UPC - No Broadband in rural communities?

Burswood

Hi all.

I'm not sure if this is the correct place to be posting this kind of question. Just a curious one, I am

The question is in relation to UPC Broadband and they're lack of availability in rural communities throughout R.O.I.

How is it exactly, that Eircom can have such wide coverage, only have 8Meg, yet be so expensive, and UPC have 12Meg with basically only coverage in urban settings, yet they are far cheaper.

I mean, we have UPC Digital Television in our home and its great. Does the job. All major stations. But 8Meg BB from Eircom just isn't cutting it lately due to more video streaming and downloading and more time being spent on gaming.

Is there any expected date or estimation as to when UPC will have more extensive Phone & Broadband coverage, especially in rural settings/communities?

Any answer would be greatly appreciated here. I'm really just curious as to why one company can be offering such amazing value while a very little amount of people being allowed to use that service, yet the other company can offer fairly middle of the road coverage whilst getting away with murder and extorting their customers simply because the rival company can't be bothered extending their coverage..?

It just perplexes me.
Would someone attempt to explain this to an ignorant man like myself?

Again, it would be really appreciated.

Cheers all.

Shane732

Burswood wrote: »

Hi all.

I'm not sure if this is the correct place to be posting this kind of question. Just a curious one, I am

The question is in relation to UPC Broadband and they're lack of availability in rural communities throughout R.O.I.

How is it exactly, that Eircom can have such wide coverage, only have 8Meg, yet be so expensive, and UPC have 12Meg with basically only coverage in urban settings, yet they are far cheaper.

I mean, we have UPC Digital Television in our home and its great. Does the job. All major stations. But 8Meg BB from Eircom just isn't cutting it lately due to more video streaming and downloading and more time being spent on gaming.

Is there any expected date or estimation as to when UPC will have more extensive Phone & Broadband coverage, especially in rural settings/communities?

Any answer would be greatly appreciated here. I'm really just curious as to why one company can be offering such amazing value while a very little amount of people being allowed to use that service, yet the other company can offer fairly middle of the road coverage whilst getting away with murder and extorting their customers simply because the rival company can't be bothered extending their coverage..?

It just perplexes me.
Would someone attempt to explain this to an ignorant man like myself?

Again, it would be really appreciated.

Cheers all.

Are you actually getting 8mb or anything near to it? If you are then you aren't really in that rural of an area (from a broadband perspective anyway!).

I'm only able to 1mb broadband max from Eircom. It really sucks as is annoying the hell out of me. I'm an extended reach customer - i.e. near the end of the exchange line, so the boardband speed the line can handle are sh*t. I'm not actually in that rural of an area at all.

I'm thinking about get Vodafone mobile broadband or something to augment the current Broadband I have. The only problem is that it'll knock me back another €50 a month to get anything decent from them.

jor el

Burswood wrote: »

How is it exactly, that Eircom can have such wide coverage, only have 8Meg, yet be so expensive, and UPC have 12Meg with basically only coverage in urban settings, yet they are far cheaper.

eircom are in debt to the tune of something like 2 billion euro, which makes upgrading any of their network rather difficult, since they're spending all their cash on paying their debts. Also, if you take a rural exchange, with maybe 200 lines in it, and enable it for broadband, they might only get a dozen or so customers. Given the cost of installing the DSL equipment (tens of thousands), it would never be paid back. This is why they are not spending any money on some 300 or so exchanges that will never be enabled for broadband.

Even with enabling the exchange, there is a limitation on the distance that DSL will work over, and the line quality needs to be sufficiently good too. Given the state of some of the lines in this country, and the distances that houses are spread over, this rules out a certain percentage of the lines from the very start. My guess is that overall about 25% of lines simply are not suitable for DSL, and I'd also guess this number is higher on rural exchanges.

UPC are only in urban areas, where demand for broadband is higher. If they enable a cable segment, they hit a much higher percentage of customers that will buy it. They are also not laden down with the amount of debt that eircom is.

