ISP condemns new BT backbone Business ISP Andrews and Arnold has strongly criticised BT's new 21CN network backbone as unable to cope with current bandwidth demands. The small firm runs a network status blog for its customers, and this morning came out with some harsh words for BT. "It is quite clear to us that BT's 21CN network simply cannot cope with …
Get a clue.. a lot of people are not on LLU.. some companies are not content to just cherry pick from a few unbundled areas. A GOOD ISP is one willing to push the various arms of BT to get things working as they should - rather than just employing script monkeys. AAISP is one such ISP.
WE know the BT network is pants, nice to see an ISP willing to stand up and challenge BTs rosy view of itself.
lets get it right,,,,
21cn was purely about saving money..... they sold it to the public on promoises of faster speeds but in reality unless you are on top of the exchange you wont be getting much better than you were on adsl1
I used to be with an ISP called ADSL24 which was a re-seller for entanet. It was a really good ISP, one of the best. But the rollout of 21cn really stuffed it up. People were going from really good solid stable connections to total shite in a matter of weeks. The company lost coustomers left right and centre, I went to BE where I have not had a single problem in the two years I have been here...
If you needed any more proof just how crazy the design of the BT network is....try a traceroute from your home to anything on the web...
Sit back and enjoy the ridiculous number of hops.....
And that is only what you can see and not including the Infrastructure underneath it.
This is not normal......except for BT ;)
"The original 21CN premise could be achieved without even touching the DSLAMs."
Depends on which original you mean. The 21CN vision I remember involved ripping out pretty much all of the innards of pretty much every exchange (all 5000+ of them?) in the UK. The existing kit would be replaced by multi-function kit which would terminate the customer connection for both voice and broadband connections, **on the same box**. Behind the scenes, there'd be changes in the hierarchy of voice interconnect - kit in "exchanges" would no longer have any role in routing calls, they'd just be concentrator nodes for a half dozen or so call switching centres. This was in the name of massively reducing costs rather than improving services, though I never really understood where the cost savings came from.
There'd be big changes too in the broadband interconnect structure between exchanges and ISPs, and changes (not necessarily welcome ones) in the way things were priced. Allegedly the broadband changes would allow improved services (such as faster ones, of which ADSL2+ would be one example). Purely by coincidence, many of the changes seemed to disadvantage smaller ISPs (such as AAISP and Zen and others in between) whilst being more than acceptable to the big boys (BT Retail).
Most of the 21CN broadband stuff has gone ahead, although A+A have pointed out on more than one occasion that there are deficiencies in the design, especially where robustness is concerned. Anyone who has watched BTwholesale's rollout of broadband since Pipex invented consumer broadband will be well aware that BTw's track record is far from glorious.
As far as I'm aware, the 21CN voice rollout is "under review". Would be interesting to hear more, if anyone knows more.
21CN, being IP-based as mentioned already, brought big chanhes in the broadband interconnect structure between exchanges and the ISPs who use BTwholesale to connect to their customers (ie the non-LLU ISPs), and changes (not necessarily welcome ones) in the way things were priced.
Allegedly the broadband changes would allow improved services (such as faster ones, of which ADSL2+ would be one example). Purely by coincidence, many of the changes seemed to disadvantage smaller ISPs (such as AAISP and Zen and others in between) whilst being more than acceptable to the big boys (BT Retail).
Most of the 21CN broadband stuff has gone ahead, although A+A have pointed out on more than one occasion that there are deficiencies in the design, especially where robustness is concerned. Anyone who has watched BTwholesale's rollout of broadband since Pipex invented consumer broadband will be well aware that BTw's track record is far from glorious.
As far as I'm aware, the 21CN voice rollout is "under review". Would be interesting to hear more, if anyone knows more.
As readers may or may not know, BT has various bits. The "last mile" bit that connects from premises to exchange is currently called Openreach. Short range services such as BES/WES connecting relatively local premises are relatively simple services and are delivered with reasonable success by Openreach. Be may well use BES/WES to interconnect their kit at groups of local exchanges where they have an LLU presence, but the groups of exchanges will connect to a Be national backbone which almost certainly comes from one of the many BT competitors offering backbone capability (in selected parts of the country).
Building a wholesale broadband network able to serve multiple ISPs with customers *everywhere* in the UK is a slightly more complicated task. This task has been BTwholesale's responsibility since broadband became a mass market product, and BTwholesale has had issue after issue (the first publically visible one might have been the MTU size one back in 2001 or thereabouts, then there were persistently undersized VPs, and so on). This decades biggest issue is a backbone design incorporating multiple pinch points which are both single points of failure and points at which congestion/queueing (ie increased latency) will occur.
Entanet bought into the much overhyped much delayed 21CN concept and went for it in a big way, before anyone else really, and as noted above it was a disaster. AAISP are only a little way behind, but are attacking the problem a slightly different way. Good luck to them.
You missed out CP.
That one tripped me up first time I came across it in BT's documentation. I used to think it meant customer premises. Sometimes it does.
There's also SLU of course although I think it's a bit like dwarf bread. Network planners everywhere sigh, look at SLU and then decide perhaps the other options aren't so bad after all. Amazing how motivating it is realising that the only thing left is SLU.
Hey, lookit - I threw out another TLA. Have I won a prize yet?
:D
CP - Communications Provider.
SLU - Sub Loop Unbundling.
since my local exchange (broadstairs) has been upgraded earlier this year, my internet connection often disconnects, not good for an always on connection !
yes i complained to my ISP, plusnet, which is owned by BT of course
at first it disconnected quite a lot, i did complain but during the standard plug the modem in main socket and master test socket, we suffered a serious power cut too
once it returned it didnt do it
now it generally does it once a day but a disconnect and reconnect cures it, so no joy in actualy getting it sorted properly
when it does go, the modem knows something is wrong but seems to think it is still connected too. i'm sure someone here will understand the technical reason why that is
who knows one day they might sort whatever it is causing it if a big enough company complains!
BT Option 3 with "unlimited" downloads.
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I'll admit that I don't know very much about telco stuff... so I've found this thread to be full of useful information. Makes a nice change to read some informative posts rather than the fanboys going off on one at each other with their 'my Dad is bigger than your Dad' rubbish.
I should spend more time reading these articles, instead of just skipping them cause I don't need to understand this stuff for my job.
..but for some reason I find this network stuff fascinating. It has little to nothing to do with my job as a computer programmer but I love it. Anyone else curious about it should check out:
http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/equip.htm
And if you want to chat about it:
http://thinkbroadband.com is probably the best place.
That is very bad news because high latency and some packet loss will also seriously affect many games (and with millions of games players in the country thats a big issue). The High latency is very bad for any real time game but its even worse to also suffer packet loss on top of that, as each lost packet makes game ping speeds unpredictably variable and could easily make real time games completely unplayable online.
I've been upgraded to 21CN and its been a pretty good experience.
My download speed has gone from 6.5Mbps to around 15Mbps and upload hovers around the 800 to 900Kbps range.
I've tested it every few days since and latency hangs around the 22 to 30ms range and no packet loss has been seen in all the tests.
If a corporate like BT gives me bad service I'll go for the throat but so far overall, very impressed.
things like this eventually roll over on themselves.
Comcast had a good thing going selling $1/Mbit transfer here to isps but isps quickly learned just how much it smelled and are running from it.
If the quality is not good, the market will go elsewhere for service. Those providing good service at reasonable prices will still succeed.
Well technically, but since most of our internet is monopolized you can semi get what you want.
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