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4G: The odd state of affairs

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In this blog post, 4G = LTE, and not any variant of HSPA…

I have been on O2’s 4G tariff since they launched it back in August, and at the time I knew that their coverage was limited to just a few large cities, but I took the tariff in the hope that they would commence an “aggressive rollout“. Now almost 7 months into the rollout of O2’s 4G network (as well as Vodafone & Three, for that matter), their 4G city coverage is still extremely limited and doesn’t appear to have grown that much. I understand that 4G rollout is just that, a “rollout” that happens over a period of time, but surely when you are trying to play catch-up to the likes of EE (who have far, far superior 4G coverage, albeit due to their massive time advantage), you would think both O2 and Vodafone would be pushing to get 4G to as many cities and towns across the UK as quickly possible.

Now, I might be seeing this entirely wrong, but it seems that O2 in particular have really been pushing their 4G rollout in the north of the country more so than in the south. Not that this is a bad thing, but I would’ve expected a balance of north/south cities to receive 4G in order to get as wide geographic coverage as possible. A list of examples that have yet to receive O2 4G in the southern half of the country, include but are not limited to: Bristol, Southampton, Portsmouth, Oxford, Luton, Milton Keynes.. The list goes on.

In comparison (and I do indeed realise this is very unscientific), cities in the north that have O2 4G coverage (not withstanding Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds) are: York, Newcastle, Nottingham & Sheffield.

In terms of population, the Portsmouth/Southampton area is the 6th highest population in the country, yet it gets no O2 4G as of writing. Bristol, with a population of 600,000, has no O2 4G, yet Sheffield with a similar population already has it.

However, none of the geographic issues actually matter that much when we look at the rollout of Three, the UK’s ‘4th’ mobile operator. Even though they had a later start, and you would think far less cash lying around compared with O2 (Telefonica) and Vodafone, their 4G rollout appears to have been much more aggressive and widespread. Bristol? Check. Oxford? Check. Southampton? Check. Portsmouth? Check. Milton Keynes? Check. Luton? Check…

Three’s rollout, ignoring the numbers, seems more balanced around getting 4G to areas of high population compared with Vodafone and O2. Now, unlike O2, Three has no obligation to deploy their 4G network any further than this, compared with O2’s coverage obligation to cover pretty much the entire country’s population. So this could be a factor, O2 are perhaps pacing themselves and deploying to random rural areas in small pockets (if you look at their coverage checker, there are some rural location masts that have 4G already) rather than deploying to the cities exclusively like Three has.

However as an O2 customer who is paying through the roof for 4G and living in a major southern city, and not receiving the service, and yet customers on Three can get unlimited data and 4G for no additional cost, to say it annoys me is an understatement! The UK’s rollout of 4G has been diabolically slow compared with other countries, which is a shame since we led the rollout of 3G back in the 00’s. I realise that the slow rollout was caused by regulatory incompetence, but it’s not as if the networks didn’t know 4G was coming? Could they not deploy their new masts and equipment before the awarding of the licences? This must have happened to some degree otherwise London and the other ‘starter’ cities are unlikely to have had 4G when it launched in August.

I now move onto the second part of this blog post, which is looking at 4G provision in Spain. If you have read my previous blog posts, you would see that I have been struggling in the past to get decent internet in a rural location in Spain. 2 Mbps internet on an extremely flakey ADSL line  just wouldn’t cut it anymore. The speed wasn’t really the issue, but the constant sync failures and sky-high (150ms average) latency just wasn’t acceptable in the year 2014. Vodafone (Spain) has also begun their 4G rollout in Spain using (I believe) the 2.6/1.8 spectrum, since the 800 spectrum isn’t active until later this year. So imagine my surprise when, I get out a friend’s iPhone with a UK Vodafone SIM in, and discover it has a 4G signal in pretty much the middle of nowhere! Data download was about 30 Mbps down and 15 Mbps up, with around 70 ms latency – this probably because the gateway was in the UK. Ignoring the fact that 4G data roaming on Vodafone actually works , (nil points to O2 for not having this yet – it’s not as if Telefonica, their parent company, owns pretty much all the telecom infrastructure in Spain) I was surprised that I even had 4G signal in my location. According to the coverage checker, there is meant to be zero 4G coverage at all, the nearest transmitter is behind 2 hills and a town. So I imagine the signal is reflecting off something and reaching us. (It’s definitely not coming from our local mast, since that is visible from our house and we only had 2 bars of 4G).