The biggest problem with UPC is that they have no publicly viewable plan for their expansion. No one knows when or if they will come to their area. Expansion does seem to be going quite slowly, and there are a lot of large towns that have UPC cable, but no sign of broadband coming.

Rural areas will never get cable broadband.

bk

Burswood wrote: »

I mean, we have UPC Digital Television in our home and its great. Does the job. All major stations. But 8Meg BB from Eircom just isn't cutting it lately due to more video streaming and downloading and more time being spent on gaming.

Do you get UPC via cable or MMDS (aerial on the roof).

If the former, then yes, it is likely you will be able to get BB from UPC some day, but it could take a while (over a year).

If you currently get MMDS, then it might take a very long time or never at all.

As for the reason for this. Well Eircom was previously owned by the government (people of Ireland) and the people of Ireland paid for a telephone line to be run to every home in Ireland.

The government then stupidly sold Eircom off to private investors who turned it from a debt free company to a company with 4 billion in debt, by using it as their own personal piggy bank and not bothering to invest in upgrading the network.

Meanwhile UPC's network was paid for by the company themselves and they only have so much money and only invest in laying cable and upgrading their network to where it makes most financial sense (urban areas).

So rural areas are unlikely to get cable unless it is subsidised by the government.

D'Peoples Voice

to be fair, Wimax is availabe from Imagine in rural areas
http://www.imagine.ie/about_imagine.html

WiMax is a worldwide technology changing the way we communicate.
This 4G technology operates over radio waves and transmits a signal from our high site to your WiMax device. We dedicate bandwidth on our WiMax network to phone and internet services so we guarantee to give you a reliable, quality service in your home.
Our WiMax network is capable of delivering high quality voice calls and high speed bandwidth to everyone in Ireland.

and no I don't work for Imagine but there are options out there - for what its worth I use Magnet's 24mb (although I usually only get about 18mb)

jor el

Imagine cannot guarantee to give you a reliable, quality service in your home via their WiMax technology, and they currently fail to do that for hundreds of their customers. It is also no where near available to everyone in Ireland. Their website is a pack of lies.

-=al=-

I'm in west Dublin beside Lucan and cant get any fixed broadband service (wired or wireless) apart from Eircom on a line capable of a max of 1mb. We were on Irish broadband fixed wireless, who imagine (wimax) took over and they just cut off the service without having an alternative... ridiculous, I have a high annoyance with wimax and as stated, their lies. They also charged us for a month's service 2 days before cutting the service off. we never got refunded

Iin certain rural areas there are fixed services available, but mobile midband like meteor/3/vodafone is prob the rural solution, wimax is a similar technology to it if not the same

Also we have UPC tv... on a digital package but its an analog signal we recieve. Are you sure your not on a similar plan!? its labeled as a digital package etc but its recieved analog...

Ultra Violet

We were with Imagine and are based out the country. Everything was going great with them for years until our internet decided to fry itself. It had something to do with our connection to the local exchange, supposedly the port was fried. Imagine refused to fix it because they said they could touch any of the line (because the lines were Eircoms property). We ask could there be anything done and they just said no. We immediately switched back to Eircom, the problem was fixed within days.

I'm also interested in switching to UPC but it isn't available in our area, I'm hoping this will change. Eircom are notorious for charging you extra.

Burswood

bk wrote: »

Do you get UPC via cable or MMDS (aerial on the roof).

If the former, then yes, it is likely you will be able to get BB from UPC some day, but it could take a while (over a year).

If you currently get MMDS, then it might take a very long time or never at all.

Not sure what the difference is between cable & MMDS....

DingDong

Burswood wrote: »

Not sure what the difference is between cable & MMDS....

MMDS is some what similar to a satellite dish, it's not connected to any core network such as fibre while cable is.

bk

Burswood wrote: »

Not sure what the difference is between cable & MMDS....

Different ways of receiving your TV service.

Cable means the TV service enters your promise either underground from the path outside, or strung from house to house (from your nieghbours house to yours).

