SNMP Toaster

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SNMP Toaster
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The Last Mile Arms Race

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• Simon Hackett
• Agile Communications / Internode
• simon_at_agile.com.au

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The Last Mile Arms Race

• The problem space
• The playing field
• The players
• The hidden battleground

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Fixed-site home/soho broadband

• The speeds keep going up
• The price charged keeps going down
• Triple play may be needed to hold average revenue
  per user (ARPU) to a sustainable level in the
  future

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Main challenge is not technology

• Moores law doesnt apply to labour costs
• Digging up the road is expensive
• Hence the appeal of wireless, but
• well get to that

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What defines the playing field?

• Our Designated Monopoly-
• Owns key infrastructure built from historic
  income sources that no longer exist
• Resists access to that infrastructure by others
• Constrains monopoly-coverage broadband speed to
  protect monpoly-rent income sources
• E1, Frame Relay, ATM data services vs ADSL2
• Foxtel vs VoD/IP-TV
• Uses retail market price changes to damage
  competitors builds damage wholesale market
• 29.95/month - the ultimate two-edged sword

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The Would-Be Heroes

• 3G wireless (and relatives)
• Too expensive, too slow, too late
• Mobile email and SMS isnt broadband
• Broadband over Powerlines
• The Leyland P76 of broadband technology
• Fibre to the Home
• It works, just far too expensive to build
• Labour costs main issue, not hardware costs

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Greenfields Challenges

• Old habits die hard
• Developers still giving the farm to Telstra
• Education needed
• Habits need to be changed
• Few other triple-play enabled carriers (yet)
• Telstra lobbying to excise FTTH from requirements
  to provide wholesale access to competitors.

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Brownfields Challenges

• Multiple technologies for the local loop
• All try to re-use existing infrastructure on
  opportunistic basis.
• One size does not fit all
• Some geographic areas cant be solved this way
• The losers (blackspots) often hard to solve
  economically
• No USO for real broadband
• ISDN is not broadband!

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The wireless magic bullet

• Ever read these claims?
• gt2Mb/s to your mobile phone
• Unfortunately, one at a time, please
• Wi-MAX will solve all broadband access challenges
  and usurp wired broadband
• real soon now
• Broadband over Powerlines will deliver 100
  megabits to your home
• real soon now
• all despite the laws of both physics and
  economics tending to act against their success

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So where does wireless fit?

• Direct relationship between screen size and
  bandwidth required
• Inverse relationship between travel speed and
  screen size required

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Wireless Value is really Mobility
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Best weapons for target market

• Hybrid Networks
• Use the old stuff where you can
• minimise cost, maximise reach
• Build new only where you must
• High speed backhaul paths to aggregation points

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Fibre to the Node

• xDSL - The current winner (in .AU)
• Fibre to Node, Copper to customer
• Dedicated bandwidth per customer
• Competition enabled by regulatory intervention
• HFC - The niche player (in .AU)
• Fibre to Node, Coax to customer
• Shared bandwidth per customer
• Insignificant new geographic expansion
• Cable operators deny access to others

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ADSL advances

• ADSL v1 (G.DMT)
• Up to 8Mb/s
• Telstra artificially constrain to 1.536 Mb/s.
• ADSL2 (G.DMT.BIS)
• Up to 12 Mb/s
• Being deployed by Internode/Agile today
• RE-ADSL2 mode for extended line range
• ADSL2 (G.DMTPLUS)
• Up to 24 Mb/s
• Spectrum-doubled ADSL2
• Will be deployed by Internode/Agile by circa June
  2005

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ADSL performance chart
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The Star-Wars solution

• Direct Fibre To The Home (FTTH)
• Technical optimum for ultra-bandwidth forever
• Constraint is economics, not technology
• Not about more trials simply dont add up.
• Current customer income (even from the
  triple-play) has ARPU insufficient to fund FTTH
  overbuild in brownfields sites

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Bandwidth for the Triple Play

• Triple-play services
• Voice (4 concurrent calls o/head) 0.25Mb/s
• 2 x 2-3Mb/s MPEG-4 HD-TV streams 6Mb/s
• Internet _at_ 5-10 Mb/s
• Total 11-16 Mb/s
• ADSL2 can service this data rate for at circa
  80 of the Australian population
• FTTH business case awful before ADSL2
• How much worse if lt20 of the market is left?

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Backhaul The secret war

• The real war is for access to backhaul at pricing
  compatible with current retail pricing for
  broadband services
• Without very low cost, very high availability,
  very high capacity backhaul, the war is lost
  before it even begins

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Backhaul already exists, but

• Telstra own it and protect access to it
• Single Mode fibre to most exchanges
• Sufficient bandwidth for ultra-broadband backhaul
• Funded by their historically higher price points,
  and monopoly income base, for voice and data
  services over past decades
• Older, higher, phone call rates
• Older, higher, ISDN data rates
• These income sources no longer exist
• Insufficient potential income to fund overbuild
• Especially true in context of regional/intra-state
  backhaul

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Some (potential) magic wands

• ACCC intervention in backhaul pricing
• Declared direct access to inter-exchange Fibre
  and/or
• Lower the ACCC price cap for Declared
  inter-exchange Transmission services
• Telstra structural separation
• Watch out there goes that flying pig!

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Conclusions Wired vs Wireless

• Wired vs Wireless is the wrong battle
• Its low cost backhaul that wins the war
• Some specific areas can be fixed now, but
• We need a general solution for backhaul cost
• 1) Force it out of Telstra (ACCC intervention)
• 2) Spend nation building money to replicate it
• 3) Convince gt 1m broadband customers to double
  their current spend to change the world
• I didnt say it was easy )