Irish Speeds not as bad as sugested

DingDong

Kerb so to speak but they do run fibre on houses. I think this is most suit for old over head networks.

Whatsthisabout

paulm17781 wrote: »

That because it is more widely available, better promoted and often better priced. We got DSL about 5 years after the UK. This solely comes down to operators / government. This "lower PC penetration" or "Not technically inclined" lark is what the government / operators / Comreg feed us as excuses for their under performance.

That might be the reason but it is still true that people have not touched on what the internet has to offer in Ireland like they have in other countries.
Also IT education is schools is almost non existent, this shocks me giving almost everyone will need to use a computer at some stage in the future

Running fibre will improve however not fix the problem. A major overhaul of allot of the exchanges would be required to giving most of the equipment was only designed to handle voice traffic at its time of install. So there is no point running lots of information quickly if it is going to bottleneck at the exchange.

Allot more of UPCs network is fibre then others but their entire equivalent last mile is still coax. This is still potentially better then copper except for the fact that it was installed overhead which means it’s going screw up.

At the people who are asking how half is “not bad” my original point was that allot of the recent press has claimed we are much farther behind then it would appear.

Allot of the time in Ireland the “up to” remarks still mean most people expect to get close to the speed in the UK the up to 8Mb max packages almost never provide anywhere near that its more like 5Mb or less.

paulm17781

Whatsthisabout wrote: »

That might be the reason but it is still true that people have not touched on what the internet has to offer in Ireland like they have in other countries.

Hold on, you just said that we're not big into broadband because it's not more widely available, better promoted or better priced because we aren't aware of what broadband can offer because it isn't being offered. I think that's my point.

Whatsthisabout

I was agreeing more with the fact that more could have been done to facilitate people in becoming more internet friendly. Be it the ISPs or the government.

Essentially for whatever reason Irish people still don’t use internet services as much as they do in other countries. An example would be the lack of live chat services which other Broadband and service providers use in other countries. Another would be how difficult it is to get in contact with any hardware or software providers on the phone in Ireland. If you where in England you would have contact numbers for Router Providers, McAfee, Norton, Microsoft etc.. in Ireland that is very difficult.

I agree that the underlying reason for this is the lack of availability however if every house in Ireland had a PC and the internet in the morning there are a lot of people who wouldn’t know what to do because it would be so new, more so then in other countries where availability has been better for a longer time, that is what I mean when I say Ireland is not as technically inclined

DingDong

paulm17781 wrote: »

Do UPC do fibre to the kerb / junction or is it mainly Co-ax?

If your talking about business in your question they run fibre direct into the building, no coax

paulm17781

DingDong wrote: »

If your talking about business in your question they run fibre direct into the building, no coax

No I meant typical user. I'm more trying to find out what the network is capable of.

Shinto

pardon my ignorance here,

But i've a 2MB connection in Korea and in Ireland, and i'd like to know what i'm missing out on with such a "slow" connection?

Sure i see the benefits for Irish business to have super fast connections...but for ordinary Joe Soaps...what am i missing out on with my measly 2MB connection? I genuinely would like someone to tell me.

Wcool

Well:

- streaming TV, including better slingbox
no more VCR/DVD recordings for television, just download when you want to see something
- possibility to host your own website (depends on upload speed as well)
- home office would have the same speed as your company network, thus making working from home more viable. Video conferencing would be of high quality as well, no more webcam type conferences

And of course the possibility to do all those things at once, without clogging the pipe.

Somehow I think that we will see lot's of new ways of using the net as well, stuff we haven't imagined yet.

PS if you live in Korea, can't you get 20Mb connections for peanuts? Maybe you could try it out?

zilog_jones

Someone really needs to sort out the LLU problem in this country, be it ComReg or whoever - it is really inhibiting development and competition in the ADSL market. They really need to make the part of Eircom that deals with the exchanges and lines completely separate to the rest of the company - that's what they did with BT in the UK, and they don't have arseways/non-existant LLU, lack of choice, etc.

