Packet shaping
is to blame here
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 …
Wonderful timing. BT ran an event this morning entitled "BT WAN: Fit for Business" where they were selling the virtues of their 21CN backbone and the services they offer on top of it. AC because the lunch wasn't bad and the views from the top of the BT tower are amazing, so would be nice to be invited again :)
21CN was originally about replacing half a dozen different legacy protocols (including ATM) in their core with IP. In other words BT would operate an exclusively IP based network. At face value there was no need for it to have any impact on xDSL. It has an impact on the backhaul and core but the local loop didn't need to change at all.
However in order to do this work they needed to replace the equipment in exchanges that performs the analogue to digital conversion for voice calls. For whatever reason they ended up buying in kit that can /also/ do the work of the ageing DSLAMs. This new kit goes by the name of MSAN (Multi Service Access Node). It also happens to support ADSL2+. In my opinion someone at BT saw a marketing opportunity and therefore decided to tout this as a benefit of 21CN.
In my view it's no such thing. It's a nice side effect of the new equipment.
Meanwhile to address A&A's complaint:21CN does cause BT to overhaul the backhaul and core network (basically the way that data gets to/from your exchange). They came up with what on the face of it are improvements on the old IPStream and DataStream service. In practice, as many of us expected, they are making what is known in technical circles as 'A right old bog 'ole of it'. Eventually the services might live up to their hype but right now BT appear to (using another technical term)' Not got a bloody clue'.
The real irony is that A&A are apparently getting a good ADSL2+ service out of Be (an LLU Operator) and I'm pretty sure that Be use BT almost exclusively for their backhaul.
So put another way:A company buys network capacity of BT is doing a better job of wholesaling its service than BT is itself managing.
Okay so BE isn't at every exchange but from what A&A are saying the problem is with the core and or ISP end rather than at exchanges.
Rather brilliantly summarised, except:
"The real irony is that A&A are apparently getting a good ADSL2+ service out of Be (an LLU Operator) and I'm pretty sure that Be use BT almost exclusively for their backhaul"
Be don't use BT as far as I'm aware for backhaul, certainly not exclusively - the reason I know this is that when Paddington blew up, Be weren't affected.
Why are A&A commenting on this other than for PR reasons? Surely if, as an ISP, they are any good they will be using LLU in which case the state of BT's 21CN is a matter for BT's customers, not for them. I use Be and my broadband leaves BT at the exchange and hopefully never touches them again!
And a small, technically savvy customer for a BT service that they're seeing problems with. If their customers are complaining it's reasonable to try and explain to them. LCP is part of the PPP protocol, so not something end users normally monitor but can troubleshoot problems with the BRAS/PPP servers. Those are controlled by BT, not A&A. LLU ISP's can and do experience the same problem, but they have more control over the DSLAM -> BRAS flows to manage it.
This post has been deleted by its author
A&A use a variety of services. They also resell Be's wholesale LLU service.
> BT at the exchange and hopefully never touches them again!
Doubtful. Be's network was originally created using BT's BES/WES services. They may be using other suppliers right now but only a few LLUOs own any significant quantity of cable and almost all of them are reliant on BT to carry the data out of the exchange initially. It's just the way that it is. BT has so much fibre in the ground connecting so many places that building a network without using them is nigh-on impossible and often doesn't make financial sense.
When it comes to shifting /raw/ data from A to B BT is a one-stop shop and actually not that expensive. It's when you want them to help out with managing the data flow that things get a bit wobbly and expensive.
Not that easy, sure the LLU (might) terminate at your ISPs DSLAM at the local exchange, but guess who supplies the backhaul line from that DSLAM into the ISPs core network? Yes, it's very likely to be BT (who else has lines all over the country..)
So LLU is just a short detour really, most time your packets will still be travelling on a BT line. Now usually these would be leased lines supplied from within BT's SDH network, with guaranteed bandwidth and precise latencies.
Throw in 21CN and what have they replaced these leased lines with? Cheap but far more unpredictable Ethernet.
Now sure if you have lots of capacity this relative unpredictability is not a big issue, so these complaints might all just be positioning in advance of negotiations, but the issue is out there.
