interleaving

[aceado]

Quote:I'm not sure why you're getting ranty though. You're experience of what a good connection should be and ours differs. Neither is wrong, but the customer should always be given the choice based on *their* preferences.

here's my 2 cents:

to right i know ask4 do allow the customer to ask for what you would like doing with your line, like for myself i picked for a higher upload at the cost of a slower download this is something i don't mind... recently people said you can get interleaving turned off so i did and by god it sure helps with connecting to a site or start downloading/upload alot faster than it was before. i did worry my line might have alot of FEC errors (got to love the name lol) so i when from about ~32ms with full interleaving on down to 10 ms with no interleaving on what so ever, i got interleaving turned back on at the very minimal settings i had to stress this to them now am at ~16 ms (the ping is both based on pinging both thinkbroad.com and google.com :o )

[SpencerUk]

(03-06-2012 10:33 PM)LeJimster Wrote:  

(03-06-2012 10:19 PM)SpencerUk Wrote:  First part, see above.

And the latter part of your comment I don't quite understand. Are you saying a customer on borderline 2KM line from the PCP should aim for a 6dB target?..That's daft!. As you would be aware, the longer the line, the quicker the signal tails off, but also its more susceptible to interference too.

I don't think there is any aim here.

It's all about the quality of the line..If you have a 1KM line and its aluminium and joints all over place, 6dB isn't realistic.

Interleaving has a purpose, its why MULTIPLE LLU provision it as default as well as BT.

End of the day, if Interleaving made that difference between a 7 day connection and a 30 day solid connection, I know what I'd rather have.

People who moan about "oh the latency for gaming", the skill of the gamer can put up with it. The people use it as an excuse (I used to!). You will always have latency of some form..Its a case of living with it.

RANT OUT.

Each line needs to be tested to it's limits, if we all took the cautious side I'd be still stuck on a sub optimal 4Mb connection. Instead of 6-7Mb lower latency experience I've had for the past few years. BTW my line is estimated @ 3km to the exchange. And I would say my line falls closer to staying up all month before resyncing rather than every week. I don't remember my Bulldog connection *with* interleaving and a much higher SNR (obviously) being this stable either.

I'm not sure why you're getting ranty though. You're experience of what a good connection should be and ours differs. Neither is wrong, but the customer should always be given the choice based on *their* preferences.

That's where I'll go 50/50 on this.

The majority of customers complain about slow speed because that's what they notice. The actual fault is X however.

This is where I don't think they should be given a preference. Facing facts, customers won't have the same diagnostic tools as what an ISP will have so at the end of the day, who are they to tell any different to what they can and can't have on a line.

Another way of thinking of it..Lets say customer has a fault..because they don't have interleaving on, the ISP will probably put it on as a quick fix..By waiting for it to come on and then compare data in essence you are losing atleast 48 hours of resolution time as its being wasted monitoring the line.

(03-06-2012 10:42 PM)aceado Wrote:  

Quote:I'm not sure why you're getting ranty though. You're experience of what a good connection should be and ours differs. Neither is wrong, but the customer should always be given the choice based on *their* preferences.

here's my 2 cents:

to right i know ask4 do allow the customer to ask for what you would like doing with your line, like for myself i picked for a higher upload at the cost of a slower download this is something i don't mind... recently people said you can get interleaving turned off so i did and by god it sure helps with connecting to a site or start downloading/upload alot faster than it was before. i did worry my line might have alot of FEC errors (got to love the name lol) so i when from about ~32ms with full interleaving on down to 10 ms with no interleaving on what so ever, i got interleaving turned back on at the very minimal settings i had to stress this to them now am at ~16 ms (the ping is both based on pinging both thinkbroad.com and google.com :o )

Interleaving for the majority of it is, is a successful tool.

[alexatkin]

But how much interleaving is good interleaving? Should we have INP on too and what setting? You can't blanket either argument.

I totally understand why Thales put the lines on interleaving by default, because most people have no clue what latency is but will notice if their connection is going up and down every five minutes. Also particularly in businesses, stability is FAR more important.

However the argument that the customer should have no say in their settings I cannot agree with. Fact is in the case of Digital Region with a HG612 connected we DO have better diagnostic tools than the ISP, because Thales do not disclose the kind of information the ISP would need to make an objective decision on settings.

But why are we arguing about it anyway? Thales DO make changes based on suggestions from the ISPs which in turn are from their customers.

[SpencerUk]

(04-06-2012 10:37 PM)alexatkin Wrote:  But how much interleaving is good interleaving? Should we have INP on too and what setting? You can't blanket either argument.

In a faults perspective..VERY USEFUL!.

INP settings vary to each line. It's not necessarily one fits all. I've seen some with a high INP for a short line as I've seen no interleaving on longer lines.

Not sure what you mean by blanket each argument?.

(04-06-2012 10:37 PM)alexatkin Wrote:  I totally understand why Thales put the lines on interleaving by default, because most people have no clue what latency is but will notice if their connection is going up and down every five minutes. Also particularly in businesses, stability is FAR more important.

O2 and Sky & Talk Talk to my knowledge provision interleaving as default on the LLU product. As did Orange when I was there but they have ditched LLU in favour of WBC.

Stability is king over everything and that's that. Without stability you have a degraded service. The first thing any user should have is stability.

(04-06-2012 10:37 PM)alexatkin Wrote:  However the argument that the customer should have no say in their settings I cannot agree with. Fact is in the case of Digital Region with a HG612 connected we DO have better diagnostic tools than the ISP, because Thales do not disclose the kind of information the ISP would need to make an objective decision on settings.