MMDS means the TV service comes from a sort of funny mesh antenna on the roof of your house.

Burswood

bk wrote: »

Different ways of receiving your TV service.

Cable means the TV service enters your promise either underground from the path outside, or strung from house to house (from your nieghbours house to yours).

MMDS means the TV service comes from a sort of funny mesh antenna on the roof of your house.

MMDS it is so. That's what we have... Not looking likely for 100Meg BB any time soon so

C81

jor el wrote: »

Imagine cannot guarantee to give you a reliable, quality service in your home via their WiMax technology, and they currently fail to do that for hundreds of their customers. It is also no where near available to everyone in Ireland. Their website is a pack of lies.

I would have2 agree with the above.. They tell u there is coverage. But don't. Then try to offer a booster for an extra €150! No guarantees..
Defeating the purpose of moving away from eircom.

roast

Its not a case of UPC "not being bothered" to expand the network..... its a case of UPC choosing areas which are more likely to have more potential customers.

Its very unlikely that UPC will even have coverage in all urban areas within the next 5-10 years, yet alone even touching rural areas. It took Eircom/Telecom Eireann 50+ years to get such an expansive network.

lucernarian

jor el wrote: »

UPC are only in urban areas, where demand for broadband is higher.

jor el, where did you get this from?

lucernarian

roast wrote: »

Its not a case of UPC "not being bothered" to expand the network..... its a case of UPC choosing areas which are more likely to have more potential customers.

Its very unlikely that UPC will even have coverage in all urban areas within the next 5-10 years, yet alone even touching rural areas. It took Eircom/Telecom Eireann 50+ years to get such an expansive network.

I would disagree on both points. UPC haven't chosen any extra areas for investment except what their existing cabled network serves. It's too early to say what UPC are going to do once they've provided all those existing customers with broadband services. There is a bad precedent by UPC however. In Castlebar, Irish Multichannel/Chorus were given State money to build a cable network suitable for carrying digital channels (DVB-C). Having built the necessary cable rings etc., they left this network idle and left customers in Castlebar on MMDS as at the time they were under pressure from the ODTR to get customers onto digital and MMDS was the easier short-term solution.

UPC have owned that partially finished network for 6 years or so and they've still done absolutely nothing with it despite the fact that the donkey work of digging up roads was done. This *could* be for a wide variety of factors but I think it will serve as a barometer of UPC's coverage ambitions once the network rebuilds in Dublin are complete over the next two years.

Wrt the point about P&T, the network never received any real investment until the mid to late 70s. Before then they were only keeping what they had which was limited telephone service using the old galvanised wire on insulated poles and telegram services. Then it became a massive govt. priority and over the next 15 years several hundred million pounds was spent directly by the exchequer and hundreds more was borrowed through a special state-owned company for the purposes of buying all manner of network equiment. E.g the Telephone Capital Act 1977 and the Telecommunications Capital Act 1981. The wholesale replacement of the access network along with replacing every manual exchange with a digital automatic exchange took about 10 years. Fully digital switching was introduced in Ireland only a year or two after the technology launched and the vast bulk of the network used it by 1989. Afterwards any small exchanges which had small versions of 70s equipment were replaced with digital (ISDN-capable) tech and I think that finished in 1996 or 1997.

All the above suggests that eircom's nationwide network was almost completely rebuilt over a period from 1977 to 1989 with what was very much cutting edge technology. TÉ had many advantages over UPC though UPC have the opportunity to raise whatever capital they wish while TÉ had to go cap in hand to govt to allow them borrow on the open market and only indirectly at that. UPC is also using technology that's been around for a few years now whereas TE were buying equipment that only existed in a lab the previous year.

bk

To_be_confirmed wrote: »

I would disagree on both points. UPC haven't chosen any extra areas for investment except what their existing cabled network serves. It's too early to say what UPC are going to do once they've provided all those existing customers with broadband services. There is a bad precedent by UPC however. In Castlebar, Irish Multichannel/Chorus were given State money to build a cable network suitable for carrying digital channels (DVB-C). Having built the necessary cable rings etc., they left this network idle and left customers in Castlebar on MMDS as at the time they were under pressure from the ODTR to get customers onto digital and MMDS was the easier short-term solution.