There's also the problem that ADSL can never be as good here as the UK and other countries, due to our low population and low population density (60.3 per sq. km here compared to 246 in the UK). There will always be people too far away from the exchanges, etc. I think development of fibre-optic and wireless networks would be much more worthwhile here.

Hopefully UPC Ireland will get their act together in the next few years, so we'll at least start to get real speeds in the cities.

everdead.ie

Well with a 2 meg line here it normally comes with a pitiful cap that doesn't allow for a lot of streaming tv and downloading but i suppose thats a different issue isnt it

Nehaxak

everdead.ie wrote: »

Well with a 2 meg line here it normally comes with a pitiful cap that doesn't allow for a lot of streaming tv and downloading but i suppose thats a different issue isnt it

Not really as the caps imposed by ISPs are NOTHING more than another method for them to earn more money by selling and doing less on their part, another rip off which I'm sure many ISPs or those working for them will explain away with blah blah blah piracy blah blah torrents, blah blah. Whatever... Their excuses may wash with the retarded media but the only reason people will stick with an ISP that has a cap imposed is due to either having relativley light usage themselves to not be worried too much or just the age old classical Irish thinking of "ah sure it's grand, sure let me bend over and grab my ankles for you to make it easier".

The fact that still many ISPs run off the back of Eircon with just reselling Eircon's product, just shows the greed, ineptitude and lack of any interest in improving the Irish broadband market from them and Eircon.

I'm still stumped as to why multi-nationals choose Ireland as their Euro HQ, some of them are probably lucky to get dialup.

JohnC.

Nehaxak wrote: »

I'm still stumped as to why multi-nationals choose Ireland as their Euro HQ, some of them are probably lucky to get dialup.

Multinationals won't be using the kind of connections that the public would be using. It's a totally different market.

zilog_jones

Nehaxak wrote: »

Not really as the caps imposed by ISPs are NOTHING more than another method for them to earn more money by selling and doing less on their part, another rip off...

I think you'll find it's so they can actually make a profit. It is not feasible to supply all residential customers with totally unrestricted, uncontended net connections. You'll find restrictions everywhere else in the world, in the form of caps (granted many ISPs elsewhere have much higher caps but they enforce them strictly, unlike here), "up to" advertised speeds, and ye olde fair usage policy.

We are quite lucky that a few ISPs here have been very lenient WRT enforcing caps, but as we've seen with BT's introduction of throttling heavy users recently, as traffic is increasing this is not going to last.

I'm still stumped as to why multi-nationals choose Ireland as their Euro HQ, some of them are probably lucky to get dialup.

And there's the proof that you haven't a clue how ISPs work.

Nehaxak

Again, excuses explaining away yet another rip off of the Irish consumer.
Sorry, not buying it. You can make them up and explain the caps away until the cows come home but it's all bull and people will cop on sooner or later.

As for my comment on multinationals and them using dialups, I was being sarcastic but it's not that far from the truth either but then again it's a hard thing to say as, oh no, god forbid people might find out and decide not to open business here. Rather than, alright lads, we're kinda in the proverbial poo here with this broadband business and have been for the last ten years, think it's about time we got the finger out so we continue to make it actually attractive and worthwhile for business to come here and lets stop all these charlatans and rip off merchants fleecing the customers while we're at it.

The Irish market for broadband is an absolute total and utter joke. Those ISPs that impose no caps are the few that are trying to change things. The rest of you can rot in hell and the sooner your business goes belly up and you're run out of the market, the better for it the Irish customer will be.

To be honest, all advertisements to do with broadband with caps imposed should be changed and all open with "Would ye like to buy a carpet love ? or a bit of nice lino for the floor ? How about a nice sofa ?"

zilog_jones

Nehaxak wrote: »

As for my comment on multinationals and them using dialups, I was being sarcastic but it's not that far from the truth either but then again it's a hard thing to say as, oh no, god forbid people might find out and decide not to open business here. Rather than, alright lads, we're kinda in the proverbial poo here with this broadband business and have been for the last ten years, think it's about time we got the finger out so we continue to make it actually attractive and worthwhile for business to come here and lets stop all these charlatans and rip off merchants fleecing the customers while we're at it.

