Posts by YorksinOaks 24 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Oct 2011
I have the choice between BT FTTC which did not have a working spare twisted pair when one of my pairs cracked, or VM coax which is constantly under repair and was 92% availability in the last 2 months before I left them.
Old (speed capped) copper needs retiring and replacing with fibre for the next 100 years.
The NIMBY squad will tell you it's the wrong shade of green, or French Oak instead of English.
The technical reality is that it's more or less impossible to make a site 2G/4G/5G ready with a convincing cloaked design.
Councils put up Lampposts and traffic signs with impunity, roads are built with our money and no say.
National Grid can raise 60M towers with statutory powers, but mobile masts are expected to have the physical footprint of a toothpick.
CRTC shows a pretty crappy model for an interventionist regulator (reserved spectrum for newcomers, but allied with Canadian company ownership/control ) with a series of failures with Mobilicity and Wind. They tried to retain independent operators but the minnows cannot invest and compete with capital restrictions.
EC/CMA/OfCom seem destined to ignore this, despite BT adding almost as much spectrum to EE as 3UK has. BTEE is now more dominant, 3UK are too small and O2 starved of investment from a parent who wants out. Faced with this, why would Vodafone invest, so the UK will persist in having underperforming networks. Everyone's a critic when it comes to network coverage and quality, but they all want a bargain on their iPhone, Galaxy, Nexus, Z5 and Ascend.
But hey, who cares about quality as long as we have 'cheap' packages.
"Ofcom are probably beginning to think about how it is going to handle this auction in 2019/20, when the established operators may have little interest in bidding against each other..."
Precisely. They are concerned that 3.5GHz and DD2 auction proceeds will be a bit light.
We should also recall that 20% corporation tax was lost on most of the 3G license proceeds as they were massively written down with the associated tax write-off when those losses were declared. As well as the slow deployment of 3G and knock on delay of 4G so that 3G RoI could be maximised. So short term ('OfCom') gain must be balanced against lost revenue, lost investments and lost taxation.
In a typical auction, there is enough spectrum for 3 operators but not enough for 4. When there were 5 - engineered by OfCom - it was carnage, which you may remember as killing 3G before it was born with a £24Bn debt. So with excess demand, prices go up, and most operators are not happy with what they got.
But hey, OfCom got their bonus and G.O. gets his lump sum at the treasury.
3 operators mean a bit of competition but the auction is quickly over. The Operators have money to invest in Network Infrastructure and consumers are happy. But OfCom will have to cry in their beer and they seem not to be happy with this.
Well, having used QHD Note Pro 12.2 with "Wacom-like, full-bells-and-whistles pressure/angle sensitive" as another user put it, with the ability to launch apps directly from the stylus, I bemoan the lack of these.
The standalone nature of the pencil (no slot) means many users will lose them and the acid test will be how many will shell out $99/£99 on a replacement.
Xxx Pro : 12.X Inch Tab Copied From Samsung.
Magnetic Keyboard Copied From Microsoft
Stylus Copied from Samsung (less well)
Before we look at
5" Flagship Phone Copied from Samsung, Sony, LG. ...
5.5" Phablet Copied from Samsung
7.x" Tablet Copied from world and dog
4K camera, xHD pressure sensitive screens......
Almost all these ideas were derided when they were initially launched, yet are suddenly brilliant.
Rounded corners "design patent" pending cancellation due to blindingly obvious prior art.
Gobsmacking hipocrisy and lack of innovation.
"so, in places where there is minimum 2Mb broadband, the networks should be persuaded (forced) to give out the picocells free of charge, they should also allow the registration of any (same Network) mobile the contract owner wants ( usually fiends or family who pay their own way) irrespective of whether they are PAYG or Contract"
Hey, I have a car. I should be able to drive it anywhere I want, and if there is no road, then someone should build one for me.
All "National Roaming" does is cause your phone to constantly hunt for the best signal so you have no battery power from mid-afternoon. There would be a short-term gain while you can roam onto any network, then the gains will stop and the drawbacks begin. If roaming traffic swamps a site, it takes months to get capacity expanded, probably with planning delays for new antennas and maybe a site rebuild. Meanwhile all the customers of the operator who put the site there and the roamers have poor service.
No-one will build a new site (with planning delays of 18 months while all the locals protest, bumping up costs) at a cost of £30-80K, only to see their competitors immediately reap the coverage benefits. How do they compete for your business then, apart from a race to the bottom on price, and the associated unwillingness (inability?) to invest in improvements.
Ironic that for many years Apple and Analysts compared iPhone sales to Samsung Sx and excluded the massive Note sales (>25M was reached for the Note 2 and climbing since then) but now they aggregate the iPhone 6 and 6+ sales in their comparisons....____, ____........and damned statistics.
