I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Telecom have really made an effort over the last few months to reach out to industry. I applaud that. Yesterday a couple of senior Telecomers working on cabinetisation took the time to walk me through what they are doing and why they are doing it.
An issue they face is explaining why cabinets go where. Especially when it seems that some customers close to an Exchange are already well served. The explanation is logical but will require more typing than I have time for right now and I expect there will be documents out in the public domain explaining that next year.
Cabinetisation is about taking fibre right out to the node. It provides the backbone of the New Zealand network and once in place will provide us with a world class internal infrastructure.
The issue has been clouded by LLU. I’m no expert on all of that but I did note the new cabinet design does have space for 3rd parties.
Cabinetisation really solves the back haul issue. A big performance bottleneck on your home or small business internet connection is not your copper to the cabinet or exchange, but the cabinet or exchange to the central network.
I thought a useful digram would be one that shows the difference in bandwidth from the home to the central network as it stands now and as it will be with fibre to the Cabinet. Gerard from Telecom agreed and drew up these two diagrams which lay out the benefit of cabinetisation..
This is the relative bandwidth of links pre-cabinetisation …
This is what the links look like with fibre to the cabinet …
So I think cabinetisation is a very good thing.
blog
It all makes sense, especially when the limited range of ADSL2 is factored in.
My only comment is I’m personally not limited inside NZ, it’s the global links which cause me problems, so whilst local cabinet’s ( assuming 3rd party integration ) look a good thing, it’s all going to be for minimal advantage if the “National Transport Bandwidth” shrinks right back down again at the point it goes global.
Lastly, if Telecom are trying to be more open, it seems to me that bringing up the state of NZ ISP “peering” now would be a good thing.
I agree with Nigel on the international link problem - lets face it, if you want to stream media then chances are that it is from overseas.
International capacity is what people who hold up countries like Korea as paragons of broadband investment often miss.
Korean people access very little content that isn’t local. Try and access international Anglophile content when next you’re in Seoul - It’s quite likely that it will be slower than it is from NZ.
Just based on the look of those diagrams I am happy.
I think many people would agree that the bottleneck has been in the network rather than the last mile (when you are getting 200kB on your fancy 20MB connection that’s kinda obvious). But, on the other hand it may be too easy to just blame the international links for that.
I’m not an telecoms engineer or anything but was quite suprised when I first saw the math of how fast the aggregated bandwidth requirements add up as you move ‘back up the pipe’ - even at the regional level it can get pretty big pretty fast. Those great big green ‘national bandwidth’ bars certainly look good to me!! Decent national bandwidth may even improve international connections a lot too. Correct me if I’m wrong here but don’t CDN edge delivery networks like Akamai or whatever kick in mostly at the national level? That is, as long as everybody else can get their YouTube videos without clogging up the (national or international) pipe that means the rest of us get some space for the latest .net extensions pack or whatever.
One word, Rod. Credulous.
I’d be highly suspicious if someone told me that installing a cabinet between the exchange and customer magically increased the bandwidth *behind* the exchange. The mini-DSLAM put in the cabs will generally connect to the same ATM network that the regular DSLAMs in exchanges connect to (AFAIR).
There have been some heated emails coming out of TNZ recently about plans for cabinetisation - not all employees are toeing the official party line that cabinets are a good thing. I get the impresion that the folks working hard on LLU are getting a bit hacked off with all this manouvering.
The idea that cabinets closers to the home improves national capacity is rubbish. Unless every cabinet is link to all the others. Is Telecom suggesting that they are going to lay a huge mesh of fiber?
I think not, this us just a move to change the game on the LLU.
And what about companies connecting to those cabinets? We’re now supposed to buy fibre to the cabinet, install it and battle through the whole resource consent process before we get to hook up (wait for it) 30 customers at a time!
Yes, cabinetisation is a great idea. Where it’s appropriate. Inner City Auckland is not the place for it (with a few exceptions like Pt Chev) because it’s all well within the reach of the exchanges anyway. Customers won’t notice the difference in (say) Mt Albert because most customers will be a similar distance from the cabinet they would have been from the exchange.
I’ll send you a map of Auckland, Rod. If you could post it I’d be chuffed. It shows the areas of Auckland that are being cabinetised. You’ll notice they’re NOT the outlying areas that really are a long way from exchanges, but instead the inner city exchanges that really don’t benefit in quite the same way.
