Guernsey Fibre – It’s finally here, but is it too expensive?

Last year, it was announced that Sure was finally going to be rolling out an island-wide FTTH service to connect to all properites by 2026.

However, it did take £12.5m of taxpayers money for them to finally do so. Potentially without the States’ intervention, we would be stuck on VDSL forever! Nevertheless, this is a good thing for the island and on balance a bit of public funding for something as important as broadband is probably worth it.

My only minor concern regarding this funding, is exactly what kind of deal the States and Sure have. Unfortunately, it seems the actual agreement between them has not been made public (which isn’t great from a transparency perspective). Was the £12.5m just a lump sum of cash handed to Sure to use however they like? Or, is there some sort of clawback mechanism so that if Sure ends up making a greater profit off the service compared to before, they hand some of the money back? (The UK government subsidy scheme for fibre rollout had a clawback mechanism).

Regardless of the deals that happened behind closed doors, we do instead get to see the end-user pricing for the new fibre services:

Service NameDownload SpeedUpload SpeedMonthly Price*
Basic Fibre30Mbps3Mbps£43
Essential Fibre50Mbps5Mbps£52
Superfast Fibre100Mbps10Mbps£58
Ultrafast Fibre300Mbps30Mbps£69
Gigabit Fibre1Gbps50Mbps£126
*Excludes introductory offer for first 6 months, which is slightly cheaper. Includes landline rental price.

My immediate impression when I saw these prices, was that they were expensive. We have already gotten used to paying more for our telecoms in Guernsey compared to the UK (which is somewhat understandable given our location and smaller market size). However, the new fibre pricing is problematic for I think a few reasons:

  • The top tier, gigabit service costing £126 per month seems extremely expensive. It seems to be set at a level to discourage basically anyone from taking it.
  • The upload speeds across the board are pretty miserable. My existing VDSL service has a 20Mbps upload speed. I have it on relatively good authority that Sure are deploying GPON, which has a technological reason for asymmetric upload speeds. GPON is however cheaper to deploy than P2P fibre. To offer just 3Mbps and 5Mpbs upload speeds on a fibre product is pretty terrible, regardless of the technology used.
  • The ‘Basic Fibre’ and ‘Essential Fibre’ products are very expensive for the speeds delivered. I don’t even think these products should exist at all.

I thought it would be a good idea to do a comparison of the fibre plans against other jurisdictions, namely within the UK (BT and Gigaclear) and within Jersey (JT). Whilst I fully accept that as a smaller island we are always going to pay a bit more for the same level of service, I think the graphs below demonstrate just how big a difference there is in pricing.

The Graphs

I have split my comparison up into 3 ‘tiers’: ‘Budget’, ‘Mid range’ and ‘High range’, to try and compare like products with each other. In order to capture introductory pricing (i.e. a discount for the first x months of service) and also to capture that Sure doesn’t provide a free router (you effectively pay £72 for one) , I averaged the pricing out over 5 years. This gives a fairer idea of pricing.

The bar charts are displayed over two axes. The blue bar represents the 5 year cost, on the left hand axis, whilst the yellow represents the headline speed, on the right axis.

First, the ‘Budget’ services. Sure is undoubtedly the most expensive service in this category. It is also the slowest, by some margin! In fact, the next fastest service to compare with is BT fibre and this is 3x faster. BT is also nearly £600 cheaper over the 5 year period. Note here that I chose to use Sure’s 50Mbps product instead of the 30Mbps product. Whilst the 30Mbps service is slightly cheaper, it is even slower and it didn’t seem right to compare this with services in the 100’s of Mbps range.

Now is probably a good time to mention that in Jersey, JT have usage caps on their services. I have chosen to use their middle tier product offering which comes with a 100GB data cap during daytime use (I assume this is monthly). Sure is unlimited.

Next, the ‘Mid range’ offerings. Sure is again the most expensive here, by some significant margin. JT is over £1000 cheaper in Jersey over the same time period, and is also offering a faster service (caveat: but with data caps!). The UK providers come in significantly cheaper, and in BT’s case faster than what Sure offer. I would actually argue that the ‘mid range’ service is the most competitive area for Sure. Despite the highest cost, the speeds are competitive with the others in this segment.

Finally, the ‘High end’ category. All of the providers here offer 1Gbps services. Again, JT’s service has a 300GB data cap during day usage, the others are all unlimited. In the UK, BT actually comes in cheaper than Gigaclear, but it is worth mentioning that all of Gigaclear’s speeds are symmetric (1Gbps upload and download speeds). Here we really see the high cost of Sure’s 1Gbps service. It is approaching 2x the cost of the UK providers, and 1.5x more expensive than our neighbouring island.

