ADSL2+ on the way?

thefinalstage

A few months ago my broadband connection went down for nearly three weeks
along with my phone but that only lasted one week.

I have noticed over this time that a lot of people are getting cut off for a similar amount of time. Is it possible that eircom are upgrading these exchanges?

Sponge Bob

no it reflects either

1. the amount of time eircom normally takes to clear a fault is 3 weeks and rising, Comreg do not enforce their own rules as per the USO deal with eircom so eircom do not care.

and/or

2. air conditioning problems in some exchanges are a big issue, adsl gear runs very hot

and/or

3.The fact that there is no service level agreement for ADSL.

Its not an upgrade program, this would be notified in advance here .

email Noel Dempsey and ask for a proper regulator .

thefinalstage

Yeah Sponge Bob you are probably right. I was just living in hope...

I think we need a government that is willing to buy back the infrastructure from eircom and sell it to a whole new private company. That might fix it!

a line failure

thelastangryman wrote:

I think we need a government that is willing to buy back the infrastructure from eircom and sell it to a whole new private company. That might fix it!

Not sure if your being sarcastic but splitting eircom into retail and infrastructure as has been suggested previously by some experts and brining the later into state ownership would be a A+ achievement for the DMCMER.

Ah, the pleasures of being hopelessly optimistic...

thefinalstage

I know eircom will never sell the infrastructure but I can dream can't I?

Do-more

Heh lads - did ye not hear Pierre Frenchbloke from Eircom on "the Last Word" today, the 5 major cities will have 25Meg BB within a year and the country will have 100% BB coverage within 2 years! Sit back and enjoy the wait...

JNive

100% coverage = 100% of exchanges enabled.
for those in rural areas, that probably means that 1/2 wont have pairgains/carriers, and of that 25%, probably 50% would be lucky to have copper good enough for over 2mbps.

WHenever they refer to who can get broadband eircom always refer to percentage of lines connected to enabled exchanges, and nothing about actualy availability or pass rates.

Also i belive 25meg BB is a pipedream. the theoretical max of adsl2+ is 24mbps as far as i know. so unless you are within 100 metres of teh exchange i doubt you would get that even on the greatest line around.

more likely for the average person is 10-14mbps given eircoms standard of copper in general.

Sponge Bob

JNive wrote:

Also i belive 25meg BB is a pipedream. the theoretical max of adsl2+ is 24mbps as far as i know. so unless you are within 100 metres of teh exchange i doubt you would get that even on the greatest line around.

more likely for the average person is 10-14mbps given eircoms standard of copper in general.

He mentioned fibre to the curb (not to the home itself but nearby ) implying fibre pushed out to within 1km-1.5km of all and then copper the rest of the way. Funnily enough it sounds very very like what is promised in this here particular Brochoor.

But he did say that these 25mbit services will be in the 5 main cities which really means ONLY in the 5 main cities where Docsis 3 is on the distant horizon already across cable tv networks and where them feckers in IBB and Digiweb are taking customers too. They did trial VDSL (not VDSL2) in south Dublin last year in a 1970s estate full of semis.

Maybe Pierre was banging on about VDSL2 Long Reach (see page 4) in the 5 main cities ??? The rest of the country will not get 25mbits or anything like it and only about 1/3 of the population lives IN the 5 main towns .

Do-more

He also mentioned that they would be supplying BB via WIMAX in rural areas!

Sponge Bob

Wimax wont do 25mbits, you will be very very lucky to even get mega contended 2.5mbits with the 3.5Ghz spectrum eircom has .....although one always wonders what Comreg will everntually let them bend their "telephony" licence for 2.3Ghz towards .

kaizersoze

Do-more wrote:

He also mentioned that they would be supplying BB via WIMAX in rural areas!

Their press release about a month ago said that WIMAX would only be available in 5 main urban centers.

JNive

so when they say to the curb is it essentially meanign to the green multiplexer boxes dotted around the place ( here in bishopstown there is about 6 of those within a 10 minute radial walk distance from my house.
the one im on serves our estate which has about 200 houses and probably a few others around us also, and is about 200 metres away

On another note, choruses equivalent the 'alpha' boxes , is right next to me, and our speed on chorus is pants. the actual conenction speed is fine, its just heavily over saturated on their network, since a single download is about 20kb/s typically whears download same file in flashget using 10 connections, i get about 120kb/sec proving that all their available bandwidth at some point between me and their uplink is used up.

Sponge Bob

JNive wrote:

so when they say to the curb is it essentially meanign to the green multiplexer boxes dotted around the place ( here in bishopstown there is about 6 of those within a 10 minute radial walk distance from my house.
the one im on serves our estate which has about 200 houses and probably a few others around us also, and is about 200 metres away

Yes exactly , watch out for a second box right next to those ones and some digging and footpath repairs about. That will be the fibre coming in .

I don't know if anybody noticed how Pierre gave the government the finger with his announcement yesterday.

the government is _supposed_ to be redistributing growth a bit more evenly around the country . This is the National Spatial Strategy.

There are the 5 main towns/centres of growth , behind which come the gateways and then the hubs.

Were eircom to take the overall requirements of the state into account then they surely should be doing the big 5 + the gateways and maybe the hubs as well . But NO! . Fortunately there are Mans instead.

Gateways:

The NSS identifies, Dundalk, Sligo, Letterkenny/(Derry) (Border Region) and Athlone/Tullamore/Mullingar as four new Gateways in addition to the five ( Dublin, Cork, Limerick/Shannon, Galway and Waterford) identified in the National Development Plan. These will act at National level, through their large scale and critical mass to both drive development over the urban and rural areas they influence, and support more balanced patterns of development nationally.