Can you prove that you have better diagnostics tools than an ISP or the NOC?..Probably not. From what I've seen at the NOC centre, no user, unless they want to become a partner of the network isn't going to get the relevant tools.

All the user is doing is attempting to make a guess on data they have.

(04-06-2012 10:37 PM)alexatkin Wrote:  But why are we arguing about it anyway? Thales DO make changes based on suggestions from the ISPs which in turn are from their customers.

Thales do place changes at the request of ISP, but that no different to what O2 Wholesale of BT Wholesale do.

[prichardson]

(06-06-2012 10:39 AM)SpencerUk Wrote:  

(04-06-2012 10:37 PM)alexatkin Wrote:  However the argument that the customer should have no say in their settings I cannot agree with. Fact is in the case of Digital Region with a HG612 connected we DO have better diagnostic tools than the ISP, because Thales do not disclose the kind of information the ISP would need to make an objective decision on settings.

Can you prove that you have better diagnostics tools than an ISP or the NOC?..Probably not. From what I've seen at the NOC centre, no user, unless they want to become a partner of the network isn't going to get the relevant tools.

All the user is doing is attempting to make a guess on data they have.

I can be absolutely certain that no user has equal or better tools than the CP may potentially have.

However, you need to read between the lines of that statement, specifically "potentially" have.

Wholesale certainly do not have better tools, but they have the ability to do so. DR should also have better tools, but may not.

The killer in this area is that a CP mas the ability to see other lines on the CAB. They could also see historical data for a line or lines on the CAB.

An extreme but simplified example. Next door neighbors, served by the same DP and CAB. If a CP has historical data, they could potentially see when a individuals problem started. Did this occur on the neighbours line too?

Yes this example means they both need to be on DR.

BT Wholesale provide access to DP data for customers supplied on the BTW network. It does not show who the end user is, but it will provide one tow responses for the current speed, historical minimum and maximum speeds (in a given period), ILQ (line quality marker, red/amber/green and so on), interleave status. AKA, a snapshot of how good or crap the neighbours lines are.

I've located a old email from 2008 of the soak tests that O2 perform on their own LLU network. I will have to sanity check the email and remove some personal detail from it (including some internal system addresses), but they use a Alcatel-Lucent 5530 unit for their network monitoring (what I would kill for, to make BTW implement this kit).

Much like you can pull from your own router, they show bit plots per tone, but present this as a heat map (something that could probably be done yourself if you spend the time to collect and code the output). It shows tones on the vertical axis, time along the horizontal and then expresses the number of bits as a colour. So as you look from left to right, you see colours change as bit load adjusts to compensate for problems.

It has others including mean and variance in the bit loads. Mean and variance in the SNR. Values and variance in the QLN (quiet line noise). Artificial noise.

For those in the know, much of this is not available from BTW, but they are making efforts towards some elements of this with their BRAT stuff, but still doesn't have a patch on what is possible.

There is also one thing that needs to be considered on what you see locally and for that matter, what the CP sees. The data is only as good as how the chipset can measure and report it. Whilst local CPE and chipsets provide an indicator, I would never use them as a hard fast figure. This is one of the reasons that I generally ignore a customer when they say they know what the problem is but listen to them and factor it in as a piece of the investigation (that and customers lie, fact).

[alexatkin]

All very good points, but again I must point out that I was saying that we have more information than the ISPs on Digital Region.

I am aware that on BT things are different as they have spent years creating backends to allow the ISP greater control of their customers lines. LLU even moreso as generally the ISP and the LLU provider are one and the same, so obviously have direct access to the detailed information from the DSLAM itself.

Although VDSL on BT I understand is TOTALLY locked down to the automated DLM. So you can scream that interleaving is on until you are blue in the face, the only thing you can do is hope Openreach are willing to reset the DLM to retrain your line, but you are still at the mercy of DLM as you can't force any particular settings at all.

Anyway back to DR. I have discussed time and time again my line with Origin and its been clear all along that they knew very little about how Thales were doing things. They didn't know the speed cap was implemented via capping the sync speed, or that interleaving was turned on. Likewise they hadn't a clue what Thales were doing that drastically increased the latency when 17a was first turned on, they even said to me that the "fix" for the latency problem had been to switch me back to the 8 profile. That was either not true or Thales switched it back later when they fixed the profile setting that caused the latency problem, without telling anyone.

But that is the point of the network, the ISP just needs to know that "it works". It was never really expected for people to discuss SNR, Interleaving, etc, as we were never supposed to know about those things which is one reason the Cellpipe was so locked down.

Of course I'm not implying I have more information than Tales, they can get the information straight from the BRAS/DSLAM which will be a lot more accurate than any CPE equipment. However what the CPE reports is "good enough", as its going to show how that specific CPE is able to utilise the line, which after all is what is important.

While it would be nice to know more concrete information as it would indicate if the CPE itself is limiting the performance, its unrealistic to expect that kind of detail. That if for your Thales to worry about and again why they expect you to use their provided CPE, as its got known performance characteristics when paired with the DSLAMs.

I'm not saying this will always be the case either, obviously Thales (or whoever replaces them) may choose to divulge more information with the ISPs in the future. However I feel its unlikely as Thales are only provisioning for a stable line, not optimum performance or minimal latency. With that being the case, how useful would it even be to tell the ISPs this stuff? In most cases it would be far more information than the ISP needs to know.

[Nutty34]

Just had interleaving disabled on my line via LBO. My ping times are much better, down to 10/11ms and my sync speeds are 40964/10212 kbps, I am on 40/10.