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

bk

murphaph wrote: »

I think fttc is the right focus for the medium term but yes, we need to be looking at fttb as well. It is a shame nobody was thinking about fttb during the building boom. We could have made massive inroads already by making developments fttb ready. A huge lost opportunity there given we have built so much of our housing stock in the recent past when people knew fttb would be coming sooner or later.

Those of us involved in Ireland Off Line back in 2000 certainly were, we were looking for at least carrier neutral ducting to be added to the building codes, but unfortunately they ignored us on this point. I guess the building lobby was too strong.

bk

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

I think at one stage someone reckoned it would take €2Bn to fibre up the whole country. We've spent far more on roads, I haven't been keeping track but I wouldn't be surprised if that figure was close to what has been asset stripped out of eircom over the years.

When Eircom was privatised it had zero debt. It ended up with €5 billion worth of debt, mostly as a result of asset stripping. So yes, we could have built a national fibre network twice for that money.

Btw the intercity motorway network has cost roughly €5bn to build.

Impetus

murphaph wrote: »

Indeed. It's a lot easier to fibre up legacy buildings in the US because they favour overhead supply. In Ireland most urban developments over the last 40 years have had power and telecoms supplied underground, which makes thinks much trtickier to upgrade at low cost.

I think fttc is the right focus for the medium term but yes, we need to be looking at fttb as well. It is a shame nobody was thinking about fttb during the building boom. We could have made massive inroads already by making developments fttb ready. A huge lost opportunity there given we have built so much of our housing stock in the recent past when people knew fttb would be coming sooner or later.

Underground generally means use of ducts / conduits. ie little tunnels many/most of which have space for one more cable at least

Mr Cumulonimbus

Anybody currently having problems with efibre in Dundalk? My speeds have gone from this:



to this:



PC is connected to the router via an ethernet cable.

EDIT: using Eircom's own speedtest page, I'm getting the following result:



Why is there such a discrepancy between Eircom's result and the speedtest.net result I wonder?

Going back to speedtest.net, using the server in Cork I get:



While a Dublin server returns:



Why all the differing results?

FURTHER EDIT:

Another result from the Dundalk server:



Seems ok now again. Mysterious....

Mc Love

My fiber speeds were a complete joke as well yesterday going up and down! This morning they are back to normal but I am going to track them all day to see if there is any difference, surely with fiber broadband the speed shouldnt be dropping.

Impetus

Mr Cumulonimbus wrote: »

Anybody currently having problems with efibre in Dundalk? My speeds have gone from this:

Images deleted to save space/bandwidth.

Seems ok now again. Mysterious....

Most operators use DLM (Dynamic line management) which will alter your speed and latency depending on changes in the line quality. Line quality is affected by water ingress, dampness, atmospheric pressure etc. This is not a problem with real fibre to the premises.

With the eircom “speedtest”, the entire speedcheck probably (almost certainly) takes place within the eircom network. You are not getting an accurate measure of the real speed that you will experience in the wider world - ie from other Irish servers, other European servers, not to mention those in North America or Asia. This is partly because the “international” backhaul between Irish ISPs (including eircom) tends to be insufficient in capacity terms to meet the traffic levels of their client base. This is one of many bottlenecks.


Traffic shaping (a favourite of UPC, among others) slows down one’s end to end internet connection especially on video applications. Ie you are not even getting even 1 Mbits/sec on a so called 120 Mbits/sec connection, for much of the time watching video on live.twit.tv. Misleading / fraudulent advertising in terms of materiality of content/message and the real service delivered to the customer. Another version of snake oil.


The slow download speed you encountered on the “Cork test” is probably a function of inadequate backhaul capacity between Cork and Dublin. There is probably more capacity in the other direction (upload - ie Dublin to Cork) - assuming the routing from where you are situated and Cork is via Dublin.


If the network was properly engineered your intra-Ireland ping times should be between 5 and 10 ms, because physical distances are so short on a small island that is only 84,421 km2 in area. Dynamic line management program changes can have an impact on your latency - which is affected by line quality. Real fibre (ie FTTP) does not have issues of dampness and other environmental changes on the speed of an internet connection, that applies to fake fibre (ie eFibre).


While the speed may be reasonable on your Dublin server test, depending on the real distance between your premises and the VDSL2 cabinet, the ping time stinks. Also there would appear to be insufficient capacity in the upload direction to the Dublin server, given the higher upload speeds you are getting to Dundalk and Cork servers.


