but this never materialised.

As OrbitalNet had failed in taking my broadband speeds into the stratosphere the next step for some actual usable bandwidth was satellite. Avanti, to be precise, via reseller Avonline. Now, I knew satellite would be bad, but a lot of time has passed and 4mbps down, 1mbps up 'low latency' (600ms...) connectivity was now available at a not altogether unreasonable cost for a not spot. Not unreasonable on paper, anyway. What I've quickly realised is that, for whatever reason, getting anywhere near these speeds is nih-on impossible, but the worst bit is that, for whatever reason, large downloads ALWAYS fail. Some download managers can overcome the problem, but iTunes has the worst download management I've ever seen and the only option when an iOS download fails is to start again from the beginning. Streaming doesn't work. Browsing works, if you allow being able to make a coffee in between changing web pages to be classed as 'working'. To add insult to injury, there's a 10GB non-negotiable cap on all packages after which the connection is suspended. "Why's that a problem" I hear you cry "you can't get anything to download anyway"! I think you'll find that when it takes 4 tries to download a 1GB Mac OS X update that 10GB doesn't last very long at all. As a result, Avanti is either working badly, or not working at all. Pathetic, useless, and, well, crap.

It's 2011 now, and I'm horse from screaming "GET OFF THE ADSL" every time I need to use my mobile, months behind on any sort of OS update, and completely unable to play Call of Duty on Xbox Live. There's nothing worse than a Christmas present that can't be used! Drastic action needed to be taken, and this time it manifested in an email to Spitfire for a new fibre quote.

Spitfire, of course, use BT Openreach at the back end to get fibre laid, so another survey, and another heart attack:
BEARER : FIBRE .. RE-COST ? NO QTY RATE( ) TOTAL( )
SURV OVD DATE N/A 1.00
INITIAL ECC SURVEY 1 350.00 350.00

CABLE, BLOWN FIBRE AND TUBING QTY RATE( )CHARGEABLE A
CABLE 969 7.50 7267.50
BLOWN FIBRE 1718 4.00 6872.00
TUBING (EXTERNAL) 669 3.50 2341.50
INTERNAL CABLING/BLOWN 22 8.00 176.00
SMALL FOOTWAY BOX (UP TO 104) 2 750.00 1500.00

OTHER 1710 1710.00

REASON FOR MISCELLANEOUS CHARGES : -
MISCELLANEOUS OTHER IS FOR APLICATION CHARGES FOR WAYLEAVE REQUIRED ON 5 ELECTRICITY POLES
TOTAL EXCESS CONSTRUCTION CHARGE
£20217.00

What's this? The charges are suddenly a fifth of what they were? And yet still so irritatingly expensive?

BT will now, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, sling fibre optic cables up over telegraph poles. Whether this is a good idea or not is yet to be seen, but the lovely Openreach engineer had some nice tales of people's fibre being shot through, knocked down and run over etc, so excitement may well be on the cards with this solution. Still, I thought to myself, at least it's a physical connection; that's got to trump any sort of complex wireless mess any day of the week, and it'll make sending my tweets into orbit and back seem positively stone-age.

The original excess charges quote included 3 new poles, which I thought was pretty sweet, but that seems to have been subbed for using ones used to deliver the leccy. I had plans to decorate my poles (much to BT's objection I would imagine, given that they'd technically own them...) but, alas, looks like I'll have to do without such frivolity.

And there we have it. All going to plan, fibre capable of 100mbps should be making its way to my little village over the next few months. Skipping out all of the other properties on the way, sadly. Given the location of my property I doubt there's any reasonable way of sharing this advancement with the community. I'll not take the full 100mbps because we're talking uncontended symmetrical bandwidth here, and that's pricey, but I'll take enough, and it'll be incredible because fibre always is. What if BT deploy FTTC within a couple of years? Well, that would've been nice, and certainly cheap, but to be honest nothing, and I mean nothing, competes with FTTH (even though my fibre will trump that), and that'll never be a reality here. For me, someone who values connectivity so much and on such a low level, this is one excess I feel I can actually justify.

No, I haven't lost my mind. I'll be joining with my local Parish Council to campaign and appeal for better broadband for the village. Clearly this 'solution' for me is no solution at all for regular Internet users, and I deplore the Labour and Coalition government attempts to improve access to decent Internet speeds. I believe in a government just big enough to fit in our pockets, but at the same time where government can really excel is in bringing fairness where the markets fail to provide it. That clearly isn't happening; too many quangos and pointless initiatives to bankroll.