National Postcodes to be introduced

clewbays

Sam Russell wrote: »

We might make the twenty-first century before it is half over.

So your house numbering and road naming has a target date of 2050 = sounds about right based on Australia's experience of trying to name rural roads. Eircodes will be 35 years old.

Sam Russell

clewbays wrote: »

So your house numbering and road naming has a target date of 2050 = sounds about right based on Australia's experience of trying to name rural roads. Eircodes will be 35 years old.

Eircode is already best described as a twentieth century solution, and mid twentieth century at that.

As for house numbering and road naming, this will only occur after we start the project. The postcode project is already more than a decade since it became an active project to be delayed. It existed as an aspiration for more than a decade before that. And guess what, the powers that be have chosen a dreadful camel of a horse type system.

Fortunately, in the twenty first century, we should be able to review and revamp it fairly easily because it is a computer based project. The telephone numbering system (a twentieth century invention) has been revamped several times in the last 40 years. Numbers have been added to the front and whole exchanges have been renumbered all without riots or marches on the exchanges.

So in a few years time, when the Eircode fails the way eVoting did, it can be redesigned to meet real peoples needs.

Leonard Shelby

Sam Russell wrote: »

So in a few years time, when the Eircode fails the way eVoting did, it can be redesigned to meet real peoples needs.

The postcode An Post delivers to you this year will be same one your house has until the day you die. Expansion has been built in, which is the only reason phone numbers had to change.

Sam Russell

I am sure similar things were said about the eVoting machines, and how they would not have hanging chads. Because of that fiasco, we will be using the same pencils to vote into the next century.

If Eircode is seen as the solution to unique addresses, heaven help us.

SpaceTime

We really need to give ComReg some role in standardising addresses. Postcodes don't really solve the chaos that is Irish addressing.

Sam Russell

Comreg do not even seem able to sort out the broadcasting.

my3cents

SpaceTime wrote: »

We really need to give ComReg some role in standardising addresses. Postcodes don't really solve the chaos that is Irish addressing.

To standardise our address system you have to identify each and every address then put all the addresses into a data base with locational information and in the process assign each address entry a unique key.

What do you think Eircode is?

Carawaystick

my3cents wrote: »

To standardise our address system you have to identify each and every address then put all the addresses into a data base with locational information and in the process assign each address entry a unique key.

What do you think Eircode is?

How do you figure out where someone lives from the eircode?

Sam Russell

A standard address should consist of:

House number, Street Name,
Locality,
Post Town,
County.
Post code.

For rural addresses, locality=Townland as defined by OSI.

Urban addresses tend to be nearly there but would suffer from Snob Locality vs Lesser Locality battles. Locality maps are the way out of this, but obviously there will still be battles on the fringes. Roads without proper numbering should be renumbered. House names are omitted. Apartments have the apartment name/scheme and the street name, if that is possible or an extra line but that can be sorted.

I would think it is not that difficult to do, but it needs to be started at some point and now would be good.

SpaceTime

Name,
House Number (Rural houses would be numbered based on distance along road)
Road Name or, if none, Road Number.
Townland and County
Post code

Ann Other
901 O'Connell Street,
Dublin
D01 X2Y3

Ann Other
182 L1235
Ballyconfusing Westmeath
XY1 9x9y

182 L1235 could simply mean 18.2 km down the L1235 (you'd put a marker on each and of it saying 0km and say 29km on the other end)

If you're going to have eircode, the county wouldn't be needed as much and could become optional.

Addresses shouldn't need to be longer than that.

HardenendMan

I am miffed with the people suggesting that addresses should be restructured to include numbers, street names etc.

Don't get me wrong, that logical solution is the ideal, and many countries have done it the right way.

But to take on such a task is like solving world hunger. It would be impossible trying to get consensus on a lot of place names. People are very strange about things like this.

As I stated a couple of pages back, I think the eircode is a good design, albeit with compromises. Necessary compromises.

I have read some more of the thread. I think a lot of people are unfair to heavily criticise the design and they don't seem to see the balance in what the design achieves.

I will repeat what I said before - random codes are GOOD for postcode design. It gives redundancy to an address. This is very helpful for sorting systems. Ok I agree it hinders the more manual operations.

But we live in a world where the Technical feasibilty should be the limit, not human ability. Previous postcode implementations did not have the same climate.