So now my challenge was to get hold of a 4G data sim card in Spain, on a business contract, to make use of their unlimited 4G offer for €49. This is actually impossible – Vodafone in Spain clearly don’t want your custom even if you wave money in front of them. With the endless spaghetti mess of bureaucracy and paperwork and legal shit, it’s no wonder Spain is bankrupt. So the easier solution was to get a PAYG sim card and make use of their 4G PAYG option (Called Vodafone Yu) which offers 1.6GB of data for €20. Although it’s pricey, it has some advantages:

1) It will probably work out cheaper paying 5x€20 in one month when we are in Spain, then to pay €49 per month for a service we aren’t going to use all year round.

2) No paperwork. No bureaucracy. Phew!

So with the PAYG sim on order, I’ll have to update you when I get it and do some speed testing. The plan at the moment is to buy a 4G router with external antenna connectors (Probably Solwise) so I can affix an omni antenna to the roof with a bit of extra gain. Also since 4G is meant to be MIMO, with the right hardware/dual feed antenna, I should be able to get 30-40 Mbps.

So, I’m now in the amusing situation that I can get 4G in a rural location in Spain, on a PAYG sim card, and yet I can’t get 4G on my expensive O2 tariff in a major UK city.

Don’t even get me started about O2’s data roaming policies…

JT Fibre coming to Guernsey?

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Over the past year, many Guernsey residents may have noticed the roadworks caused by JT (Jersey Telecom) on the island, for example around the Rohais area and now currently into the Castel area. On the States roadworks website (iris.gov.gg), JT have been regularly appearing with the reason listed as “Improving the JT network”. One can only assume that this is for the process of laying Fibre optic cabling underneath the road.

Now it seems on JT’s Guernsey website that they have announced they plan to connect “Schools and Government buildings” in 2014, and then in the future to connect “one third of residential customers to a Fibre service”. I assume this 1/3 only applies to those premises that the Fibre has been laid next to, and not 1/3 of the entire island.

The prospect of JT further expanding their FTTH network on Guernsey is an exciting one. Currently there is a near-monopoly on fixed broadband access in Guernsey, since all DSL lines are effectively run by Sure. Whilst JT appear to offer their own DSL on Guernsey, it is in fact just a re-sell of the existing Sure service.

By having an entirely separate JT fibre network on island, it will hopefully force Sure into action to provide their own FTTH services or at least an improved FTTC service. Any form of competition in this area is definitely welcome to consumers.

A while back I posted on the blog that Sure planned to increase their VDSL speeds in 2014 to “up to 100Mbps”. However whilst ‘Superfast’ customers received an upload speed bump to 5Mbps, there were no download speed upgrades. I can only assume that Sure are focusing on expanding their FTTC (or MSAN) reach before increasing headline speeds. After all, speeds greater than 40Mbps will only be reached if customers live within 100’s of meters of an exchange or cabinet.

Whilst it may appear that Sure have ‘caught up’ with the UK, the fact is that many customers in UK city areas can get 150Mbps cable with Virgin Media and 80Mbps FTTC with BT. Additionally wireless broadband in the form of 4G LTE is now widely available in many cities, which is still not at all available in Guernsey.

It now leaves the question as to how quickly JT will start to connect residential customers to their FTTH service, and what Sure will do to combat JT’s advance.

Sure Superfast Broadband: Upload speeds increased

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Sure Guernsey appear to have silently increased the upload speeds for the Superfast and Superfast Pro broadband products.

The upload speed that the line is now synchronised at is 5 Mbps, up from the existing 2 Mbps. Actual throughput using speedtest.net was recorded at around 3.5-3.8 Mbps upload speed**.