Your sarcasm was quite obvious, but you clearly continue to fail at knowing what is available to businesses in this country. Big multinationals ARE here because they CAN get decent net connections (100Mbps+). You cannot compare the situation of residential broadband.

Those ISPs that impose no caps are the few that are trying to change things.

They're not trying to change anything, they're just being lazy right now because bandwidth is not yet a problem for them. I bet you a million internets that this current situation is not going to last! The more households get broadband, the worse it's going to get. And I'm not talking about "unlimited" packages - they always have some limits, no matter where you are.

The rest of you can rot in hell and the sooner your business goes belly up and you're run out of the market, the better for it the Irish customer will be.

Contrary to what you may think, the current caps are not a problem for 90%+ of the population. You are the minority here, and spouting uninformed gibberish and moaning on a message board isn't going to change things.

I'm not trying to excuse the ISPs for their current slow speeds and high prices, I'm trying to show how you are talking out your árse. Caps are there for a reason, people will always have to pay a premium for any "unlimited" broadband because of this, and there just doesn't seem to be enough of a market right now for such unlimited services to seem worthwhile to most ISPs.

Solair

The reason for low speeds here are complex.

1) eircom was very keen on drip feeding the market. There was nothing driving them to increase speeds or to decrease price. The majority of other ISPs simply use eircom's DSL equipment to provide their service. The only exceptions to this are Smart, Magnet and BT (to a limited degree). These are only recently making big inroads.

2) Despite big plans by Chorus and by NTL Ireland neither of these organisations managed to get cable broadband rolled out to anything more than a test market. There were a whole load of reasons for this:

i) Irish cable was in a weird position where it's main purpose was to provide access to BBC/ITV/C4 and it had a unique advantage in that regard. So, the cable companies didn't really have to do much to sell the service and failed to innovate.
ii) Irish cable networks are much older and longer established than others in Europe. They were established in the 1960s, in the UK they were mostly established in the late 80s and 90s! The upgrade costs here were huge.
iii) Chorus nearly went bust, and never managed to roll out any of the products they'd planned. NTL Ireland was also very cash strapped.

iv) Sky Digital's launch and the fact that they can now basically compete fully with the cable companies with access to BBC and ITV as well as having RTE 1,2,TV3, TG4 etc in the line line up has forced the cable companies to wake up.

UPC, which now owns pretty much all of Ireland's cable networks, is genuinely taking the broadband and phone market seriously. They have to compete with Sky and they can't just assume people will stay connected for the sake of BBC access. Their investment in the infrastructure since they've taken the two cable operators over has been pretty substantial.

Cable can really drive speed as it has huge bandwidth available and it has driven speed in most other European markets and in the US. DSL tends to follow.

4) Finally, the wireless providers have been making big in roads. This has also driven competition. The likes of Digiweb etc are having considerable impact.

In general, the Irish broadband market's only starting to reach a level where there is decent competition in the last 12 to 24 months. So, fingers crossed things will improve!!

We're finally seeing decent speeds on offer!

smellslikeshoes

I agree that we are not actually as far behind in terms as speed as some people make out(though we are well behind). But you really need to put it into context, everyone goes on about our technology based economy and how we are the tech hub of Europe. When in reality we are below the EU average in broadband. We should be leading the way and could be leading the way if the was any amount of forward thinking on the governments part.

Nehaxak

Your sarcasm was quite obvious, but you clearly continue to fail at knowing what is available to businesses in this country. Big multinationals ARE here because they CAN get decent net connections (100Mbps+).

I'd like to see proof of that and compared with the cost of getting same in any other EU country. I'd also like to see proof that their connections come from Irish providers.