Conversely I see far bigger uptake of iPhone6 among my customers (male managers) than iPhone 4 to 5 so sales are definitely hitting a market which was missed previously.
Which is it: "the telcos have a marvellous "incentive"... where they could earn a good income from others " or "the roaming costs would be neutral (so no need to change customer rates)". It cannot be both.
Business Case 101:
Cost of new Site £50K
Roaming revenue of new not-spot site - cost of roaming onto other 'new sites' = £0.
Net Cash -£50K
So with no new net revenue, why would the operators add new sites? They would sit on their current asset base, 50 grand to the good. The best that you can hope for is that existing rural single-operator sites become 'multi-operator' but there will be no new coverage deployed in the hunt for roaming revenue. This is either MIP or "son/daughter of MIP" but the key is to get MIP sorted which will close down the NotSpots.
If it takes 19 signatures to get a MIP site installed (run by Crown Castle competitor Arqiva as I am sure you know), imagine how many your solution would need and the compensation needed?
EE value their site at XXX because it is a well engineered bottom 15m of a 30m mast. Vodafone say that their site is worth YYY because it covers a key corporate. 3 fought for 2 years to build their site to stop paying O2 or Orange roaming costs and object to having only amortised 30% of the build costs. Company A or Council B demands compensation for 3 years lost rental on a 5 year lease for their office roof.
Whatever happens, locals revolt as someone loses coverage as the shared site is another half a mile away. Sites significantly decrease. This is what happens on a weekly basis as Vodafone and O2 trade sites for their Cornerstone shared sites and Former T-Mobile or Orange sites get shut down to become EE/MBNL sites.
You did read this before jumping 2-footed onto your soapbox? The word 'small' perhaps?
Metal monstrousity, no. 7L small box yes. Same as an alarm box. The public are often just uninformed, and unfortunately MPs are by and large just bog-standard members of the public.
No more masts! Where's my coverage? No more masts! Where's my coverage?
You are forgetting the compensation which the government will then have to pay the MNOs for their spectrum and to access their sites to put the Government Infrastructure onto.
Then local planners will reject the additional antennas and the Government will finally bring in legislation that allows sites to be put in.
Or the "Can't call me Dave" could lean on Arqiva to deliver MIP, the £150M government scheme to tackle not spots which they seem to have conveniently forgotten about. Launched 17 months ago, perhaps they are plagued by NIMBYs too.
http://www.arqiva.com/our-views/mip-better-connecting-rural-britain/
"11/06/2013
MIP - Better connecting rural Britain
Our business operates across a number of sectors. We provide the vital communication services that make it possible for public and private organisations to connect people for enriched and safer lives.
And it’s for that reason that we’re proud to announce that we’ve been selected to deliver the government’s £150m Mobile Infrastructure Project, known as MIP, to improve mobile coverage across the UK.
MIP will enable mobile services to be delivered to some of the most
remote locations and communities in the UK where no mobile signal is
currently available."
You sound like my wife. Start an argument and then as soon as you realise that you are losing the argument, say that the topic is not important. Ooh high resolution, very important....but not over 326ppi.
I'm now waiting for iP to come up with an excuse for why they discovered 2 years ago that a thumb could magically stretch 4" across a screen rather than 3.5" and now they realise that people's thumbs can stretch 4.7/8 or even 5.5".
I know that Darwin had a point, but I think that a 2 year evolution on opposable thumbs is beyond his theory's limits.
Instead it leads to Rage when the BA Steward cannot get to grips with the magnetic sensor on my Nexus 7 putting it to sleep.
<<Close case>> "Let me check..<<open case>>..see it's still on!"
<<Close case>> "Let me check..<<open case>>..see it's still on!"
<<Close case>> "Let me check..<<open case>>..see it's still on!"
Just let me read my book on the darned kindle App rather than staring around the distraction-free cabin for 15 minutes seeing peoples faces fill with dread as whirring motors push and pull control surfaces in and out!!
The At800 site only allows you to join a mailing list, not to contact them. There is no information on how to pro-actively prevent the issue, only a link that you might need a filter if you have an old amp.
They should be promoting Amps and Distributors which stop at 790. Triax seem to have a few products labeled as "LTE Protected" but even their Distribution Box has the same specs as the 'popular' Labgear/Philex 8-output 470-862 MHz system.....and therefore needs a filter for a BNIB unit!
DSO was supposed to end in 2012 - is this OfComs fault or @800?
"Comm boxes are being covered in graphic vinyl...."
The competition (Virgin media) did that recently, the problem being that they (illegally) put bright red adverts on their boxes, and these looked manky when people started ripping them off.
I wonder just how many 16' CCTV poles are in the borough, how many parking meters, bollards (to stop eejits parking on the pavements) lamp-posts (mostly emblazoned with a big blue ugly recycling schedule sign) and parking restriction signs the council has put on the middle of pavements?
