Broadband in Ireland

conjamuk

Why are we so far behind in terms of speed and availability, broadband in Ireland is a joke, in Japan the average download speed is 100 mbps thats nearly 10MBps:eek:.

In France they have 40mbps. And in Ireland our highest speed is 10mbps and very few people have that. When are we going to see uncapped reliable Broadband in this country

Nexus

With eircom at the helm? I say 10-15 years IF we are lucky!

godskitchen

I firmly believe it will be a new company or a mobile operator will bring truly fast BB to Ireland. Traditional telco companies have had their day, its happening all over the place, not just the telecoms market. The wont move on and invest and as a result they will die, sooner the better!

thebman

Ireland's broadband will be moved forward by mobile and wireless operators and eircom will react to it. This will put pressure on the mobile and wireless operators again to compete and our coverage will improve as the mobile broadband operators need high levels of coverage for their product as that is why people take the hit on ping times and speeds.

Although mobile broadband and wireless may not attain the speeds of eircom's lines or cable operators, they can provide a cheaper, reliable, fast enough alternative that people will take the hit on speed in exchange for the advantages of price or coverage.

I think that will force eircom to compete and I think that despite the best efforts of our government to cripple our communications infrastructure, we will eventually catch up with Europe but it will be due to natural market conditions and improvements in alternative technologies that we will compete. Expect FF & Greens (the opposition are partly to blame for no pressure) to take the credit though.

watty

godskitchen wrote: »

I firmly believe it will be a new company or a mobile operator will bring truly fast BB to Ireland. Traditional telco companies have had their day, its happening all over the place, not just the telecoms market. The wont move on and invest and as a result they will die, sooner the better!

How?
You need a national Infrastructure of last mile and a national Infrastructure of backhaul. Magent Entertainment & BT have deep pockets and they don't have it.

Only for BT talking over CIE/Esat fibre and some Esat LLU they would be nowhere.

Unless there are 1000s of cells and a fabulous backhaul, Mobile can't provide a substitute for Fixed Wireless, Cable and DSL.

UPC is running flat out fixing 20 years of neglected cable. That will pass 460,000 households. The main Fixed wireless operators are running flat out adding bases and customers.

We need the other 450 exchanges upgraded to DSL. We need all the pair gains gone and bad copper fixed or replaced with fibre. But eircom has the monopoly on that and and has been multiply asset stripped in each takeover since privatisation.

3G was never designed for IP data (strangely), HSPDA and HSUPA are poor on number of VOIP calls they can support compared with 3G voice. They are poor latency and spectrum utilisation for Mobile Data.

Even the Digiweb mobile is Complementary to Fixed services and when rolled nationwide will be good in far flung areas that fixed wireless is not possible and phone lines are too long.

DjeInSlanchaLan

France have a very good have injected a lot of money into the telecom system, renewing the whole backbone in the 70's to have a full fiber optic backbone,

then Jacque Chirac that it was not tolerable that in france people couldn't not have boradband so operator did what he asked..

it's maybe because irish gov is a bit soft that operator are doing what they want for their profit.

to the one that beleive that wireless will force eircom to provide dsl tech troughout ireland... it is all wrong, wireless cannot compete with dsl the speed has been quickly reach the maximum and are often local provider that might not resit very long if eircom with to take them over...

thebman

watty wrote: »

How?
You need a national Infrastructure of last mile and a national Infrastructure of backhaul. Magent Entertainment & BT have deep pockets and they don't have it.

Only for BT talking over CIE/Esat fibre and some Esat LLU they would be nowhere.

Unless there are 1000s of cells and a fabulous backhaul, Mobile can't provide a substitute for Fixed Wireless, Cable and DSL.

UPC is running flat out fixing 20 years of neglected cable. That will pass 460,000 households. The main Fixed wireless operators are running flat out adding bases and customers.

We need the other 450 exchanges upgraded to DSL. We need all the pair gains gone and bad copper fixed or replaced with fibre. But eircom has the monopoly on that and and has been multiply asset stripped in each takeover since privatisation.

3G was never designed for IP data (strangely), HSPDA and HSUPA are poor on number of VOIP calls they can support compared with 3G voice. They are poor latency and spectrum utilisation for Mobile Data.

Even the Digiweb mobile is Complementary to Fixed services and when rolled nationwide will be good in far flung areas that fixed wireless is not possible and phone lines are too long.

Yes but the advantage of mobile technologies isn't really the speed of the service or the quality, its the fact that it exists in rural areas and is faster than dial up and cheaper in many cases which will force eircom to compete.

I think that if users had the option of mobile broadband, many would ditch their phone line as the line rental is huge and would make calls using mobile phones instead as most peoples mobile phones are their primary contact method anyway these days. This does hurt eircom as they can no long be a bottom feeder, taking huge line rental for no investment in their network and it will encourage them to compete.

