The rural broadband challenge
Is ubiquitous rural broadband a pipedream?
This is a subject that has been a sore point for me for many years. I have been supporting some large customers around the UK for well over 20 years and it has always been a challenge to get any reasonable bandwidth to these locations. When I say reasonable bandwidth, I have struggled until very recently to get any more than 0.5Mbps to some locations even those close to fairly large towns. Some of these customer sites were the size of small towns themselves.
Fast forward to the current day and Ofcom are now saying the average requirement for broadband in the UK is 10Mbps based on domestic use. The government are still basing their recommendations on a minimum of 2Mbps. This could be an endless story given the time it takes for government policy to change followed by the subsequent launch of an implementation programme. The remaining five percent of the premises in the UK are likely to be playing catch up for many years to come.
“There are still many locations around the UK that struggle to get any broadband…”
There are still many locations around the UK that struggle to get any broadband and I am sure there are many who would jump at the chance of getting 1Mbps. I am currently helping a holiday village in Cornwall provide internet access to around 50 holiday bungalows and lodges. The best internet service we can get to the reception building on site is less than 2Mbps but that is far as we can go. The bungalows and lodges are spread out across a hill and tree covered valley with no underground or overhead cable routes. The owners have had a quote to provide telephone lines into each of the premises for a total cost of over £30,000, way above the published installation cost for a telephone line.
These may be holiday homes but our economy dictates that most of us need to be on-line wherever we are, at work or play. In addition to this, many young people and children expect to have internet access for entertainment or to keep in contact with their friends while they are away from home. In my opinion, holiday homes and accommodation are no different to permanent residences as far as their needs for internet access. The majority of us are significantly disadvantaged when we do not have access to reasonably fast broadband.
What are the options?
Back in 2004 Bourne Leisure were seriously concerned that the lack of bandwidth into many of their holiday parks and resorts was so bad that it was seriously damaging their customers’ experience. While many urban areas of the UK were beginning to see the benefits of the new broadband services only a handful of Bourne Leisure’s locations were within reach. We had to find a solution. By pure chance, while browsing the PC magazines in WH Smiths I spotted a review in MicroMart on satellite broadband services. The few satellite broadband providers at that time were delivering internet services using transmission technology designed for TV broadcast. However, this led us to a solution that saved the day.
The 25,000 miles between our customer and the satellite and another 25,000 miles from the satellite to the ISP was the first challenge. The 100,000 mile round trip delay led to some interesting ping times averaging one second during periods of low activity. These response times meant we could not depend on satellite for business critical traffic. So we decided to continue to use the existing 64kbps terrestrial lines for business critical traffic while policy routing any non-critical traffic via a VPN delivered over a satellite broadband service. The pilot worked so well the solution was rolled out to 40 sites with a project time span of five months from conception to commissioning. We referred to this service as our ‘Satellite Overlay’ solution and we won The 2005 Project of the Year Award beating BT and TeleWest for our innovation and delivery.
Moving on just over 10 years there are some more elegant solutions available now.
If you have some broadband connectivity but the speed is slow some ISPs provide the ability to take two or more telephone lines with bonded ADSL services across the lines creating a higher speed service. Typically in this type of service, one of the ADSL routers serves as the master router and allocates the data across the available ADSL services. The service provides additional bandwidth and resilience. In the event of failure of one of the lines the remaining services will continue to carry the traffic.
Satellite broadband services are now delivered using technology designed to deliver broadband services rather than just TV broadcast. There are a range of services available but the greatest problem is still the distance between the earth stations and the satellite and the resulting latency. This can be a show stopper to some applications and very frustrating to users, especially at times of peak traffic load. These services are reasonable low cost to install and run but they usually have monthly download restrictions. In the event of the download limit being reached the additional bandwidth charges can be expensive and the sudden halting of the service while awaiting payment a severe disruption. Satellite services may use traffic shaping to throttle back the bandwidth during peak times. It is even more important to examine the terms and conditions carefully when considering satellite services.