Just to make things a little clearer, Andrews and Arnold do sell LLU products, as well as BT, allowing them to offer their customers a choice. From the monitoring and analysis they have performed it is clearly an easy choice to take an LLU product. Key point they are trying to make is that BT say its fit for purpose, when they have impirical evidence to the contrary. They perform the same monitoring on the LLU lines and dont have the same problems, proving its a BT Network issue.
Yes all very well. But the state of LLU is such that you can't guarantee having the provider you want in your exchange. Ok there's CPW and Tiscali in many but who the hell wants to use them?
BT still has the lions share of DSL connectivity in the country.
I'd also add, as an A&A customer I can say that these guys wouldn't be complaining openly if they didn't have the facts straight and also hadn't been badgering BT for a long time. In fact if you read their blog post:
"We have been chasing BT for this for weeks now, and are getting nowhere. Hopefully this posting will prompt BT to make some formal response to their apparent capacity issues. Either admitting they can't cope, claiming the service is working as designed (i.e. designed not to cope) or if we are very lucky - giving a clear timescale for when it will be fixed."
These guys are also consummate professionals. They push BT hard to get faults fixed and faults that other ISP's would just give up on and happily lose your business to get away from.
Best DSL ISP I've ever had over the past 10 yrs, trust me, this isn't a PR stunt.
A&A aren't a massive ISP but since I switched to them I've had absolutely no problems with bandwidth and only one outage of a few hours that was BT's fault. My usage is pretty comprehensive: VoIP, VPN for business during the work day, frequent streaming audio & BBC iPlayer evenings and weekends - it works, plain & simple.
Prior to switching to A&A I'd made the mistake of assuming ADSL service, being ubiquitous, was now a undifferentiated commodity, bad mistake, far from it. Previous supplier, O2 (via BT IPstream), had become unusable with their traffic shaping &, obviously, massively over-subscribed Central pipes.
A&A comprehensively reports on service performance and charge for use graded by when you use it. - none of this "all you can eat" for a ridiculously low price that's typical of so many other retail & SME ISPs. They mix and match LLU with BT IPStream wholesale service on the basis of what's available but do remember that it's typically only exchanges serving large metropolitan areas where LLU is economical.
No disclosures necessary, simply a satisfied A&A customer of a company who provides the service they describe.
...unless all the customers that A&A want to gain have LLU'd exchanges, they have to use BT-supplied backhaul for some of their infrastructure.
Don't you think that if *all* exchanges had LLU that BT would have either a) no customers or b) much better value and better performing services?
More than adequate for _what_, pray tell? Giving enemas to elephants? [Sorry, dear Moderatrix, but that phrase burbled its way to the top of my mind without malice aforethought.]
That sure sounds like some kind of spin to me.
Wouldn't BT be further ahead in the long run if they actually tried to deliver plenty of bandwidth instead of trying to pack a hundred pounds of <whatever> into a fifty pound bag? Packet shaping is simply the response of a company that knows damned well their network isn't up to the job.
It's a disease.
They don't give a toss about whether or not you get the speeds advertised, they care about you signing the contract.
And if Virgin have oversold their bandwidth then BT has probably done so several times over.
This is what you get when you a) live on an island and b) have a succession of supine, cretinous politicians who are so stupid that they don't know what questions to ask or what the answers mean when someone tells them what to ask.
Tom 15: A&A DO offer LLU lines via Be but opnly cover about 70% of the population and there are plenty of areas where BT are the ONLY choice.
A&A are commenting on it as BT are refusing to accept that there is a problem and A&A are hoping that shining a little publicity on the issue will persuade BT to do their job properly and fix it. It's a strategy that has worked before.
For those that don't know, A&A came up with a method of monitoring BT which is really really accurate.
All A&A broadband accounts are fully monitored every second. From the time I spent with A&A support techs (as a customer with one of their techs onsite for a few days) it was clear that BT engineers appreciated the A&A system, because it pinpointed system faults. A&A were even telling BT exactly what the problem was, even tho A&A didn't know what some of the BT codes were (i.e. when a fault was fixed, sometimes the fault report said (and I'm paraphrasing) A G10 whack fault on the Kapow Node, if at a later date their system detected the same symptoms from the monitoring, they would simply report it as a "G10 whack fault on the Kapow Node", which resulted in a "fault found. how the **** were you able to tell us that").