That was Chorus in 2000, long before UPC bought them. We all know how bad Chorus were, specially as I'm from Cork.

Yes UPC still haven't enabled things there, but then there was a big court case between Chorus back then and the town council with the town council ending up with egg on their face. So UPC might not want to go there in fear of opening old wounds or the town council might not want them there.

Also I don't believe Castlebar has a MAN ring and is it even connected to BT fibre backhaul?

So I don't think Catlebar offers any precedent for what UPC may or may not do.

To_be_confirmed wrote: »

All the above suggests that eircom's nationwide network was almost completely rebuilt over a period from 1977 to 1989 with what was very much cutting edge technology. TÉ had many advantages over UPC though UPC have the opportunity to raise whatever capital they wish while TÉ had to go cap in hand to govt to allow them borrow on the open market and only indirectly at that. UPC is also using technology that's been around for a few years now whereas TE were buying equipment that only existed in a lab the previous year.

Firstly UPC didn't exist back then, Chorus and NTL were two separate companies back then, plus lots of other small companies.

Second it is bizarre to claim that TE had a harder time to get money for their network then Chorus and NTL, when TE pretty much had money shoveled at them by the government to build their network in the 80's.

Anyway this is all completely irrelevant to the reality on the ground today. The 00's represented a decade of almost zero investment in the network by Eircom and now it is coming back to haunt them.

Sponge Bob

To_be_confirmed wrote: »

I would disagree on both points. UPC haven't chosen any extra areas for investment except what their existing cabled network serves. .

Correct. The UPC Cable footprint is where it was in 1990 or so with some of new estates thrown in. They never did Drogheda or Dundalk, not even during the 1990s cable bubble(s) (there were 2 significant ones).

lucernarian

Wrt to Castlebar, the whole point is that UPC already own ducting around the town and therefore a MAN wouldn't be involved assuming the ducting is indeed completed. Secondly, BT have fibre installed along all Irish railways so Castlebar does have BT fibre (it's on their network map anyway). Thirdly, my point was not about Chorus' inaction, it was that UPC have owned Chorus since about 2005 and they have sat on their hands with Castlebar since then. I still think it will be a good bellwether of UPC's intentions.

I don't see how or why it is bizarre to claim that TÉ had funding problems of their own (of a different nature to UPC's). You really should look back over Oireachtas debates on the issue. Needing the Dáil to approve loan guarantees in the early 80s with a budget deficit to rival todays and an interest rate that makes the IMF's "bailout" look trivial is hardly a walk in the park. I think my reference to TÉ has relevance to how UPC could expand their network if they wanted to and it would be easier to do so on an engineering and technical basis for reasons I mentioned and more, assuming that UPC will never target rural areas in the first instance like TÉ had to.

The single biggest issue UPC would have in expanding to new areas is how likely people who never had cable are to give wayleaves to UPC. That is probably the million dollar issue IMO for expansion to urban areas. I don't think UPC will ever offer service in properly rural areas unless some considerable self-help schemes get going or MMDS is finally sorted out or there is a govt. backed initiative (like it would happen...)

As for MMDS, bk's other thread has an idea of some good merit I think. Using Ka-sat or suchlike to offer the TV aspect of MMDS would give spectrum to their other services though they may not have the spectrum to use DOCSIS 3 as likely popularity in a given area per transmission site could be pretty significant even for 90MHz of spectrum per site roughly. I'm not sure how sites could be sectorised etc to help capacity or if DVB-C-based modulation (that's all DOCSIS is) allows for better spectrum usage than what exists with the current MMDS bandplan.

Razzuh

To_be_confirmed wrote: »

You really should look back over Oireachtas debates on the issue.

Perfect! I had some holiday days coming to me and I was looking for something to do...:D

Seriously though, nice comment, some good points.