This is a significant improvement in upload speeds, and very much needed in today’s online world of remote & cloud computing.

There is still no word from Sure about the supposed 100 Mbps upgrade that I found in their news section earlier this year, but we will just have to wait and see if anything is delivered.

It is possible that the upgraded upload speeds are simply a precursor to further upgrades later this year, but then why not release your new faster internet product at the same time as increasing the upload speeds, in order to have more impact?

**Edit: This is not entirely accurate. I generally now receive at least 4 Mbps upload, if not slightly more.

Sure promises “100Mbits” by end of year in Guernsey

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So I was reading through some of the new sections on Sure’s website today, since the sale of Sure to Batelco from Cable and Wireless.

I noticed that in their news section, there was an interview from Sure’s CEO Eddie Saints, and in one part he said that:

[we] aim of making Superfast Broadband accessible to all Bailiwick properties at speeds up to 100Mb/s by the end of this year at greater coverage and lower pricing compared with our competing jurisdictions.

So this looks like some sort of confirmation (or at least plans ) of 100Mbps internet by the end of 2013.

Now I am not certain if Sure will be rolling out a FTTH network like in Jersey, or if they will simply continue to roll out their VDSL2 network over copper as they have been doing currently.

Copper cable, using VDSL2, is not particularly future proof for the next 20 years  and beyond. Whereas JT have already taken the plunge and created an island wide FTTH network which will be able to cope with speeds in excess of 1Gbps, Guernsey’s VDSL2 and copper network is simply incapable of speeds this fast. In fact, the current technical maximum (assuming you are next to the street cabinet) is about 200Mbps for VDSL2. These speeds drop significantly the further you are from a street cabinet. Additionally, the connection will be more susceptible to noise and interference on a copper cable, compared to a fibre optic cable.

Whilst I applaud Sure’s continued work in delivering high speed internet to Guernsey (and who can forget the dark days of 1Mbps ADSL), I think that if Sure isn’t planning to go down the FTTH route then they are being a bit short sighted. In the distant future when internet bandwidth is abundant and Jersey are offering 10Gbps fibre to every home, with almost just a flick of the switch required, Sure will look back and wish they had deployed fibre to every home rather than just the street cabinet.

[Of course, deploying FTTC does mean that the fibre connection is closer to homes, and they could use this in the future to deploy FTTH from the cabinet connections, but arguably the most difficult bit is the last xx metres into peoples individual properties]

Mac: Locked firmware password and you didn’t set one. Or did you?

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I recently had a pretty major problem on my mac.

The ‘Master Firmware Password’ appeared to have been set on my new Macbook Pro, but I don’t remember ever setting one. The firmware lock prevents you from choosing boot up options like holding down ‘alt’ to select a startup disc, or using cmd-R to enter recovery mode.

I hit a problem when my Bootcamp installation become corrupt. Windows 7 wouldn’t start and I couldn’t get it to boot off the recovery USB stick that I made. So I thought, no problem, we can just boot back to OS X. But that’s when the problem started.

Because for whatever reason I had the firmware lock, it wouldn’t let me choose OS X as the startup disc. My Mac was effectively bricked. Stuck on the Windows 7 side, which itself didn’t work. It would not boot OS X, and holding down the alt key sent me to a grey screen with a giant padlock and a password box.

I couldn’t for the life of me remember setting a password. It was a brand new machine (a few months old) so it seemed odd to have a firmware password set, when it is usually turned off by default. After reading pages and pages of forum posts from the Apple support website and endless googling, I stumbled upon the answer: Find My Mac.

I will now give you my solution: When I first got the laptop, I setup ‘Find My Mac’ as most people do. Months ago I tried to test a ‘remote lock’ of the mac from the website. I expected a remote lock to prevent user access in the OS, a bit like the iPhone lock screen. To my dissapointment the lock function didn’t seem to work, nothing happened on my screen, and it just seemed to have failed. I completely forgot about this, until now.

