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

godskitchen

phog wrote: »

The cost of FTTH rises significantly once you include the cost of getting the fibre into the home/premises. An underground pipe is required and in some cases this requires licensing from the local authority. At this moment in time supplying FTTC and using the existing connection seems to be the best option.

Northern Ireland have gone the route of FTTC too.

I know how hard it would be to pull cable to every house from a fiber cab, but I don't think thereasons you gave are why its not done.

The lines are uunderground from the cab to the house anyway on most places, if not all. Most telegraph poles went years ago except for rural areas.

Eircom could if they wanted use the existing ducting to pull fibre to the home.

My guess is they want to exhaust this model and the revenue from it before having to lay out more money to pull fibre to homes.

They should offer the home owner or business owner the option of paying to have fibre from the cab to the home. Owner pays eircom to install the fibre, eircom get an infrastructure upgrade for free.

Solair

Eircom's coverage prediction is 1.2m households that's 75% of households which would put it higher than the UK average. Bear in mind Wales only has 34% coverage and some English regions are similar

Northern Ireland's rollout is the exception due to state funding.

UPC in Ireland had 304,000 broadband customers which is about 19% of Ireland's 1.6m households!

Virgin media has about 4.2 million customers : about 16% of the Uk's 26m households

UPC passed a much higher % of homes than Virgin too. There are even large areas of London without cable. Small towns are (which would be major urban centres by Irish standards) are rarely cabled in the UK.

All in all Ireland's broadband situation is improving rapidly. I would prefer to see us benchmarking against Western France or Scandinavia rather than the UK which is a rather low bar to reach right now.

crawler

Ah...so the inevitable debate on FTTC v FTTH v DOCSIS 3.0 (and 3.1) and such things has come up....I like this debate

My personal View - VDSL is a "today" technology and is ok for now but the future for land based networks is Fibre all the way coupled with LTE for mobile. Fibre and LTE will kill copper.....

The very fact people are now talking about ping times means the debate is moving on from just speed and availability (although still an issue for some but decreasing)...this is a good thing.

Not just my view - have a read of what BT's ex CEO himself has said....i.e. "FTTN is one of the biggest mistakes mankind has ever made"

http://delimiter.com.au/2012/04/30/fttn-a-huge-mistake-says-ex-bt-cto/

I dont agree with all of it - but a lot of it makes 100% sense..

bk

My opinion is that FTTH is obviously the long term goal. However it is much more costly.

I believe if Eircom went for FTTH rather then FTTC, that the rollout would be far slower and far less extensive.

500m FTTC gets them to 75% of homes. 500m FTTH would only get you to about 25% of homes and even at just 25% of homes would take much longer to rollout.

Given that FTTC Eircom is rolling out maybe capable of up to 200mb/s with vectoring and pair bonding and given that should be more then enough for the vast majority of applications people will be using for the next 5 years, then I think Eircoms decision to go FTTC today, while future proofing it for FTTH upgrades when such speeds are needed in the future is a very sensible move.

And perhaps more importantly, this will benefit far more people in Ireland, far more quickly then FTTH would and which would largely go unused.

Yes it is a bandage, but it is a good stepping stone. I think it is much more important to get 100% of Ireland on minimum 50mb/s before we start thinking about moving on to much higher speeds, which to be honest, applications to take advantage of don't really exist yet.

This is a very sensible plan by Eircom.

An underground pipe is required

Not necessarily true, in the US, Verizon uses it's overhead telephone poles to carry fibre into peoples homes, no digging or ducting required. They use special bendable and shielded fibre cable.

The lines are uunderground from the cab to the house anyway on most places, if not all. Most telegraph poles went years ago except for rural areas.

Not true at all, I think that is just a Dublin view. Cork city is mostly overhead telephone poles and this is true of almost everywhere outside of Dublin. Hell even large parts of Dublin still use telephone poles out in the suburbs.

Which can actually be a good thing if they string up the fibre along the telephone cables like they do in the US.

bealtine

crawler wrote: »

Ah...so the inevitable debate on FTTC v FTTH v DOCSIS 3.0 (and 3.1) and such things has come up....I like this debate

My personal View - VDSL is a "today" technology and is ok for now but the future for land based networks is Fibre all the way coupled with LTE for mobile. Fibre and LTE will kill copper.....

The very fact people are now talking about ping times means the debate is moving on from just speed and availability (although still an issue for some but decreasing)...this is a good thing.