It will also force rural wireless operators to offer services at fairer prices as some providers charge 40 euro a month for 40:1 contention ratio on a 1Mbps line.

I think given most users only want to check email and book holidays and the like that these services will be good enough for many customers and that it will force the others to compete. At least I hope it does because we are rightly screwed if it doesn't

BeerWolf

Eircom is a monopolising whore, plain and simple.

jester77

conjamuk wrote: »

Why are we so far behind in terms of speed and availability, broadband in Ireland is a joke, in Japan the average download speed is 100 mbps thats nearly 10MBps:eek:.

In France they have 40mbps. And in Ireland our highest speed is 10mbps and very few people have that. When are we going to see uncapped reliable Broadband in this country

Yeah, it sucks. My family can't get any form of it, so that means I have high phone bills calling them when I could be using Skype for free

Sorry to go off topic, but what's this capped/uncapped thing I see mentioned here often? Is that where you have a 16MB line but the provider caps your max speed to 5MB or 6MB so you pay less?

watty

Many Mobile system are not faster if everyone used them instead of Dialup. You'd have add a terriffic number of masts if the 450,000 dialup users changed to HSDPA. They where not designed for 24x 7 fixed use but intermittent occasional mobile use. Like Mobile phone calls. So the "sums" and "assumptions" for usages of HSDPA and EDGE are wrong.

Mountjoy Mugger

Capped refers to the amount of data you upload/download in a given period. Most ISPs have a monthly limit. They may charge extra if you exceed this limit.

Uncapped is the opposite.

jester77

Mountjoy Mugger wrote: »

Capped refers to the amount of data you upload/download in a given period. Most ISPs have a monthly limit. They may charge extra if you exceed this limit.

Uncapped is the opposite.

:eek: Never heard of that before, nothing like that here in Germany. They should be calling it narrowband instead broadband... that's crazy!

watty

Cap is the limit per billing period or rolling 30 day average of the traffic, Usually in GByte.

Some claim to have no Cap and operate Fair Use Policy. But this just means they know the Cap and you don't.

Exceeding cap may mean, depending on contract:
Getting charged more (Typical for Mobile).
Getting disconnected.
Getting slower speed (Throttled).

Terrlock

I dunno...nothing is really going too change as long as eircom has a monopoly....they have moved broadband so slow in this country...its so silly as Ireland relies so much on technology to compete with other countries.

Maybe we should organise a huge march or protest against eircoms handling of broadband in ireland. Just a crazy idea but its really only the technical people that know how bad broadband is in Ireland....all the rest are clueless and think broadband is just a 2meg line with a 12 gig cap limit....

We should have a march too both educate and show eircom and the government that we need to see some change.

But how do you go organising one...would people actually show up ?

DjeInSlanchaLan

Burn some tire too in front of eircom :P

just to help them understand )))

but seriously why not .... never killed anybody

tonton-bob

The delay to get broadband are awfully long as well

I managed to get a dedicated line (by luck they took us off the carrier line) and ordered smart telecom almost 3 weeks ago and i still have no ETA

It would have taken 1 to 2 weeks in other countries of Europe ( France ... )

Duiske

tonton-bob wrote: »

The delay to get broadband are awfully long as well

I managed to get a dedicated line (by luck they took us off the carrier line) and ordered smart telecom almost 3 weeks ago and i still have no ETA

It would have taken 1 to 2 weeks in other countries of Europe ( France ... )

A little off topic, but just wondering about them taking you off the carrier. Did you ask them to do it, or was it just an area upgrade or something ?

juuge

Probably been asked before but.....any chance of Sky offering broadband in Ireland?

watty

In the UK Sky bought an ISP with a lot of unbundled lines. They have proper LLU in UK and also resold BT is much better than Bitstream. Sky can supply their own BB for about 1/3rd.

Here they would only be able to resell. It's so expensive they could not offer basic BB free with TV package. They would need buy outright BT + IBB or Smart + Digiweb or some combo like that in Ireland as you need the LLU and Wireless here.

So I can't see it happening unless something seismic happens.

tonton-bob

Duiske wrote: »

A little off topic, but just wondering about them taking you off the carrier. Did you ask them to do it, or was it just an area upgrade or something ?

Luck and something you always need in Ireland : knowing someone who knows someone ...

We used to have random crackles on the line ( that was so bad that we had to hang up ) and so did our neighbours ( who were on the same carrier ).

An eircom technician came ( well the third visit in 2 weeks ) and just told me : " Well i put you on a dedicated line, there was one spare so that should fix your problem"

I asked him about broadband and he told me that we wouldn't have any problem getting broadband now ( i'm 2.3 km from the exchange ).

Just be patient ... ( 3 weeks today ... )