Broadband feature

Broadband FEATURE

FEATURE Broadband

How fibre broadband transformed Cornwall Barry Collins visits Cornwall to discover the huge impact fibre broadband has had on the county – and on those who have missed out

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lun Morgan shakes his head and puffs out his cheeks. He remembers a time when his staff had to take turns to download files over the internet; how they used to go home at 6pm and then deal with their emails because the office connection was so deplorably slow. A 1.5Mbits/sec line shared between 28 staff sounds like a wistful tale from 1999, but it isn’t.

This is how his Truro-based manufacturing firm was operating only eight months ago.

And then a BT van pulled into his car park.

Helped in no small part by more than £50 million of EU funding, BT is halfway through a rollout that will see between 80% and 90% of Cornwall’s homes and businesses benefit from a fibre connection – whether it’s right up to their door or just as far as the local street cabinet. It’s helping to transform lives and livelihoods in a largely rural county, where the debilitating effect of long ADSL lines on connection speeds is greater than it is in most areas of the country.

The lucky ones, such as Morgan’s resistor manufacturing firm Arcol, have seen their connections hurtle from near-dial-up speeds to hundreds of megabits per second, opening up business opportunities such as online backup and remote working.

And then there are the unlucky ones, the 10-20% of Cornwall residents who don’t have fibre and won’t receive it, either because they’re too remote to fit BT’s business case, or because they’re victims of the postcode lottery that can leave even urban dwellers dumped outside of the fibre footprint. “When you say you’re going to do 80-90% fibre, everyone thinks they’re in the 80-90%,” laments Dr Ranulf Scarbrough, director of BT’s Superfast Cornwall programme, with the wearied shrug of a man who’s had his ears chewed by expectant customers.

So what is life like on either side of this fibre divide?

The arrival of fibre across the county has brought other business benefits. As many as five of Morgan’s employees now routinely work from home. Having only a handful of staff working from home might not save the business much money, but the employees feel the economic benefit: they don’t have to pay expensive petrol bills to drive back and forth from the office every day, which is one reason why they might choose to continue working for Arcol rather than an employer closer to home.

Morgan can now call on expertise from further afield, by giving them remote access to Arcol’s network. “The man who sorts out the ERP [enterprise resource planning] system lives in Windsor – we couldn’t do that six months ago.”

“Staff had to deal with work emails at home; the office connection was deplorably slow” The upgraded connection has also let Arcol hold face-to-face meetings with its many foreign customers and partners for the first time. Instead of the wobbly audio Skype connection the firm used to rely on, it can now hold HD video conferences from the company’s boardroom. However, Morgan admits this has its downsides: the people on the other end of the line can now see the strange faces he pulls when they make a ridiculous proposal.

Virtual wine tasting Ten miles down the road in St Agnes, another newly enabled fibre business is taking a more leisurely approach to videoconferencing. Louise

Treseder is the owner of the Driftwood Spars inn, a homely old-fashioned pub with its own microbrewery, a function suite, 15 guest rooms and a dog sleeping on the carpet in the bar. Its name derives from its timber beams (or spars) that were plundered from the shipwrecks washed up on the local beach, which is a pebble’s throw from the pub.

We arrive just in time for a virtual wine tasting. Treseder and the local brewery import their wines from Domaine Laroche in the Chablis region of France, and hit upon the idea of asking experts from the vineyard to deliver the tasting notes over a Skype connection. The Driftwood Spars inn doesn’t have fibre running right up to its door, but even the 38Mbits/sec maximum of the pub’s fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) connection is plenty for a two-way HD video conference.

So, on this squally winter’s night in Cornwall, we’re sitting back and sipping a little too merrily as Christine from Laroche takes questions from the floor about the wines and their production.

Granted, it isn’t exactly pushing the available bandwidth to its limit, nor is it the most bleeding-edge demonstration of e-commerce we’ve witnessed, but it doesn’t need to be. For a large pub with no shortage of local competition and bills to pay during the off-season, such an event can make a sizeable difference to the bottom line.

Treseder tells us how even running reliable Wi-Fi connections to the guest rooms – a 14Mbits/sec connection to our bedroom on the second floor was enough to substitute the appalling reception on the room’s television for the iPlayer on our iPad – has helped to attract business travellers, who much prefer to spend the night in a colourful local pub than a faceless hotel chain if they can get a reliable internet connection to the office.

Thrust into the fast lane When you first hear Arcol’s Alun Morgan describe how the firm coped before fibre broadband, you begin to wonder how the business even survived. “Like a man out in the car park had his foot on the line” is how Morgan describes life on his sluggish 1.5Mbits/sec ADSL line.