Not just my view - have a read of what BT's ex CEO himself has said....i.e. "FTTN is one of the biggest mistakes mankind has ever made"

http://delimiter.com.au/2012/04/30/fttn-a-huge-mistake-says-ex-bt-cto/

I dont agree with all of it - but a lot of it makes 100% sense..

Well, to my mind, a few points come up here...

There are still huge area of the country, mostly out West, without access to real broadband (I exclude 3G as "real" broadband). So availability is still an issue here in Ireland and in the UK too.

I would agree and argue that VDSL is yesterday's technology (slightly resurrected) and is prolonging the misery of copper <g>. To me it is merely a stopgap measure until a proper FTTH is rolled out, the practicalities and financial model for an FTTH rollout are a separate issue but one that certainly needs to be addressed. 100Mbs over VDSL is probably fine for the near future and perhaps the medium term future but in reality the long-term future is FTTH and that should be our ultimate aim.

I'd also disagree that LTE will kill copper, LTE is a huge leap forward that much is true (far better than 3g) but because it's a shared medium it is difficult to guarantee any sort of speeds on "the network" so it will never be a replacement for "real" broadband. LTE is an excellent technology when used for what it was designed for e.g. "bursty" on the move traffic, however when the networks start to be used and become busy the drop-off in speeds will be significant.
This cannot be controlled by the telcos so speeds cannot be guaranteed.

I love tweeting about my breakfast or updating my FB status when I'm out and about but I'd hate to rely on it for remote admin of servers or VPNing if my speeds can vary from fantastic to almost nil

bealtine

bk wrote: »

Not necessarily true, in the US, Verizon uses it's overhead telephone poles to carry fibre into peoples homes, no digging or ducting required. They use special bendable and shielded fibre cable.


Which can actually be a good thing if they string up the fibre along the telephone cables like they do in the US.

eircom have started to string fibre along poles too, it is my understanding that rural routes like out to Dingle or up to Clifden parts of the fibre run are strung along poles.

Solair

bk wrote: »

My opinion is that FTTH is obviously the long term goal. However it is much more costly.

I believe if Eircom went for FTTH rather then FTTC, that the rollout would be far slower and far less extensive.

500m FTTC gets them to 75% of homes. 500m FTTH would only get you to about 25% of homes and even at just 25% of homes would take much longer to rollout.

Given that FTTC Eircom is rolling out maybe capable of up to 200mb/s with vectoring and pair bonding and given that should be more then enough for the vast majority of applications people will be using for the next 5 years, then I think Eircoms decision to go FTTC today, while future proofing it for FTTH upgrades when such speeds are needed in the future is a very sensible move.

And perhaps more importantly, this will benefit far more people in Ireland, far more quickly then FTTH would and which would largely go unused.

Yes it is a bandage, but it is a good stepping stone. I think it is much more important to get 100% of Ireland on minimum 50mb/s before we start thinking about moving on to much higher speeds, which to be honest, applications to take advantage of don't really exist yet.

This is a very sensible plan by Eircom.



Not necessarily true, in the US, Verizon uses it's overhead telephone poles to carry fibre into peoples homes, no digging or ducting required. They use special bendable and shielded fibre cable.



Not true at all, I think that is just a Dublin view. Cork city is mostly overhead telephone poles and this is true of almost everywhere outside of Dublin. Hell even large parts of Dublin still use telephone poles out in the suburbs.

Which can actually be a good thing if they string up the fibre along the telephone cables like they do in the US.

It just depends on the era the houses were built.

Cork is definitely not mostly overhead.

There's plenty of overhead last drops (pole up house) in Dublin and Cork but the cables disappear underground after that.

Our area of cork is fully underground. Our area in Dublin (Rathmines) was still overhead drops. My relatives in Dublin 7 have overhead drops from the pole too.

They basically distribute the cables out to poles underground and the pole connects overhead to a few homes.

In a lot of places you've a mixture of that and underground services to newer buildings or where streets were repaved / fancied up. It's normal enough for local councils to do big urban renewal projects they tend to run ducts to underground everything too.

If you've ever lived in the US they out absolutely everything overhead in some areas and it looks absolutely hideous! I'm not just talking phone wires but you've huge amounts if wiring for electricity, cable TV, phones, etc all up poles and on top of that they'd probably install those FTTC cabinets on a pole too.

FTTH here would be mostly underground with some short overhead drops in older urban areas. They've underground ducts in most places though carrying the lines back to the local exchange and cabinets

In the US in a lot of areas everything right back to the exchange is just srung along poles. It would be acceptable in Irish urban areas from a planning point of view.