Cheers
Paul
In January last year the Danish equivalent of TNZ (TDC) undertook to roll out 50Mbit/s to over 80% of households in Denmark over 2007-8.
Can anybody tell me if fibre to the cabinet is such a good thing, why the targets here in NZ for 2012 are so much less ambitious.
Yes, I know Denmark is not NZ (population, density) but that does not account for all of the differences.
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Of course there’s no requirement that the backhaul/aggregation/core improvement must be coupled to cabinetisation — it’s necessary for ADSL2, but by many accounts existing DSL performance would be greatly improved with less congestion on the backhaul side of things.
And Paul is right — more places for Telecom’s competitors to have to run fibre to in order to serve a small number of customers can only be good for Telecom.
Guys,
By all means let Telecom get their fibre in place to the cabinets - at least that allows the end user to get his ‘expected’ bandwidth, rather than truncated bandwidth at at least 35-1 contention ratio per current backhaul link…
The problem remains that there is NOW no competitive BB access at the SubLOOP level either. For some incredibly stupid reason SubLOOP unbundling is to be considered separately from LocalLOOP unbundling (Who let or ‘engineered’ THAT one through?) and the Commerce Commission will take ANOTHER year to regulate the SubLOOP.
Paul - rather than laying more fibre, or buying access to it - how about Vodaphone proposing alternate backhaul via the new multiported DSLAMed cabinets (where they exist already) - using attached dishes (on adjacent homes), beaming area street cabinets to a local high spot (minimising siteline amenity issues), then muxing the beams back to the local CO ? eg In Auckland - All the muxed beams would go back via Skytower to the CO.
2 benefits -
1. Copper sub-loop users would have the choice of a ‘competitive’ dedicated backhaul provider, and / or:
2. The provision of dual backhaul routing for high bandwidth / peak load needs ie backhaul ‘bonding’ taking advantage of TCP/IP’s ability to route over alternate IP paths using load sharing to the specified ethernet ports on the new (4 or 8 port) multiported DSLAMs.
That would be an ‘economic’ way of provisioning to provide the step-change capacity required for Videoconferencing / IP TV etc, Content Streaming…How about it Dr Reynolds - Co-operative Backhaul…?
If not Vodaphone, has Kordia revised it’s costings yet (assuming street cabinets are fibred) ? Are local equipment vendors like 4RF Communications ready to do the WiMax / Digital Radio backhaul in volume post cabinatisation, are vendor consortiums being formulated with these options in mind yet?
A Second Option (at least for Auckland):
With or without contestable backhaul, why not RELAUNCH an updated form of IHUG’s ULTRA service - lets call it Ultra II, where only the downlink (from Skytower) is used for say 100/200 Mps, with the uplink being provided by the fibre OR current copper BB backhaul (instead of the old dialup link of the original Ultra). Imagine the bypass implications, if Telecom didn’t step up to compete by providing the upgraded backhaul! The platform provides for digital TV broadcast also.(Either MPEG2 or MPEG4).
Merry Christmas People…
David
28 Years IT&T
All Science is either Physics or Stamp Collecting-
Ernest Rutherford
Just been reading the InternetNZ report they commissioned looking at Cabinetisation & LLU. http://www.internetnz.net.nz/issues/current-issues/bband
I think cabinetisation is great too BUT this report makes it clear it will be virtually impossible for competitors of Telecom (read recently branded network operator Chorus) to catch up. As competitors build their own cabinets to the node (FTTN) maybe in next couple of years if they’re lucky, Telecom will simply counter by extending their own fibre to the curb (FTTC). And it the competition has any money left to copy that, Telecom will finally deliver fibre to the home (FTTH). Once again Telecom defends its monopoly position and reaps the booty!
In a country the size of NZ and only serving a population of 4 million people it is patently absurd for a bunch of communication companies to waste billions laying their own fibre past our homes. Think about the $500 million Telstra Clear has spent putting in their own cables into Wellington and Christchurch (only 70% before the money ran out). How long will it take to get a return on this ‘wasted’ investment?
This report gives even more urgency to Rod’s white paper on Securing Our Digital Trade Routes. The Government must take up his proposal and secure this critical infrastructure for all New Zealanders if we have any hope at all of “being in the top half of OECD by 2010â€