The capacities and latency on eircom’s network seem totally screwed up, nation-wide.

Eircom’s eFibre is no more fibre than UPS fibrepower - because they both involve copper at the subscriber end of the chain and the performance of copper is flaky. It all depends on dampness, distance from VDSL2 cabinet (in real metres - not as the crow flies), and other environmental factors.

ED E

@Mr Cumulonimbus: They might be trialling adaptive profiles in your area. The way it was fluctuating like that suggests it as typically the fixed rate VDSL profiles in use are rock solid.

Tests to Dublin servers will often be better, this is normal as there is an INEX point in Citywest. This is where all the ISPs meet and there is huge backhaul there. Trunks down to Cork might be busy at peak(though they shouldnt be that bad).

Impetus wrote: »

Traffic shaping (a favourite of UPC, among others) slows down one’s end to end internet connection especially on video applications. Ie you are not even getting even 1 Mbits/sec on a so called 120 Mbits/sec connection, for much of the time watching video on live.twit.tv. Misleading / fraudulent advertising in terms of materiality of content/message and the real service delivered to the customer. Another version of snake oil.

Theyve been caught red handed fiddling with the youtube CDN but to say you're pulling 1Mb on 120Mb connection simply isnt fair. I've had routing issues of some sort on the UPC network before but for the vast majority of the we, and many others I know, receive the advertised speed from local and international hosts.

Mr Cumulonimbus

Thanks Impetus & ED E.

Speeds have dropped again in the last half hour or so. Same last night. Results using the Dundalk server from speedtest.net & the UPC speed test facility. Speeds tend to recover towards midnight. I'm on the Up To 50 meg package.

Will give Eircom support a ring tomorrow I think.





Line stats:

Impetus

ED E wrote: »

Theyve been caught red handed fiddling with the youtube CDN but to say you're pulling 1Mb on 120Mb connection simply isnt fair. I've had routing issues of some sort on the UPC network before but for the vast majority of the we, and many others I know, receive the advertised speed from local and international hosts.

I can't recall a problem with youtube and UPC. Probably because $$$ is passing hands.

I always have problems with live.twit.tv (who use multiple streaming companies). One gets video buffering at 1 Mbits/sec - forcing one to use 400kbits/sec (poorer quality video) - on an allegedly 120 Mbits/sec feed. I don't get video buffering on the 1Mibts/sec feed from twit.tv at from other ISPs ie outside of Ireland.

Picture quality on netflix is far poorer via UPC than via any other ISP I use, which makes me think that UPC is playing traffic shaping games with netflix. Netflix is available at INEX, though the last time I checked, UPC didn't use INEX for Netflix for some reason.

There is an inex equivalent in Cork http://www.cix.ie but all the networks seem to be Dublin centric - transporting bits up and down from Dublin, over sometimes ramshackle, inadequately scaled pipes.

While google maps is probably served from Ireland, if you zoom in and out on a map, the page fill is massively faster on good quality ISPs on the continent, compared with UPC (and eircom the last time I checked).

The Irish consumer "broadband market" is dominated by fiddlers and con merchants!

gerryk

Impetus wrote: »

The Irish consumer "telecoms market" is dominated by fiddlers and con merchants!

FTFY

Impetus

Mr Cumulonimbus wrote: »

Thanks Impetus & ED E.



Line stats:

eircom seems to be traffic shaping your feed, because your line rate up and down is much higher than you are actually getting on speedtest. Alternatively they don't have enough backhaul on their "fibre" backbone to serve the customer demand.

Not dissimilar to a shop selling bags of flour marked 1kg, with only 600g inside.

Irish ISP victims are getting a raw deal.

ED E

I dont totally disagree, but I think you're a little cynical. Our infrastructure is way behind(good old eastern europe is giving us a hiding) but we're an awful lot better off than chunks of the US where ISPs can do whatever the f'ck they like. For example TW(IIRC it was them) were prioritizing their own streaming service's packets and lowering that of netflix's to give artificially improved performance. And verizon want netflix to pay for bandwidth that end users are already paying for.

Packets are round tripping to dublin only in case of people on Dublin BRASs. If they're on a southern BRAS they'd have a direct path to cork hosts.

RE UPC and VOD, they appear to redirect traffic to mobile CDNs so even on a 50Mb connection Youtube will default to 360p or 480p. You can manually hop over but it'll default to crap. Same may well go for Netflix.

I actually follow SecurityNow from twit, but I get on demand via YT so I havent tested it from themselves directly. Will give it a shot.

