McRedmond concedes 25% can't get broadband

damien

Almost 60% of Irish people fail to log on

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2091-1892745_1,00.html

As things stand 75%-80% of the population can get broadband,” said McRedmond. “I’m not saying there isn’t a supply issue — we want the other 20% to get it, and we’ve called on the government to help us. We can’t do it on our own as it would drive our price up.

Meandering article. ComReg blames no cable and a late start. The low PC penetration rate is also blamed.

TempestSabre

The fact that the cost of getting online, dialup, ISDN, and BB was crippling for years mainly because of Eircom might be a factor. Its hard to persuade people that doing things differently, like using the VOIPinstead of a landline is cheaper, because in Rip off Ireland Ireland it isn't 90% of the time for other things. As for technical problems being difficult, eircom should know. They find everything difficult, and make everything difficult.

eircomtribunal

“That many people saying they don’t use the internet enough correlates with our research,” said David McRedmond, the commercial director of Eircom. “It’s not a technological problem. We have high mobile and computer-game penetration. It may well be something around social interaction, which is something the industry needs to address.

If a company doesn't give people affordable dial-up and excludes half of the population from always on broadband for short term greed and gold mining the assets, and then has the brass neck to lie and lie and fog-bomb on the issue, there should indeed be some social interaction with the guys of this company. They should in very clear terms be told whenever they are at public gatherings that their actions are unwelcome, that they should leave and come back when they have something to offer.
A company may decide to go the route of looking only after the profit margins, whatever the social costs – but if they do so there should be a clear public expression of the gov opinion about this attitude.
P.

ednwireland

i bored of syaing this (so ius everyone else i guess) two years after the exchange was enabled i still cant get broadband

Solair

My own personal experience talking to people in Ireland is that because of the insanely high prices of internet access in the past that many people are frightened off it completely now. There were horror stories in the 1990s of £1000 phone bills caused by kids accidently leaving a modem dialled in for serveral days or people staying on line too long.

This kind of rip off pricing model simply created a situation where a large chunk of the population have a notion that the internet is a pricy luxury item.

On top of that, the huge 1990s prices lead to a lack of service development in Ireland. Other than Ryanair.com and a few other innovative sites, there has been little development of irish-focused content due to the low levels of internet use in Ireland.

004412

I've been trying to get broadband installed in my parents home for that past few years now without success.

I phoned Eircom again today and I got a very different answer than I expected. The lady informed me that our phone will never be able to accept broadband, not in the future, never ever. I asked when will our line be upgraded so it can take broadband, and she said that Eircom don't upgrade lines, they only maintain them.

We live within 3km of the exchange which is enabled (ADSL & ADSL2). This is just crazy, I mean what company doesn't upgrade its network! If the Valentia hadn't purchased debt free Eircom a few years ago and then paid itself a dividend of half the cost of the company, sinking it into debt maybe, just maybe we would have a better network. What company pays out a huge dividend to it's shareholders when it badly needs to reinvest in itself! And McRedmond saying that 25% can't get broadband isn't a surprise, the only surprise is that in reality is close to 40%. And maybe if Eircom told their marketing department what broadband is more people would sign up, have you seen there adverts lately, their pointless!

Also the lack of PC in households will always stop broadband penetration going about 40% in this country there is no government drive to get PCs into homes.

Well the good news is that when WiMax and HomePlug (Broadband through power lines) come standard across Ireland within the next three years we can all wave goodbye to Eircom!

I can't wait.

oscarBravo

004412 wrote:

[Eircom] informed me that our phone will never be able to accept broadband, not in the future, never ever.

I was told that once. Less than a year later, I had broadband. And Eircom had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

004412 wrote:

Well the good news is that when WiMax and HomePlug (Broadband through power lines) come standard across Ireland within the next three years we can all wave goodbye to Eircom!

WiMax will be an interesting technology; whether or not it lives up to the hype remains to be seen. Broadband over power lines isn't going to happen.