BT Management on the other hand didn't appreciate it, to the point of just outright saying "yes it's a fault, but why can't you wait until more people report it, we havent got time to fix all these fault reports you're raising".
FAIL cos BT don't like everyone knowing just how bad their 80's laid aluminium infrastructure is
Microsoft has leaned that calling products by their year of issue can cause problems when you end up shipping in the last months of the year.
I just hope that BT manage to ship 21CN in the 21st century.
Yes our local exchange was going to be upgraded in 2009, but alas we are still connected to 20CN.
I don't think A&A are doing this as a PR stunt, reading their status page you get an impression that the 21CN upgrade is constantly producing major BT outages, which BT consider acceptable collateral damage by changing the rules by which an ISP can report line latency faults.
BT appear to be taking the view that once they have performed an upgrade of an exchange that as long as everybody is still connected then "thats good enough for government work" even if new subscribers to 21CN may be worse off than being connected to 20CN.
21CN is about how BT move data around their network. This is different to the internet. Internet access is just another application the same as voice, ISDN, Ethernet and who knows what other services BT offers.
All of these are 'encoded' for want of a better word before being pushed around BT's network. Voice and ADSL for instance are carried using the ATM protocol (hence PPPoA that most people use to connect). As I understand it the problem BT has is that these applications don't all use the same underlying protocol and as a result their network layer is a bit of a mess.
The idea behind 21CN is to shift everything over to a single protocol - IP - which ought to simplify their network operations.
This does not mean the packets you send from your modem will suddenly be sent unaltered across BT's network. They will still be encoded it's just that the underlying protocol will change.
To be honest I only have a lay person's understanding of this stuff but a simpler way to look at it is to think of 'internet access in the UK'(*) as being a form of VPN that BT make available to people. The fact that their VPN doesn't currently support IPv6 is not the fault of 21CN(**). For all we know 21CN is using IPv6 but I think it unlikely. I can't see BT having enough nodes on their network to require the address space. What I don't know is what address range 21CN uses. Does it stick to 192.x or 10.x? There'd probably be no reason to. It's a private network (I bloody hope so, anyway, lol) so they can use any address range that takes their fancy.
(*)Although I imagine all countries do the same. I can't see any other way for it to work. You don't want your customers sending actual packets around your network.
(**)Very few UK ISPs do support IPv6. Ironically (but those in the know are not surprised) A&A are one of the very few ISPs that do.
.... when the BT b'stards refuse to do anything about the appalling line I have to the BT exchange that even barfs and chokes with relentless regularity at 0.8Mbit/sec. They have point blank refused to run a 30 metre copper cable to a nearby FTTC cab so I can enjoy the 16Mbit/sec that my neighbours get.
Possible reasons include: (a) because they know what they are talking about and have a history of being blunt when "defective by design" things inside BT affect the service to AAISP customers and prospective customers (b) because they have an alternative to BTwholesale's much overhyped much delayed 21CN, an alternative carrier with a proven network, and (more recently) a proven interconnect to AAISP.
"Surely if, as an ISP, they are any good they will be using LLU "
LLU on a widespread basis is uneconomic for all but the largest ISPs. There are some LLU wholesalers and one of them is the alternative of choice at AAISP (the one you already use, as it happens).
Other ISPs typically lack either the technical knowledge or if they have the technical knowledge they don't have the alternative carrier and so are frightened of speaking out (hello Rochdale can you hear me? And where are Metronet when you need them? Oh yeah, I forgot, BT own them now, and all that remains is the name. Hi Paresh, Hi Alex, etc, we miss you all)
It could of course be for PR reasons as well, and I hope it gets them lots.
although I also have Be...
A&A are like the uber ISP on BT's network. Their packages aren't cheap, because they expect you to use it. They are technically proficient, and if they say it is so, it is so.
@Number 15 - some people have no choice but to use BT's network, in which case you get the best ISP you can, like A&A.