UPCs CPE is shíte btw, so that may be the source of some of your troubles if you havent bridged it out.

Mr Cumulonimbus

2 further tests, the worst yet (for download speeds).





EDIT: Further test from UPC, falling through the floor........

ED E

http://ftp.heanet.ie/debian-cd/7.2.0-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/debian-live-7.2-amd64-kde-desktop.iso

Try grabbing that file. Will give you a real world "goodput" figure.

Still wired I assume?

Mr Cumulonimbus

ED E wrote: »

http://ftp.heanet.ie/debian-cd/7.2.0-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/debian-live-7.2-amd64-kde-desktop.iso

Try grabbing that file. Will give you a real world "goodput" figure.

Still wired I assume?

Yeah, cable from PC to router. File downloading at approx 400 kB/sec at the moment. That's not great is it?

ED E

Mr Cumulonimbus wrote: »

Yeah, cable from PC to router. File downloading at approx 400 kB/sec at the moment. That's not great is it?

Watch it for while, it'll scale up if its not competing with other traffic.

Mr Cumulonimbus

ED E wrote: »

Watch it for while, it'll scale up if its not competing with other traffic.

Hopping around all over the shop. Between 500kB to 850. 20 minutes indicated as remaining.

EDIT: over halfway there. Downloading now at approx 2 MB/sec. About 3 indicated minutes to go.

FURTHER EDIT: file downloaded. Climbed to 3.5 to 4.0 MB/sec for the last 10% or so.

Mr Cumulonimbus

Further test. Download speed back to normal, like this time last night.



@ED E. File downloaded at 3.5 to 4.0 MB/sec for the last 10% of it.

fbradyirl

I've noticed new black rectangles on the eFibre map. Do these indicate where the cabinets are planned or are they meaningless?

L1011

fbradyirl wrote: »

I've noticed new black rectangles on the eFibre map. Do these indicate where the cabinets are planned or are they meaningless?

The small black rectangles are the road numbers for the N roads, they'd normally be green but they've an overlay on the entire map.

fbradyirl

ah I must be blind! I didn't see the road numbers while in map view. Thanks.

gerryk

What black rectangles are you referring to? The only ones I can see are the road markers.

fbradyirl

gerryk, yes that's what I was on about. I didnt see the dark gray text written inside each back rectangle.

Gonzo

Dunshaughlin and Ratoath has been pushed back yet again from November 2013 to March 2013 just before the christmas and now has a new date of May 2013, I would not be surprised if it gets pushed back at least another twice between now and 2015.

smelly sock

Gonzo wrote: »

Dunshaughlin and Ratoath has been pushed back yet again from November 2013 to March 2013 just before the christmas and now has a new date of May 2013, I would not be surprised if it gets pushed back at least another twice between now and 2015.

Can you get upc?

Gonzo

smelly sock wrote: »

Can you get upc?

not a chance of it unfortunately. UPC is still isolated to large towns and cities.

smelly sock

Gonzo wrote: »

not a chance of it unfortunately. UPC is still isolated to large towns and cities.

That sucks. I finally got upgraded to it last week. Was facing the same wait for efibre. Now on 205meg down 10 up. Eircom are as bad as upc for the areas they decide to upgrade though. I'd say 50% of my town is actually going to be fibre enabled.

jca

ED E wrote: »

http://ftp.heanet.ie/debian-cd/7.2.0-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/debian-live-7.2-amd64-kde-desktop.iso

Try grabbing that file. Will give you a real world "goodput" figure.

Still wired I assume?

My speeds are gone terrible this evening, between 200-300 KB/s while downloading this file:(

Getting a sense of deja vu...

Mr Cumulonimbus

Mr Cumulonimbus wrote: »

Will give Eircom support a ring tomorrow I think.

Well, gave Eircom's tech support a ring tonight after speeds dropped again after 9pm. The agent couldn't find any fault on the line. He suggested heavy traffic, throtting issues etc, plus possible damage to the network (especially in the West) due to the current weather, when I mentioned the differing results when using the different servers on speedtest.net.

Here's Sligo:



compared to Enniskillen. (Enniskillen also gives the best ping of the lot). Fair difference in a minute.



Eircom's own speedtest always gives the same result (approx 47 down, approx 10 up) regardless of the time.

Mr Cumulonimbus

3 more tests in the space of about 3 minutes. Enniskillen, Sligo & Dublin (Digiweb).