Eircom running out of money?

April Raine

probe wrote: »

eircom really provides about 95% of the DSL connections in IRL. You too could "compete" with eircom by setting up April Raine Broadband LLC, and going to the eircomwholesale website http://www.eircomwholesale.ie/products/subproduct_details.asp?id=71 and "signing up".

Your customers would get Genuine (TM Microsoft) April Raine Broadband LLC invoices every month - but you would be paying over most of the money to eircom. Needless to say your prices would be determined by eircom, as would the speeds you could offer, contention ratios, non-use of ADSL2+, latency, etc. And when the eircom broadband network broke down in area X, April Raine broadband customers would be disconnected too!

As this punter found out recently: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=56977176&postcount=37

.probe

Thanks . Do you mean that companies like Perlico and other BB providers are doing this?

probe

April Raine wrote: »

Thanks . Do you mean that companies like Perlico and other BB providers are doing this?

Yes. BT etc every DSL provider is doing it. About 5% of DSL customers are unbundled - which means their provider is their provider. The other 95% are eircom customers directly or indirectly.

.probe

April Raine

probe wrote: »

Yes. BT etc every DSL provider is doing it. About 5% of DSL customers are unbundled - which means their provider is their provider. The other 95% are eircom customers directly or indirectly.

.probe

OK thanks for explaining it. You can hace free BB when I start April Raine Broadband:D

old boy

i can see an eircom tower from my yard, its on top of a mountain, it is sending out a b.band wireless signal for yonks, there are about 10 people using it for free as it is been tested, i offered to pay for this service about 30 times and was refused,

Solair

The single biggest problem is that Comreg is basically useless. It seems that it's both legislatively hobbled and internally incompetent.

I have no doubt that there was plenty of lobbying from vested interests who wanted to keep the regulator as weak as possible. I think that warrants at least a bit of investigative journalism.

However, I also think that there was an idiotic assumption by many TDs that eircom plc was still behaving like the old Telecom Eireann i.e. working in the national interest. Our politicians and senior civil servants seem to have been utterly clueless about broadband infrastructure, most of them don't know any more about it than your average 'awl one' who still thinks that eircom is P&T. Yet these people were making decisions on long term communications infrastructure policy.

There was absolutely no attempt made by anyone in Fianna Fail over the last 10+ years to do anything meaningful to get this problem solved.

I'm only hoping that Eamon Ryan is slightly more tech savvy than the people who have been in that office in the past.

We had a similar crisis situation in the 1970s when the Irish phone network was so under invested in and mismanaged by P&T that it had become an economic liability to the growth of the economy and an international laughing stock. That led to a very rapid digitalisation project that brought it from one of the worst networks in europe to the cutting edge of technology by the late 80s.

We have excellent international connectivity via big fibre optic links and a pretty decent national backbone infrastructure. The single sticking point is local access to all of these highways. It's like we've a huge motorway network with no on/off ramps (entrances/exits). If you're a big corporate entity or if you're lucky enough to have access to Smart or Magnet LLU or UPC (Chorus/NTL) you can access it at reasonable speed, but otherwise you're stuck on access via the eircom boreen road network.

eircom for a whole variety of reasons has failed to invest and has held up development of the access networks that most of us are stuck with. Now we're facing into a situation where eircom, due to external factors impacting upon their majority shareholder is going to find it very hard to get funds to invest in anything. They're undoubtedly going to try and hold up the market and avoid decent roll out of LLU as they won't be able to lead the market in terms of speed. They're also going to try to claw in as much revenue as possible.

Comreg / the department of communications HAS to force LLU to happen on a widespread scale, or we're stuck in this situation.

UPC's pushing things forward as their cable network improves, but that's only 1 alternative ISP. We need LLU and we need it immediately and wireless is really only a half-baked alternative given the state of the current technologies. It's ideal in some rural areas, but in urban areas due to the density of subscribers it tends to get very flakey and congested.

If Babcock and Brown folds and has to sell eircom off at a discounted rate it could be a good thing. Maybe this time it might get bought out by a communications company who can actually drive things forward. It could also provide an opportunity to do something about opening up the access network e.g. by the state taking a majority share in the access networks.

The value in the traditional eircom network may ultimately not be the actual copper wire and exchanges, rather that it has ducts, poles and access pathways to every home in the country. Ultimately these could be re-used.

The short term aim should be a fibre-copper hybrid network where you have fibre optic network linking out to street-side cabinets. These feed out to the existing telephone lines providing voice/data services with the option of linking some subscribers to higher speeds with either fibre or coax. Because the lines are shorter, it means that speeds can be much much higher and there's very little congestion.

You'd immediately have the option of :
Basic voice service
ADSL2+ (up to 24mbit/s) over high quality short copper lines.
Coax - cable like access similar to UPC up to 160mbit/s
fibre to home - full fibre connection.

That can then make a gradual jump to full fibre-to-the-home.

It MUST be a fully compeditive and open infrastructure though and if eircom are not prepared to all to allow that, they need to be bypassed / forced to sell their access network back to the state or compelled to allow access to the physical infrastructure i.e. ducts, poles, pipes, buildings so that someone else can do it.

Any network of this type should be designed to be fully open access to any telecommunications company from the word go. Not some locked-down eircom network that requires everyone else to resell eircom services.

It isn't THAT difficult to achieve either. You just run enough 'netural fibre' i.e. not owned by eircom but rather by some state body / the local council or whatever into each of these nodes and provide an extensive standardised duct network so that these nodes can easily have new fibre pulled into them should the need arise 10,20,30+ years into the future.

There's also an argument in my opinion for opening up UPCs cable network to competition too. Perhaps a deal could be struck allowing UPC into eircom's physical infrastructure e.g. allow them to run fibre / coax on eircom poles and into eircom's ducts.

Scram

Funny you should mention this coz i got a "harvey Normas" advert in the door the other day and it said in big bold writing that "Eircom was now 3mb". I checked the eircom site and i found out that these so called "upgrades" were suppose to have happened in june-july. But i aint seen no increase yet nor heard any letter about. Dundalk area by the way.l

Strange tbh.