Hubs

The NSS identifies ‘Hubs’ to hold a strategic position in support of Gateways, energising their own immediate areas and establishing a link between the larger urban areassuch as Gateways and more rural areas. The ‘Hubs’ identified in the NSS are, Cavan and Monaghan (Border Region) Ballina/Castlebar, Ennis, Kilkenny, Mallow, Tralee, Killarney, Tuam and Wexford.

Were eircom to give a fraction or a small percentile of a **** they should be looking at deploying FTTC/VDSL in the gateways and/or hubs as well as the 5 main towns. FTTC / VDSL is a non runner anyway outside the main towns/gateways/hubs in my opinion.

So they gave this important national developmental framework the finger. Without advanced telecoms the entire spacer strategy is a dead duck. Dempsey stayed quiet as he normally does when anything of real importance happens on his watch.

thefinalstage

I already have a small silver box right beside my exchange (The exchange is the green box right?) I thought it was for electricity...

BTW: If that green box is the exchange I am withing 150m of it

pjproby

what is digiweb planning with 4g and what is 4g anyway?

JNive

exhanges are full buildings, not roadside boxes ( in towns/cities at least)
The eircom multiplexer where your individual copper pair is conenct to and frequency multiplexed with other lines onto one E1 or greater type line to the exchange is a slim green box, usually with a yellow sticker with the exchange code, box number and CCP written on it ( mine is DYX11 for instance )
they have a triangular top and ridges on the front.

These are essentialyl the local distribution points from exchanges. if there is a case that you cant get broadband and your neighbour can, and its due to bad copper/signal then the problem uis between you and this box.

If nobody in your area can get it, then its more likely due to bad line issues between the multiplexer and the exchange, apart from narrow spectrum noise interference of course which is able to effectively disturb only part of the spectrum on the line to the exchange making it possible that you get screwed lol.

Anyways, yup keep eyes out from any 'work' occuring on or around these boxes in particluar routing, roadwork or other such traces.

The thicker silver boxes ( if nothing is written on it) is generally a traffic signalling box. ( if it has a lightning symbol then its an esb node ).

The chorus nodes are silver boxes with a red and green light on the side, often marked with 'alpha' written on its front.

The old analogue chorus boxes are lime green, smaller and a curved front edge with venting. and are more numerous than the digital nodes.

Oh fun fun fun :-)

watty

4G is anything for Mobile Data comms thought up since 3G

There is no "offical" definition of 4G.

Mine is that it is mobile broadband..
:: Works while moving
:: Automatic handoff of connection between bases
:: Mostly < 50ms pings
:: 200k to 1500k+ speed depending on what you pay for
:: QOS management for VOIP
:: You allowed VOIP
:: IP based, or seems to be at the user termination and network interface
:: Looks more like an ethernet than a dialup adaptor for "built-in" interfaces on a PDA or PC.

Not everyone would agree with this defintion. People disagree as about the upgrade to 3G is 3.5G or 4G, HSPDA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSDPA

Band is an issue too. Too high a frequency (e.g. 3.5GHz, 5GHz, 10GHz ) it is Near LOS or LOS
Two low a frequency (e.g. 220MHz DAB /DVB-RCT / DRM) the bandwidth gets too small and cells get too big.

700MHz to 1200MHz is best band for mobile data. The proposed 2.5Ghz and 3.5GHz bands for WiMax suit an external fixed MMDS style aerial better.

700MHz to 864 is currently TV. After analogue switch off it ought to be for mobile data.

I imagine that Digiweb willl tell us what their 4G system is when it arrives.

pjproby

watty,
thanks again

Foxwood

Sponge Bob wrote:

the government is _supposed_ to be redistributing growth a bit more evenly around the country . This is the National Spatial Strategy.

If the cabinet can ignore the National Spatial Strategy and act like medieval Lords decentralising their serfs (aka Departmental civil servants) into their own home constituencies, they can't very well complain if commercial entities ignore it too.

Sponge Bob

Not really the point Foxwood. There is only really one stated national development framerwork plan. eircom are blithely ignoring this one national plan by concentrating all their resources in the centres that we would all tend to agree are economically overcooked .

Then eircom seem to think the government will give them anywhere between €50m (McRedmond to the oireachtas comms committee in June) and €200m (danon this week to media) to 'complete' BB rollout according to some unenforceable definition of complete decided by eircom themselves as it suits them .

At a minimum this new FTTC/VDSL tech should be made available to the Gateway towns I listed above, by eircom, in the national interest and to encourage better dispersal of economic activity in Ireland as per stated government objectives.

Apart from that minimum there should also be a timeline (this decade) to upgrade the hub towns with this tech. The current eircom plan as proposed is actually contrary to the National Spacer Strategy and yet eircom seem to think the govenment will somehow fund them indirectly to implement it.

Dempsey is such an utterly weak minister they will probably persuade him it was all his own brilliant idea in the first place

Foxwood

eircom isn't looking for money from "the government" - it's looking for money from "the cabinet". As I've already pointed out, the cabinet doesn't give a flying **** about the National Spatial Strategy - if acting in the best interests of the country might cost a few votes locally, then bye-bye NSS.

The fact that eircom's plans are contrary to the NSS is neither here nor there to the Cabinet - if they think they can squeeze a few votes out of the issue, they'll give the money to eircom - (it's not as if it's their money, after all)!