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

ElNino

Post 6891 on the previous page clearly identifies the source of the problem. The question is did eircom willingly allow vodafone and bt to piggyback on their own cable to the UK to the detriment of their own customers?

The posting from the eircom rep appears to be very missleading as it doesn't state that the undersea cable fault was not on the eircom backbone. It is kind of like when you are getting a flight somewhere and you are told that your flight is being delayed for technical reasons until a replacement plane arrives whereas in fact there is nothing wrong with your plane but it is being diverted to cover for another broken down plane on a different route.

arctan

I'd imagine it's an SLA requirement until the problem is repaired or a routing solution found

nilhg

flamegrill wrote: »

Probably wouldn't get excited just yet. Carlow town had this done more or less by end of September. orders were only possible from the 11th of December onwards..

Cheers, I understand about the time lag, the efibre map has the exchange to go live in June, just I don't/didn't have much expectation of them putting a fibre cab out in the sticks, there are probably only 20/30 houses within 1000 meters range.

nickhilliard

ED E wrote: »

Im assuming UPC are INEX members, so my theory was tests to a vodafone server would be UPC-INEX-Voda. But if they all have their own links then that cant be the congestion point and it may just be an overloaded test server.

UPC are INEX members, but not all INEX members peer with each other. You can check this out by running a traceroute from your UPC account to the Vodafone Ireland nameserver (89.19.64.164, according to the VFIE support web site).

Nick

tdonegan1990

Wonder if this "hiccup" will slow down their plans on the rollout of vectoring?

fat-tony

jca wrote: »

They've identified the source of the problem. I really don't care what causes the slowdown I just want it working all the tine. Mine was perfect last night.

That may well be the source of one particular problem, but there are multiple routes to ensure packets get through - t'internet depends on diverse routing to function in the event of a line outage.
Without someone who has inside knowledge of the location of routers and network entry/exit points for the various ISPs posting those details in this thread (unlikely and probably a breach of confidentiality), then I would consider most of these posts to be highly speculative.

jca

fat-tony wrote: »

That may well be the source of one particular problem, but there are multiple routes to ensure packets get through - t'internet depends on diverse routing to function in the event of a line outage.
Without someone who has inside knowledge of the location of routers and network entry/exit points for the various ISPs posting those details in this thread (unlikely and probably a breach of confidentiality), then I would consider most of these posts to be highly speculative.

Ah shur it makes us think we know what we're talking about:pac::pac:
Perfect speeds today,

That's all I'm interested in tbh;)

NextYearIthink

From the eircom Forum......

http://community.eircom.net/t5/Service-Updates-and/Recent-service-issues/m-p/56284#M110


Recent service issues.
[ Edited ]
Options

6 hours ago - last edited 6 hours ago

Hi All



We have had confirmation of a break in a major cable under the Irish Sea.



This has created a lot of issues on the network and explains a lot of the issues raised in the past couple of days. Such issues include a high number in reports of congestion like symptoms, slow speeds, high ping spikes and difficulties with latency.



I would like to assure you that divers and engineers are being dispatched this morning to begin repairs.



At present we do not have a specific timeframe of how long repairs are expected to take however there are indications that this could indeed take up to a couple of days. I will do my best to keep you updated on any further information I may get.



Regards



eircom Customer Care

Morrisseyy

Does anyone have any info on how accurate eircom are in regards to predicted line speed? Rang up today and they said we could get 20megs down which I'd be happy with, just wondering if this is an over-sell as usual?

ED E

Morrisseyy wrote: »

Does anyone have any info on how accurate eircom are in regards to predicted line speed? Rang up today and they said we could get 20megs down which I'd be happy with, just wondering if this is an over-sell as usual?

Thats best case. Real world its 50/50 between 17 or 20. And when you test it'll show 15 or 18 respectively.

nickhilliard

folks, there's a lot of speculation going on in this thread about a lot of things. Here's a quick outline of some of the things that people have been commenting on.

1. connectivity from ireland to the rest of the world

There are lots of submarine cables to and from ireland. You can get an up-to-date map of these on http://www.kis-orca.eu/map, among many other places. The operators of these cables include Vodafone, UPC, BT, GEO, Hibernia, Sea Fibre, Level 3 and several others.

