FEATURE Broadband

Broadband FEATURE

How fibre broadband transformed Cornwall

Barry Collins visits Cornwall to discover the huge impact fibre broadband has had on the county and on those who have missed out

lun Morgan shakes his head and puffs out his cheeks. He remembers a time when his staff had to take turns to download les over the internet; how they used to go home at 6pm andthen deal with their emails because the ofce connection was so deplorably slow. A 1.5Mbits/sec line shared between 28 staff sounds like a wistful tale from 1999, but it isnt. This is how his Truro-based manufacturing rm was operating only eight months ago. Andthena BT van pulled into his car park. Helped in no small part by more than 50 million of EU funding, BT is halfway through a rollout that will see between 80% and 90% of Cornwalls homes and businesses benet from a bre connection whether its right up to their door or just as far as the local street cabinet. Its helping to transform lives and livelihoods in a largely rural county, where the debilitating effect of long ADSL lines on connection speeds is greater than it is in most areas of the country. The lucky ones, such as Morgans resistor manufacturing rm Arcol, have seen their connections hurtle from near-dial-up speeds to hundreds of megabits per second, opening up business opportunities such as online backup and remote working. And then there are the unlucky ones, the 10-20% of Cornwall residents who dont have bre and wont receive it, either because theyre too remote to t BTs business case, or because theyre victims of the postcode lottery that can leave even urban dwellers dumped outside of the bre footprint. When you say youre going to do 80-90% bre, everyone thinks theyre in the 80-90%, laments Dr Ranulf Scarbrough, director of BTs Superfast Cornwall programme, with the wearied shrug of a man whos had his ears chewed by expectant customers. So what is life like on either side of this bredivide?

The arrival of bre across the county has brought other business benets. As many as ve of Morgans employees now routinely work from home. Having only a handful of staff working from home might not save the business much money, but the employees feel the economic benet: they dont have to pay expensive petrol bills to drive back and forth from the ofce every day, which is one reason why they might choose to continue working for Arcol rather than an employer closer to home. Morgan can now call on expertise from further aeld, by giving them remote access to Arcols network. The man who sorts out the ERP [enterprise resource planning] system lives in Windsor we couldnt do that six months ago.

Staff had to deal with work emails at home; the office connection was deplorably slow
The upgraded connection has also let Arcol hold face-to-face meetings with its many foreign customers and partners for the rst time. Instead of the wobbly audio Skype connection the rm used to rely on, it can now hold HD video conferences from the companys boardroom. However, Morgan admits this has its downsides: the people on the other end of the line can now see the strange faces he pulls when they make a ridiculous proposal.

Virtual wine tasting

Ten miles down the road in St Agnes, another newly enabled bre business is taking a more leisurely approach to videoconferencing. Louise

Treseder is the owner of the Driftwood Spars inn, a homely old-fashioned pub with its own microbrewery, a function suite, 15 guest rooms and a dog sleeping on the carpet in the bar. Its name derives from its timber beams (or spars) that were plundered from the shipwrecks washed up on the local beach, which is a pebbles throw from the pub. We arrive just in time for a virtual wine tasting. Treseder and the local brewery import their wines from Domaine Laroche in the Chablis region of France, and hit upon the ideaof asking experts from the vineyard todeliver the tasting notes over a Skype connection. The Driftwood Spars inn doesnthave bre running right up to its door, but even the 38Mbits/sec maximum of the pubs bre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) connection isplenty for a two-way HD video conference. So, on this squally winters night in Cornwall, were sitting back and sipping a little too merrily as Christine from Laroche takes questions from the oor about the wines andtheir production. Granted, it isnt exactly pushing the available bandwidth to its limit, nor is it themost bleeding-edge demonstration of e-commerce weve witnessed, but it doesnt need to be. For a large pub with no shortage oflocal competition and bills to pay during theoff-season, such an event can make a sizeable difference to the bottom line. Treseder tells us how even running reliable Wi-Fi connections to the guest rooms a 14Mbits/sec connection to our bedroom on thesecond oor was enough to substitute theappalling reception on the rooms televisionfor the iPlayer on our iPad has helped to attract business travellers, who muchprefer to spend the night in a colourfullocal pub than a faceless hotel chainifthey can get a reliable internet connection to the ofce.

Thrust into the fast lane

When you rst hear Arcols Alun Morgan describe how the rm coped before bre broadband, you begin to wonder how the business even survived. Like a man out in thecar park had his foot on the line is howMorgan describes life on his sluggish 1.5Mbits/sec ADSL line. He laughs as he recalls the conversations heused to have with cold-callers ringing up tooffer him online backup services, and the despondency in their voices when he told them how many months of solid uploading it would take to back up all 27GB of the companys critical data. Instead, Morgan relied on tapes for off-site backups, admitting that he often found a tape in the back of the van and thought that should be in the safe. Now things are a little less haphazard. With bre connections at both the ofce and his nearby home, Morgan backs up the company data to aNAS drive in his back-bedroom ofce.

