Eircom eFibre VDSL/FTTC rollout – plans to reach 1.6m premises by mid 2016

Dingatron

Signed up for fibre upgrade with Eircom there. Long wait on the phone and it was long process probably due to this being a new system for them. (That's what I was told anyway) A few things that I observed

1. They tried to get me to sign up to direct debit for bill. I refused point blank. This was why I didn't sign up on line as it was the only option available.
2. If you are on any discount it is not transferable.
3. Had to agree to an 18 month contract. I just agreed to a 12 month anyway so no major deal for me.
4. My account number is changing for some reason. I'd lost the will to enquire as to why at this point.
5. No firm date for engineer visit as system was slow. I have provisional date.

KOR101

Dingatron wrote: »

Signed up for fibre upgrade with Eircom there. ......
2. If you are on any discount it is not transferable.

You just have to laugh. I signed up in February and was explicitly assured by salesman that the discount would apply when I transferred. Otherwise, I was just going to wait for fibre. Oh well, another hit.

Tommy Lagahan

Dingatron wrote: »

Signed up for fibre upgrade with Eircom there. Long wait on the phone and it was long process probably due to this being a new system for them. (That's what I was told anyway) A few things that I observed

1. They tried to get me to sign up to direct debit for bill. I refused point blank. This was why I didn't sign up on line as it was the only option available.
2. If you are on any discount it is not transferable.
3. Had to agree to an 18 month contract. I just agreed to a 12 month anyway so no major deal for me.
4. My account number is changing for some reason. I'd lost the will to enquire as to why at this point.
5. No firm date for engineer visit as system was slow. I have provisional date.

What provisional date did they give you?
Whats the number to call btw, I don't want to sign up direct debit either.

JustMac

gazzamc wrote: »

Called up vodafone

gazzamc wrote: »

I had to sign a new 12 month contract (If it went through) and the Engineer Fee/Modem was Free (as i was a current Home broadband customer)...

I signed up with Vodafone but agreed to a 24 month contract so I wouldnt have to pay for Engineer Fee/Modem. I'm already a home broadband customer with Vodafone. (Tralee area). I can't find anywhere on their site or in Terms and Conditions that Engineer Fee/Modem was Free for existing customers. Anyone got any details on it.

I have an engineer calling on Thursday morning. I might wait till after that and give them a call to see if I can reduce it to a 12 month contract.

Any advice?

Richard Dower

Until i see a screen grab of a speed test i am not even going to belive this fibre thing even exists!

gazzamc

JustMac wrote: »

I signed up with Vodafone but agreed to a 24 month contract so I wouldnt have to pay for Engineer Fee/Modem. I'm already a home broadband customer with Vodafone. (Tralee area). I can't find anywhere on their site or in Terms and Conditions that Engineer Fee/Modem was Free for existing customers. Anyone got any details on it.

I have an engineer calling on Thursday morning. I might wait till after that and give them a call to see if I can reduce it to a 12 month contract.

Any advice?

I was told that as well and before agreeing to it she checked again and said i didn't need to sign the 24 month contract to get the free installation.

Codpeas

Richard Dower wrote: »

Until i see a screen grab of a speed test i am not even going to belive this fibre thing even exists!

LOL. I've seen one (don't have a screen grab to share though) and it showed 43/11 on a 50/20 package.

Tommy Lagahan

Codpeas wrote: »

LOL. I've seen one (don't have a screen grab to share though) and it showed 43/11 on a 50/20 package.

"Pics or it didn't happen" :P

5.11 Tactical

I am just under 800 metres as the crow flys from my nearest VDSL cabinet as it is on the other side of my estate, would speeds could I expect for that distance ?

iMuse

5.11 Tactical wrote: »

I am just under 800 metres as the crow flys from my nearest VDSL cabinet as it is on the other side of my estate, would speeds could I expect for that distance ?

Around 35mb downlaod, See here. KN are still working at cabinets in Letterkenny today even though its phase 1 and supposedly complete.

LFCFan

5.11 Tactical wrote: »

I am just under 800 metres as the crow flys from my nearest VDSL cabinet as it is on the other side of my estate, would speeds could I expect for that distance ?

More than likely the line will follow a less direct path to your house so you may be over 1KM from the cabinet. If so, you may not get it at all and if you do your speed would be a lot lower than the advertised up to speed.

Dingatron

Tommy Lagahan wrote: »

What provisional date did they give you?
Whats the number to call btw, I don't want to sign up direct debit either.

I just got official confirmation date of 31st May. I rang 1901 and they manually forwarded me to eFibre as it seems to be a separate team.

5.11 Tactical

LFCFan wrote: »

More than likely the line will follow a less direct path to your house so you may be over 1KM from the cabinet. If so, you may not get it at all and if you do your speed would be a lot lower than the advertised up to speed.