A few quick points that need highlighting:

  • Sure’s 50Mbps service in the ‘budget’ tier is actually more expensive than the competition in the ‘mid-range’ tier! Except we are looking at competitors offering 300 or 500Mbps services in this tier. Sure’s 30Mbps service would be cheaper, but the speed is woefully slow.
  • Sure doesn’t offer a router as standard. You have to pay an additional £3 per month over 2 years to ‘buy’ the basic router. This is pretty bad and for the high cost of this service, it should be free. Note I have included the cost of this in the graphs.
  • Gigaclear and BT don’t offer voice services by default (i.e. no landline rental is included). I would argue that for 90% of people, this is fine. Very few people would use landlines for calling and only have it to support their broadband.

Conclusion

Overall, I do feel that the pricing for fibre broadband in Guernsey is too high when compared to the UK and Jersey. In particular, the ‘budget’ services are very poor value for money and the gigabit service is insanely expensive.

I think a fairer service offering (for the consumer at least) should look something more like this:

Service NameDownload SpeedUpload SpeedMonthly Price
Basic Fibre30Mbps3Mbps£43
Essential Fibre50Mbps5Mbps£52
Superfast Fibre100Mbps10Mbps 20Mbps£58 £43
Ultrafast Fibre300Mbps30Mbps 50Mbps£69 £58
Gigabit Fibre1Gbps100Mbps£126 £99
My proposed service offering
  • Scrap the Basic and Essential tiers, they are slow and should barely qualify as a ‘fibre’ broadband service
  • Make the 100Mbps tier the entry-level one with matching pricing
  • Bump the upload speeds a bit to differentiate it from the existing VDSL services
  • Lower the pricing on the 300Mbps service so it is more similar to the mid-tier VDSL price.
  • Cut the price of gigabit fibre so it is less than a 3-figure number. £99 is still very high.

What do you think? Is this analysis fair, is Guernsey Fibre too expensive or is this just the cost of doing business on a small island?

Sure Guernsey – 100Mbps service now available

It’s here! Sure announced their 100Mbps VDSL2 product back in December. And today it went live on my line:

Finally, my phone line is actually ‘maxed out’. I’m hitting the 6dB target SNR now, which has never happened on my line before. Sadly it means I am 0.08Mbps off the 100Mbps sync speed!

The speed test results are actually very impressive. When I was on the 60Mbps service I would usually only get 45-50Mbps on average, so I was sort of expecting the 100Mbps service to scale similarly i.e. a throughput nearer 80Mbps.

The price of the new service is fairly high – £50.99 per month, or £62.98 per month if you bundle it with a phone line. Compared to Gigaclear in the UK, which offers 100/100 FTTH for ~£47, Sure’s service is effectively 30% more expensive, and Gigaclear’s pricing includes VAT!

I am genuinely pleased though that Sure are at least offering this product on the island. At least users now have the opportunity to choose from 4 different product offerings, priced at different levels.

It will be interesting to see what the medium to long term plans are for Sure. In the UK, BT are beginning their roll-out of G.Fast, whilst in Jersey they will have island-wide FTTH (though, I might add, with fairly draconian usage limits).

But in the short term, I’d really like to see some movement on IPv6!

Sure Guernsey – Some unusual latency & packet loss

I’ve been getting some unusual readings on my latency monitoring graphs these past 2 days.

I was getting this on Tuesday:

BQM-1

And then I was getting this today:

BQM-2

It’s a mixture of increased latency and, in some cases, moderate packet loss!

I’ve restarted the router and it doesn’t seem to have helped. Looking at the DSL stats, there have been only a small number of FEC events (which is expected – the error correction is simply doing what it’s meant to), and no other stats to indicate line instability (SNR margin sitting at a comfortable 16dB).

So this leads me to a few potential conclusions: There is some upstream issue with Sure’s network; perhaps some sort of DDoS attack against my ip address(?); or perhaps a fault with my router?

I don’t think it’s traffic at my end, since that would involve saturating the connection for long periods of time (I mean, 4 hours at 50Mbps continuously is a 90GB download!). Also the shape of the graph, particularly the top one, makes me quite suspicious (it’s a curve, rather than a distinct block).