004412

oscarBravo wrote:

Broadband over power lines isn't going to happen.

BPL has been in development since 1996 and most tech problems have been resolved, and Google recently invested a large sum of money in Current Communications Group who are making it a reality. There is even a consumer version called homeplug for creating a network in your home.

Also a company in the USA Nethercomm has just started developing broadband through gasline pipes (using ultra wideband wireless signals) which is totally safe and fast. So other options will be available other than phonelines and WiMax.

As for the 25% who can't get broadband from Eircom, well that's 25% of users who they will loose as they'll either get broadband from another source, NTL/Chorus or Irish Broadband/ClearWire, or other wireless provider. And once that happens people will wonder why they are paying €50 rental for a service they really don't need or use.

oscarBravo

004412 wrote:

BPL has been in development since 1996 and most tech problems have been resolved...

...leaving only the showstoppers outstanding.

004412 wrote:

...and Google recently invested a large sum of money in Current Communications Group who are making it a reality.

Lots of people have invested lots of money into making it a reality. No amount of investment will change the laws of physics.

004412 wrote:

There is even a consumer version called homeplug for creating a network in your home.

That's a different set of challenges. The biggest problem with broadband over power lines is that it's extremely limited in range (as in, hundreds of metres). It has been tested in a housing estate in Tuam. It worked (as long as there wasn't a licenced HF radio operator in the immediate vicinity), but it could have been done as easily with wireless or DSL.

This has been discussed to death here in the past.

bminish

004412 wrote:

BPL has been in development since 1996 and most tech problems have been resolved, and Google recently invested a large sum of money in Current Communications Group who are making it a reality. There is even a consumer version called homeplug for creating a network in your home.

Not so I am afraid. The laws of physics have not been changed. Powerlines still act as antennas and radiate the signal causing interference. Powerlines also receive signals and this degrades the quality of service to the end user.

I was recently involved with a PLT trial where we tested the ingress susceptibility of a modern PLT system to licensed radio transmission. in one instance use of a licensed low-power transmitter completely shut down the system from a distance of about 500m. Extrapolating this indicated that a licensed HF user running at typical operating powers would have shut the system down at a distance of over a mile. These results are consistent with similar ingress tests in other countries, generally however this kind of testing is done under an NDA !


The trial PLT system that I was involved with ingress testing used all underground mains wiring and was in a housing estate with semi-detached housing, textbook PLT install and also a prime Cable tv/ good copper / fibre to the home type location. The PLT service was in real world conditions providing a highish latency connection with a throughput of ~ 400 Kbs. In every way inferior to ADSL
This, by the way was a second generation system that the PLT equipment supplier touts as being capable of 14 Mbs and was installed correctly. it is their current product offering.

Even IF all the laws of physics changed miraculously to permit PLT to function as advertised you still have a problem in that powerline network topology (all houses connected to a common backbone) will create severe bottlenecks and the current line reach of powerline Internet products is approximately 300m before requiring a repeater to be fitted making it a strictly urban product

The UK telecoms regulator carried out measurements on the interference problems associated with the various UK PLT trials and published the results here.
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/technology/archive/cet/powerline/#content

Also a company in the USA Nethercomm has just started developing broadband through gasline pipes (using ultra wideband wireless signals) which is totally safe and fast.

Unfortunately it's pure 100% snake oil. 'last mile' Gaslines (which are generally made out of plastic ) do not work as waveguides and you cannot send UWB or any other form of RF energy down them for any useful distance

.brendan

004412

oscarBravo wrote:

...No amount of investment will change the laws of physics.

to sum it up that's the difference between the usa and the rest, americans invest in the impossible to make it possible, everyone else says that's impossible and gives up.

physics evolves as more minds are put on the task, people develop workarounds to problems and the laws physics. at the end of the day the key is r&d. broadband over powerlines is a possibility and it'll be a reality within the next few years. i'll leave it at that.

oscarBravo

004412 wrote:

to sum it up that's the difference between the usa and the rest, americans invest in the impossible to make it possible, everyone else says that's impossible and gives up.