You see, when you do a ‘lock my mac’ from that website, it turns out some sort of bug (or maybe it’s meant to do this, I don’t know?) actually locks the FIRMWARE password of the mac, using the password you entered on the website as the firmware lock password.

So to solve the problem, all I had to do was remember what the password I entered into the ‘Find My Mac’ website was all those months ago. Thankfully it turned out to be ‘1111’.

So if you find your mac’s firmware has suddenly become locked, the password might well be one you entered into the ‘Find My Mac’ website to lock the device. It will save you a lot of time and messing about with visiting an Apple Store to try and reset the password.

VDSL 40Mbps: Some Thoughts

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So, my router is now synced up at the full 40Mbps download, 2Mbps upload. Although an engineer visit was supposedly required, it seems Sure transitioned the line a day early, and the supplied router re-synced onto the VDSL service without much input at all. The engineer is still coming tomorrow though, but for what? If the service works I don’t understand the need for it. Anyway, I thought I would therefore commence my mini-review of the new VDSL broadband service.

Now, it is being marketed as ‘Superfast Broadband’. And so the first thing I did, of course, was to run a speedtest.

The results were pretty much as expected. On average, the download speeds are around 30Mbps and the upload speeds around 1.5Mbps (this is on a fully synced line, and with a computer connected via ethernet to the router, and with no other internet use occurring at the same time). I tested it with quite a lot of different servers around the UK, as well as the Guernsey speedtest server, and they all delivered fairly similar results to the above. When I first did the speedtest, this was around lunchtime on a weekday.

However, things got a little worse later on in the day. When I did a speedtest at around 6pm, unsurprisingly the speeds decreased quite a lot. I was looking at around 20-24 Mbps on various speedtest servers, with the upload speed remaining fairly constant as before. Now I understand that Sure marketing a service as 40Mbps does not mean you are ever going to get that speed, but when the majority of users will be using this service in the evening (i.e. when they are home from work), I would’ve rather hoped for speeds a bit higher than 20-24Mbps, considering that you are expecting 40Mbps. Effectively at peak times the actual throughput to the internet decreases by 50%, from the theoretical 40Mbps down to nearer 20Mbps. I personally don’t consider 20Mbps to be ‘Superfast’ Broadband. It is fast of course, but 20Mbps is quite attainable on a synced up ADSL2+ line for example. And so in a way, the whole fuss over VDSL2 is a bit mute. You only get the benefit of the new technology really during the middle of the day, or probably in the middle of the night. But in the evening peak period you might as well be using an ADSL modem (since if the line is synced at 24, you can still get about 20 down it theoretically).

It’s certainly a very good thing that Guernsey has got faster internet. I am not complaining as such, but merely pointing out that the service shouldn’t be marketed as a 40Mbps service, when at peak times you only get 20+ Mbps. And during the middle of the day, I was only getting (and only just scraping it too) 30Mbps on various speedtest servers. What is the point in having a line synced up at 40Mbps when only 75% of it is actually able to be used for internet, or 50% of it during peak periods. Why not just sell the service as ‘Up to 30’ if that is all Sure are able to provide, and then if the end user gets more than that, they can count themselves lucky and be pleasantly surprised that they are receiving more than what they paid for.

I think perhaps one of the issues here is that Sure provide unlimited internet. There are no monthly limits or caps, and so you can download as much as you like. Also, I wonder if any kind of traffic management is used to curb the use of P2P traffic, which takes up a lot of bandwidth but often isn’t time critical. BT use traffic shaping during peak periods to try and maintain the bandwidth for other users that are trying to stream ‘time critical’ data like Youtube or iPlayer.

I also hope that Sure will continue to work on upload speeds. In the UK comparable VDSL services offer much greater upload speeds than currently available on Guernsey. I think to be fair, my download speed is fast enough for almost anything. But uploading large attachments or backing up to the cloud still takes too long and this is something that should be worked on before thinking of increasing download speeds. I think a good target would be 10Mbps upload such as that available with BT Infinity.

