Eircom running out of money?

thebman

PogMoThoin wrote: »

:rolleyes: No point just blaming the Fianna Fail government, in fact the opposition were all for the sale of Eircom 2, blame our idiotic, corrupt politicians for being a backward nation that couldn't predict that we might need to hold on to our network.

Fixed, we didn't make the decision, our politicians did. If the opposition and government were both in favour of it then they are both fooking idiots.

A blind monkey on drugs could see that selling the entire communications infastructure to a private monopoly with little to no regulation was probably one of the worst ideas the country has had in a while.

Its a sign we need younger politicians TBH, ones that know how the modern world works and don't need millions spent on reports to throw them out the window and fook it all up anyway or worse getting incompetent people to right the reports in the first place because there a friend of their cousin.

Solair

I think it's a bit unfair to blame Mary O'Rourke on the whole thing. She only privatised Telecom Eireann. Her role ended at that point. Its privatisation wasn't the issue, it's that her colleague the then minister for communications and every minister for communications who has followed failed to regulate the sector properly. It's more than just eircom too, the cable industry was also allowed to fester and rot. It didn't roll out broadband etc and could have provided serious competition to eircom. It's only woken up in the last 12 months!

Whether eircom was public or private it would still be screwing us because it can!

MunsterCycling

€ircon couldn't screw us if the infrastucture wasn't owned by the BBQ boys from down under and their predessessors in Monaco, Mr Bean emporium. Its the owners of the network that have the real power and not the service providers which is all €ircon should be.

MC

BTW M O'R IIRC was the minister for Communications at the time of floatation of é1rc0n

telecomsman

bk wrote: »

Babcock & Brown shares suspended

http://www.rte.ie/business/2008/0820/babcock.html

Things looking really bad for them, it would seem like an excellent time for UPC, Smart and BT (LLU) to gain from Eircoms pain, I don't think Eircom will be upgrading their infrastructure any time soon.

If Smart were to push out a 24mb/1mb BB product now like BT, I'm sure they would gain lots of customers.

I think if anyone did a little bit of research here, they would find that while Babcock & Brown Ltd (B&B) does have an 8% interest in Babcock & Brown Capital Management (BCM), it does however have a completely separate corporate governance framework from that BCM. Allied to this is the fact that BCM has no share interest in B&B. Therefore I would suggest that any talk of Eircom as a whole being sold by BCM is pure paper talk and folly.

Solair

MunsterCycling wrote: »

€ircon couldn't screw us if the infrastucture wasn't owned by the BBQ boys from down under and their predessessors in Monaco, Mr Bean emporium. Its the owners of the network that have the real power and not the service providers which is all €ircon should be.

MC

BTW M O'R IIRC was the minister for Communications at the time of floatation of é1rc0n

She was actually Minister for Public Enterprise, so had responsibility exclusively for semi-state companies i.e. Telecom Eireann, ESB, CIE, Bord na Mona, etc etc. She'd actually no role in regulating the communications sector.

Moriarty

MunsterCycling wrote: »

It's funny (not in the Ha Ha way obviously) Moriarty that you regard the nations communications infrastructure as a vanity project, the fianna failure Government should never have sold the infrastructure off in the first place, it should have been turned over to a state organisation to administer in the nations interest and only allow the service providers access to network services on a lease basis, we would know who to blame if the infrastructure was crap like it is now and there could be no passing the buck in good auld fianna failure style.


MC

As long as the eircom network is operable, spending a crapload of taxpayers money reinvesting in it would be a vanity project. The government should be a buyer of last resort, to bastardise a banking term - only to step in when it's on the very edge of complete failure. If they can't even regulate the industry in any shape or form, there's no reason to believe that they could run the company any better.. and we'd be €xbillion worse off to boot.

Splitting the network from the retail arm and enforcing more than than the current half-ounce of ineffective regulation on the resulting wholesaler would have a far brighter outcome for the long term future of broadband here.

probe

April Raine wrote: »

Please can you expain what you mean by rebranding fiddle. Thanks!

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

probe

telecomsman wrote: »

I think if anyone did a little bit of research here, they would find that while Babcock & Brown Ltd (B&B) does have an 8% interest in Babcock & Brown Capital Management (BCM), it does however have a completely separate corporate governance framework from that BCM. Allied to this is the fact that BCM has no share interest in B&B. Therefore I would suggest that any talk of Eircom as a whole being sold by BCM is pure paper talk and folly.

BCM is a leveraged financial engineering entity operated by Babcock and Brown. Same address. Similar staffing. Babcock control it. Structures like this allow a tiny company like Babcock & Brown (worth €436 million as of 2008.08.22) to control eircom, without having to produce consolidated financial statements under IFRS. The Financial Times (Lex) estimated that Babcock's debt is around $50 billion this week.

BCM itself owes (according to its last annual report) just under $7 billion. It's market cap is about €340 million - a hell of a debt equity ratio!

.probe

www.babcockbrowncapital.com
http://babcockbrown.com
www.iasb.org

probe

Moriarty wrote: »

As long as the eircom network is operable, spending a crapload of taxpayers money reinvesting in it would be a vanity project. The government should be a buyer of last resort, to bastardise a banking term - only to step in when it's on the very edge of complete failure. If they can't even regulate the industry in any shape or form, there's no reason to believe that they could run the company any better.. and we'd be €xbillion worse off to boot.

Splitting the network from the retail arm and enforcing more than than the current half-ounce of ineffective regulation on the resulting wholesaler would have a far brighter outcome for the long term future of broadband here.

There is no point in spending 1c of taxpayers' money on eircom's network. It is worn out, obsolete, high cost, low performing, etc etc. No point in splitting up retail arms or any other cosmetic stuff like that either.

There is no alternative to a single, national open, future-proof, FTTH system which is open to all competitors to deliver their services - phone, internet, television, VoD, security monitoring, etc to the end user. Let eircom use this network, or if they wish they can take their copper wires down, and recycle the copper in the metals market, and liquidate everything!

.probe

probe

Solair wrote: »

She was actually Minister for Public Enterprise, so had responsibility exclusively for semi-state companies i.e. Telecom Eireann, ESB, CIE, Bord na Mona, etc etc. She'd actually no role in regulating the communications sector.

Don't be naive!

.probe

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.