George, no offense intended. As I said I don't know how 1st broadbands' network is structured. From what you say it seems little if no different to ours.
Whether you own/lease fiber or take a circuit over someone elses fiber doesn't realy matter much in the grand scheme of things.

I am also a user of the penguin :) The Cisco's are mainly there because of their port density.

Jon Lawrence
Network Manager, Tellnet Internet

1st Broadband have been operating in Penwith (a little bit more west than Penzance) for over a year now. We have other points of presence in the St. Agnes/Mt. Hawke/Perranporth areas as well as Buckfastleigh and surrounds in Devon.

And ... Er... We also have full control over our entire wireless connection right up to the customer premises equipment - which we provide too. We don't normally allow self installs. It's all done with outdoor units at roof-top level unless there are exceptional circumstances.

And while we don't own any fibre we do have a very good relationship with a local network company who own a lot of fibre in the South West and we use that to bring all our connections back to our core pop near Exeter.

We also use real public IP addresses for our customers.

Can't see whats different, really! :-)

Contention ratios will always be a point of, er. contention. I prefer to think of not quite an actual ratio, but prefer to qualify it by a level of service. The suits however want numbers and thats probably what the masses are used to seeing now with all the publicity surrounding *DSL, etc., but we have various service levels (bandwidth allocations vs. number of punters in that particular allocation) and it's all controlled rather nicely by our distributed network of routers (not cisco though, it's the penguin for me!)

We can do uncontended bandwidth too, if you can afford it. Most people don't really need it which is why contended services seem to work very well for the majority.

Gordon
Network Manager, 1st Broadband Ltd.

Yes Tellnet do offer contention ratio's on 802.11b links.

We do things differently to 1stBroadband, we have full control over the entire wireless connection from our Access Point right upto the Customer Premmis Equipment - which we provide :)
It's not the Wireless link that is contended as such, it's the connection out to the internet - the same way that ADSL contention works :)
I can offer you the following contention ratio's 20:1, 5:1, and 1:1 - obviously increasing in price :)- and at various synchronous speeds.

I believe I'm correct in saying that our wireless network is considerably different to 1stbroadband's. We have our own backhaul network to our own core POP in Penzance. Some of the backhaul is fiber based and some wireless point to point. Once back at the core POP, we have some nice large pipe's to the internet :). The actual contending is done on our main cisco routers prior to sending the information to the internet.
As we use real public IP addresses to the CPE boxes, contending a connection is actually very simple - I simply add the IP address to the correct contention vlan and it's done.

1stbroadband may also do things like this - I don't know exactly how their network is setup, but I do know how ours is.

HTH
Jon Lawrence
Network Manager
Tellnet Internet

We seem to be getting spoilt for choice in the South West. That area of Cornwall is also covered by 1stBroadband, a wireless outfit using 2.4GHz transponders to reach most of Penwith.

I know, 'cos they've also started a system around Buckfastleigh, Devon, which I've hooked up to. So, I'm getting a share of a 2Mbps pipe for £25/month, which suits me just fine. There are around 60 people on it at the moment, with a final target of around 120. I'll be interested to see what speed we get if they hit that target, but at the moment I'm seeing just under 500Kbps regularly.

Not sure about claiming contention ratios of 20:1 on a WiFi link! - but if that's what they claim at Tellnet in Cornwall, see if they can be pinned down to it!