Usefully Useless

Let’s hope this abortion never, ever becomes law. This is the Government’s beleagured response to entertainment industry lobbying. I’ll go through it point by point.

Without any evidence, without any trial, without any proof, you can be disconnected from the Internet if anyone from the entertainment industry complains.
All it takes is an accusation and it only applies to music or movies. Not photographs, not paintings, not poetry, not opera, dance, novels, etc. If you manage to accumulate three of these special accusations, you’re cut off from the Internet pretty much forever – Without any form of trial or proof. Oh, did I say “you”? I meant “anyone in your household”.

Your Internet Service Provider is legally mandated to spy on you.
Any “evidence” the movie or music industries can use to sue you, or anyone in your household, your ISP is legally obliged to collect it. This basically means they have to monitor everything and anything you do online, or they’ll be fined £250,000 per instance. Then you’ll be fined £50,000, as well as being cut off for life.

The Business Secretary gets arbitrary power to do whatever the hell he likes
This includes making up new offences, setting new penalties including jail time…and better yet, the Business Secretary (one Peter Mandelson) has stated that he’ll use private enforcers provided by the entertainment industry who will have the legal right to hack into your computer(s).

Video games will get a strict new censorship regime
This means that many titles will not be able to be sold in the UK. Rather than use the popular (it’s used across Europe) and successful PEGI system or even renovating the existing BBFC standard, they’re inventing a completely new system which appears to be among the harshest in the world.

Digital Economy?
There’s no mention of anything remotely to do with the “digital economy” other than a mandate for Ofcom to review infrastructure every two years and a 50p/month stealth tax on telephone line rental. That’s really it. No addressing of our decidedly mediocre broadband performance. No dealing with astronomically high mobile data charges.

So will it pass? Very, very unlikely. The Tories have already opposed it and the Liberal Democrats are very likely to reject it.

To follow up from my coverage of the Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report, SamKnows and BBC News are reporting that three million homes do not have access at 2 Mbps or above.

What worries me, however, is that many homes which should have greater than 2 Mbps do not and it’s their own fault. I do broadband installation as part of my whole freelance techie thing as well as troubleshooting problems with it. It’s amazing how many people don’t wire their systems properly. One home I was at just a few weeks ago was achieving 1.5 Mbps and disconnecting often. Actual throughput was less than 1 Mbps.

When the actual throughput is less than the sync rate would predict (divide the sync by 9 to get the usable data rate, then multiply by 8 to get megabytes per second) it means a lot of errors on the line cause retransmission, thus slowing down the observed data rate. In this case, the DSL microfilter was plugged into the phone hookup for the Sky satellite TV box, so placing a phone device before the DSL device, absolutely verboten.

After I reorganised the wiring, the sync rate shot up to 6.2 Mbps with an actual data rate of 590 KB/sec. Service providers need to educate people better so that these elementary mistakes aren’t made. The DSL filter should be on the master socket or a filtered NTE-5 faceplate should be provided. Extensions done “properly” (that is, from the back of the master socket) are bad for DSL since they’re not filtered and so to make the best of a bad situation they should be filtered immediately on their socket.

Ask your neighbours how fast their Internet is or use the SamKnows Mapping Engine to query an average for your immediate locality. Remember that the average includes people who’re set up badly so you should be well above the average. My average is 3 Mbps, I get 4.5 – 5.2 . The average at the example I gave above was 5.0, they get 6.2 – 6.5.

If you’re significantly below what you should be getting, check your wiring. All lines are bundled so any problems with lines will be affecting your neighbours and the rest of your street too, too many people have said “Oh, my line is just bad” when it wasn’t. If the line really is bad, get a BT engineer out to sort it out. Be warned, however, that if the problem is with your wiring inside your home, you’ll be charged about £200. Make sure all your wiring is flawless first!

A report by Lord Carter recommends that “baseline broadband”, that is the minimum speed which can be called “broadband” be set to 2 Mbps. In the ancient times, when DSL was first being rolled out, it was set to 512 kbps. This meant BT had to sync users at 576 kbps (ATM overhead eats the difference and isn’t counted) or suffer.

Nowadays, we’re talking differently. Plans are afoot for a Universal Service Obligation of broadband, for which Lord Carter prepared his report. USOs guarantee that providers, regardless of the expense, will provide service. They exist for electricity, telephone and water (some very remote rural communities have exceptions) and Lord Carter’s report recommends that the broadband USO be set to a minimum of 2 Mbps, defined as 2048 kbps or an ADSL rate of 2248 kbps.

Reaction has been mixed. User groups have applauded the report, though some fear it doesn’t go far enough in guaranteeing universal availability. Infrastructure managers, led by BT, have criticised it. Much of their infrastructure, up to 30% of all households, cannot achieve 2 Mbps via ADSL and if they do, it’s a very unstable service with frequent dropouts.