I wouldn't be so sure. To hear some 2-way satellite vendors talk, you'd think they'd found a workaround to the speed of light...

eircomtribunal

004412 wrote:

As for the 25% who can't get broadband from Eircom, well that's 25% of users who they will loose as they'll either get broadband from another source, NTL/Chorus or Irish Broadband/ClearWire, or other wireless provider. And once that happens people will wonder why they are paying €50 rental for a service they really don't need or use.

Eircom don't mind potentially loosing part of those 25% (note that only less than half of them want Internet – currently only 37% of homes have/want(!) Internet connections) to other Internet providers, which can potentially(!) also provide telephony via the broadband connections:

There is a certain percentage that is seriously difficult to reach (I'd guesstimate 5%) that will not be supplied by any other provider (other that satellite);

Eircom can at any time increase the supply percentage up to 80-85% without big investment, by simply enabling more exchanges and doing minimal line upgrades, if the competition makes inroads;

Eircom are allowed by the regulator ComReg to squat on a nationwide 3.5 gig wireless licence, which they have intentionally not in a usable state at the moment, which they can at any time, if competition starts to eat into their territory, upgrade and make usable.

The biggest threat to Eircom comes from SMART, BT and Magnet, who will all, once and provided that the LLU mess is sorted (in the years to come!) make serious competition in the easier to reach population centres, targeting the main 50 to 100 exchanges. NTL will also take its toll of Eircom customers in its (limited) territory, especially once it's getting telephony included again.

All this only partially helps those who are not within broadband reach currently.

By then the gangstas at the helm of Eircom hope to have sold the company on...
P.

bk

eircomtribunal wrote:

NTL will also take its toll of Eircom customers in its (limited) territory, especially once it's getting telephony included again.

It is also worth noting that Chorus is also upping it's game, it is now offering 3 products, 512k, 1.5m and 3m.

I expect that UPC (NTL + Chorus) will become a far greater threat to Eircom in the new year, then the LLU companies. All of Galway, Waterford, Kilkenny, Clonmel, Thurles and about half of Cork and Dublin isn't a very limited territory, it represents most of Eircoms customers and it is much wider then either Magnet (what, 5 exchanges so far?) and Smart (not even in North Main yet, one of the biggest exchanges in the centre of Dublin).

And with NTL testing 10m/512k last night, things are going to get very exciting next year. All they need now is to complete the Cork and Dublin rollout, get the voice serive working and have a big advertising campaign. Things will get really interesting then.

paulm17781

eircomtribunal wrote:

NTL will also take its toll of Eircom customers in its (limited) territory, especially once it's getting telephony included again.

NTL cover all Waterford & Galway and have been upgrading there network in Dublin, soon to be all of Dublin. I believe Chorus have upgraded Cork (not sure). I would hardly call this limited coverage. I wouldn't expect LLU operators to do much more than this.

watty

Geostationary Satellite BB will never work properly, too far (50k MILE trip up/down, 100K miles for a ping).

PLT transmission will ALWAYS cause interference and be susptabible to interference. It's rubbish.

I'm not to enamoured of these "plug top" "LAN via household mains" either. Security and Interference to other issues.

eircomtribunal

bk wrote:

..I expect that UPC (NTL + Chorus) will become a far greater threat to Eircom in the new year, then the LLU companies...

Potentially yes. The main reason being that cable will take away all of Eircom's revenue of a customer, while with LLU, Eircom will not really suffer a great financial loss: unbundlers will keep paying € 15something to Eircom per month for the last mile, and a hefty fee for the exchange access. Unbundlers are not making a sizeable profit, or in other words, they are not taking profit away from Eircom.