Take a tour of the borough on Streetview and these are all easy to see, but telco cabinets I could only find 4 on around 2 miles of road, all green painted and pushed right back against brick walls and railings.
"Subsidy? What subsidy?
They have long gone. The actual cost of handsets are typically £200 to £250 max. (Google Nexus 4 series).
Contracts usually costs upwards of £600 (includes minutes). Where's the subsidy."
The exception does not prove the rule. Nexus was an operator rip-off.
A typical high end Smartphone on a ~£36 per month contract will be around £400-500 to buy. So Around £20 per month is 'subsidy / installment'. Since the handset was already bought from Samsung/HTC/LG/Sony, this will not vary. Of the rest, some went as commission to the retailer, and again this is fixed. Getting to the business end, the rest of the cash is split 3 ways, OpEx, CapEx and profit. Let's peg these as evenly split so around £5 each.
Of these, CapEx is typically fixed for 3 years or so by an RfQ process, and in fact has some price erosion in, so the network kit bought at the end of the contract has negative inflation. So all that is left that the operators cannot fully plan for is OpEx. BUT: A good portion of this is now Managed Services, which are on a 3 to 7 year contract, so no scary price rises there. So then it's down to Operator Staff, who are being slowly whittled away.
In short, around £2.50, or 7% of your contract is subject to RPI/CPI of around 3%*. That's 8p per month increase. Run the same calculation on a mid-range device at £200 cost and £15 per month and you are looking at £8 per month of subsidy and variable costs of around £1.25 per month so 4p per month paper increase.
If T-Mobile want to justify why they could not fiscally manage to plan £0.04 to £0.08 of cost increase per year into my contract, I'll be happy to have that meeting. However, the latest T-Mobile price increase is "typically about 79p". It is incumbent upon me to prove that this is of 'material detriment' to me, but it should be incumbent upon them to show why they need a price increase of 1000% of their variable cost rise.
* Not that any TelCo is paying 3% pay-rise in any case!
I think that the first person to post this should sue you for $1.05 B , unless you're actually the same sad guy trolling this around every forum on the Register.
The fact that Samsung is in global top 3 in Semiconductor, screens, memory, printers, smartphones, tablets, TVs, Blu-Ray players, ships, buildings (Burj Dubai / Khalifa AKA World's tallest building in case you did not know) might tell you that they're no-one's 'kin pawn.
Can you list the original improvements made in 2 years from iP4 through iP4S to iP5? Same look (well, moved to Android Form-Factor) Same connector######### (oops, my bad) Own Maps (Oh, I did say improvement, didn't I) and Siri (is that still in Beta and therefore technically not a feature?).
Other than that, it's all kind of incremental, and a galaxy away from innovation. That's why companies resort to the courts, and since the Judge basically said that in the light of all the prior art, she cannot agree with the juries argument that there was wilful copying. The whole thing will get tossed at appeal, if the USPTO does not review and reject all the patents first (2 down, 4 to go).
Let's see if iP6 has some clever multipic camera application or 360 panorama, or phones the contact on screen when you lift the handset to your ear, a screen as long as your thumb-reach, multiple user profiles, expandable memory and USB OTG or some other innovation.
What you guys are talking about are Femtos, these are typically 25-250mW covering a house or a cafe.
Next up are Picos which are typically 1W and would cover an office or something like a Next store.
The 4W you mention would be a Micro which would be more likely to cover a warehouse or a street or village. Unless you guys have big houses, you really don't want a 4W coverage booster in it!
Pehaps you could explain how ""both ends ARE ALREADY PAYING THEIR WAY..""
If you spend all evening watching 5GB of data on BBS iPlayer, exactly what are the BBC paying towards your use of ther pipe? If you spend £1.99 on an app that pulls down 200MB per day, through what means is that app provider chanelling his investment in ISP backbone , interconnect, GSN, RAN and site rental and power? I don't see how either organisation are paying their way, and that is exactly the problem.
A series of similar fixed BB Government incentives are distributed by local authorities to ISPs (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/27/broadband_rollout_devon_norfolk_wiltshire/), so I can't see why a similar approach would not work with mobile BB? An operator with some local infrastructure/RNC/BSC would find it cheaper to tender to fill in the areas not yet covered.
As for those suggesting making these sites shared, are you suggesting that the lack of a business case in the past 20 years for any of the operators to cover a patch of land/road/rail line would suddenly be overcome to the extent that you can have a free choice of operator because they all deploy there???
In any case NNMBYs (Nowhere Near MBYs) would object to the planning applications that the larger structures require for shared sites would entail, and then would complain that a site disguised as a scots pine was inappropriate in a national park, it should be a douglas fir (sub-species Carnt beyarsed).
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