There's no particular issue dropping fibre from pole to house though.

godskitchen

bk wrote: »

My opinion is that FTTH is obviously the long term goal. However it is much more costly.

I believe if Eircom went for FTTH rather then FTTC, that the rollout would be far slower and far less extensive.

500m FTTC gets them to 75% of homes. 500m FTTH would only get you to about 25% of homes and even at just 25% of homes would take much longer to rollout.

Given that FTTC Eircom is rolling out maybe capable of up to 200mb/s with vectoring and pair bonding and given that should be more then enough for the vast majority of applications people will be using for the next 5 years, then I think Eircoms decision to go FTTC today, while future proofing it for FTTH upgrades when such speeds are needed in the future is a very sensible move.

And perhaps more importantly, this will benefit far more people in Ireland, far more quickly then FTTH would and which would largely go unused.

Yes it is a bandage, but it is a good stepping stone. I think it is much more important to get 100% of Ireland on minimum 50mb/s before we start thinking about moving on to much higher speeds, which to be honest, applications to take advantage of don't really exist yet.

This is a very sensible plan by Eircom.



Not necessarily true, in the US, Verizon uses it's overhead telephone poles to carry fibre into peoples homes, no digging or ducting required. They use special bendable and shielded fibre cable.



Not true at all, I think that is just a Dublin view. Cork city is mostly overhead telephone poles and this is true of almost everywhere outside of Dublin. Hell even large parts of Dublin still use telephone poles out in the suburbs.

Which can actually be a good thing if they string up the fibre along the telephone cables like they do in the US.

I'm "out west". The vast amount of towns here have no poles in urban centers.

As a side note, any new housing development should not pass planning stage unless it has fibre to every house, underground and back to a cabinet that providers can hook into.

Solair

godskitchen wrote: »

I'm "out west". The vast amount of towns here have no poles in urban centers.

As a side note, any new housing development should not pass planning stage unless it has fibre to every house, underground and back to a cabinet that providers can hook into.

There should have a requirement for a duct system to be put in along with cabinet locations (little landcapes fenced off area with power etc and access to trunks etc and that made accessible to any licenced telco. Or an equivalent in the basement of an apartment building with communal space and wiring for mounting satellite dishes and antennae on the roof.

We even had some developments with no phone lines or cable TV! Where you had to use the management company's monopoly homebrew 'broadband' provider or whoever they opted to let on site.

The government didn't give a toss! It was all about profit for developers and to hell with planning or quality of life issues for residents or the digital economy etc etc etc

It's too late now as nothing's being built do it'll all be retrofitting to existing stuff.

A truly massive opportunity to make all of those hundreds of thousands of new build homes 21st century communications ready was missed spectacularly badly!

In new build in France they even require that you fit a network hub and Ethernet to each room as part of the planning permission. The idea is that your house will be future proof and that you'll be ready to consume online services, telecommute, etc etc thus boosting the French economy and driving investment, keeping it at the cutting edge of technology.

We have never really thought like that.

arctan

everyone seems to be forgetting that eircom and other operators will be under the soon to be EU directive of giving broadband access to the population.... FTTC/LTE was the fastest and most viable rollout option ... of course they'll have to make money along the way, but FTTH would have been to costly and too long a process to do in the timeframe

e-side routes being fibred have enough capacity and are future proofed for potential FTTH upgrades, which will see the what is soon to be d-side copper, fibred. although that'll be a few years down the line

network backbone routes do go overhead already in a vast amount of rural areas, you won't see much in Dublin, Wicklow has a lot of overhead fibre routes as ducting in some of those rocky areas would be to costly and time consuming

also re: the "fibre should be available to business and residents if they want it" .... it is, there has been fibre build teams in place for years to do this, they pull in and splice a fibre from the exchange out to whatever premises requires it, it's not cheap though.

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup

bk wrote: »

I think it is much more important to get 100% of Ireland on minimum 50mb/s before we start thinking about moving on to much higher speeds, which to be honest, applications to take advantage of don't really exist yet.

Agree with this point but I'd even go lower and say it's way more important to get all of Ireland on a *reliable* 10Megabits or even 5Megabit with a 20-30ms ping and no packet loss. I'm due for the upgrade to 70Mb from the reliable as clockwork 12Mb I'm on now and I can't see what advantage it's going to give me. Downloads are quick enough as it is.