You cannot compare the situation of residential broadband.

Of course, because we all know residential customers get shafted and will continue to be shafted, that's a a given.

Contrary to what you may think, the current caps are not a problem for 90%+ of the population.

They said exactly the same years ago when most people could only get dialup.

You are the minority here, and spouting uninformed gibberish and moaning on a message board isn't going to change things.

No I'm not the minority but yes I am moaning and complaining because unlike most other people in this country, I care for the economy, I care for the business accumen of this country and I care for the ordinary customer.
I'm not a typical paddy who bends over and accepts his fate, hoping for the best and saying things *might* improve. Pfft...

I'm not trying to excuse the ISPs for their current slow speeds and high prices, I'm trying to show how you are talking out your árse.

So why defend them then ? Why defend caps ? why defend ISPs who are clearly crap, do nothing for the customer or this country and look like they never will ? ISPs in this country are an absolute joke, always where and always will be.
Fair dues to those of them that do not impose caps due to greed like most others are doing.

Caps are there for a reason,

Yes, plain and simple greed, no other reason, caps are there due to greed.

people will always have to pay a premium for any "unlimited" broadband because of this, and there just doesn't seem to be enough of a market right now for such unlimited services to seem worthwhile to most ISPs.

Explain to me then how IBB and some other smaller ISPs have no caps on their service yet don't charge a premium for it ?

Rip off merchants, plain and simple, second hand carpet sellers roaming around in their Hiace vans selling crap to people.

I'm done with arguing on here tbh as I know it's pretty pointless, what with half the board working for digiweb, an ISP who couldn't even pay their own bills to the Isreali company providing them the wireless kit years ago and who left their customers absolutely shafted when the Israeli's sent them a dodgy upgrade to be applied to all the kit, which Digiweb duly did, on a live system, destroying it all.

Only hope to improve the market in Ireland was with BT but with the state ESAT was in then - all hope was lost.

If Magnet and IBB merged into one company, they take over the whole market here and it would be for the better, driving out all the rest of the rip off merchants and finally providing Ireland and it's citizens with the hope of a decent broadband service for the future. It's probably too late now though with the downturn in the economy.

If you had a choice of a cap or no cap, only a retard would choose the capped service.

Me, if IBB weren't available here then I'd go back to Satellite broadband as there would be no way in hell I'd hand my money over to another stupid paddy rip off merchant.

The_Conductor

DingDong wrote:

I didn't want to say it but I agree eircom do have alot to answer for. Are they putting any money back into the network or just beating a dead horse?.

Current capital expenditure (according to their annual report) is below the rate of depreciation of their installed equipment and cables, and has been for the last 4 years running.

Recently when "party-lines" were identified as the reason why a number of people would never ever be able to activate ADSL on their copper, Eircom's response was to issue a statement that the government should fund the upgrade of these, and any other lines, as the lines were obviously laid before the company was privatised.

By the way- how can you reckon that less than half the average EU speed being the top speed available in our 8 best counties- and even comparing us to our close neighbour the UK- even allowing for iPlayer and other goodies- we're still right at the bottom of the heap. If you want a decent link between offices here, you either lay your own fibre (as several government departments did), or you use microwave links (ala the demonstrations on Georges Street a few years back). Even in the best of situations- you cannot get a reliable highspeed service here- unless you go and do it yourself.

S./

The_Conductor

PogMoThoin wrote:

What those stats don't show is that a large percentage of the rural population can't get broadband at all and have to rely on mobile internet or stay on dial up if all else fails

Its not just the rural population- I'm in Lucan village- precisely 11 miles from College Green in Dublin City Centre. Eircom are unable to offer me DSL, Smart and BT have yet to enable the exchange (for some strange reason I'm not on the Lucan exchange at all......) I've flirted with NTL cable BB and with Vodafone and 3 Broadband. I've a 3G mast, designed for a boat, wired into my wall to ensure coverage at peak times, and have NTL BB too- not that its reliable in the least...... At least I've moved on from using dialup via a data cable with my mobile.......