My concern with betting all on cable is its limited footprint in the overall picture. How many of Eircom's customers could walk over to UPC? Latest figure of NTL was below 200 000 lines broadband enabled, with a roughly 10% broadband take-up.
What will cable competition do for stopping Eircom milking forced dial-up users to near death for the foreseeable future?
Eircom can put up some defence against cable by upping the speeds and reducing price, but otherwise give a damn about extending the bb rollout.
How expandable is the cable footprint?
Cable competition was a driving factor for dsl development in many other countries, but not the only one.

Don't get me wrong, I am all hoping that cable, especially with the new ownership, will have a major impact – especially with seeing that we will see no improvement on the regulatory side, with Noel having renewed the current leadership for the next three years, with Mike Byrne in the helm in a years time, and then John Doherty again. At least I have not to change the intro image on comwreck.com...

P.

Solair

UPC (Merged NTL/Chorus) will be desperate to sign up tripple play customers as soon as possible.

Irish cable companies were able to sit on their backsides and not offer anything new as they relied on the fact that they'd a monopoly on UK terrestrial television reception in Ireland. Sky digital's launch of BBC and the fact that ITV is now tunable in manually on satellite, and channel 4 may follow has left them with half-baked uncompeditive cable line ups.

There was no other technical reason that Irish cable operators failed to bother with broadband. It was expensive and they didn't need it to keep their companies a float.

That's going to give them the same kind of market that UK and other european operators have had to face for 15+ years... i.e. that they had to offer something better than satellite tv can..

So, fingers crossed UPC will see a need to start providing broadband / telephony services and unique cable content television as a matter of urgency.

Chorus in particular has felt sky's impact much more severely than NTL. They invested heavily in digital MMDS and ended up with a very uncompeditive product with 60 channels when sky could offere hundreds without supporting a large MMDS network of ground based transmitters.
These could yet become the basis for very widespread WiMax or similar high speed broadband infrastructure as they're also line-of-site.

NTL's cable service wasn't impacted upon as badly as most people keep standard cable subscriptions in NTL areas, even those with satellite still tend to hang on to the basic 15 channel package.

bk

eircomtribunal wrote:

Potentially yes. The main reason being that cable will take away all of Eircom's revenue of a customer, while with LLU, Eircom will not really suffer a great financial loss: unbundlers will keep paying € 15something to Eircom per month for the last mile, and a hefty fee for the exchange access. Unbundlers are not making a sizeable profit, or in other words, they are not taking profit away from Eircom.

Exaclty and in particular because of the relatively high entry price of unbundling, it will never be aimed at low price entry level BB, the unbudlers will only ever be able to offer relatively expensive high end BB and triple play packages.

This is important as I believe a €20 - €25 price point for always on entry level BB is vital to drive mainstream market uptake, but at current LLU prices this isn't really possible.

It is possible on cable because their network is completely independent of Eircom and that is why we have €20 512k bb from Chorus and €25 1mb BB from NTL.

eircomtribunal wrote:

My concern with betting all on cable is its limited footprint in the overall picture. How many of Eircom's customers could walk over to UPC? Latest figure of NTL was below 200 000 lines broadband enabled, with a roughly 10% broadband take-up.
What will cable competition do for stopping Eircom milking forced dial-up users to near death for the foreseeable future?
Eircom can put up some defence against cable by upping the speeds and reducing price, but otherwise give a damn about extending the bb rollout.
How expandable is the cable footprint?
Cable competition was a driving factor for dsl development in many other countries, but not the only one.

You are right, cable will more then likely be limited to urban areas only, but if UPC even cover all the cities and large towns like Thurles, etc. it will still be about 60% of the population. Which isn't really that limited and isn't something to stiff at.

The thing is LLU isn't going to do any better, there is no way that the LLU providers will rollout their service in rural areas, unless they get grants from the government and even at that ADSL is going to be fairly bad in rural areas.

MY goal when I joined IOFFL was always that people could choose from three independent, competitive BB platforms (all bitstream providers are one platform) in urban areas and at least one BB platform in rural areas.

I think the best most rural areas can hope for is bitstream DSL and at least one wireless operator.