Mobile services are becoming more viable as WAN replacement services, especially where 4G services are available. As with any wireless service, connection and bandwidth can become unreliable and cannot be guaranteed in times of peak network demand or radio frequency interference. So 4G may not be good enough for commercial use if your business depends on reliable connectivity. Mobile services can be made more reliable by load balancing across two or more 4G services, but more about that later.
But what about the longer term future?
Considering our broadband services are being delivered over a physical infrastructure that was designed over 100 years ago for telephone and telegraph services, the DSL manufacturers have achieved fantastic results. They have constantly astounded me with their ability to push the laws of physics to absolute extremes to overcome cable distance and noise limitations, but we really are reaching the limit and it is naive to think that one day ADSL served by exchange hosted DSLAMs will solve our rural broadband issues. Using a bonded ADSL service is only viable if you are within range of reasonable speed broadband. If you are in the unfortunate minority with no broadband connectivity you have limited options such as waiting for FTTC (could be a very long wait) or using satellite broadband solution.
Given the local loop infrastructure is no longer fit for purpose, it is inevitable that we will see a move to replace the local loop copper infrastructure with optical fibre at some time in the future. In the meantime the only other means of achieving the bandwidths quoted by Ofcom and the European Union is to move the DSLAM closer to the customer, which at the moment means FTTC. We may also see the deployment of FTTdp – Fibre To The distribution point as this is also under consideration. In a traditional ADSL broadband delivery the DSLAM is in the local exchange. FTTC has DSLAMs installed in the Primary Cross Connection Points (PCCP or cabinet). FTTdp has DSLAMs installed in the Secondary Cross Connection Points (SCCP – typically pole, wall or underground installed distribution points).
So, what about the elegant solutions in the meantime?
We thought our Satellite Overlay solution was very elegant, and at the time it was. But it was relatively complex and it required several stages of routing at the main site to handle the policy routing, tunnel encapsulation and VPN encryption. In addition to this, the routing was fairly complex and required two routing protocols to cater for every failover situation. Fortunately this can all be achieved with a single appliance on each site now. WAN link aggregation solutions enable you to mix and match your connectivity services to provide a single high performance, high availability connection to each remote location. It is now possible to provide high availability and high reliability WAN connectivity using any combination of leased line, ADSL, 3G/4G, wireless broadband and satellite, in fixed locations and mobile. Using these techniques means we can use two or more ADSL services or 4G services or even use a mix of connectivity to create a single reliable service, especially if we use ADSLs and SIMs from different providers.
If you choose an ISP appropriate to your business requirements you will also be in a much better position to service your remote locations. Some ISPs have more experience than others in getting to those harder to reach locations around the UK. I mentioned in my earlier blog that some ISPs provide low cost broadband services by cutting back on their infrastructure. If your ISP does this the only way they can provide fair access to all of their customers is to use traffic shaping techniques to limit bandwidth hungry protocols. This is standard network traffic engineering practice.
It is also very important to understand that network traffic engineering is a complex subject with many factors to be taken into consideration. When we experience network performance issues we cannot simply assume the fault lies with the ISP. If the ISP has effective monitoring they will be able to give you a good indication as to where and why the slowdown occurred.
“…if we are to solve our rural broadband shortfall we need significant investment.”
For business requirements in particular we strongly recommend carrying out the relevant due diligence to establish whether the ISP has the capacity to support your business traffic as and when your business needs it. If the ISP limits certain traffic types it is important to understand the potential impact on your operation. Know and understand the ISPs infrastructure and talk through the potential bottlenecks. Also, discuss your ISPs maintenance procedures in detail. Some assume that all businesses are closed at midnight or 0200 hours and plan their downtime and upgrades at this time. This may be peak business time for your live business traffic or backup traffic and totally inappropriate to you. It is much better to engage with an ISP that understands your business and plans their maintenance around your requirements.
Going back to where we started in the first of these three blogs, if we are to solve our rural broadband shortfall we need significant investment. If the Service Providers are only interested in investing in the infrastructure when they know they have a guaranteed return then our poor rural broadband relations are going to remain poor for some time. Even if the new government see the potential return for UK PLC and make the required investment, nothing is going to happen soon.