BT is rolling out bre to between 80% and 90% of Cornwalls homes and businesses

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from the performance hall to the site of the presentation simply wasnt possible before the university was hooked up to bre broadband. Now the university is hoping to turn the jiggling Cameron into an app. We head upstairs to the music studios and there stands a man in front of a grand piano. Frankly, he might as well not be there, since this is a Yamaha Disklavier piano that unbeknown to the untrained eye plays itself. Hidden beneath the bottom left of the keyboard is a controller unit that converts MIDI data into instructions for the pianos electromechanical solenoids, which move the keys and pedals without any human help. These 45,000 pianos include CDs full ofsongs, so owners can set the piano to play automatically in the corner of the room, or even stream music over the net, all delivered with the live acoustics that even the most expensive hi- setups couldnt hope to equal. Theyre also

Its difficult for small businesses to see the potential benefits of reliable broadband
used to deliver music lessons remotely, with the tutor and pupil able to physically play together at pianos that are thousands of miles apart. However, the Disklavier at University College Falmouth is being used for something a little more ambitious: a live concert performed simultaneously in three different locations around the world. Synchronising thepianos is no mean technical feat: the livestreams will require 500-800Mbits/sec ofdata to be shunted between the three locations, which is at the top end of the capabilities of current commercial FTTP services. Latency is also key, as adelay ofeven a few milliseconds could put the performance out of sync. Needless to say, the concert couldnt even have been conceived using the ADSL technology that Cornwall relied on until recently. Before we sweep out of academia, were treated to one nal demonstration of breenabled remote learning, this time in a dance studio where a tutor is walking his pupils through a series of steps. For the purposes of this demonstration, the pupils are just next door, but with the amount of bandwidth Falmouth has on tap, theres no reason why they couldnt be in another part of the county, country or planet provided the other end hadsufcient bandwidth too, of course. And they do need some pretty serious bandwidth. This particular setup uses three cameras andthree full-wall projectors, so the tutor canseehis pupils movements face-on and inprole and vice versa.

New casing allows bre to be run via telegraph poles, to reduce the amount of digging

The tangible difference even moderate broadband speeds has made to such businessesraises the question: why on earthdidnt they do something about their appalling speeds before BTs bre vans rolled into town? Even if bre wasnt available, other (albeit more expensive and slower) solutions such as bonded lines and Ethernet in the FirstMile (EFM) could have given them amuch-needed boost. However, even if they could have affordedthe hundreds or thousands of poundsa month for these workarounds, its often difcult for small- and medium-sized businesses to see the potential benets of faster,reliable broadband until they actually have it, BTs Ranulf Scarbrough told us. Indeed,Louise Treseder only upgraded to breafter she wascarpet-bombed by leaets from BT and decided to nd out what all the fuss was about.Now, as chairperson of the StAgnes Chamber of Commerce, she says shes one of bres biggest advocates.

Broadening education
The benets of bre broadband are also evident at University College Falmouth, a sprawling, modern campus with impressive facilities, some of which were also paid for by grants from the European Social Fund. Cornwall may have an active band of separatists but, to an outsider, it seems to be doing pretty well out of being part of the Union. Were taken to the performing arts studio, where a female student stands in what appearsat rst to be a catsuit dotted with smalllight bulbs. The bulbs are, in fact, reective markers, used by the light sensors mounted around the room to capture the movement of her joints and limbs. The student starts dancing and, to our left, a video screen appears with a 3D caricature of David Cameron, mirroring the students distinctly unstatesmanlike movements. This amusing send-up has been used as part of functions and presentations at the university, but beaming the megabits of animation data

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The Cornish business with Olympic bandwidth