So my final thoughts? The new service is fast. It’s the fastest that Guernsey has seen. And the price isn’t that bad either. But it isn’t 40Mbps, and as such I won’t be declaring this ‘Superfast’ yet. After all, in Jersey you can get 1Gbps fibre. We can’t let our competitor get ahead of the internet race!

 

Guernsey gets VDSL. 40Mbit speeds

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I genuinely didn’t think Guernsey would ever get ‘high speed’ broadband. When the 20mb upgrade came along over a year ago, I was actually quite surprised.
And yet again, Sure have surprised me again.

Completely out of the blue, all of a sudden they were advertising their new ‘Superfast Broaband’ service. I thought, I wonder what this could be? And sure enough, it’s basically what BT in the UK call ‘BT Infinity’.

As an aside, and to clear things up, VDSL is not fibre optic broadband. It is still delivered over your telephone line’s copper cable. However to achieve speeds as fast as 40mb, it requires the line distance to be very short indeed. And that’s were the ‘fibre optic’ bit often comes from. The telcos have to deploy street side cabinets everywhere, in order to reduce the length of the telephone lines. Think of these street cabinets (or MSans, as Sure are calling them) as mini telephone exchanges, if you will. The closer you are to one, the faster your new 40mb service will be.

But here is the rather good thing. Unlike BT in the UK, I believe, who will only connect you to their VDSL service if you are need a cabinet, Sure appear to be connecting up anyone so long as their line is short enough. (Read: if you are connected straight to the telephone exchange).

So, with the aside over, what is this service actually about? Well firstly, it’s all about speed. 40mb is a lot of bandwith. There really isn’t much that you can’t do over that kind of connection. Multiple HD video streams, super fast file downloads and plenty of bandwidth for the entire house to enjoy, without someone screaming if the internet is being used by someone else.

What about the upload speeds? Well, the advertised ‘up to’ speed here is a rather measly 2Mbps. I was actually expecting a bit more, since in my opinion upload speeds are now becoming more and more important. With the shift to services ‘in the cloud’, users need to be able to upload their data just as quickly as they download it. In the UK, upload speeds on similar VDSL services can approach up to 10Mbps. Maybe Sure will bump it up in the future.

The pricing for the service, in my opinion, is very good. For their home product, it’s just £35 per month. Much less than my current £50 per month for just 20mb. So for pro users, it’ll be a no-brainer to switch, unless you really need a fixed IP address or a sightly lower contention ratio. But in any case, I highly doubt the 40:1 ratio on the new service will slow down speeds on the 40mb service down to ADSL levels.

Another ‘issue’, is that the installation requires a visit by an ‘engineer’ (No, they aren’t engineers, they are Technicians. Try going to University for 4 years first). This visit seems rather pointless. It appears that the sole purpose for the visit is to fit a new master socket on the line, that will split the telephone and VDSL signal at source, before it enters the home’s internal wiring. For most people this probably won’t be a problem. But for some with master sockets in unreachable locations, it’s going to be a bit of a pain. As far as I am aware, you can get VDSL micro filters just as you can for ADSL (in fact, they’re probably the same). So why they can’t just do that is beyond me? If someone’s internal home wiring is really that bad then they shouldn’t be getting this service anyway.

Update: C&W have contacted us and will be sending the engineer to visits on the 12th September! So a few weeks waiting time. I’m hoping that they have already enabled the line for the service, and if the VDSL modem arrives in the post before the visit then I will plug it in and see if it works!

Apache, Virtual Hosts & Subdomains

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I was trying to setup a subdomain on this website. After reading countless articles and forum posts on how to do it, it just wouldn’t work! No matter what I typed as subdomain.villocq.com, it would always just redirect to www.villocq.com!

The answer: You need to make sure the following is true:

1) Set CNAME records of your subdomains to point to your main domain

2) Configure apache in httpd.conf (or any of the main apache config files) to include AT LEAST this information:

NameVirtualHost *:80

 

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.villocq.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/home
</VirtualHost>

 

<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerName subdomain.villocq.com

DocumentRoot /var/www/subdomain
</VirtualHost>

It’s critical that the first line is included. Without this, it just would’t work. Once it was in, everything worked perfectly!