Support Tools – Development of specialist modelling and software tools to assist in capturing broad statistical based information and present it in a visual and accessible form. With these tools we offer a follow up service to allow our customers to keep their data current thereby allowing rapid and accurate assessments to be made.

Tools to date have included:

Excel Modelling Dashboard - We are now able to offer our business modelling clients an interactive dashboard representation of the major inputs and outputs from the model. Inputs Interactive inputs typically include the ability to change the start date of the the project, market penetration, and ARPU. These inputs can be modified easily with the configurable sliders resulting through the rather more complex modelling calculations in outputs such as the number of customers, capital expenditure, operating expenditure, breakeven dates and net present value cash flows. Each of the six output chartlets is expandable into a larger window enabling the user to examine the output in further detail.

Broadband Speed Mapping - The partnership has also developed tools to map areas where broadband speeds are low due to the length of the telephone lines from the serving exchange. Although this is not a significant problem, BT claim that less than 1% of lines cannot get broadband due to line length or other problems, it is a major problem for some rural areas served by very long line lengths. Broadband users are increasingly demanding greater and greater speeds. Only a few years ago 512kbps seemed to be incredibly fast, now users often require 2Mbps or more to enjoy streaming video applications and download films in a reasonable time period. We have therefore not only started using the tool to map so called not-spots but also areas with relatively low broadband speeds of less than 2Mbps.

The chart to the right shows the cumulative distribution of line lengths, e.g. 70% of lines are less than 3,000m long but only 40% are less than 2,000m long. The newest DSL variant VDSL2 is not significantly better than ADSL2+ beyond a line length of 1,500m. The chart shows that only 30% of the population have line lengths shorter than this, indicating that the majority of the population would not benefit from an exchange based VDSL2 deployment.

Click for larger image

Broadband Speed Testing - Speedtest.net is not one of the tools we have developed but having tested a number of these tools over the years, (and indeed increasingly so as we search for value in terms of internet connections), we feel that this is one of the best in terms of the reliability of the results it produces and the user interface. Click on the image to the right to check your internet connection speed now.