They seem to be putting the cabinets in clockwise as the back of my estate is done first beside the old cabinet, the other cabnet is at the front around 200 metres away, so possibly I wont be served by that one.

LFCFan

5.11 Tactical wrote: »

They seem to be putting the cabinets in clockwise as the back of my estate is done first beside the old cabinet, the other cabnet is at the front around 200 metres away, so possibly I wont be served by that one.

Keep your fingers crossed you are on the one 200 metres away so and you could be looking at 60+ mbit speeds

Corcaigh84

I'm not too far at all from the Hettyfield exchange on the Blackrock Road in Cork City, and I was told it's not going to be upgraded until Dec 2013

Solair

thefloss wrote: »

I'm not too far at all from the Hettyfield exchange on the Blackrock Road in Cork City, and I was told it's not going to be upgraded until Dec 2013

It'll probably be earlier than that, but they've only just started doing Hettyfield. So it could be a while yet.

5.11 Tactical wrote: »

I am just under 800 metres as the crow flys from my nearest VDSL cabinet as it is on the other side of my estate, would speeds could I expect for that distance ?

They're almost never as the crow flies, as the ducts are usually under the roads / line follow the roads.
ESB wiring tends to go overhead as the crow flies for major medium/high voltage links, but eircom usually just followed roads.

The only exceptions to that might be where it crosses a green area or something like that in a housing estate or takes some other shortcut.
The wiring might also take an unexpected detour before it gets to your house. It's all very hard to calculate really without knowing the exact layout.
You could also be nearer to another cabinet that doesn't quite make sense from a visual point of view either depending on how the lines run.

I know in the UK you can end up with situations where one cabinet's serving older ducting to older homes and another cabinet's serving newer homes even though they're actually located next to each other.

You have to remember these networks of ducts and cables grew up over decades in older urban areas / towns / city centres. They make more logical sense in new build housing estates but in old areas the cables could be taking some rather unexpected routes.

Bear in mind there's been automatic telephone service in places like Dublin and Cork since the 1920s and 30s and the physical infrastructure like ducts and stuff like that could be decades to nearly a century old in some cases, especially in the city centre even if the wires are long since replaced, the exchanges digital and some ducts carry fibres etc. The layout doesn't necessarily make all that much sense.

The other issues is that the ducts and cables weren't planned with DSL in mind. They were planned for telephone service which isn't all that distance sensitive and the cabinets were only distribution points, they contained no active electronics at all. So, they wouldn't have been putting them in willy-nilly, rather only where they'd a large cluster of homes to connect out to.

The fact that they're there at all is a bit of a happy coincidence for VDSL!

CastorTroy

iMuse wrote: »

Around 35mb downlaod, See here. KN are still working at cabinets in Letterkenny today even though its phase 1 and supposedly complete.

Ha! And the eircom map says it's live. Though I have seen ones working on them in Letterkenny over the past few weeks.

I checked my speed last night out of curiosity and I'm currently just getting 2.7mbps. So even double that would be an improvement. If I got 20 or 30, I don't know what I would do.

Solair

They can put an area live without putting all the cabinets live and they may yet have to install more cabinets too.

The easy ones are done first i.e. where a distribution cabinet already exists. There are probably a few more to go in where there might be underground distribution points that will need to be cabinetised. That's a bigger job than what's been done so far as it involves more ground work and rewiring of existing telephone cables.

Eircom originally wanted to start selling service in April as it became available almost on a cabinet-by-cabinet basis.

When an exchange goes live, it just means that it has cabinets and there's all the necessary equipment installed in the old exchange building to aggregate and connect the fibre back to the core network. There's nothing to stop them continuing to add cabinets over the coming months and even years as the rollout goes on.

---

I'd love to see them using the new mini-DSLAMs that are being marketed by several companies at the moment including ECI.

They have a mini-DSLAM that can be just installed in a manhole. It's a small waterproof, passively cooled device that just needs electricity + a fibre connection and you can then VDSL2 enable them to hook up 64 VDSL2 customers and the 'cabinet' can be just shoved onto a pole overhead or into an underground vault.

http://www.ecitele.com/OurOffering/Products/Pages/MiniCab-64V.aspx

I wonder if Huawei has something similar in the pipeline ...?

BT are already rolling out some of those devices in the UK.

dak

CastorTroy wrote: »

Ha! And the eircom map says it's live. Though I have seen ones working on them in Letterkenny over the past few weeks.

I checked my speed last night out of curiosity and I'm currently just getting 2.7mbps. So even double that would be an improvement. If I got 20 or 30, I don't know what I would do.

