NZ Telecom Hands over Rural Spectrum to CITY WISP

Sponge Bob

Basically there is a chunk of bandwidth held by eircom for supplying Rural Telephony or 'Rurtel' in areas where wires may not be advisable owing to length or aesthetics or cost or indigent tendencies in Eircom or any combination thereof .

The Black Valley in Kerry is an example. Eircom also supply 'Rurtel' over two further chunks of spectrum in the 2.2ghz and 3.5ghz bands although they normally prefer to pairgain .

NZ which is similar to Ireland in having lots of rural areas has an incumbent which got the same spectrum for the same reason.

Of course spectrum used for Rurtel is sort of dead in the cities, they not being rural. NZ Telecom has agreed to hand this spectrum over (in the cities) to someone who DOES want to use it as you can see here

http://www.shorecliffcommunications.com/magazine/news.asp?news=5146

In Ireland, however, Comreg lets eircom squats as much spectrum as they want so it could not happen here except that maybe Comreg are squatting this spectrum themselves are they ???

The Director also proposes to replace the WT license held by Telecom Eireann for its ‘RURTEL’ service. The new license would allow full rural deployment (removing the current restriction limiting use to the West Coast), but on condition that TE:

* migrate the RURTEL service to new technology, using 30 MHz of spectrum between 2300 and 2400 MHz to avoid the growing interference likely from Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) systems and the license exempt low power devices being increasingly used in the part of the current RURTEL spectrum allocation which overlaps the 2.4 GHz ISM band;

watty

And in rural Eircom will only admit it exists if you miles away from a telephone pole, preferably with no access road for fitting extra poles.

crawler

Grumble grumble...bone of contention...annoyance...grumble. General "Victor Meldrew" type noises....

netwhizkid

This is quite Interesting. My Grandmother had one of these Rurtel Telephone one time. It was called "routel" I'm sure twas a typo on their behalf. Anyway it was extremely unreliable and used to break down regularly and owing to its technical nature special crews would have to fix it not just the local technicians. Eventually a Landline was provided which entailed standing about 40 poles and about a mile or two of dropwire.

I know of several other people in my area that were on the system, most of them now are being served by FWA for their telephone service or were given Landlines. It is a bit of a cod really as I have rang Eircom umpteen times looking for FWA Broadband, I'm always told it isn't available where I live. How the heck so are those rural houses getting a Telephone service.... Aliens? It is provided through this mast which is located slap bang in the middle of a new Windfarm that has been built. The Eircom tower is there for about 20yrs and the turbines were built around it. All of which are located on what is or was Coillte land. Puzzles me how they are giving FWA Telephone but not broadband

Sponge Bob

Puzzles me too, if its a 3.5Ghz FWA mast their licence obliges them to provide BB from it (up to 384k but its 6 year old licence) but its an obligation. The licence conditions are on the Comreg site from very end 2003 or beginning of 2004 .

do the houses have airspan boxes if so its 3.5Ghz mast.

email phil.nolan@eircom.ie and ask for a quote for BB installation