There's swathes of rural Ireland who are paying for 12 Mb and getting 0.25-0.5Mb with **** ping and it's terrible for average browsing.

Solair

georgiecasey wrote: »

Agree with this point but I'd even go lower and say it's way more important to get all of Ireland on a *reliable* 10Megabits or even 5Megabit with a 20-30ms ping and no packet loss. I'm due for the upgrade to 70Mb from the reliable as clockwork 12Mb I'm on now and I can't see what advantage it's going to give me. Downloads are quick enough as it is.

There's swathes of rural Ireland who are paying for 12 Mb and getting 0.25-0.5Mb with **** ping and it's terrible for average browsing.

Remote housing really needs to be served by microwave links, not wired services.

With the right technology, 50+ mbits and low pings should be quite achievable in low density rural locations.

Towns, villages, even the odd rural housing estate could be connected to a couple of FTTC cabinets, possibly even entirely replacing the telephone exchange for voice / ISDN too. Whole thing could be done from a multi service can giving a village / small location similar service levels to a big urban area.

Running bundles of of copper cables over long distances no longer makes sense as the technology to put the exchange in a cabinet is now very cheap. 10-15 years ago it was far too expensive to justify doing it. Now it's far too cheap to justify not doing it!

phog

godskitchen wrote: »

I know how hard it would be to pull cable to every house from a fiber cab, but I don't think thereasons you gave are why its not done.

The lines are uunderground from the cab to the house anyway on most places, if not all. Most telegraph poles went years ago except for rural areas.

Eircom could if they wanted use the existing ducting to pull fibre to the home.

My guess is they want to exhaust this model and the revenue from it before having to lay out more money to pull fibre to homes.

They should offer the home owner or business owner the option of paying to have fibre from the cab to the home. Owner pays eircom to install the fibre, eircom get an infrastructure upgrade for free.

They trialled FTTH in Sandyford and Wexford, I've no idea of the results but I know they had huge problems using the existing pipe into the house which lead to a 2nd pipe being provided. Some customer didn't want their hallway dug up, others were annoyed they had their garden/pathways dug up so I doubt many would want to actually pay for the pipe to be installed.

arctan

was a bit stupid alright, they wanted fibre in, but didn't want ducting put in .... they wanted the speeds to magically appear in their hallway

Cheerful Spring

spix wrote: »

30ms is very very good for gaming. I've been gaming with 80-90ms for years.

Microsoft recently announced their next generation gaming console (the X Box One)

To use this console internet access is required!

If your internet is slow and unreliable. Experiences may not be that enjoyable.

Irish people living in towns and cities can play the newest console.

Irish people living in villages were internet is slow or non existent. You game, the future does not look bright for you. The digital divide has arrived. You don't live in a certain place. You can't enjoy the latest gadgets.

Tommy Lagahan

Solair wrote: »

Remote housing really needs to be served by microwave links, not wired services.

With the right technology, 50+ mbits and low pings should be quite achievable in low density rural locations.

I can attest to this, back at home we ditched Three's NBS service for an ISP that was used in the last mile rollout in the north, this is always the speed apart from about 8-9PM when contention cuts in and it drops to maybe 3Mb at its worst.
http://speedtest.net/result/2624532778.png
I actually got host in P2P matchmaking online games a fair bit, the latency is consistent. I had trouble with NAT type, but I called them up and they assigned me a static public IP for an extra fiver a month (€30 total - no line rental ).
Provided contention is addressed and not ignored like with Three, microwave is enough for rural, even for people like me who wants to break the sub 10ms ping barrier with FTTC here in Letterkenny

Yeah Cheerful Spring is right in some sense, http://hothardware.com/News/Microsoft-Xbox-One-Will-Render-Some-of-Its-Graphics-Workload-in-the-Cloud/ you've got crap like that going on with X1 at the moment which is just DRM in a guise like with the new Sim City game. I'm personally on the fence on if they get away with this or not, no country in the world has 100% down to every last citizen broadband cover. Would be backwards of them to try this crap.

dxhound2005

Cheerful Spring wrote: »

Microsoft recently announced their next generation gaming console (the X Box One)

To use this console internet access is required!

If your internet is slow and unreliable. Experiences may not be that enjoyable.

Irish people living in towns and cities can play the newest console.

Irish people living in villages were internet is slow or non existent. You game, the future does not look bright for you. The digital divide has arrived. You don't live in a certain place. You can't enjoy the latest gadgets.