I suffered years of crap service with Eircom and others charging for up to 12mb and only getting 2 or 3mb

Since changing to UPC I've gone from 30 to 67 and now to 100mb and now have a different problem. One of my 3 year old computers now needs a gigabit ethernet card but still gets 85mb ...Dell mut not have envisgaed these sort of speeds a few years ago .

efc67

This may sound a bit thick....but was looking at the coverage map, and i am well inside the shaded green area....probably about 1/2 mile inside...i live in the country about 3 miles outside of Enniscorthy, i am guessing i am on the exchange in Enniscorthy, i remember reading somewhere that its possible to have firbe from the exchange then send the signal through the existing copper wire to our homes......is this the plan for us that live in the country....i am only on 1.5 mb download at the moment, so any increase would be good

Solair

efc67 wrote: »

This may sound a bit thick....but was looking at the coverage map, and i am well inside the shaded green area....probably about 1/2 mile inside...i live in the country about 3 miles outside of Enniscorthy, i am guessing i am on the exchange in Enniscorthy, i remember reading somewhere that its possible to have firbe from the exchange then send the signal through the existing copper wire to our homes......is this the plan for us that live in the country....i am only on 1.5 mb download at the moment, so any increase would be good

Basically the 'exchange' is being moved close to your house. The old exchange itself will house fibre aggregation nodes / routers etc that connect with the core network, but your phone line will actually connect to equipment in a local cabinet on the street where it is carried back to the exchange by fibre.

What matters is your distance to the nearest VDSL2 cabinet, not to the exchange itself.

If you're out in the countryside, and there are no cabinets installed, your situation may not change much at all although you might see some speed improvements they might not be as dramatic as someone closer to a cabinet. That being said though, the cabinets often seem to go out into the very outskirts of the exchanges' footprint. So, you could be lucky too!

apophis

Hi all,
I notice now that the 6 euro add on of 150 GB is gone from the vodafone simply broadband max offer.


http://www.vodafone.ie/home-phone-broadband/simply-broadband-max/?ts=1369138893737


apophis

efc67

Solair wrote: »

Basically the 'exchange' is being moved close to your house. The old exchange itself will house fibre aggregation nodes / routers etc that connect with the core network, but your phone line will actually connect to equipment in a local cabinet on the street where it is carried back to the exchange by fibre.

What matters is your distance to the nearest VDSL2 cabinet, not to the exchange itself.

If you're out in the countryside, and there are no cabinets installed, your situation may not change much at all although you might see some speed improvements they might not be as dramatic as someone closer to a cabinet. That being said though, the cabinets often seem to go out into the very outskirts of the exchanges' footprint. So, you could be lucky too!

Cheers....that explains it better.....Now on my day off today do i jump in the car and go looking for the nearest cabinet

neddynasty

How many homes can 1 cabinet service?

allen175

neddynasty wrote: »

How many homes can 1 cabinet service?

up to 192 connections.

Tommy Lagahan

iMuse wrote: »

Around 35mb downlaod, See here. KN are still working at cabinets in Letterkenny today even though its phase 1 and supposedly complete.

They're still working up here?? Last time I saw any work on the cabinet next to me in Gortlee was December or so. There is a small army of Eircom vans shuffling about the town the past few weeks though alright.

Dr. Nick

According to the map showing where the cables are being laid they're putting a cable between Tara and Trim exchanges. This was confirmed by a couple of lads who were on the road laying cable last week (they've since disappeared!)

However according to the coverage map Tara is not being upgraded (Trim and Dunshaughlin each side are). The closest old cabinet to me may actually serving Dunshaughlin (01 area).

Does this make sense?

Vico1612

Solair wrote: »

...

---

I'd love to see them using the new mini-DSLAMs that are being marketed by several companies at the moment including ECI.

They have a mini-DSLAM that can be just installed in a manhole. It's a small waterproof, passively cooled device that just needs electricity + a fibre connection and you can then VDSL2 enable them to hook up 64 VDSL2 customers and the 'cabinet' can be just shoved onto a pole overhead or into an underground vault.

....

Reminded me of this :-)
http://www.google.ie/tisp/install.html

Tommy Lagahan

Vico1612 wrote: »

Reminded me of this :-)
http://www.google.ie/tisp/install.html

I think that's how threes NBS scheme works its backhaul.

Finical

Right finally got through to eircom and the chap seemed to know what he was talking about. I'm well inside the green shaded area on the rollout map, but my line isn't enabled for the fibre as of yet. He asked where the nearest cabinet to me was and it's just outside the estate. I asked if he could give an approx date, but he said he couldn't and it could be up to a year!!!

Personally think they should get rid of the rollout map as it is showing areas which aren't enabled at all yet. What is sickening is the estate up the road can all seem to get it. Must be connected to a different cabinet.

I wonder will they be enabling cabinets in all the areas included in the initial phases of the rollout first or could they move on to other phases and not come back to certain cabinets at all like the one near me. :eek: