Conspiracy Theory #342: Is Eircom keeping the sweet spot for itself?

dahamsta

It's not really a conspiracy theory, more an observation: The consensus on the BB board seems to be that Eircom's product, while lowest on the ladder on features and price, is "best for pings", "best for gaming", etc. With bitstream, this shouldn't be happening unless /all/ the resellers have shoddy internal operations. So I wonder, out loud and quizzically, is this the case? Or is Eircom keeping the sweet spot in the routes back all for themselves?

adam

Ripwave

Originally posted by dahamsta
It's not really a conspiracy theory, more an observation: The consensus on the BB board seems to be that Eircom's product, while lowest on the ladder on features and price, is "best for pings", "best for gaming", etc. With bitstream, this shouldn't be happening unless /all/ the resellers have shoddy internal operations. So I wonder, out loud and quizzically, is this the case? Or is Eircom keeping the sweet spot in the routes back all for themselves?

It's a bit more complex than that. All traffic for UTV or IOL customers is routed back over to the eircom network to one or two connection points, where it connects out to the relevant ISPs to the internet through whatever size interconnect that ISP has paid for, based on the size of their customer base. (That's why netsource went through the whole good-bad-good-bad cycle, because that interconnect kept filling, then they'd buy more, then more customers would come on line, choking that pipe again). eircombb customers aren't all routed back to a single pipe, but connect out from eircoms network at various places, and generally don't encounter contention at whatever handover point they use.

Technically, this is an illegal cross-subsidy, because eircom.net isn't paying the full economic cost of this additional infrastructure, but we all know that nobody is going to do anything about it.

bk

Hi Adam,

If you are interested you can find the full details of Eircoms Wholesale Bitsream service on their website:

eircom.ie -> About Us -> eircom Activities -> Wholesale

Near the bottom of the page you will find: "Provision of the ADSL bitstream service"

Sorry I can't link to it, Eircoms site is badly designed with the session in the URL.

Anyway I can link to the docs you want:

- Bitstream connection service
- ADSL bitstream service
- ADSL bitstream service price list version 1.1
- Change matrix for ADSL bitstream service

I assume Eircom.net must follow these docs to the word or get in big trouble with ComReg.

However I can see two places where they might have an advatage over UTV/IOL:

1) They probably have the RADSL bitstream service operating over as multiples of 2M VP over a STM-1 (155M) ATM pipe from each of the 11 regional pop's, while IOL/UTV are probably operating out of a single regional POP where all their traffic is brought by Eircom and handed over on a IP interface. That is when you are not connected to an Esat LLU exchange, wwhere they might take the traffic themselves.

2) Of course the bitstream service says nothing about how each companies internal network is designed (gigbit ethernet, cisco routers etc.), how much backhaul they have to the rest of the Internet and what sort of peering agreements they have with other ISP's, INEX, etc.

I'm sure Eircom.net are perhaps unfairly getting to use Eircoms excellent internal network, massive backhaul pipes to the rest of the Internet and very favourable peering agreements.

However IOL/UTV aren't that far behind, just a few ms higher.

vishal

RE: eircombb customers aren't all routed back to a single pipe, but connect out from eircoms network at various places, and generally don't encounter contention at whatever handover point they use.

This finally explains it to me. I always wondered how they can offer a 48:1 or whatever it is without everything slowing to a crawl. Do IBB do this as well?

Ripwave

Originally posted by vishal
This finally explains it to me. I always wondered how they can offer a 48:1 or whatever it is without everything slowing to a crawl. Do IBB do this as well?

From looking at tracroutes, it looks to me as though IBB are connected to the Internet by C&W (Cable & Wireless, how appropriate!). I've no idea what sort of connection they have, but I imagine that any contention that might occur on IBB would occur on the wireless leg, rather than on the wired leg.

Kevok

Yes IBB use C&W. They used to use colt, which often became contended during the day at peak business times.