Zen Internet, ADSL2+ 14Mbps Sync with exchange (1.3Km distant)... this lunchtime *very* sllllooooowwwwww and dropped packets:
root@cruella:~# traceroute dns.thorcom.net
traceroute to dns.thorcom.net (193.82.116.5), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 router-zen.tubby.org (82.68.212.70) 1.520 ms 1.736 ms 2.336 ms
2 losubs.subs.dsl2.wh-man.zen.net.uk (62.3.87.147) 174.112 ms 174.494 ms *
3 * * ge-2-1-0-164.cr1.wh-man.zen.co.uk (62.3.87.165) 176.706 ms
4 * ge-3-0-0-0.cr2.th-lon.zen.net.uk (62.3.80.45) 182.866 ms *
5 * * linx-gw.ltn1.intl.telstra.net (195.66.224.14) 184.507 ms
6 154.32.3.142 (154.32.3.142) 185.234 ms * *
7 * * cr-1.LDN4.intl.telstra.net (154.32.3.241) 176.118 ms
8 154.32.9.17 (154.32.9.17) 176.559 ms * *
9 6.57.32.154.intl.telstra.net (154.32.57.6) 192.808 ms 210.686 ms 210.327 ms
10 ns0.thorcom.net (193.82.116.5) 194.420 ms 195.919 ms 199.638 ms
root@cruella:~# traceroute dns.thorcom.net
traceroute to dns.thorcom.net (193.82.116.5), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
this afternoon things picked up again:
root@cruella:~# traceroute dns.thorcom.net
traceroute to dns.thorcom.net (193.82.116.5), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 router-zen.tubby.org (82.68.212.70) 1.569 ms 1.775 ms 2.212 ms
2 losubs.subs.dsl2.wh-man.zen.net.uk (62.3.87.147) 27.572 ms 28.733 ms 29.719 ms
3 ge-2-1-0-164.cr1.wh-man.zen.co.uk (62.3.87.165) 30.191 ms 30.786 ms 31.428 ms
4 ge-3-0-0-0.cr2.th-lon.zen.net.uk (62.3.80.45) 38.553 ms 39.520 ms 40.255 ms
5 linx-gw.ltn1.intl.telstra.net (195.66.224.14) 41.477 ms 41.685 ms 42.703 ms
6 154.32.3.142 (154.32.3.142) 43.449 ms 42.513 ms 43.154 ms
7 cr-1.LDN4.intl.telstra.net (154.32.3.241) 44.731 ms 35.937 ms 35.922 ms
8 154.32.9.17 (154.32.9.17) 35.905 ms 36.494 ms 36.543 ms
9 6.57.32.154.intl.telstra.net (154.32.57.6) 46.054 ms 43.126 ms 49.067 ms
10 ns0.thorcom.net (193.82.116.5) 48.031 ms 46.817 ms 47.053 ms
root@cruella:~#
No hosts or users on my circuit.... you can clearly see that the first hop from my router to Zen (via BT 21CN) was rubish at lunchtime, yet my Cisco router showed "5 min input rate 31kbps, 10 packets per second" which is hardly stressful :-(
Mike
I think this is an absolute lie. Why? Last Thursday, during the footie, we moved from an office with BT business broadband to our new one (just down the road, running of the same exchange) with A&A. Guess what? Fine on BT before the move, shit on A&A afterward.
Perhaps their "plentiful capacity" is why they're charging us £50 for 5GB per month, on a so-called business grade connection. And that's why we're changing as soon as business conditions permit. They are an absolute joke.
(Upfront - yes, I'm a customer)
The "plentiful capacity" that was failing was BT's network. A&A have been very public about the fact that a while back (can't remember exactly, but I think it was during the video peak before the world cup) their link to BT (the smallest pipe in their chain, I believe) was saturated. Although this was a "one off", they promptly arranged (as fast as they could) for this to be increased.
Since then, all of their pipes have been less than full - therefore any drop in throughput is the responsability of another part of the chain.
Also, the £50 for 5GB doesn't sound right - I think you might want to go and look at their pricing again, it doesn't match any of their tarriffs.
that certain BT people thought they knew better than the suppliers when it came to optical networks design. Not BT optical designers of course (although there was some of that too), no it was the project managers and bean counters who did not care about future scalability.
Oh yes, and the application that was conspicuous by its absence in these considerations? Video!
Have to laugh really!
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!
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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.