More often these days, in our email boxes and during radio interviews, we are being asked questions and hearing complaints about the quality of broadband.
In general the complaints are:
- the quality (speed) of the broadband service is decreasing;
- it takes longer to download and to access websites;
- the level of quality of the connection often varies and is typically poor during peak hours such as early morning and early evening.
After a while the users affected by these issues call helpdesks but, as we all know, that rarely results in a positive experience.
Many factors can be involved, which makes it easy for telcos and ISPs to dodge responsibility. And often they themselves have no idea why it is happening. The hard reality is that this issue will not go away until the NBN is in place — and it will only become worse in the meantime.
Of course there are PC and modem issues, but I will ignore them for the purpose of this article and concentrate instead on the telecoms side, where it is basically a capacity problem.
The copper-based telecoms network was never designed for broadband and it is rapidly approaching its limit. Copper-based technologies such as ADSL and VDSL have been able to lengthen its life, but only so much can be extracted from a piece of copper. And when add-on technologies (e.g. ADSL2+) are brought into play distance becomes an issue also — the further away from the exchange, the more the broadband signal deteriorates.
The problems are worsening as broadband traffic over the telecoms network increases — people are using more and more rich media applications, to such an extent that the network is approaching full capacity; and once the network can no longer handle the amount of traffic it slows down, drops out, etc. Users at the end of the network then see their broadband flow dried up to a trickle.
Obviously this happens mainly in prime time — if one uses the network outside those times the speeds are generally better. However, as more people do this the problem simply becomes extended over longer periods.
The better the quality of the network the more can be pushed through the pipe. However, many parts of the network are decades old and the quality of the copper network varies enormously. This additional problem is exacerbated by the increasing traffic. Often the quality of the network is unknown to ISPs, and obviously there is very little they can do about it.
So the outlook is bleak. There is very little that can be done with the existing network. The sooner the NBN becomes available the sooner people can be transferred to it; and, as this infrastructure is based on fibre (not copper) and has near-unlimited capacity, the problems will then disappear.
*Paul Budde is managing director of BuddeComm, an independent telecommunications research and consultancy company. This article first appeared on Technology Spectator.
Roll on the NBN. My Internet ranges from reasonable to glacial, depending on time of day. Using wireless from the ADSL-2 modem, it often takes an hour or more (if successful) to download a 50 MB file to an iPad. If I move 15 km to my sister’s home using the same Internet provider and wireless, it takes 15 minutes to download the same file.
I think some parts of this could be said a bit differently.
ADSL is using the copper in ways which it wasn’t designed for. That they work at all is a tribute to the engineering investment that was made deploying it in the first place.
High speed data is basically radiowaves. The more there is in a bundle of telephone wires, and the faster it is being sent, the more likely there is ‘leakage’ between the pairs of wires. This means that the more ADSL that is sold, the more likely it is to interfere with other customers. The way ADSL works, is that when it detects this interferance, it slows down a bit to get the data through. So as more ADSL is sold, and used, and as more ADSL is upgraded to faster ADSL2+ the more likely it is that EVERY customer sees a slowdown.
High speed CABLE internet is even more prone to ‘sharing pain’. There is only one pipe connecting all the houses, and you just have to share it.
Then, there is congestion at the head end, from the devices which collect the ADSL and feed to the ISP, and the ISPs feed offshore and to other ISPs can itself be congested.
Finally, there is an emerging problem called “buffer bloat” Which some of us are skeptical about, but none the less, it has to be taken seriously as a reason why people see more ‘congestion’ and ‘slowing down’ even when the raw link speed is reported as faster and faster.
-G
There are two common issues that cause slow/unusable internet, even with fast connections:
1. File sharing. Bittorrent and other similar file sharing protocols open up many simultaneous connections (in the download AND upload directions). These connections take up all the available bandwidth and due to the way that TCP scales speeds short-lived connections (like say opening a webpage) are at a massive disadvantage. This problem is exacerbated by the ‘sharing pain’ that GGM mentions above. You only need one of me downloading every single simpsons episode ever made to bring internet pain to the whole street (especially on bloody Optus cable, it has very low upload speeds).
2. Buffer bloat. One of the things about buffer bloat is that it increases latencies. The thing that most users of the internet notice more than absolute speed is the time between when they do something and when they start getting data back from the internet, this is called latency. I’m not sure why GGM and his friends are skeptical of it. There is a (quite technical) article by Vint Cerf discussing buffer bloat here: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2076798
Both of these issues are related to the design of the internet and the software that runs it therefore they can theoretically be solved with software updates… theoretically. However this still won’t help you if you’re at the end of a 60 year old copper phone line or sharing one cell tower between everybody in your town.
I would like to see some facts and numbers here. The article is very general.
Leaving aside the limited bandwidth of ADSL connections:
* is there actually a bottleneck inside ISP networks causing a slowdown at peak times?
* if so, will the NBN actually make any difference? ISPs still need to provision capacity within their own networks. They might not provision enough just like now.
The NBN will ensure the “last mile” catches up in capacity but it will not solve ISP core network problems.
While it is all very well waiting for the NBN, and I think it’s a good plan by the way, it’s still going to be YEARS and years before it rolls out to regional centers. I’m 30 minutes out of Toowoomba, itself on the NBN even as we speak – but not in my valley. There are four houses in this valley, just waiting for the glass to replace the copper. I’m 66 now – how old do you think I’ll be when the glass comes? The NBN cable to the Northern Territory goes past here. So Arnhem Land will have NBN, but I won’t. The boundary for the Toowoomba roll out is the other side of the hill.
Meantime I pay $70 a month for 12GB, over 3G Wireless. Now it’s not a bad service really. Lets face it, we don’t have the Peak Hour traffic like you guys in the city, but it makes it real hard to work from home. I’m an ESL teacher and programmer (iPhone apps), and having clients connect to me is often hit and miss. You will see from my email that I operate in Shanghai as well as Toowoomba nearby, and Suffolk England – So I have a pretty good range of samples to look at. From what I see now, Australia is doing pretty good by comparison. Big place, no one lives here, so it’s going to take a while.
-RC