Sure Guernsey – Superfast Premium Broadband – Speedtest

After 4 years of Sure’s original VDSL product launch, they have finally launched a new home broadband platform, the oddly named ‘Superfast Premium Broadband’. It offers headline speeds of 60Mbps download and 10Mbps upload. If you opt for the ‘Superfast Premium Pro Broadband’ (seriously, who names these?) then you get the same speed but with a static IP and 10:1 contention, which is the same across all of the ‘Pro’ options.

Here is a speed test done in the evening, with no other devices connected to the network:

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First, the upload speeds are right on target. The download speeds are slightly lower than I expected – I imagined around 50-55 Mbps wouldn’t be unreasonable for a 60 Mbps service. After all, on the 40 Mbps service I was getting around 35 Mbps. The maximum transmissions speed I have observed so far is just shy of 50 Mbps when pulling multiple files from different locations. So not slow by any means, but a bit off the advertised figure.

Obviously the usual caveats apply – not least that this test was done during peak time. Also, just to ‘prove’ it’s not the sync speed itself, here is a router screenshot:

router

Interestingly, my SNR margins are still not maxed out. I have a 16dB margin on the downstream and a fairly large 27dB margin on the upstream. So basically, my line can still go faster if at some point Sure decided to uncap the service.

Another thing I haven’t really talked about is latency. This may be anecdotal, but I’ve noticed a reduction in latency of around 4-5 ms switching to the new service. This may be the new router vs the old one, or it could be a result of the higher upload speeds reducing the amount of (potential) upload congestion.

Overall a good improvement. It’s just a shame very few people will get the maximum speed due to distance constraints, and even fewer will even bother signing up to the service.

Guernsey – 60Mbps VDSL coming soon!

From Sure’s news page:

60mb-broadband-prices

Sure gives notification that it will introduce two new broadband products from the 17th October 2016.

These new products will offer speeds of up to 60MB and will be made available to customers who have line lengths of up to 500m from the exchange or street MSAN.

Well, it’s about time! Finally a speed increase on the VDSL product. It will cost an additional £3 per month for the non-pro service, and an additional £4.99 for the pro option.

The price increase isn’t too bad, all things considered. I’m definitely considering upgrading our connection. It just depends how easy it is to upgrade (hopefully online?).

Guernsey Connectivity Review – some thoughts

Last week the States of Guernsey released the ‘Guernsey Connectivity Review’ report, undertaken by Analysys Mason. You can see the full PDF document by going to the States website here.

My thoughts on this report are mixed. Firstly, I do wonder how much money the States spent on ‘consultancy fees’ to produce this document. I guess though the important thing is that internet access is on the governments agenda, even if no actual action has been taken yet.

An interesting thing about the document though, is that it provides some data from Sure that wouldn’t otherwise be publicly available. For example, they claim that only 10% of subscribers have taken up the ‘Superfast Broadband’ (VDSL) product, which did actually surprise me a bit (I thought it would’ve been higher than that).

As I read through it, I highlighted a few things that stood out that I will list here, in no real order:

1.) “Broadband services to JT’s subscribers are supplied on a wholesale basis via the Sure network.” [p.19] – This has obviously been the case all along – JT offers exactly the same broadband as Sure does, with only a very minor price difference. I fail to see how true broadband competition can exist when there is a single monopoly wholesale provider, that doesn’t seem to be regulated very harshly. In the UK ADSL market, LLU allows for providers to have their own physical equipment in the exchange, with the ability to offer different speeds and service levels that they choose.

2.) The VDSL rollout has stalled at only 60% penetration [p.20]. According to the February 2016 statistics (provided by Sure themselves, mind you), VDSL is only available to 60% of households on the island.  We need to remember that VDSL has been available on the island since September 2012, that’s approaching 4 years ago. If we look at the UK figures, BT had already reached a 66% population coverage of VDSL at the same time as Sure launching the product. Today, the coverage of superfast broadband in the UK is now over 90% of the population (admittedly, with state aid above the 65% mark, approximately). However, it’s really important to remember that Guernsey is an island of just 30 square miles, and the world’s 14th most densely populated jurisdiction. One of the reasons for state aid being necessary in the UK is that the remaining 30% of the population lived in relatively rural areas. The same cannot be said anywhere in Guernsey really. It’s also a fact that, in terms of raw population coverage, we are 4 years behind the UK.