He laughs as he recalls the conversations he used to have with cold-callers ringing up to offer him online backup services, and the despondency in their voices when he told them how many months of solid uploading it would take to back up all 27GB of the company’s critical data. Instead, Morgan relied on tapes for off-site backups, admitting that he often “found a tape in the back of the van and thought ‘that should be in the safe’”. Now things are a little less haphazard. With fibre connections at both the office and his nearby home, Morgan backs up the company data to a NAS drive in his back-bedroom office.

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BT is rolling out fibre to between 80% and 90% of Cornwall’s homes and businesses

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from the performance hall to the site of the presentation simply wasn’t possible before the university was hooked up to fibre broadband.

Now the university is hoping to turn the jiggling Cameron into an app.

We head upstairs to the music studios and there stands a man in front of a grand piano.

Frankly, he might as well not be there, since this is a Yamaha Disklavier piano that – unbeknown to the untrained eye – plays itself. Hidden beneath the bottom left of the keyboard is a controller unit that converts MIDI data into instructions for the piano’s electromechanical solenoids, which move the keys and pedals without any human help.

These £45,000 pianos include CDs full of songs, so owners can set the piano to play automatically in the corner of the room, or even stream music over the net, all delivered with the “live” acoustics that even the most expensive hi-fi setups couldn’t hope to equal. They’re also

“It’s difficult for small businesses to see the potential benefits of reliable broadband”

New casing allows fibre to be run via telegraph poles, to reduce the amount of digging

The tangible difference even moderate broadband speeds has made to such businesses raises the question: why on earth didn’t they do something about their appalling speeds before BT’s fibre vans rolled into town? Even if fibre wasn’t available, other (albeit more expensive and slower) solutions such as bonded lines and Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) could have given them a much-needed boost.

However, even if they could have afforded the hundreds or thousands of pounds a month for these workarounds, it’s often difficult for small- and medium-sized businesses to see the potential benefits of faster, reliable broadband until they actually have it, BT’s Ranulf Scarbrough told us.

Indeed, Louise Treseder only upgraded to fibre after she was carpet-bombed by leaflets from BT and decided to find out what all the fuss was about. Now, as chairperson of the St Agnes Chamber of Commerce, she says she’s one of fibre’s biggest advocates.

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Broadening education The benefits of fibre broadband are also evident at University College Falmouth, a sprawling, modern campus with impressive facilities, some of which were also paid for by grants from the European Social Fund. Cornwall may have an active band of separatists but, to an outsider, it seems to be doing pretty well out of being part of the Union.

We’re taken to the performing arts studio, where a female student stands in what appears at first to be a catsuit dotted with small light bulbs. The bulbs are, in fact, reflective markers, used by the light sensors mounted around the room to capture the movement of her joints and limbs. The student starts dancing and, to our left, a video screen appears with a 3D caricature of David Cameron, mirroring the student’s distinctly unstatesmanlike movements.

This amusing send-up has been used as part of functions and presentations at the university, but beaming the megabits of animation data

used to deliver music lessons remotely, with the tutor and pupil able to physically play together at pianos that are thousands of miles apart.

However, the Disklavier at University College Falmouth is being used for something a little more ambitious: a live concert performed simultaneously in three different locations around the world. Synchronising the pianos is no mean technical feat: the live streams will require 500-800Mbits/sec of data to be shunted between the three locations, which is at the top end of the capabilities of current commercial FTTP services. Latency is also key, as a delay of even a few milliseconds could put the performance out of sync. Needless to say, the concert couldn’t even have been conceived using the ADSL technology that Cornwall relied on until recently.

Before we sweep out of academia, we’re treated to one final demonstration of fibreenabled remote learning, this time in a dance studio where a tutor is walking his pupils through a series of steps. For the purposes of this demonstration, the pupils are just next door, but with the amount of bandwidth Falmouth has on tap, there’s no reason why they couldn’t be in another part of the county, country or planet – provided the other end had sufficient bandwidth too, of course. And they do need some pretty serious bandwidth.

This particular setup uses three cameras and three full-wall projectors, so the tutor can see his pupils’ movements face-on and in profile – and vice versa.

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The Cornish business with Olympic bandwidth

So the benefits of Cornwall’s fibre revolution to businesses, residents and academia are substantial – but what’s happening to those who fall outside of the fibre footprint?

The have-nots BT says its target is to reach “80 to 90%” of Cornwall’s premises with its fibre rollout, but even the higher figure would leave around 25,000 households and businesses on ADSL. Although the company is still in the middle of the rollout, BT claims it has 29 other ISPs already offering fibre connections to Cornwall residents on a wholesale basis. However, locals told us they’re struggling to find fibre products from anyone other than BT. Falmouth-based IT consultant Mark Lis is a Sky customer, but claims he’s unable to get fibre from the company. “I have a number of clients dotted around Falmouth, Truro, Camborne, St Austell and Padstow, and currently all of them struggle to get fibre provision,” says Lis. “Either they aren’t with BT (which is the primary problem), or they’re exchange-only connected and not via the [fibre-enabled] green box.”