Impetus

SpaceTime wrote: »

You haven't been to many 3rd world countries then!
Also, ALL telecommunications tones originate in the pre-digital era. They were generated using rotating 'tone generators', relays and switches, including the continental ones. There's nothing unusual about that.

So, phones on one of the Irish mobile phone networks should only be able to be used for voice calls and SMS? The world moves on, and British 1950s tones are a tiny minority on this planet.

SpaceTime wrote: »

The reality is that *ALL* English-speaking countries use those warbling tones for ringing. We'd be the only English-speaking country not to use them if we changed. Also, it makes no particular difference as they're widely understood on the continent and elsewhere too. I've never encountered anyone having a difficulty with them.

Warbling tones in my experience are only used in Australia, NZ and similar.

SpaceTime wrote: »

The North American and British tones just developed in parallel to the ones used in continental Europe. They're all digitally generated and have been for decades, by very similar / identical equipment.

The US and British tones are totally different. And most mobile phones give an ITU-T standard ringing tone, (ie same as Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia etc) unless the mobile operator is engaged with the British terrorism (ie we are different to the rest of the EU state terrorism agenda), whereby the mobile operator overrides the normal tone wiht a british tone. Blueface is playing the same game with calls to many continental countries.

SpaceTime wrote: »

Almost all (except the Dutch and British) postal code systems in Europe just tell you the town/suburb.

While the NL postcode system has two letters at the end, the positioning of the code and the fact that it uses 4 digits to point to the town and sector makes it Euro-compatible. The British system as it stands is broken, its barcode system is at variance with the standard barcode used by An Post and virtually every post office system in Europe. You, and people like you want to compound the confusion and incompatability with a crappily designed fake "postcode" - to what end? According to "The Econimist" Britian is going to have to spend GBP 4 billion to bring its sorting system up to date. Which makes me ask why does Ireland want to create a system based on the British system (which was invented in the 1960s) that totally ignores the abilities of current mail sorting and database address management technologies? At a massive cost to the taxpayer and a huge risk to personal privacy and which delivers almost zero value added in terms of finding rural addresses?

SpaceTime

So basically you're saying that Irish people will put petty local nonsense and total intransigence against having a logical address system and end state's so incompetent that it can't do anything about it.

I'd certainly sum up most things wrong with this country : illogical planning overrides that mean unserviceable scattered housing, excrement in lakes and drinking water, slow broadband due to 12km lines connected to exchanges with 20 customers and so on...

Impetus

Sam Russell wrote: »

That is nonsense. If you insist that everyone has a smartphone in order to get about, why bother with road signs at all. Everyone will have a satnav - not so.

Not to mention the inaccuracy of GPS. Aside from availability of devices. And aside from the respect for the individual who starts at number 2 on a street or road and wants to go to 209 on the same road. Why should you or your granny have to take out a GPS device, with all its clumsy menu options, and missing street names have to put up with this rubbish, or else contribute to the millions paid to Capita etc? Appointed by a clueless government, the members of which have never lived in a functionally designed country. What hope for the logistics industry in Ireland who have to deliver stuff ordered on the WWW?

Gov.ie have turned postcodes into a racket - leaving the absence of road names and house numbers to continue a la 200 years ago.

SpaceTime

Impetus wrote: »

So, phones on one of the Irish mobile phone networks should only be able to be used for voice calls and SMS? The world moves on, and British 1950s tones are a tiny minority on this planet.

You've lost me there. I don't know what your point is.

Impetus wrote: »

Warbling tones in my experience are only used in Australia, NZ and similar.

UK, Ireland, Malta, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and many others use our ringing tone. The US, Canada and Japan also use a warbling tone. They're all generated by playing two tones simultaneously which interact. 450Hz and 400Hz for ours.

SpaceTime wrote: »

The North American and British tones just developed in parallel to the ones used in continental Europe. They're all digitally generated and have been for decades, by very similar / identical equipment.

Impetus wrote: »

The US and British tones are totally different. And most mobile phones give an ITU-T standard ringing tone, (ie same as Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia etc) unless the mobile operator is engaged with the British terrorism (ie we are different to the rest of the EU state terrorism agenda), whereby the mobile operator overrides the normal tone wiht a british tone. Blueface is playing the same game with calls to many continental countries.

Actually, increasingly tones aren't relevant.
Blueface and a few others are just ahead of the game on that as they're VoIP based.

When you call a number, the distant exchange sends an SS7 message (or SIP if it's VoIP) saying "ringing" … "playing announcement" …. "Busy/engaged" ... "Unavailable" ... "Invalid number" etc

Your local switch or even your handset can play out whatever tone, voice message or text information is most useful to you.

On the PSTN, you don't hear foreign busy tones etc anymore as the SS7 (digital signalling) message is all that's returned. However you still usually hear the other exchange's ring tone mostly because many exchanges don't distinguish between a voice announcement and ringing which is a bit confusing. (Ireland's systems all do.)

If you set your VoIP phone or ATA to generate ETSI tones, most numbers will ring in the continental style. Even Irish ones.

Blueface don't waste bandwidth connecting voice channels they don't need.

Where your point makes sense is for mobiles, most networks don't open voice channels to listen for the tones. This saves your battery and network radio spectrum. On the continental systems, all tones usually get generated by the handset. In Ireland only the busy, invalid number etc tones do, the ringing tone is audio. In Britain often all tones are audio. Three Ireland actually plays out an audio British busy tone meaning for example your car kit doesn't hang up automatically when it gets a busy line as there's no digital message sent. The phone just opens an audio channel to the 3 exchange instead and will keep playing that until it time out. Where as on every other Irish network the phone plays the tone and will display busy, and other info too (call being forwarded etc)

When I ring Ireland on a French mobile, I often get the normal French ringing tone btw. This increasingly happens on French landlines too.

Changing tones on Irish exchanges would probably be fairly trivial to do. It's just a software thing and could be done nationally but it's still something that would cost Eircom and others time and money so, I can't see it being a high prioritiy nas it's causing no problems!

Anyway, this is highly technical and totally off topic!

I suggest we stick to postcodes.

HardenendMan

SpaceTime wrote: »

So basically you're saying that Irish people will put petty local nonsense and total intransigence against having a logical address system and end state's so incompetent that it can't do anything about it.

Yes! I agree it is sad, but it is a fact of life. People designing the Eircode seem to have accepted certain facts like this, and come up with a compromise that will work for most applications, and work well IMO.

People are strange - it will become that A65 1 is a so called "postcode ghetto", A65 9 may be affluent. The A65 part is big enough to not experience this (with the exception of existing legacy Dublin issues).

I know this is illogical silliness. But it is a fact that Eircode had to consider. Do you agree?

HardenendMan

Impetus wrote: »

Not to mention the inaccuracy of GPS. Aside from availability of devices. And aside from the respect for the individual who starts at number 2 on a street or road and wants to go to 209 on the same road. Why should you or your granny have to take out a GPS device, with all its clumsy menu options, and missing street names have to put up with this rubbish, or else contribute to the millions paid to Capita etc? Appointed by a clueless government, the members of which have never lived in a functionally designed country. What hope for the logistics industry in Ireland who have to deliver stuff ordered on the WWW?

Gov.ie have turned postcodes into a racket - leaving the absence of road names and house numbers to continue a la 200 years ago.

This is the very negative and harsh criticism I mentioned in a previous post. It is not very objective.

To solve Granny's problem you would need an impossible overhaul of Irish addressing. That wasn't Captia's brief. So why not focus on the postcode itself?

SpaceTime

HardenendMan wrote: »

Yes! I agree it is sad, but it is a fact of life. People designing the Eircode seem to have accepted certain facts like this, and come up with a compromise that will work for most applications, and work well IMO.

People are strange - it will become that A65 1 is a so called "postcode ghetto", A65 9 may be affluent. The A65 part is big enough to not experience this (with the exception of existing legacy Dublin issues).

I know this is illogical silliness. But it is a fact that Eircode had to consider. Do you agree?

To a degree yes, but to another it's just the same kind of populist pandering that results in many Irish systems being a total mess - planning being the main example of this.

Impetus

SpaceTime wrote: »

You've lost me there. I don't know what your point is.



UK, Ireland, Malta, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and many others use our ringing tone. The US, Canada and Japan also use a warbling tone. They're all generated by playing two tones simultaneously which interact. 450Hz and 400Hz for ours.
etc stuff deleted - saving bandwidth

I suggest we stick to postcodes.

The regular Japanese ringing tone warbles – I would define warble as melodic embellishment.



The US ringing tone does not warble, it is 440 + 480 Hz 2 sec on 4 sec off. The British ringing tone used in Ireland 0.4 seconds noise, 0.2 sec pause, 0.4 second noise, and a 2 second pause. An annoyingly overstated cadence which remains unchanged since they first introduced “automatic” telephone exchanges.


Malta uses the normal ITU-T ringing tone. Eg +356 27 27 00 00. Australia does not use the British tone – their tone is sine wave. Hong Kong and New Zealand are also different – closer to the Japanese tone, but with a warbling melody. ZA is different too.


VoIP is hardly “ahead of the game”. It has been out for years. In fact, using a VoIP phone set to ITU-T call progress tones on Blueface, one hears a British ringing tone even when calling a mainland European number. Forced on the phone, against the customers’ wishes by Blueface.


Mobile phones also have ITU-T tones built in, but Irish networks waste bandwidth by sending call progress tones using the British ringing tone – instead of letting the phone generate the tone, along the C7 lines you referred to. This is a far bigger waste of airtime than a VoIP phone connected to the internet would involve.


>>> If you set your VoIP phone or ATA to generate ETSI tones, most numbers will ring in the continental style. Even Irish ones.
No it doesn’t – not on Snom VoIP phones anyway.

Impetus

SpaceTime wrote: »

Name,

Ann Other
182 L1235
Ballyconfusing Westmeath
XY1 9x9y

County and province names are not used in any country other than Ireland (in postal addresses) - and they certainly will be of no use with a postcode.

SpaceTime

Actually deleting comment as it's too OT.

SpaceTime

SpaceTime wrote: »

I don't see what any of this has to do with postal codes.

This whole thread has turned into an episode of "Ever decreasing circles" so anything that breaks the circular arguments is welcome.

I'd rather people just used this thread to discuss the timeframe of the introduction of the postcode as the technical & political aspects have really been done to death.

SpaceTime

Deleted User wrote: »

This whole thread has turned into an episode of "Ever decreasing circles" so anything that breaks the circular arguments is welcome.

I'd rather people just used this thread to discuss the timeframe of the introduction of the postcode as the technical & political aspects have really been done to death.

Well there is a point in saying that Ireland and Britain do tend to go out of their way to be non-standard on a whole load of basic things.

I find for a lot of things, Ireland seems to still consider "Europe" a very foreign place and something that we are clearly not part of. It's evident in all of these little technical things which European countries tend to want to try and harmonise while we just seem to be more focused on the UK or even the US than continental Europe.

Most European countries reformed their addressing practices and introduced postal codes many decades ago. Ireland ignored all of these trends and just continued using a Victorian model that we'd inherited from the GPO in 1921.

Continental style postal codes and addressing would have even been useful for manual and semi-manual sorting of letters, which is largely what it was introduced for.

I do think that Ireland's tendency towards 'exceptionalism' comes down to the island mentality though as well as proximity to the UK, which generally considers "Europe" to be a foreign concept anyway.

For example, for totally practical reasons, all of Europe (and way beyond the EU) signed up to the Vienna Convention on road signage. Ireland didn't bother and came up with some weird mix of European, North American and home-brew signage some of which directly clashes (and has opposite meanings) to normal European signage.

The British plug/socket system has few, if any, technical advantages, it's very cumbersome for portable appliances and is used in only 4 EU countries (two of which are tiny Mediterranean islands). This creates a barrier to entry for companies selling appliances and forces Irish retailers into Sterling supply chains as all appliances sold here require localisation to fit British plugs. From a consumer's point of view this means - less choice and higher prices and no advantage to being in the Eurozone.

Plumbing - Ireland's using it's own pipe sizes that are literally used by nobody else, not even the UK. These seem to have been arrived at by some weird intransigence and conventions and results in higher prices for plumbing supplies here as well as lack of consumer choice for accessories.

Telecoms - the unusual ringing tone as mentioned above (although almost everything else in Ireland's networks is highly ETSI/ITU standardised, much more so than the UK and even many continental countries - there was never any advantage for Ireland setting weird standards, where as in the UK, France, Germany etc there was as it protected local suppliers from international competition. We didn't have many local equipment suppliers.)

The postal code thing seems to be a case of reinventing the wheel too, although our addressing system is so completely bonkers it doesn't look like we have a lot of options as nobody's prepared to actually reform it and make it logical.

SpaceTime

@Impetus - There are actually rather complicated reasons for the Irish ringing tone having evolved as it did.
Despite independence, until Telecom Éireann arrived, the old P&T had retained a huge degree of dependence on the GPO in the UK for international connectivity and was even semi-integrated into the British network for a long time. For example, if you were calling Ireland from the UK, it wasn't an international call you dialled 0001 for Dublin, 0002, Limerick 0006 for Cork and so on. Calling the UK from Ireland was done by dialling 03+UK number.
The GPO or BT national "100" operator could also connect Irish calls and the Irish national "10" operator could do the same with British ones. They were basically treated like Kingston Telecommunication in Hull or the Isle of Mann's services.

While P&T used different switching equipment, mostly Ericsson, in its post WWII era, it still had to maintain all sorts of signalling standard norms with the UK.

During the 1970s but more so when things went digital under Telecom Eireann we began to break that link with the UK and established substantial independent international connectivity for the first time and standards developed here that were exclusively based on ETSI and ITU recommendations. For example, we were very early to adopt things like standardised signalling that ultimately led to SS7. There was absolutely no advantage to Telecom Eireann in having systems that didn't comply with standards as it would have increased equipment costs and reduced supplier options.

There was no reason why we couldn't have changed ringing tone even in the 1970s or 80s. It wouldn't have been particularly difficult to change the ring tone on the Ericsson crossbars either, as the tones were all generated by one piece of equipment.

In the digital era, it should be a matter of just changing it in software, although I guess it's still expensive to do as it would require testing and rollout. However the exchanges used here (by Eircom anyway) are identical to those used in France in particular, a mixture of Alcatel E10 and Ericsson AXE.

As for the tones : warbling just means a modulation of the frequency. In the case of pretty much every English-speaking country and Japan, that's done by playing out two interfering tones simultaneously that creates a 'beat' pattern.

Ireland, Britain, NZ, HK : 400+450Hz ... some other countries also use this and Australia uses it for mobiles.
USA, Canada: 440+480Hz
Australian and Japanese landlines use some other combination of tones to produce a similar effect.

Irish landlines:
Dial tone: 425Hz - (ETSI/ITU-T standard) - UK one is the US one!
Busy tone: 425Hz - 0.5sec on, 0.5sec off (ETSI/ITU-T standard) - UK: 400 Hz tone with equal 0.375-sec.
Reorder (technical issue with routing / wrong number) : 425Hz 0.25 on / 0.25 off (ETSI/ITU-T standard) - UK: uses a 425Hz contnious tone i.e. what everyone else uses as a dial tone!?
SIT (wrong number etc) - 950Hz, 1400Hz, 1800Hz for 330ms each followed by 1 sec of silence (used in the UK too)
Ringback: 450+400 - 0.4 s ON, 0.2 s OFF, 0.4 s ON, 2.0 s OFF repeated.

Old Irish ringtone (Crossbar): 425Hz modulated by 50Hz (mains frequency)
0.4 s ON, 0.2 s OFF, 0.4 s ON, 2.4 +/- 0.2 s OFF

ukoda

[Deleted User] wrote: »

This whole thread has turned into an episode of "Ever decreasing circles" so anything that breaks the circular arguments is welcome.

I'd rather people just used this thread to discuss the timeframe of the introduction of the postcode as the technical & political aspects have really been done to death.

This is pretty much what I said and i got a Mod warning to tell me stop trying to shut down debate!

BarryM

ukoda wrote: »

This is pretty much what I said and i got a Mod warning to tell me stop trying to shut down debate!

Mod power....!!

Re implementation: I understand it won't be "obligatory" as if it ever could but will it be used by the gov in its communications? Could be quite an effort for people like revenue and social a whole new 7 digit field in the db and the data entry issue; even allowing for access to the data set. It made me wonder how do they deal with the paddy murphys now? somewhat confidential their communications.

ukoda

BarryM wrote: »

Mod power....!!

Re implementation: I understand it won't be "obligatory" as if it ever could but will it be used by the gov in its communications? Could be quite an effort for people like revenue and social a whole new 7 digit field in the db and the data entry issue; even allowing for access to the data set. It made me wonder how do they deal with the paddy murphys now? somewhat confidential their communications.

All government departments are currently upgrading their systems to have ericode on them for launch. That's what we have been told by the government

Sam Russell

I hope they have allowed for a larger field than just 7 characters. They may need it for the redesign in 2017.

ukoda

Sam Russell wrote: »

I hope they have allowed for a larger field than just 7 characters. They may need it for the redesign in 2017.

The way it's designed and uses random characters will mean there's enough capacity in it to have more eircodes than we could actually build houses for.

Why would they ever need extra characters?

SpaceTime

I'd prefer something with more ability to pick out small areas, but anything would be better than the chaos we have at the moment.

Is there any rollout date on this system?