3.) VDSL take-up on the island seems to be very low – only 15% of total subscribers have taken up the VDSL service (weirdly, this 15% figure contradicts the 10% figure used earlier in the report – perhaps older data?). Again, if we compare this take-up figure with the UK data of around 33% (Ofcom 2014, extrapolated by a year), it does appear to be fairly poor. The data is slightly confusing, since it’s not entirely clear if that is a % of households who are already covered by the VDSL footprint, or % of total households. If we had 100% VDSL coverage, the actual take-up number would obviously be higher, but it’s unclear if the % would go up. I think a focus should be made on asking WHY people in Guernsey aren’t opting for superfast broadband. The first obvious answer to me would be price. Comparing with a UK operator, e.g. Sky, they charge £37.40 per month for line rental and 40/10 VDSL. In Guernsey Sure charge £44.98 for line rental and 40/5 VDSL. However that doesn’t tell the whole picture – at any given point in time there is often a deal available with at least one of the UK operators, offering much cheaper VDSL. This means if you regularly switch you can end up saving a ton of money. For example, right now BT are offering 55/10 VDSL for just £28.98 per month. That’s over £5 cheaper than Sure’s standard ADSL! I realise fully that comparing Guernsey to the UK is not necessarily accurate or ‘correct’, but I feel it’s an important area to look at.

I suspect that another reason VDSL take up is low is due to consumers not realising it is even available, or just not really considering it. For many, ‘broadband is broadband’, and the speed they receive is the speed that they get. If their connection struggles when multiple people use iPlayer, I get a feeling many would just blame Sure regardless, and not realise they can get a much faster service. Sure have been pushing Superfast on the radio and in the press over the past year, as well as offering a discount if you sign-up, but this leads me onto my 3rd point. The name ‘superfast broadband’ may confuse some people, especially when in the UK the same product is labelled as ‘fibre’ (even though it obviously isn’t). Maybe a rebrand to make the VDSL service a lot more distinctive in name would help here? See the screenshot from Sure’s website:

sure-broadbandThere are 4 products all called ‘broadband’. Personally I see little point in the ‘Pro’ products since they are practically the same as their non-pro counterparts, except for a static IP and lower contention ratio (and what difference that actually makes is questionable). My point here: is having 4 ‘broadband’ products confusing people, when the UK advertising that we see on the TV is constantly pushing ‘fibre’? I suspect this may be playing a small part.

My final ‘possible minor reason for the low take up’ is the engineer install. For people that have busy lives, having to book an engineer in to fit the filtered faceplate could be a negative reason not to get VDSL. Again, in the UK, more providers are offering self-install options for FTTC that simply involve using a microfilter rather than a faceplate. I do agree that a faceplate is superior, but as long as your internal wiring isn’t dodgy, a micro filter can still work.

4.) The report blatantly confuses DSL sync speed with throughput speed. It compares the average sync speed of Guernsey connections against international metrics of average download speed. The effect of this is obvious: it makes Guernsey’s internet appear faster than it actually is, when compared to other countries. The other concerning aspect is that the Guernsey data is provided by Sure – and not an independent authority.

5.) The term ‘FTTC’ is often used to describe Sure’s VDSL product when, in fact, this is not really the case. As far as I know, they use a mixture of roadside and exchange-based MSAN’s. This means that all telephone and data services terminate at the same place – unlike FTTC where POTS continues back to the exchange.

6.) “We understand through our discussions with Sure, that a number of improvements to its existing copper access network are planned, including (a) expansion plans to install additional MSAN cabinets around the island, with the aim of making VDSL accessible to all properties; and (b) the introduction of vectoring, FTTdp and G.fast in 2017. We also understand the company intends to increase FTTH penetration in Guernsey in the period 2018–2020.” [p.44].

This statement is probably the most revealing, since we get a small glimpse into Sure’s future plans. The first point is essentially that they plan to increase VDSL coverage to the entire island. Clearly this is good news, though they don’t give a timeframe for this, nor does Sure reveal whether they will be funding this privately or asking for States money.  The second point reveals they probably intend to trial some future technologies, such as G.fast, which could offer 500Mbps+ speeds, assuming short enough line lengths. FTTdp is probably a planned intermediary for lines that are a bit too long and exist in the more ‘rural’ areas of Guernsey to receive a fast VDSL service. Vectoring is something which wouldn’t actually increase speeds, but just prevent speeds from going down due to crosstalk, when more people sign-up to the VDSL service. They list 2017 as the introduction date, which is fine, but by then Jersey will probably be near or at completion of their FTTH rollout. The final point is probably the most interesting – Sure intends to offer some sort of FTTH by 2018-2020. Could these be due to potential pressure from JT’s own FTTH network on Guernsey? (even though no real residential customers are actually able to get it yet, apart from the trial locations).

