Broadband - Distance from Exchange

hjr

Last week the Eircom guy, Paul Bradley, told the govt. committee that anybody outside 5km from the exchange would never receive DSL broadband. Now according to the Eircom website the following is stated:

How close do I need to be living to an exchange to get broadband?
You need to be living within 8 kilometres of your local exchange. This distance represents the total length of the cable route, and not the shortest distance "as the crow flies".

So I'm just wondering which is correct?? I live 8.5 kms from an exchange which is due to be enabled and would hope that if 8KM were the correct answer, then the .5 could be dealt with.

Also, do Eircom use any DSL Repeaters to boost the DSL distance for people living further than the permitted distance from the exchange?

I am currently using 1MB Satellite Broadband from NBB and while it is ok most of the time, it is genuinely terrible at weekends, due to congestion I guess...its taken about 4 minutes to open this page, and even reading the paper online is a pain. Forget about downloading of files as well, cos the speed is comparable to dialup, esp. at weekends.

So hopefully I'll hear good news on my DSL query and I can forget about Satellite!

Thanks in advance!

Sponge Bob

@ 8km you are at the mercy of one crap joint .....somewhere .....and that eircom will not devote any resources to finding it . It may work fine of course.

Therefore you must be prepared to complain bitterly about each and every strange noise or echo or crackle on that line to get it cleaned up and fixed if it is in any way unstable .

What is your dial up speed by the way and is it consistent or is it weather affected..eg it has not rained for a while ??

hjr

Hi Sponge bob,
Thanks for your reply:

I don't know how good my dialup is as I just built a new house and 5 months ago and had satellite broadband installed about a week after we moved in!

My parents live next door, about 300 metres away and they use dialup and its seems fine for dialup, no major changes with different weather.

I remember when we got the line in for the telephone in our new house, the technician said we had got the last two pair of lines from the exchange and that about 600 metres of it had to be replaced as it had been damaged, so I guess out of about 8000 metres of line, i know for certain that 600 metres of it is pretty ok!!!!

What options are there to boost the signal if I am just outside the distance? I would happily live with consistent 2MB download speeds, no fancy dan here looking for 7.6MB let alone 24MB!

Does anybody here have a broadband connection and live at least 7-8 kilometres from the exchange?

Snaga

At 8km from the exchange - the cable could be another km on top of that. You will not get a stable dsl connection at that kind of distance. If it syncs at all, your looking at ~0.5Mb and youll be lucky if its stable.

There is nothing eircom will do to boost the signal to get over the last hump - if there was, they would be selling dsl out to 8km, not the 5km they currently can.

Are there any wireless providers close to you? Your far likelier to get a good wireless service than a dsl service at that distance.

Sponge Bob

They certainly never entertained installing repeaters . They shall in time as they only cost about €100 a line at a time if you put a 4 port repeater on for 4 lines .

Per line maybe €200 installed .

Baneblade

at 5+ km they wont guarantee what connection you will get, at that distance you will probably only get 160kbps maybe 256kbps if your lucky

lucernarian

There's a few errors in some of the posting on this thread. To put it politely:)

Below are the stats for my line. I'm about 6km from the exchange as the road goes, 6.5km as the cable route goes. Eircom told me a couple of years ago that my line attenuation was 78dB and that "we cannot provide broadband on this line".

Line State:Up Modulation: DMT Data Path:Interleave

Downstream Upstream
Max Allowed Speed (kbps)1024 128
SN Margin (dB) 15.60 20.00
Line Attenuation (dB) 52.50 31.50
CRC Errors 44 1

The cabinet which I believe serves us, is the same cabinet that was installed in the late 70s. No RSU for out here currently.

I admit that the stats aren't always the norm, but a neighbour has similar stats, and there are a few friends and locals here in the area, who would also be a long distance (4 miles) from my or neighbouring exchanges but are enjoying 1mbit DSL from the amber program. As Spongebob says, it doesn't take much for a long line to lose signal. A family friend a couple of miles away, completely lost his DSL connection after eircom did work in the area to connect up a new house but after a fault report, the problem was fixed. The line worked perfectly for voice throughout this.


To the OP: From what I've worked out with pass data and based on my own line as a reference point, and what eircom have said in statements and old SEC filings: The absolute cutoff for ordering DSL is a line attenuation of 98dB. Having said that, I've seen inconsistencies in this, and some lines with pairgains will be marked as amber, and some will be failed. I think a lot depends on the opinion of the local engineers. 98dB translates into a bit over 8km line length according to eircom.

Snaga

A line with an attenuation of over 65db will not sync reliably using adsl2+ - if at all. Ive seen some 63db lines hold at up to a meg, but they are not very stable. I dont know where you got 98db from, but that figure is way too high.

Every extra 3db's of attenuation is a doubling of the signal loss!! (Its a logarithmic scale, not a linear one).

This graph is a decent guide - while it is based on averages and some lines will perform better - dont count on doing much outside of these lines.

http://www.internode.on.net/residential/internet/home_adsl/extreme/

If your going to be on the bad end of this scale - its just not worth the pain if there is a reliable wireless solution in the area.

lol5605

Is Digiweb, IBB ect not a option, that would proaby be the best for you.

lucernarian

Snaga wrote: »

A line with an attenuation of over 65db will not sync reliably using adsl2+ - if at all. Ive seen some 63db lines hold at up to a meg, but they are not very stable. I dont know where you got 98db from, but that figure is way too high.

Every extra 3db's of attenuation is a doubling of the signal loss!! (Its a logarithmic scale, not a linear one).

This graph is a decent guide - while it is based on averages and some lines will perform better - dont count on doing much outside of these lines.

http://www.internode.on.net/residential/internet/home_adsl/extreme/

If your going to be on the bad end of this scale - its just not worth the pain if there is a reliable wireless solution in the area.

I would like to see your sources. Mine is a private email I got from someone in eircom's management after I emailed their CEO 3 or 4 years ago about being connected to a DSL enabled exchange but not passing the line test. He said the attenuation of my line was 78dB. Eircom have publicly stated that their estimate line distance based on attenuation of 12dB/km. This was in a SEC filing. My line is about 6km long as the road goes, a bit longer by the duct routes so this value stacks up. Lines a full km further for the exchange get a "may be suitable" result, so clearly the attenuation limit for eircom to offer DSL is well beyond 78dB.

Some of my neighbours are further again and also have stable 1 mbit. Unless repeaters are being used on the eircom network, which I'm not aware of, then what I'm saying is correct.

And I wouldn't trust some graph over empirical and practical evidence of how the amber programme works and how BT got very long lines working in the UK, 2 or 3 years before eircom.