However cable and LLU in urban areas can have a benefit for rural areas. As Eircom comes under competitive pressure from cable and LLU, they up the speeds and drop the prices. The good thing is that people who can currently get DSL in rural areas also benefit from this competition and get the same speed increases and price drops.

Another benefit is that as more people can get high speed wired BB in urban areas, the wireless companies like IBB and Clearwire will find it harder to compete and will be more likely to push out into rural areas with no BB in order to keep subscriber the numbers up that they loose in the city, hell even Eircom might be forced to do this.

One interesting possibility is that UPC now owns a considerable part of valuable wireless licenses in the MMDS spectrum. If they wanted to they could rollout wireless BB to many of their customers in non cabled areas. In particular Digiweb Metro has shown the possibilites here, Metro actually uses the cable standard DOCSIS 2.0 for carrying the BB over the wireless spectrum (the same standard used by UPC) and even some of the Digiweb engineers are ex-NTL engineers. So UPC could cover most of the country if they really wanted to. (BTW this is pure speculation, I haven't heard anything).

A final thing to remember, whatever about the state of the Irish cable networks, as a technology, cable is far superior to DSL. Cable can scale to incredibly high speeds without a massive investment. DSL can never compete with these speeds, at least not without a massive investment in fibre to the curb and VDSL technology. In asia at the moment they are testing Gigabit ethernet over cable!!! This will never be possible with DSL, only FTTH could ever deliver these sort of speeds.

Solair

I could definitely see UPC wanting to make better use of the MMDS spectrum than MPEG2 multiplexes do at present. You could squeeze a whole lot more onto using digiweb-like technology.

Broadband, telephony, interactive tv, video on demand and more regular channels too.

It would definitely give Sky a run for their money too.

As it stands MMDS is pretty much wasted spectrum and is basically providing something like very like the UK's FreeView set up (from a technical point of view) only on a commercial and paid for basis using much more problematic frequencies for the type of broadcasting they're doing.

It'd be far better to upgrade it to something more useful.

bk

Solair wrote:

That's going to give them the same kind of market that UK and other european operators have had to face for 15+ years... i.e. that they had to offer something better than satellite tv can..

So, fingers crossed UPC will see a need to start providing broadband / telephony services and unique cable content television as a matter of urgency.

That is it exactly, for a long time now NTL & Chorus have had it cushy here in Ireland with little competition. UPC will be the largest TV company in Ireland, however they now are starting to face big competition from Sky, the new BBC/ITV Freesat Platform coming soon, IPTV from the LLU companies and soon maybe even DTT here in Ireland (Freeview has been incredibly succesfull in the UK). They can't continue in their old ways, they most move into new markets and improve the value add of their core service.

That is why I believe we will see them agressively enter the triple play market, looking to steal a lot of market share in the voice and internet market from Eircom.

I believe we will also see a PVR, VoD, interactive TV and maybe even HD coming from them soon in order to boost the value add of their core service. In particular VoD will be important as there is a whole valuable market there for them to raid, the video rental market. I've used Comcasts VoD service in the US, and it works incredibly well, you would never bother to go for a DVD ever again, UPC could make a fortune with this. Of course all these new services will need a good BB backbone in order to run.

The thing is, UPC is actually in a very good position to not only continue to be the number 1 TV transmission company, but to also potentially become the number one communications company. The funny thing is Eircom have left the door wide open for them. In the UK, NTL find it hard to gain new customers because the BB market is relatively mature and people don't move much. But here in Ireland, because Eircom has fought so well with Comreg and have limited the rollout of BB, the Irish BB market is still very immature, with the mainstream users still not really having signed up for BB. This is a great opportunity for UPC, if they hurry up and finish the rollout, offer the right products and prices and advertise heavily, they could easily take a large percentage of the mainstream market as they begin to sign up for BB.

In some ways, because of Eircoms slow investment in BB, we could actually end up with one of the most competitive BB markets in Europe!!

We live in interesting times.