The rest of the report is mostly generic ‘how to offer NGA broadband’ that could’ve been cut and paste from any other report from any other country. There are also some odd numbers relating to FTTH rollout costs on Guernsey, implying it would be more expensive here than on Jersey? Regardless, the report doesn’t really conclude anything that anyone with common sense hadn’t already concluded. I do get the feeling that Guernsey will go down the ‘superfast copper’ route, whereby gradually the fibre is brought closer to our homes but never actually into them. G.fast will bring fibre within 100’s of metres, and is also the preferred approach of BT. But ultimately it is still a copper wire that does the final stretch, and will still be susceptible to interference and dodgy joints.

My wish-list for this year is only 2 things, however: Native IPv6 and a faster VDSL tier option. 12% of the world’s internet connections are now on IPv6, and it’s time that Guernsey actually led in this area rather than follow. In terms of VDSL, the least I would like to see is another upload speed bump. The report actually highlighted the upload speed requirements for small business and content creators, and that it was lacking on the island. Perhaps make it so that the ‘Superfast Pro’ product was 80/20 – at least the absurd price for this product could then begin to be justifiable.

Guernsey 4G switched on, much faster than the fastest home broadband

4G in Guernsey has finally arrived, with Sure activating 4G around the island dependent on location.

This is of course great news for Guernsey, finally catching up to the UK when it comes to mobile technologies. What surprised me more, was that the initial speediest’s coming in seem to be faster than the ‘average’ UK 4G connection:

1205873068

I’m not totally up to speed with the LTE ‘categories’ [The different speeds achievable], but it seems that Sure might be using either twice the radio spectrum/bandwidth than many UK carriers, or that their equipment can use more spatial streams (MIMO) than the ‘standard’ amount. They are offering seemingly the ‘up to’ 100Mbps 150Mbps variant rather than the more standard ‘up to’ 50Mbps (resulting in more usual average’s of 30-40 Mbps). Of course as more user’s download on the 4G network, that headline figure will begin to come down, but it’s a very promising start.

Something which is immediately noticeable though, and definitely ‘on theme’ with this blog, is that 4G in guernsey is now at least twice as fast than the fastest fixed line broadband connection that Sure offers on the island. Also, the upload speeds are at least 4x faster than the fastest VDSL connection.

4G data is also priced pretty reasonably: I assume that 4G will be available on the PAYG mobile broadband SIM’s, for which you can buy 50GB of data for £40. I think this is good value compared to the UK, where for example Three offers 1GB for £10. (Meaning 50GB would cost you the equivalent of £500!)

If you compare this cost to fixed line access, which costs £35pm for the 40Mbps service, you might wonder why even bother with having a broadband connection at all! The only reason you might choose VDSL over 4G is if you want truly unlimited data, which I admit is a pretty big deal for some of us (me included!). However for a lot of people, 50GB per month is probably enough, and if you pay just £25 you get 25GB.

So what am I really saying here? Well, there is a disconnect between Sure’s products. If you want the fastest speeds possible, you need to go the 4G route. Not only that, but if you want 4x the upload speeds, you also need to go the 4G route. Uploading a large video to Youtube? Get the 4G dongle out. Backing up your PC files? Yep, 4G dongle again…

It is really time that Sure re-focused on their fixed line product. You might argue that people don’t really need faster than 40Mbps, but then equally do people really need 80+Mbps on their phones? If anything, faster speeds are going to be more beneficial in the home than when you are mobile. Streaming 4K video, more than 1 user at a time, uploading files, cloud access, etc.

At the very least, Sure could split their current VDSL product: 40/10 for home and 80/20 for ‘Pro’, a bit like BT does in the UK. Whilst line length is still of course an issue (and some homes still don’t even have access to VDSL!), it would at least close some of the gap between the blisteringly fast 4G and somewhat slower ‘Superfast broadband’.

Late night Speedtest (part 2)

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Another late night Speedtest. Upload speeds are very consistent, approaching the advertised 5 Mbps. However download speeds still appear to be lower than the full 40 Mbps, the maximum actual throughput is more like 34 Mbps on a fully synced line.

Interestingly, and this could be a bug, Speedtest.net says this connection is “Slower than 57% of GG”. How this is possible, I don’t know? I can only assume that the reason is leased line customers with much faster connections doing a lot of testing recently.

On another note, this September we are approaching the 2nd anniversary of Sure’s VDSL service launch. Fingers crossed for some sort of upgrade announcement! After all, when LTE launches next year, it wouldn’t ‘seem’ right for their VDSL to offer the same speeds as the 4G mobile network.