Resistor manufacturer Arcol may have a standard FTTP line powering its business, but its also trialling a staggering 10Gbits/sec connection the fastest anywhere in the country. In fact, this modest rm on the edge of a nondescript Truro business park has greater bandwidth than was available to the entire Olympic Park last summer. Todays gigabit bre connections are delivered via Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON). A single 2.5Gbits/sec bre emerges from a headend in the telephone exchange, and is then split into 32 bres that are routed to individual customers. Each customer has a GPON optical networking unit (ONU), which acts like a modem, in their premises. The 10Gbits/sec connection is delivered through an enhanced version of that technology, called XG-PON. This works in much the same way, with an XG-PON headend in the exchange and an ONU in the customers premises. In Arcols case, the ONU has been built by networking equipment manufacturer ZTE in a box the size of a 1U rack server, although it will be shrunk in due course. Interestingly, XG-PON and GPON are running down the same optical bre, but work at different wavelengths and frequencies so that they can be used simultaneously. We saw a live demonstration of the XG-PON line on our visit to Cornwall. Using a special content server located in BTs Truro exchange, the ZTE team was able to download a dozen 40GB les simultaneously, without stretching the connection to full capacity. Indeed, the bottlenecks were the receiving PC (which had been tted with a 10Gbits/sec NIC) and the networking equipment, which couldnt cope with the raw speedof the connection. Although data can be shufed between the exchange and Arcol at 10Gbits/sec, it isnt connected to the wider internet at such speeds, as theres simply nothing you could do on theinternet at 10Gbits/sec, said BTs Ranulf Scarbrough.

So the benets of Cornwalls bre revolution to businesses, residents and academia are substantial but whats happening to those who fall outside of the bre footprint?

The have-nots
BT says its target is to reach 80 to 90% of Cornwalls premises with its bre rollout, but even the higher gure would leave around 25,000 households and businesses on ADSL. Although the company is still in the middle of the rollout, BT claims it has 29 other ISPs already offering bre connections to Cornwall residents on a wholesale basis. However, locals told us theyre struggling to nd bre products from anyone other than BT. Falmouth-based IT consultant Mark Lis is a Sky customer, but claims hes unable to get bre from the company. I have a number of clients dotted around Falmouth, Truro, Camborne, St Austell and Padstow, and currently all of them struggle to get bre provision, says Lis. Either they arent with BT (which is the primary problem), or theyre exchange-only connected and not via the [bre-enabled] green box. The latter problem to which Lis refers is thatBT can only run bre from dedicated cabinets, not directly from the local telephone exchange, as it can with ADSL. Perversely, thatmeans those living on the doorstep of a BTexchange may be excluded from the bre rollout. BT is working on a solution, and these customers can console themselves with the fact that theyre likely to have the fastest ADSL speeds in town. However, the majority of those 25,000 brehave-nots wont be within spitting distance of their local exchange. Indeed, theyre more likely to be several miles away, suffering deplorable ADSL speeds because the length of their telephone line attenuates the signal and reduces an 8Mbits/sec or 24Mbits/sec headline speed to a crawl. A small percentage will have no broadband to speak of.

The future for these unfortunates is as dank as the underground ducts through which BT runs its bre. This time last year, BT and EE joined forces to create a pilot 4G network in Cornwall, which they were trumpeting as a high-speed solution (greater than 20Mbits/sec) for properties where running cable didnt tick the right boxes on BTs spreadsheet. A year on, and BT has gone decidedly cold on the idea. With more people due to receive bre in Cornwall than BT originally anticipated (it wasinitially only due to reach two-thirds of thepopulation), the business case for serving that nal 10% of premises with 4G has becomeharder to make, admits BTs Scarbrough. We dont have a plan to use LTEat the moment, he says. This isnt to say that BT has given up on thenal tranche. The company is trialling alunchbox-sized device with the rather DoctorWho-esque name of Broadband Regenerator, which it claims will boost connection speeds forthose on the longest ADSL lines. Placed inBTs underground ducts,halfway between the exchange and thecustomers home, the Regenerator is effectively a repeater, deliveringto customers the same kind of speedsthey would enjoy if their house was located at the same place astheRegenerator. Itcan boost speeds from mere hundreds of kilobits per second to 4Mbits/sec, according toBTs network director Jeremy Steventon-Barnes, which is a vast improvement, even if bre typically delivers tentimes that throughput. For customers who cant currently receive ADSL at all, BT is exploring line bonding where two or morecopper pairs are

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Source: Superfast Cornwall 2013

used to serve the same property with speeds ofonly 1-2Mbits/sec or the faster but more cumbersome satellite broadband as last resorts. However, as genuinely enthusiastic as BTsCornwall team is about getting bre toasmany people as possible, as long as itmeetsits commitment to deliver at least 2Mbits/sec to the whole of Cornwall the company will consider it job done. With BT already having the majority of the county covered with its bre network, the chances ofany other provider investing in the region areslim to non-existent. For the majority of people, the benetsofBTs bre rollout will be plentifuland diverse, yet an increasingly isolated minority will be left with connection speeds that arent even capable of running services such as BBC iPlayeror YouView today,let alone whatever higher-bandwidth servicestomorrow willbring. Fibre hastransformed Cornwall, but not allof it.