Around half of the village I live in is unable to sync at more than 2 Mbps. I’m a freelance tech and installing broadband is a common job. My own runs at 4 Mbps to 5 Mbps down and 0.9-1 Mbps up, whereas the more common speeds are between 1.5 and 3.5 Mbps. Some users are STILL on IPStream 500, a 576/288 kbps service which was meant to be discontinued.

Two villages around me struggle to even achieve half a megabit.

BT’s “21CN” plan to roll out fibre to the line cabinet (those green boxes on street corners) with ADSL2 technology is looking increasingly dated. Planned for rollout between 2010 and 2012, other providers are already offering ADSL2+ Annex M offering over 20 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up, BT’s “21CN” will offer only 12/2.

My prediction is that the coming decade will see BT lose its stranglehold on telecommunications. Already services such as Virgin Media and TalkTalk are becoming sizable minority players and, what was unthinkable just a decade ago, many households have no connection to BT whatsoever.

It’s been touted so long that it has its own catchphrase. “Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted”, a term used derisively whenever any claim of anything that would harm the ‘net arises.

In the late ’90s, it was legislation crafted by ignorant lawmakers which outlawed vast swathes of online activities or technology. In the mid ’90s, it was a fear of running out of bandwidth, subscribers were signing up in such numbers that every three months the number of ‘net connected people was doubling.

As 1999 turned to 2000 and the dotcom bubble burst quite amusingly, various ‘experts’ claimed that the Internet was not viable for commercial operations, yet Google and Amazon, starting out as academic experiments and online bookstores respectively, have become corporate behemoths with valuations in the high billions.

The fickle nature of the net claims its casualties, however. Yahoo, once the darling of the web, saw its marketshare obliterated by a combination of MSN Messenger in the IM space and Google in the search space. Altavista, formerly the king of search engines, is now a little used curiousity next to the mighty Google.

So when we get alarmist re-runs of the Internet’s imminent death, it’s quite easy to turn a disbelieving eye.

The gist this time is that the ‘last mile’ is becoming too much of a problem. In 1998, the Internet became the World Wide Wait as users stuck on 56k modems managed to overwhelm websites full of graphics but this time it’s not the websites being overwhelmed, but the users themselves. The feed to the home is usually piggybacked on fibre or copper originally intended for television or telephone and it is these links which are becoming inadequate.

User generated content, such as what makes up the entirety of YouTube is growing exponentially and the bandwidth available to the home is not. BBC’s iPlayer has become so successful that many ISPs in Britain are throttling it back during the day, artificially slowing it down so it doesn’t clog their networks.

There are two key points of congestion to consider. Firstly, especially in the UK, most ISPs do not own any of their own infrastructure. Service providers like TalkTalk don’t own a single router, instead buying capacity from other service providers such as Tiscali or BT. Wanadoo have, even in their early Freeserve days, been a customer of Planet Online. It’s good business sense to buy as little capacity as possible, so the ISPs are deliberately throttling users during the day and even disconnecting heavier users.

BT, for example, market their “ideal for families” plan with a pathetic 5GB per month allowance. One child on YouTube over a rainy weekend can use that entire 5GB in just the weekend. Heavier users still, such as myself, can burn through 5GB in hours. With the advent of high definition content and services such as the BBC iPlayer, the end user bandwidth use is only going to get bigger.

This conveniently brings us to the next key congestion consideration: The last mile. A standard BT DSL link touted as “up to 8Mbps” is nothing of the kind, most users achieve between 3Mbps and 6Mbps. Even worse is that the upstream speed is a worthless 400kbps (448kbps, but ATM overhead ‘wastes’ one part of every nine), not even half of one Mbps. Wondered why uploading that video to YouTube was so slow? That’s why. Even the new ADSL2+ services, offering “up to 24Mbps” or 12Mbps are not any faster, usually offering only 400-600kbps upstream, let alone not improving download speed at all for anyone who already doesn’t get 6Mbps or more.

Cable’s even worse for many users, while it can theoretically go much faster, it is limited by the number of subscribers on one cable loop, usually an entire street or estate. A single fibre cable can perhaps handle 100Mbps or even less if it’s being loaded with many TV channels. A copper cable is a bit worse. Divide that up by the 8Mbps being offered to most cable subscribers and you have a grand total of twelve people who can use the service at full speed. Add a thirteenth and the speed drops. Most residential cable loops have fifty to two hundred subscribers.

The last mile connection just isn’t getting any faster or any more spacious anywhere near quick enough to keep up with demand. Is it going to be a crunch? It’s too early to tell but signs are there that over 2009-2010, the web will become the World Wide Wait yet again as the limits of DSL and cable become the proverbial brick wall awaiting the unwary driver.