NETWORK SERVICES
Life is Online
The time when broadband connection
speed tables comparing one nation
to another are approaching end of
life. For a country that spends its life
online, whether in business or at home, there
is only one show in town when it comes
to broadband and that is full bre access.
Anything less than this and the user is in
a state of limbo – a holding pattern if you
like and akin to a plane circling an airport
waiting to land on the real deal.
Typically, the best kind of speeds
available with bre broadband are up to
one Gigabyte per second but you are more
likely to get low hundreds. Speeds that are
unimaginable to many folk who started
their broadband journeys with a 256kbps
service back in the 1990s.
Reliable, high-speed broadband
connectivity is an essential part of life
for many people in the UK. Four in ve
households have a xed broadband connection
and increasing use of data-hungry activities
such as video streaming services (which are
used in more than 12 million UK homes)
mean that the need for fast, reliable home
broadband has never been greater.
e good news to Netix lovers is that
the average home broadband connection
speeds continued to improve in 2018, with
average download speeds increasing by 18%
to 54.2Mbit/s and average upload speeds by
15% to 7.2Mbit/s. ere’s a lag in getting
and publishing this speed data and this is the
latest from industry regulator Ofcom.
For many SMEs this kind of speed will be
sucient to power up many of their cloudbased
business process applications until
you start throwing hosted or cloud-based
telephony at it. Just like video, voice is a realtime
communications application and any
lag (latency) in delivering the data packets
containing the voice element will provide a far
from acceptable user experience. is is why
many businesses opt instead for a dedicated
leased line connection to the internet. at’s
a far from cheap alternative but does deliver
the service which keeps applications such as
salesforce and SAP.
You would be shocked to know that
under the UK Governments Universal
Service Oering (USO) a decent broadband
connection is one dened as a service that can
provide a download speed of 10 Mbit/s, and
an upload speed of 1 Mbit/s. Under the USO
5G will bring many benets to business.
users will not be able to demand even this
pedestrian level of service until March 2020 –
and then only if other service criteria are met.
is end of the market where business
broadband and the use of Salesforce, SAP
and hosted telephony goes to die. It’s the end
where businesses switch over to 4G back up
routers to keep their organisations online.
Many people are forecasting that the
introduction of 5G this year, where already
over 50 cities are connected, more than
has the capability to disrupt the xed line
connectivity market once coverage expands
beyond these cities and into more rural areas.
Broadband on 4G has already proved that
there is a market for 5G broadband and given
the speeds at which 5G is working it raises the
question should 5G be seriously considered as
an alternative for a xed connection.
Prior to 5G a mobile connection
could not compete for speed with a xed
connection and data restrictions were needed
to maintain an overall quality for all users.
But with 5G speeds will not only rival a xed
line but surpass it.
The Potential of 5G internet
By 2024, Ericsson believes 5G networks will
boast 1.9 billion subscribers, carry 35 percent
of the world’s data trac, and cover 65
percent of the global population. is creates
a huge potential market for 5G broadband,
which is viewed as one of the key new
applications in the early years of 5G.
UK regulator Ofcom is set to have a
further spectrum auction next year, releasing
a further 200MHz of bandwidth for 5G
network services - specically this equates to
80MHz worth of 700MHz and 120MHz of
3.6-2.8GHz spectrum.
Each UK network will be able to hold
a maximum of 37 per cent of usable UK
spectrum after the 2020 auction.
Trials of commercial 5G Fixed Wireless
Access (FWA) networks using mmWave
spectrum have achieved between 1-3Gbps,
while analysts believe that consistent speeds of
between 80 and100Mbps are achievable in a
real-world setting. Speed is no longer an issue.
Although bre has signicantly faster
theoretical speeds, coverage is limited in
markets like the UK. e overwhelming
majority of superfast broadband in the UK
is powered by Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC),
which uses copper for the nal part of the
connection, reducing speeds. Full bre
accounts for just three percent of the market.
is means that the average broadband
speed in the UK is 46.2Mbps, while the
number of urban users receiving less than
80Mbps is 85 percent. is is half the
promised speed of 5G Internet.
Although BT, Virgin Media and others are
expanding their Fibre to the Premise (FTTP)
footprints, 5G FWA is cheaper to deploy than
bre because there is no need to dig up streets
or for engineers to install equipment at a home
or oce. It will also take time for coverage
to expand, with the government targeting
nationwide coverage by 2033.
62 | Channel Profiles 2019 2020 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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