The latter problem to which Lis refers is that BT can only run fibre from dedicated cabinets, not directly from the local telephone exchange, as it can with ADSL. Perversely, that means those living on the doorstep of a BT exchange may be excluded from the fibre rollout. BT is working on a solution, and these customers can console themselves with the fact that they’re likely to have the fastest ADSL speeds in town.

However, the majority of those 25,000 fibre have-nots won’t be within spitting distance of their local exchange. Indeed, they’re more likely to be several miles away, suffering deplorable ADSL speeds because the length of their telephone line attenuates the signal and reduces an 8Mbits/sec or 24Mbits/sec headline speed to a crawl. A small percentage will have no broadband to speak of.

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server, although it will be shrunk in due course. Interestingly, XG-PON and GPON are running down the same optical fibre, but work at different wavelengths and frequencies so that they can be used simultaneously.

We saw a live demonstration of the XG-PON line on our visit to Cornwall. Using a special content server located in BT’s Truro exchange, the ZTE team was able to download a dozen 40GB files simultaneously, without stretching the connection to full capacity. Indeed, the bottlenecks were the receiving PC (which had been fitted with a 10Gbits/sec NIC) and the networking equipment, which couldn’t cope with the raw speed of the connection. Although data can be shuffled between the exchange and Arcol at 10Gbits/sec, it isn’t connected to the wider internet at such speeds, as “there’s simply nothing you could do on the internet at 10Gbits/sec,” said BT’s Ranulf Scarbrough.

The future for these unfortunates is as dank as the underground ducts through which BT runs its fibre. This time last year, BT and EE joined forces to create a pilot 4G network in Cornwall, which they were trumpeting as a high-speed solution (greater than 20Mbits/sec) for properties where running cable didn’t tick the right boxes on BT’s spreadsheet. A year on, and BT has gone decidedly cold on the idea.

With more people due to receive fibre in Cornwall than BT originally anticipated (it was initially only due to reach two-thirds of the population), the business case for serving that final 10% of premises with 4G has become harder to make, admits BT’s Scarbrough. “We don’t have a plan to use LTE at the moment,” he says.

This isn’t to say that BT has given up on the final tranche. The company is trialling a lunchbox-sized device with the rather Doctor Who-esque name of Broadband Regenerator, which it claims will boost connection speeds for those on the longest ADSL lines. Placed in BT’s underground ducts, halfway between the exchange and the customer’s home, the Regenerator is effectively a repeater, delivering to customers the same kind of speeds they would enjoy if their house was located at the same place as the Regenerator. It can boost speeds from mere hundreds of kilobits per second to 4Mbits/sec, according to BT’s network director Jeremy Steventon-Barnes, which is a vast improvement, even if fibre typically delivers ten times that throughput.

For customers who can’t currently receive ADSL at all, BT is exploring line bonding – where two or more copper pairs are

used to serve the same property with speeds of only 1-2Mbits/sec – or the faster but more cumbersome satellite broadband as last resorts.

However, as genuinely enthusiastic as BT’s Cornwall team is about getting fibre to as many people as possible, as long as it meets its commitment to deliver at least 2Mbits/sec to the whole of Cornwall the company will consider it “job done”. With BT already having the majority of the county covered with its fibre network, the chances of any other provider investing in the region are slim to non-existent.

For the majority of people, the benefits of BT’s fibre rollout will be plentiful and diverse, yet an increasingly isolated minority will be left with connection speeds that aren’t even capable of running services such as BBC iPlayer or YouView today, let alone whatever higher-bandwidth services tomorrow will bring. Fibre has transformed Cornwall, but not all of it.

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Source: Superfast Cornwall 2013

Resistor manufacturer Arcol may have a standard FTTP line powering its business, but it’s also trialling a staggering 10Gbits/sec connection – the fastest anywhere in the country. In fact, this modest firm on the edge of a nondescript Truro business park has greater bandwidth than was available to the entire Olympic Park last summer.

Today’s gigabit fibre connections are delivered via Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON). A single 2.5Gbits/sec fibre emerges from a headend in the telephone exchange, and is then split into 32 fibres that are routed to individual customers. Each customer has a GPON optical networking unit (ONU), which acts like a modem, in their premises.

The 10Gbits/sec connection is delivered through an enhanced version of that technology, called XG-PON. This works in much the same way, with an XG-PON headend in the exchange and an ONU in the customer’s premises. In Arcol’s case, the ONU has been built by networking equipment manufacturer ZTE in a box the size of a 1U rack

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