I would like to point out, as has been done many times on this forum before, that its not just rural areas that suffer from lack of fibre and poor broadband speeds. Some of the slowest internet connections are to be found in city centres especially in tower blocks and other multi-occupancy buildings.
The big unanswered question is whether the online service will be restricted to the Sky Broadband network or whether it will be available across all ISPs.
So far they're happy enough to run it across other ISPs.
I assume this is the same in the UK? But when Sky Q launched first in the Republic of Ireland it was only available to Sky Fibre customers. Now it's available with any broadband provider.
I ditched Sky Fibre as I found the ping times slower than Eir (Ireland's BT-like incumbent).
The big challenge for Sky is the general move away from schedule based broadcast TV generally. The idea of surfing through 999 channel numbers isn't really appealing to as many people anymore.
Sky Q, Virgin Tivo UK and Virgin Horizon in Ireland (and elsewhere in Europe - Virgin being a brand of Liberty Global) are all aiming to take things to a hybrid model.
I just think the landscape is changing far faster than many of these broadcasters originally envisaged, particularly with the rise of Netflix.
Liberty Global has partnered up with Netflix and it's now rolling out on its various cable brands including Virgin. Other IP tv providers eg Vodsfone here in Ireland have done similar deals.
Sky's major concern is going to be keeping viewers from jumping ship and keeping sports content. We've already seen a significant % of sports go to BT Sports and there's nothing really stopping Netflix from stepping into that space.
The days of Sky being the dominant player could well be drawing to a close.
I agree though, there's a major issue with broadband blackspots. Whether that is going to bother them is another question though. They exist to make profit, not provide a universal service. It'll be all about the bottom line.
The broadband blackspots issues need to be addressed by improved policy. The UK in particular is falling behind a lot of EU counterparts and the Republic of Ireland has been talking endlessly about fibre to home rollout but as yet it's still largely talk with only a small % of areas actually having FTTH.
Bad broadband in multi occupancy dwellings and dense urban areas is pretty inexcusable though. It is ridiculously easy to put a VDSL cabinet outside and have 100Mbits+
It's also ridiculously easy to put a DOCSIS 3 node in for Virgin.
The holdups on those things need to be dealt with.
Rural ultimately needs to be a mix of fibre and probably local wireless links using LTE advanced. If you use well planned fibre-to-mast LTE to fixed antennas on rooftops of houses you can get really fibre like results in low density rural areas and I don't mean pushing rural homes over to mobile broadband. I'm talking about dedicated infrastructure to replace wireline broadband.
I think the current Sky Q's IP functionality is similar to the Sky+ HD functionality isn't it? Sky limited this to Sky Broadband initially, then rolled out to all ISPs, but this wasn't for massive technical reasons AIUI.
HOWEVER - this is a unicast progressive download system - what I believe Sky are proposing for their dish-less Sky is likely to be multicast. This is tied to a specific ISP, as the multicast isn't carried over 'the internet' it's inserted by the ISP (i.e. Sky Broadband) - in the same way that BT do their BT TV product. So it may well not be unicast - stream per viewer - like NowTV, but multicast - where all subscribers effectively receive the same streams.
There are many ways to achieve this though with adequate peering and accessing wholesale providers' multicasting services.
It's possible they'll bundle it with their own branded broadband services but, it's not absolutely necessary.
Even if they make it a Sky broadband bundle, it's still ultimately delivered over BT Openreach or OpenEir in Ireland.
Netflix is managing to service vast amounts of customers without any ISP infrastructure. There isn't really any reason Sky can't so similar although a managed IP network would give better quality but, is anyone complaining about Netflix?
I would suspect Sky will probably do a combination of all 3 approaches for the medium term and start launching IP only channels via Sky Q.
Even if they make it a Sky broadband bundle, it's still ultimately delivered over BT Openreach or OpenEir in Ireland.
Though don't ISPs handle the link to the OpenReach infrastructure in each exchange (i.e. operate their own internet backbone and interconnects) - OpenReach only provide the last leg between consumer premises and the exchange ?
If that's the case then Sky would deliver their multicast streams to each exchange - and avoid any internet delivery issues.
Quote:
Netflix is managing to service vast amounts of customers without any ISP infrastructure. There isn't really any reason Sky can't so similar although a managed IP network would give better quality but, is anyone complaining about Netflix?
Thought Netflix run at very low bitrates for their content - which they achieve by hugely optimised off-line encoding. You can't do that for live streams - so have to run at significantly higher bitrates (and HEVC won't help you as much for interlaced content as progressive)
Last edited by noggin on 19 July 2017 11:35am - 2 times in total
On a loosely related note I spotted this article yesterday...
"
Openreach mulls full fibre rollout for 10 million in UK
Openreach, the body that runs the UK's fibre network, has opened discussions about rolling out super-fast fibre broadband to 10 million homes by 2025."
Full article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40643903
If full fibre broadband does get rolled out then the possibility of IPTV is more of a possibility. Though where my company is based it would be nice just to have fibre-to-cabinet so that we could get more than 6.3Mb/s download and 0.69Mb/s upload.
Even if they make it a Sky broadband bundle, it's still ultimately delivered over BT Openreach or OpenEir in Ireland.
Though don't ISPs handle the link to the OpenReach infrastructure in each exchange (i.e. operate their own internet backbone and interconnects) - OpenReach only provide the last leg between consumer premises and the exchange ?
If that's the case then Sky would deliver their multicast streams to each exchange - and avoid any internet delivery issues.
Quote:
Netflix is managing to service vast amounts of customers without any ISP infrastructure. There isn't really any reason Sky can't so similar although a managed IP network would give better quality but, is anyone complaining about Netflix?
Thought Netflix run at very low bitrates for their content - which they achieve by hugely optimised off-line encoding. You can't do that for live streams - so have to run at significantly higher bitrates (and HEVC won't help you as much for interlaced content as progressive)
Though don't ISPs handle the link to the OpenReach infrastructure in each exchange (i.e. operate their own internet backbone and interconnects) - OpenReach only provide the last leg between consumer premises and the exchange ?
Full unbundling is restricted to the top 200 or so telephone exchanges. For the rest ISP's use a BT Wholesale product. FttC uses a form of OpenReach virtual unbundling. This supports multicast packet for BT, so presumably may support this for others as well?
Though don't ISPs handle the link to the OpenReach infrastructure in each exchange (i.e. operate their own internet backbone and interconnects) - OpenReach only provide the last leg between consumer premises and the exchange ?
Full unbundling is restricted to the top 200 or so telephone exchanges. For the rest ISP's use a BT Wholesale product. FttC uses a form of OpenReach virtual unbundling. This supports multicast packet for BT, so presumably may support this for others as well?
I think it would have to support multicast for others, otherwise questions would be asked about monopolies and restrictive practises.