XXX XXXXX EVAN WEINBURG REGIONAL FTTH
speed it takes to get to you is the same. The industry and Ofcom have promoted the idea of a speedometer to measure volume, so people think that Mbps is all about speed. But in reality, a 10Mbps server could be faster than a 100Mbps server. We are simply using the terminology that people expect. The average customer doesn’t understand the difference between ethernet and GPON or VDSL – and actually they shouldn’t need to! People just need providers and others in the industry to explain in layman’s terms why it is better to have an active ethernet network than a shared GPON fibre, for example. It is all about communicating the benefits clearly and transparently. This includes the need to move away from the misleading and highly confusing language used by some of the legacy providers who market their services as ‘fibre broadband’ when they are only fibre to the cabinet – a different and markedly inferior proposition. EW: What does contention mean? Why does the network slow down at peak periods? Contention is a BT engineering term and it refers to how they engineer the amount of capacity per customer, per link. We don’t contend at the edge, we have a totally open architecture and everyone gets the speed as promised. The only place our network is congested is where it meets the exchanges and where that happens, we’ve got an elastic band around the pipe, meaning it gets bigger when it needs to. If everyone on the network is using 1Gbps at the same time, our pipes will be adjusted to make sure everyone gets 1Gbps all the time. EW: We’re building a brand new network here. Apart from sharing some Western Power Distribution plant, everything on it is brand new. Putting in this technology is expensive, it’s demanding, it’s hard work and so we only have customers where we deliver the network. If you have customers already, you’ve got to invest a lot of money maintaining your customer base. There are millions and millions of properties in the UK and you can’t just click your fingers and make a difference. It’s a huge engineering project so we’ve taken a chunk of this particular project and we’ve said we can deliver it here [in the South West] and we’re doing it. We’re not trying to beat the likes of BT, Virgin and the rest, we’re just building infrastructure. If they want to, they can sell their products over our network. It’s a case of ‘don’t waste your time building your own network, come and use mine and I’ll do you a deal’. The question is, is it wise for the available investment to all go into the same place and for providers to be competing at the infrastructure level? The answer is ‘no’. Providers should be competing at the content level, giving people what they really want and not confusing them with technology. Whether a home subscriber, a fast–growing rural business, or a huge conglomerate, the fibre we put into any property is capable of delivering whatever services are required. Truespeed can provide a 40Gbps pipe, if required, with the technology we have in our cabinets. The way that our technology is delivered, it allows for a constant upgrade of volume. The speed is still over a 1Gbps bearer, but if you’re limited to 100Mbps, that’s what you’re limited to. You can get 100Mbps from our competitors, but they’ll put it on a 100Mbps bearer. OC: Why bother building a network when there are already major players doing the same thing? OC: You also guarantee there will be no contention on the network, how do you achieve this?
ModBox Optical Reference Transmitters based on LiNbO3 modulators.
Optical NRZ & PAM-4 Transmitters • Compliant with 100 G, 200 G, and 400 G standards • NRZ up to 56 Gb/s and PAM-4 up to 56 Gbaud • Monomode O-Band Optical Transmitters for Optical Receiver Stress Test Solution • Monomode O-Band CWDM and C–Band • Multimode 850 nm Optical Vectorial Network Analyzer • Optical Transmitter designed to extend Vectorial Network Analyzers • Monomode 1310 nm, 1550 nm & 850 nm LiNbO3 Modulators • 850 nm, 1310 nmand C-Band • Wide Bandwidth Modulator up to 50 GHz • Matching components CWDM and C-Band • Multimode 850 nm
www.photonics.ixblue.com contact.photonics@ixblue.com
ECOC | booth #370
www.opticalconnectionsnews.com
33
ISSUE 14 | Q3 2018
Made with FlippingBook Learn more on our blog