I despair.

challengemaster

flyswatter wrote: »

No, Ireland are one of the slowest in terms of broadband. Look at even the UK where you can get 8mb broadband for the same price as 1mb here and the UK is only middling in the average of broadband speeds.

Mate of mine in the UK has 8mb/1mb, his upload is the same/faster than my download speed... and he pays less than me.

everdead.ie

Nehaxak wrote: »

Not really as the caps imposed by ISPs are NOTHING more than another method for them to earn more money

By a different issue i just ment that this thread is about speed not caps or t&c's that go with broadband connections. Also try googling esb networks it operates fibre connections in ireland offering speeds in excess of 100mb but theese connections cost i think, hundreds of thousands of euro. And some operators can offer no caps either because they have a good fibre based network like smart or have ridiculus speeds so no one could ever actually do that much damage anyway.

Marlow

everdead.ie wrote: »

By a different issue i just ment that this thread is about speed not caps or t&c's that go with broadband connections. Also try googling esb networks it operates fibre connections in ireland offering speeds in excess of 100mb but theese connections cost i think, hundreds of thousands of euro. And some operators can offer no caps either because they have a good fibre based network like smart or have ridiculus speeds so no one could ever actually do that much damage anyway.

ESB's fiber connections cost a lot, but not 100's of thousands. We're talking less than 50k for a 100 mbit link between two locations and then the expenses for Co-location of router-equipment and obviously the cost of getting the bandwidth out. This is yearly.

Obviously the ISP then has to buy the bandwidth to the "world" somewhere etc. and maintain his own network. But if you take into consideration how many people can be serviced with that bandwidth it's not too pricy.

No CAP ISP's in Ireland are No CAP ISP's because they want to make a difference and have their network in order. Please exclude "fair policy" ISPs, as they have a CAP, but don't tell you what it is.

/Martin

JohnC.

If uncapped ISPs get popular, it will be interesting to see how long they keep a no cap policy. It happened in the UK before us, uncapped ISPs adding caps.

Marlow

Kahless wrote: »

If uncapped ISPs get popular, it will be interesting to see how long they keep a no cap policy. It happened in the UK before us, uncapped ISPs adding caps.

Irish Broadband is quite popular and has no CAPs.

We've hooked up over 700 customers in 2 years and really, the price of bandwidth is the least of our concerns. People choose us, because we don't have a cap. If we were to change that tomorrow, we'd loose half of our customerbase.

The more bandwidth an ISP buys, the cheaper it gets per mbit.

If ISPs start cap'ing their users, it's either because they get gready, have gready investors, overspend on their infrastructure in the wrong way or don't have their network in order.

Look in the nordics (Denmark, Sweden, Norway). You'd hardly find an ISP, that has a CAP.

/Martin

Sqaull20

So Irish broadband has no cap at all then?

I can happily download 200giga a month with no risk of being throtlled?

Interesting..

DingDong

UPC have a no cap package too although it does cost 80 for the 12meg package then

thebman

Well I consider a 120GB cap to be good enough for the vast, vast majority of users.

How much do you *need* to download in a month?

The uncapped option would be interesting with NTL as I'm sure it is probably subject to fair use in their terms and conditions like most ISP's with unlimited options.

everdead.ie

This is a regional map of Irelands fibre backbone it cost the esb about 50million to install cause they wrapped it round their electricity lines instead of putting it underground the red dots are the mans. It consists of 48 pairs of fibre wires each capable of delirvering 2.5gb/s that is why multinnationals can locate here. Unfourtunately i wasn't able to find prices for it i trawled through esb telecoms site but no. It also provides the fibre backbone for the likes of upc and magnet, digiweb ect. Now lets all imagine a time when probably irelands most succesful semi-state body delievers broadband to our homes oh wait is it time to sell it off now.:mad: