National Postcodes to be introduced

a65b2cd

Trouwe Ier wrote: »

Is anyone else aware of other large areas?

According to the CSO release, H91 and T12 are quite large but once someone has ECAF or ECAD they can give more accurate figures.

Alun

FishOnABike wrote: »

I've heard of this being used by mountain rescue to locate casualties.

It's called SarLoc and has been used successfully many times here in Ireland.

https://www.facebook.com/SarlocRescue

marmurr1916

Deleted User wrote: »

What like this site you mean http://www.postoffice.co.uk/postcode-finder

That database works both ways, just like the public eircode look-up database.

If I type in my UK postcode into the Royal Mail website, I get a list of 38 possible matches.

38 matches. Please type more of the address to refine your results

Obviously I know my own address. But if I was working for a company and only knew the postcode, I wouldn't be able to find a specific address or locate a specific address on a map or using a sat-nav device.

That public Royal Mail database is limited to 50 free searches per day, better than eircode's 15 but I don't know of any UK equivalent to www.saorcode.ie which bypasses RM's limit.

Why do we set a limit on searches?
Close
Our Postcode and Address Finder is for customers who occasionally need to look up address details.

If your business regularly searches for more than 50 addresses a day, Royal Mail offers a range of address and postcode information management products. Find out more about the Postcode Address File (PAF) Opens in new window or call 0845 606 6854.

http://www.postoffice.co.uk/postcode-finder

Postcode Address File (PAF) website:

http://www.poweredbypaf.com/

For those who think that commercial use of Royal Mail's PAF is free:

I have an e-commerce website, how much does it cost to license use of PAF?

Organisations with a low volume use may prefer ‘Pay As You Go’ by licensing blocks of transactions, prices start from £1.20 for 100 clicks. Alternatively, larger users may wish to simply cap their costs. Speak to a Solutions Provider for more information.

Can my micro-business qualify for free access to PAF?

If you are a micro-business with 9 employees or fewer and turnover below £2 million per annum, you may qualify for a free copy of Full PAF for the purposes of developing PAF-based addressing solutions. At the point that you have completed your development and your solution is available for your own use or use by others, data and appropriate licence fees will apply. To find out more, please Contact Us.

http://www.poweredbypaf.com/faqs/

SpaceTime

bk wrote: »

It is a really nice hack for something that should really exist at the operating system level of all smartphones world wide.

Reading stories like the following of people who were able to contact emergency services but weren't able to give their exact location and thus died while the technology exists to easily do it makes me extremely mad:

- July 2009, Massif du Mont-Blanc, France
- Dr Bivort, a 77 year-old Belgian doctor, was hiking in the Massif du Mont-Blanc.
- He called the 10-digits special emergency number and reported that he suffered a leg injury.
- He remained online for more than one hour trying to detail his position.
- Due to the lack of collaboration between emergency services and MNOs, the location was not made during the call
-The MNO managed to locate the cell after the call but the battery went
dead.
- First responders searched for Dr Bivort for the following 3 weeks.
- Dr Bivort’s remains were found 2 years later

Madness!! We have the techonolgy to trivial send our location via Whatsapp, facebook, etc. for fun, but emergency services can't find our location in an emergency!!!!

Iceland simply had a 112 app. You could report your location (including via SMS in areas with poor data coverage) and you could call emergency services or, just check in with them to let them know you were in a remote area.

SpaceTime

Some screenshots of Iceland 112 we should absolutely have this too!

Available for iPhone, Android & Windows phone.

plodder

Trouwe Ier wrote: »

My own "V94" covers a huge area from Coose North, Co. Galway to Ballina and Birdhill in Co. Tipperary to Kilkinlea the last townland on the N21 in Co. Limerick before the Kerry border.

Is anyone else aware of other large areas?

The FTAI say they are going to publish maps of the routing key areas. Will be very interesting

http://www.ftai.ie/news-item/New_news-00003/

OU812

SpaceTime wrote: »

Some screenshots of Iceland 112 we should absolutely have this too!

Available for iPhone, Android & Windows phone.

That could easily be modified for here, right ?

irishgeo

irishgeo wrote: »

news car have to have the technology to allow to it phone in a crash when it happens with gps co ordinates. i think its happening soon.

Cars with "black boxes", the freemen will love that!

ukoda

plodder wrote: »

The FTAI say they are going to publish maps of the routing key areas. Will be very interesting

http://www.ftai.ie/news-item/New_news-00003/

I find the FTAI stance funny, it went from:

It's of no use to any of our members

Some of our members won't use it

Part of it might be of some use to our members


What's next I wonder? They are about 3 steps away from coming full circle and supporting eircode

plodder

marmurr1916 wrote: »

That database works both ways, just like the public eircode look-up database.

If I type in my UK postcode into the Royal Mail website, I get a list of 38 possible matches.



Obviously I know my own address. But if I was working for a company and only knew the postcode, I wouldn't be able to find a specific address or locate a specific address on a map or using a sat-nav device.

That public Royal Mail database is limited to 50 free searches per day, better than eircode's 15 but I don't know of any UK equivalent to www.saorcode.ie which bypasses RM's limit.



Postcode Address File (PAF) website:

http://www.poweredbypaf.com/

For those who think that commercial use of Royal Mail's PAF is free:





http://www.poweredbypaf.com/faqs/

Who has said that commercial use of the PAF was free?

Are you confusing this with the open data initiative which has released postcodes and their locations for free?

SpaceTime

OU812 wrote: »

That could easily be modified for here, right ?

I'm sure it could or something very similar coded. It's hardly patented.

marmurr1916

Sam Russell wrote: »

They are all secret. Privacy issue.

:rolleyes:

List of eircode routing keys:

http://www.ossiansmyth.ie/eircode-routing-keys/

clewbays

plodder wrote: »

The FTAI say they are going to publish maps of the routing key areas.

How did their complaint to the Ombudsman turn out? They are being emboldened by their success in attracting media attention.

bk

SpaceTime wrote: »

Iceland simply had a 112 app. You could report your location (including via SMS in areas with poor data coverage) and you could call emergency services or, just check in with them to let them know you were in a remote area.

Yes, I saw that earlier today, looks great.

The really nice feature about it is that you can send your current location, even in a non emergency situation, just so the emergency services know where to start looking if you do go missing.

- Great idea if you were going hiking, you could send your location at the start of a trail and update every few hours when you have signal.
- Or a lady going to a party in a strangers house.

However despite this I really think all these emergency services seem horribly disjointed around the world, with different countries or even local areas using different standards and different technology.

That is particularly dangerous when you consider how much people travel these days and in particular on adventure holidays.

Really the EU and the US * should get together and develop a standard for this and force the mobile phone companies (Apple, Google, etc.) to implement it and the operating system level.

The EU was able to force the mobile phone industry to standardise on micro USB for charging and the US was able to force them to all add remote locking to reduce theft. You would imagine forcing them to add this at the OS level would be easier and much more important!

* I believe the US has in fact development such a system and is mandating it's use, but I don't think it is an open standard and it doesn't seem to have spread around the world like other standards.

OU812 wrote: »

That could easily be modified for here, right ?

Unfortunately not. It would be easy to modify the app, the difficult part is the emergency services would have to update their server software to support it and the processes surrounding it.

ukoda

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=zrmXDfjvem7g.k2eSAnvagEdQ


All the ericode routing keys

SpaceTime

bk wrote: »

Yes, I saw that earlier today, looks great.

The really nice feature about it is that you can send your current location, even in a non emergency situation, just so the emergency services know where to start looking if you do go missing.

- Great idea if you were going hiking, you could send your location at the start of a trail and update every few hours when you have signal.
- Or a lady going to a party in a strangers house.

However despite this I really think all these emergency services seem horribly disjointed around the world, with different countries or even local areas using different standards and different technology.

That is particularly dangerous when you consider how much people travel these days and in particular on adventure holidays.

Really the EU and the US * should get together and develop a standard for this and force the mobile phone companies (Apple, Google, etc.) to implement it and the operating system level.

The EU was able to force the mobile phone industry to standardise on micro USB for charging and the US was able to force them to all add remote locking to reduce theft. You would imagine forcing them to add this at the OS level would be easier and much more important!

* I believe the US has in fact development such a system and is mandating it's use, but I don't think it is an open standard and it doesn't seem to have spread around the world like other standards.



Unfortunately not. It would be easy to modify the app, the difficult part is the emergency services would have to update their server software to support it and the processes surrounding it.

E112 has been being rolled out for ages - it's supposed to give enhanced geolocation of 112 calls. It's been an EU directive since 2003, but France failed to implement it, as illustrated above. We've still got a few countries not even properly supporting the 112 emergency number at all - sometimes routes to only the police or some odd setup instead of a single call answering service like we have.

plodder

marmurr1916 wrote: »

:rolleyes:

List of eircode routing keys:

http://www.ossiansmyth.ie/eircode-routing-keys/

That's not a complete list.

mada999

SpaceTime wrote: »

Some screenshots of Iceland 112 we should absolutely have this too!

Available for iPhone, Android & Windows phone.

that'll be another €200,000,000 please.... :cool:

SpaceTime

mada999 wrote: »

that'll be another €200,000,000 please.... :cool:

Oh at least.

Probably just develop their own mobile OS and launch a fleet of Eirsat satellites to handle GPS ...

bk

SpaceTime wrote: »

E112 has been being rolled out for ages - it's supposed to give enhanced geolocation of 112 calls. It's been an EU directive since 2003, but France failed to implement it, as illustrated above. We've still got a few countries not even properly supporting the 112 emergency number at all - sometimes routes to only the police or some odd setup instead of a single call answering service like we have.

Well according to this very interesting presentation, E112 only supplies the cell you are connected to and maybe the cell sector. That is far from being very accurate:

Accuracy (COCOM Report 2014):
–
wide majority of Member States, including Ireland, reported Cell ID or sector ID for mobile caller location.
Cell ID / sector ID not accurate enough
No Member State has imposed stricter
caller location criteria, although the
available technical solutions today allow
for much better accuracy

http://kildare.ie/CountyCouncil/FireService/CFOAConference2014/Presentations/D1-04%20Tony%20O%27Brien%20Mobile%20caller%20location%20information.pdf

That is why SAR has to use services like sarloc and locateme112. A cell ID in a rural area could cover an area tens if not hundreds of kilometers wide!!

Again, the mobile phones should really be reporting this at the operating system level.

bk

SpaceTime wrote: »

Probably just develop their own mobile OS and launch a fleet of Eirsat satellites to handle GPS ...

Funny you should mention that

http://www.cospas-sarsat.int/en/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cospas-Sarsat_Programme

Which is too be updated to a far superior system in the next two years:

http://www.insidegnss.com/node/4274

marmurr1916

plodder wrote: »

That's not a complete list.

The claim was that routing keys wouldn't be released because 'they are all secret' - that's clearly wrong.

Here's another list of the main ones from the CSO (scroll down to Show Background Notes, click on it and then scroll down to the bottom):

http://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/er/dber/domesticbuildingenergyratingsquarter22015/#.VaWh6_lVikq

Cork city is covered by T12 (southside) and T32 (northside) with County Cork being covered partly by T and P routing keys.

Cork city and county combined have 23 routing keys; Dublin city and county combined have 37, a total of 60 between them.

That leaves 79 for the rest of ye plebs!

The average population of the 139 routing key areas is roughly 33,100 (4,609,600/139 = 33,162.5899281) although there's bound to be variation from area to area.

This is a good deal higher than the average population of each of NI's postcode districts (there are 81 BT postcode districts although only 80 are geographic districts - BT58 is reserved for the Child Support Agency), which is about 23,100 per geographic postcode district (1,850,562/80 = 23,132.025), although again there's bound to be variation from district to district.

SpaceTime

That makes sense though.

Population of The City / Counties of Dublin is 1,200,000

Population of City & County of Cork is 520,000

After that only Galway & Kildare are over 200,000

Most others are between 80,000 and 150,000

Longford & Leitrim are <40,000!

Other than the old Dublin numbering which is an actual map, it's divided up based on number of homes. That's why you've got so many codes in "the pale" and Cork vs so few in the Northwest.


This thing isn't a grid system, it's just delivery point codes.

That's also why it's not really very helpful for couriers as routing keys in non urban and less dense areas cover vast areas by the looks of it.

The keys could have been much more useful if they'd been a grid rather than just An Post's delivery office nodes.

The keys could have been much more useful if they'd been a grid rather than just An Post's delivery office nodes.

I'd have thought that it would be OK as it actually takes into account the underlying topology & infrastructure, bit pointless having two locations on opposite sides of a river having the same routing key if to cross requires a 40+ km drive.

plodder

SpaceTime wrote: »

That makes sense though.

Population of The City / Counties of Dublin is 1,200,000

Population of City & County of Cork is 520,000

After that only Galway & Kildare are over 200,000

Most others are between 80,000 and 150,000

Longford & Leitrim are <40,000!

Other than the old Dublin numbering which is an actual map, it's divided up based on number of homes. That's why you've got so many codes in "the pale" and Cork vs so few in the Northwest.


This thing isn't a grid system, it's just delivery point codes.

That's also why it's not really very helpful for couriers as routing keys in non urban and less dense areas cover vast areas by the looks of it.

The keys could have been much more useful if they'd been a grid rather than just An Post's delivery office nodes.

or they could have kept these routing keys, but established a second level of hierarchy based on CSO small areas.

54and56

plodder wrote: »

or they could have kept these routing keys, but established a second level of hierarchy based on CSO small areas.

Has anyone produced a map showing the location of all routing keys either for country Dublin or nationally? If one exists I'd appreciate a link to it.

Edit. Found an attempt at a national map - https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=zrmXDfjvem7g.k2eSAnvagEdQ

Trouwe Ier

Trouwe Ier wrote: »

My own "V94" covers a huge area from Coose North, Co. Galway to Ballina and Birdhill in Co. Tipperary to Kilkinlea the last townland on the N21 in Co. Limerick before the Kerry border.

Is anyone else aware of other large areas?

Yet I note that Newcastlewest is allocated "V42".

How can that be if you have to pass through NCW to get from Limerick to Abbeyfeale? V94 must have some sort of "pan handle" shape in West Limerick.

The map when it comes (probably before the end of the week now I'd say) will be interesting.

BailMeOut

Why are people ITT assuming that people who work in this field are brain-dead and wouldn’t use a map to avoid issues like that?

People will, computers will not. It will be computers and software that will be created using Eircode that will make deliveries very efficient.

moyners

Whatever about the pros and cons of eircode, the @getlosteircodes guy and Loc8 are in twitter overload. I've never seen so much activity. Any tweet concerning postcodes - they've already replied to. Makes you wonder if the launch would have gone any better if the eircode twitter was used for even a fraction of that effort.

Edit: Just spotted this blog entry from autoaddress. The first rebuttal I've seen...
https://www.autoaddress.ie/blog/autoaddressblog/2015/07/14/top-5-lessons-from-eircode-launch

ukoda

moyners wrote: »

Whatever about the pros and cons of eircode, the @getlosteircodes guy and Loc8 are in twitter overload. I've never seen so much activity. Any tweet concerning postcodes - they've already replied to. Makes you wonder if the launch would have gone any better if the eircode twitter was used for even a fraction of that effort.

What they are doing is pretty disgraceful. And they are the same people as far as I can determine, although they might like you to think they are separate but the getlosteircode website is littered with loc8 logo and propaganda

Thier conduct is really unprofessional and petty. They are tweeting day and night and unfortunately, I don't believe they will gain anything from it only increasing their stress levels and damaging their own reputation