I don't think saying "the digital divide has arrived" makes sense. When nobody had internet say 20 years ago there was obviously no divide. When some people got it that created a divide but surely the divide has been narrowing ever since with more and more people having access.

It took many years for rural electrification to be completed. Telephone services were not the norm in rural areas up until quite recently. Radio and TV took many years to become universal.

I have had 56K dial up, then a 128K ISDN line I ordered specially, then 512K and so on up to 8 Meg (5 Meg really) now. All of the previous services were more expensive and obviously less value than what I have now and I can look forward to maybe 50 Meg for the same money. If you can suggest a cheap and easy solution to providing rural broadband I'm sure Eircom would be interested. And nobodys life that I know of has been changed that much for the good by having higher speed broadband and certainly not by being able to play X Box One.

Skidfingers

When are Eircom bringing it to villages?

Cheerful Spring

Tommy Lagahan wrote: »

Yeah Cheerful Spring is right in some sense, http://hothardware.com/News/Microsoft-Xbox-One-Will-Render-Some-of-Its-Graphics-Workload-in-the-Cloud/ you've got crap like that going on with X1 at the moment which is just DRM in a guise like with the new Sim City game. I'm personally on the fence on if they get away with this or not, no country in the world has 100% down to every last citizen broadband cover. Would be backwards of them to try this crap.

The Xbox One doesn't have to be online all the time, but it does have to be online. Not just once in a while—once a day, according to Microsoft vice president Phil Harrison.

In a Q&A on their press site for the new Xbox, Microsoft tackles the always-on question with a strangely-worded answer: "No, it does not have to be always connected, but Xbox One does require a connection to the Internet."

There it is. You have no internet don't buy this console.

gazzamc

Cheerful Spring wrote: »

Microsoft recently announced their next generation gaming console (the X Box One)

To use this console internet access is required!

If your internet is slow and unreliable. Experiences may not be that enjoyable.

Irish people living in towns and cities can play the newest console.

Irish people living in villages were internet is slow or non existent. You game, the future does not look bright for you. The digital divide has arrived. You don't live in a certain place. You can't enjoy the latest gadgets.

This will effect a lot of people not just Irish people... And will backfire on Microsoft.... If they can't play Xbox One there is always PS4 or PC.

Cheerful Spring

gazzamc wrote: »

This will effect a lot of people not just Irish people... And will backfire on Microsoft.... If they can't play Xbox One there is always PS4 or PC.

Some games will be internet access only games. This likely means more and more games in the future will only be playable online!

PS4@ is no different. example below.

if you want to play games like Diablo III or Bungie's Destiny then you already should know that a connection is going to be required - and in the case of Diablo III - that requirement also applies to single-player.

gazzamc

Cheerful Spring wrote: »

Some games will be internet access only games. This likely means more and more games in the future will only be playable online!

PS4@ is no different. example below.

if you want to play games like Diablo III or Bungie's Destiny then you already should know that a connection is going to be required - and in the case of Diablo III - that requirement also applies to single-player.

You do know that both those games are MMO's (Massively Multiplayer Online Games).. So obviously they will need to be played online... Single player games won't disappear any time soon....

And Sony haven't said anything about needing to connect the console to the internet to play (any game like Xbone).

And Diablo III has always Online DRM implemented so it's an exception... But when it comes to the Xbox One every game will need a connection to the internet (Activation, and then every 24hrs thereafter).

phog

Skidfingers wrote: »

When are Eircom bringing it to villages?

Will they ever but I live in a townland about 5km from Limerick city centre with a population of a few hundred and have seen a fibre cab being installed recently. The fibre is from a city exchange though.

ferpur

saw a k/n van beside a non commissioned cab today thought they did not work on sat

phog

ferpur wrote: »

saw a k/n van beside a non commissioned cab today thought they did not work on sat

KNN will work any day/hour they can if needed.

red_bairn

Skidfingers wrote: »

When are Eircom bringing it to villages?

Kilcoole is a village and it has a few fiber cabinets there.

Solair

phog wrote: »

KNN will work any day/hour they can if needed.

Eircom themselves were working Saturdays around my area of cork

liamnojo92

Ssshhh no-one tell comreg.

Solair

liamnojo92 wrote: »

Ssshhh no-one tell comreg.

No chance of ComReg working on a Saturday, that's for sure!!

jd

liamnojo92 wrote: »

Ssshhh no-one tell comreg.

I think the issue is with out of hours customer nga installations, not cabinet provisioning. Anyone know for sure?