Each cable is operated with wave-division multiplexing equipment. This means that by shining differently coloured light down the cable, you can run multiple parallel streams of data, none of which interferes with any of the others. It looks like this:

One service provider might use the blue wavelength, and another the green. Neither of them can affect the other's transmissions in any way whatever. If you're interested, the wavelengths for the DWDM ranges go from 1520nm to 1577nm, i.e. near-infrared range.

Typically on a modern submarine cable, each of these channels will provide 10Gbit/sec capacity. The technical characteristics of the cable will determine how many of these 10G channels you can run on each pair of fibres. For some cables you might be able to run 200 channels (i.e. 2Tbit/sec per pair of fibres); others will be a lot less. Also, most of the cable systems running across the irish sea are comprised of multiple separate fibre pairs. Some providers are now beginning to run each wave at 100Gbit/sec, which is pretty neat.

When an ISP gets large scale capacity like this, it will typically be delivered using its own 10g wave which won't interfere with anyone else's capacity on the same link. This means that all this talk about BT, Vodafone and Eircom all congesting each others links over the irish sea is nonsense, so let's just drop this myth.

Lots of operators rent capacity from each other for resilience reasons. The exact details of which cables are used for transporting which bytes of data is always a bit obscure, not for any conspiratorial reason but simply because this changes all the time and any sensible service provider will use multiple links anyway. In other words, if one ISP uses service from another operator, it's because a commercial service was provided. There is simply no issue of operators providing capacity to others by accident.

It seems at the moment that there is a problem with one out of the 17-odd submarine cables off the island. Big deal. These things happen every so often. It's a drag, but nothing more. The operator in question has other cable plant out of the country, but it may be that not every company which rents capacity on the broken cable has rented resilient capacity on the submarine operator's other cable. Resilient capacity costs extra money, and usually a service provider will opt for redundancy instead of resiliency (i.e. multiple links instead of a single highly reliable link).

2. connectivity within ireland

lots but not all interconnectivity between service provider networks in Ireland happens over INEX, which is an internet exchange point or IXP. That's a fancy name for a large ethernet network located in Dublin. "Large" means that it spans 5 physical sites and the sum of all member ports connected to the exchange is currently a little over 300 Gbit/sec. Incidentally, I'm CTO of INEX.

So if someone in e.g. Eircom needs to send internet data to someone in e.g. Magnet Networks, then that data will probably be sent over INEX. There are lots of members of the IXP and you can get a complete list at https://www.inex.ie/about/memberlist. But just because two members are present at INEX, that doesn't mean they interconnect there. They may interconnect by their own private links to each other, or they may do so by sending their traffic off the island and getting it delivered by some third party. INEX doesn't have an opinion on this because it's a neutral organisation and if one organisation doesn't want to interconnect with another organisation at the IXP, INEX doesn't get involved. INEX is owned equally by all its members, and there's a list of these on https://www.inex.ie

3. packet loss

When you buy a residential service package from an ISP, the path for web data from you to the rest of the world is:

• your browser
• your computer
• link from computer to your dsl or cable modem (via wifi or ethernet cable)
• either link from DSL modem to operator DSLAM or cable modem to CMTS
• either link from DSL modem to DSLAM or cable modem to CMTS
• connectivity from DSLAM / CMTS to ISP core, either directly (UPC, Eircom) or else indirectly (bitstream operators).
• connectivity from ISP core to other networks

You can google the abbreviations. There are easy-to-understand descriptions for all of them on wikipedia.

If there is packet loss or delay in any of these path segments, your end-user performance will suffer. By far the most common locations for packet loss and general problems are at the customer premises side, e.g.

• internal house wiring causing DSL sync speeds to be truly terrible
• customers' computers being compromised by a virus and trashing your uplink because you're inadvertently sending out bucketloads of spam or you're using to launch DDoS attacks
• wifi fighting with your neighbor's netflix habit / time capsule backups / your brick walls / your kingspan insulation / other noisy devices

Wifi problems are ubiquitous, but debugging them is a whole exercise by itself. Suffice it to say that you are much better off using UTP cabled network access where possible (and not UTP over power sockets pls), because this eliminates an entire category of potential problems.

Less commonly - but it does happen - there may be packet loss on the ISP side. This can be at the access layer (e.g. cable segment or wireless sector too busy), the aggregation layer (e.g. connectivity from Dublin to Ballygobackwards not being provisioned with enough capacity to handle all the customers living in Ballygobackwards), or the transit / peering layer (e.g. connectivity from ISP A to ISP .

Generally speaking, if you have packet loss on the ISP side, it is difficult to accurately diagnose where the problem actually is unless you have interior visibility into the ISP's capacity and performance. Just because you have packet loss, that doesn't mean that the cause of the problem is the same as your neighbor's.

4. speedtest.net

Speedtest runs as a flash applet in your browser. Flash is designed for displaying pretty pictures and animations, not providing accurate telemetry, so it's probably a bad idea to give speedtest much credence: generally you have no idea what you're actually measuring. As an anecdote, some while back I ran a couple of speedtest sessions from a server in ireland with hardwired 100mbit capacity. The first test got 147 mbit/sec (i.e. physically impossible) and the second test gave 2mbit/sec. This was not confidence inspiring.

At best, bad speedtest results show that maybe there is some form of problem somewhere between your browser and the speedtest server you're using, but it gives no feedback whatever on where that problem might be, or if it's a genuine problem. Note that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

There are piles of speedtest servers in Ireland: Vodafone, Digiweb, Eircom, Web World, UPC, CIX, Fastcom, NWE and several others all have them. If you happen to place any faith in speedtest results, then it would be best to choose the server which is nearest, network-wise. E.g. UPC users would be best to use http://speedtest.upc.ie, because that's located on UPC's network in Dublin. The easiest way to find out what's near, network-wise is to run traceroute and see where the packets go, but even that's a bit difficult on speedtest because it doesn't tell you the termination IP address. Also, there is no way of telling if the speedtest server itself is overloaded.

5. speculation

the speculation on this thread is awesome Taking a whirlwind tour of some of the issues just in the last couple of days: In all likelihood, the submarine fibre break that has been reported won't make much of a difference to anything, and sorry but the chain of logic in post #6891 is flat wrong. A submarine cable break will not affect dsl vectoring. SLAs are wonderful, no really, but don't materially affect the physics of getting cable repair ships into the irish sea to handle repairs. Posting daily speedtest results is entertaining, but means very little in reality without knowing what path the packets take, including the paths which are hidden by the various encapsulation mechanisms routinely deployed on service provider networks. Speedtest runs on random servers will return random results. Divers don't retrieve cables; it's all done by grappling hooks - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwkRaWDWTGw. Usually it will take significantly less than 1 second for a cable operator to realise that their cable has gone down, not two months. Eircom will never replace your copper with co-ax because that's a different technology which is not useful for dsl. "Up to whatever your line is capable of carrying" is usually a reflection of physics rather than the politics that people prefer to believe in, and eircom are attempting to deal with this sensibly by attempting to take bad quality house wiring out of the loop for their copper VDSL (a.k.a "efibre") rollout. Digiweb's speedtest server is in Dublin, as far as I know - not Dundalk, as speedtest claim. Academic networks are often provisioned with much higher capacity than commercial networks.

"And Manchester again. What does it all mean?" Probably nothing at all.

Finally, please PLEASE be nice to the poor people at the end of the tech support line: they have no control over whether your packets are being dropped or not. They're just regular people like you and me and they deserve respect and politeness for the difficult and thankless job that they do.

Nick

lemon_remon

nickhilliard wrote: »

3. packet loss

• internal house wiring causing DSL sync speeds to be truly terrible
• customers' computers being compromised by a virus and trashing your uplink because you're inadvertently sending out bucketloads of spam or you're using to launch DDoS attacks
• wifi fighting with your neighbor's netflix habit / time capsule backups / your brick walls / your kingspan insulation / other noisy devices

Did you even read the thread? We aren't stupid, this isn't what's causing our problems.

nickhilliard wrote: »

4. speedtest.net

Speedtest runs as a flash applet in your browser. Flash is designed for displaying pretty pictures and animations, not providing accurate telemetry, so it's probably a bad idea to give speedtest much credence: generally you have no idea what you're actually measuring. As an anecdote, some while back I ran a couple of speedtest sessions from a server in ireland with hardwired 100mbit capacity. The first test got 147 mbit/sec (i.e. physically impossible) and the second test gave 2mbit/sec. This was not confidence inspiring.

At best, bad speedtest results show that maybe there is some form of problem somewhere between your browser and the speedtest server you're using, but it gives no feedback whatever on where that problem might be, or if it's a genuine problem. Note that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

Eh, what? You do know what you're measuring. Speedtest spins up a bunch of HTTP connections to the web server, through flash and measures the amount of data it can push. It wouldn't make a different if it did it through flipping Fortran, it's just a HTTP connection it's pushing data through.

nickhilliard wrote: »

There are piles of speedtest servers in Ireland: Vodafone, Digiweb, Eircom, Web World, UPC, CIX, Fastcom, NWE and several others all have them. If you happen to place any faith in speedtest results, then it would be best to choose the server which is nearest, network-wise. E.g. UPC users would be best to use http://speedtest.upc.ie, because that's located on UPC's network in Dublin. The easiest way to find out what's near, network-wise is to run traceroute and see where the packets go, but even that's a bit difficult on speedtest because it doesn't tell you the termination IP address. Also, there is no way of telling if the speedtest server itself is overloaded.

Again, did you read the thread? The reason people are posting their connections to over sea servers is because those are the type of connections that are having problems. It isn't completely unimaginable that there are problems with inter country routing, it certainly wouldn't be the first time. What we are speculating on is the cause of these problems.

nickhilliard wrote: »

5. speculation

the speculation on this thread is awesome Taking a whirlwind tour of some of the issues just in the last couple of days: In all likelihood, the submarine fibre break that has been reported won't make much of a difference to anything, and sorry but the chain of logic in post #6891 is flat wrong. A submarine cable break will not affect dsl vectoring. SLAs are wonderful, no really, but don't materially affect the physics of getting cable repair ships into the irish sea to handle repairs. Posting daily speedtest results is entertaining, but means very little in reality without knowing what path the packets take, including the paths which are hidden by the various encapsulation mechanisms routinely deployed on service provider networks. Speedtest runs on random servers will return random results. Divers don't retrieve cables; it's all done by grappling hooks - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwkRaWDWTGw. Usually it will take significantly less than 1 second for a cable operator to realise that their cable has gone down, not two months. Eircom will never replace your copper with co-ax because that's a different technology which is not useful for dsl. "Up to whatever your line is capable of carrying" is usually a reflection of physics rather than the politics that people prefer to believe in, and eircom are attempting to deal with this sensibly by attempting to take bad quality house wiring out of the loop for their copper VDSL (a.k.a "efibre") rollout. Digiweb's speedtest server is in Dublin, as far as I know - not Dundalk, as speedtest claim. Academic networks are often provisioned with much higher capacity than commercial networks.

"And Manchester again. What does it all mean?" Probably nothing at all.

Finally, please PLEASE be nice to the poor people at the end of the tech support line: they have no control over whether your packets are being dropped or not. They're just regular people like you and me and they deserve respect and politeness for the difficult and thankless job that they do.

I don't see what your point is here. The reason people are posting tests is because it's the easiest way to express the issue being experienced - and the results were consistent. Speedtest run on random servers doesn't produce random results, the results are reasonably consistent. Besides the servers weren't "random", that's why people were using the Manchester server.

murphaph

nickhilliard wrote: »

It seems at the moment that there is a problem with one out of the 17-odd submarine cables off the island. Big deal. These things happen every so often. It's a drag, but nothing more. The operator in question has other cable plant out of the country, but it may be that not every company which rents capacity on the broken cable has rented resilient capacity on the submarine operator's other cable. Resilient capacity costs extra money, and usually a service provider will opt for redundancy instead of resiliency (i.e. multiple links instead of a single highly reliable link).

Eircom and UPC are currently blaming this cable break for the widespread problems they've been having. What's your opinion on that?

nickhilliard

lemon_remon wrote: »

Did you even read the thread? We aren't stupid, this isn't what's causing our problems.

All 6914 posts? No, and never will. From what I can see of the posts over the last several days, people are experiencing a variety of problems. Some look like they might be related to this fibre break; others look like they're not. As a side note, it looks to me like there is an awful lot of confirmation bias going on.

lemon_remon wrote: »

Eh, what? You do know what you're measuring. Speedtest spins up a bunch of HTTP connections to the web server, through flash and measures the amount of data it can push. It wouldn't make a different if it did it through flipping Fortran, it's just a HTTP connection it's pushing data through.

TCP is not a suitable protocol for assessing link throughput.

Flash is not a suitable tool for hosting a link telemetry diagnosis mechanism.

There is an almost religious devotion to the output of speedtest on boards.ie. It's great fun and occasionally I run it myself for entertainment purposes. But it condenses a large variety of factors into a single scalar quantity, and in doing so it loses all of the information you need to diagnose what's going on. Don't treat its output as being anything other than anecdote.

Nick

nickhilliard

murphaph wrote: »

Eircom and UPC are currently blaming this cable break for the widespread problems they've been having. What's your opinion on that?

If they say it's causing problems, then it's probably causing problems. But it's clear that this is the not the root cause of all the problems mentioned by people in this thread over the past while.

Nick

ED E

First link failed on 31/12. Repairs on 11/1 took a second off.

There are multiple lines between us and all parts of GB so you'd think the headroom would be there. Seems not.

Only a guess here but the Irish ISP(and the ISP leasing from them) lost their transit so maybe congestion WITHIN ireland is traffic that would normally leave via wexford running up other national links to get onto dublin transit. Total guess though.

We'll know soon if Nick is right and restoration of these links removes all problems or just some. Fingers crossed its the former for the sake of all the VDSL customers.

Ah-Watch

Ok I lifted this page off a friends Belkin router which is set up with Vodafone. I'm not sure if it will help as it's not the Vodafone DSL homepage but what is the likely fibre speed profile this line would be capable of if you can lift anything off this??

Thanks

fat-tony

Ah-Watch wrote: »

Ok I lifted this page off a friends Belkin router which is set up with Vodafone. I'm not sure if it will help as it's not the Vodafone DSL homepage but what is the likely fibre speed profile this line would be capable of if you can lift anything off this??

Thanks

You can't tell what speed you will get on fibre (VDSL) by looking at your stats on ADSL. ADSL delivery is from exchange to home. VDSL is from cabinet to home, so connection path will be shorter.

fat-tony

@nickhilliard - thanks for the detailed post. I have, several times in this thread, questioned the value of running speedtest to identify the source of the slowdown in eircom's network and also the wisdom in picking the Manchester server as highlighting the problem in data transiting the Irish Sea, when most of us wouldn't have any direct knowledge of the route the data packets are taking. I hope that your post (which at least is coming from someone with an insight into the internetworking of the Irish ISPs) will put a stop to pointless speedtest posts which are just consuming pages of what was otherwise quite an informative and interesting thread.

Ah-Watch

fat-tony wrote: »

You can't tell what speed you will get on fibre (VDSL) by looking at your stats on ADSL. ADSL delivery is from exchange to home. VDSL is from cabinet to home, so connection path will be shorter.

Good man tony. Cheers for that. This house has a cabinet at front if estate so between 200-300 metres away so hopefully a decent enough speed at that. I'm still afraid of telling him to sign up with Vodafone Fibre as I had a crap experience with Vodafone adsl before with slow speeds etc compared to eircom but I have to say from reading this and the other forums in general I think people appear to be happy enough with Vodafone. No point in paying Eircom more now really is there

lemon_remon

nickhilliard wrote: »

All 6914 posts? No, and never will. From what I can see of the posts over the last several days, people are experiencing a variety of problems. Some look like they might be related to this fibre break; others look like they're not. As a side note, it looks to me like there is an awful lot of confirmation bias going on.

TCP is not a suitable protocol for assessing link throughput.

No, I'm only bother by the recent posts which you seem to dismiss as user's own personal problems when it's clear that's there's a more serious problem which can't be explained by a 5 min introduction to network engineering.

nickhilliard wrote: »

Flash is not a suitable tool for hosting a link telemetry diagnosis mechanism..

Eh, why? What does Flash even have to do with anything? I couldn't give a **** what protocol my packets are being sent through. The point is I shouldn't have to care. This should be handled by my ISP and clearly there are problems with my ISP.

nickhilliard wrote: »

There is an almost religious devotion to the output of speedtest on boards.ie. It's great fun and occasionally I run it myself for entertainment purposes. But it condenses a large variety of factors into a single scalar quantity, and in doing so it loses all of the information you need to diagnose what's going on. Don't treat its output as being anything other than anecdote.
Nick

And again, why? Speedtest gives a clearer, then most services, diagnose of the problems that are experienced by end users. TCP is what 99% of users give a **** about. If you have any other reliable end user diagnostic tests then please do share but you appear to be caught up in ISP protocols and other irrelevant **** that no one could give a **** about. Would we have been taken more seriously if we've all ran "nc" commands and diagnosed our own problems? I hope not because it's plain as day that there's a more serious problem going on here and your bull**** basic net eng isn't going to change that. (Excuse me if I sound angry because I've been putting up with a bull**** Internet connection for 2 months for no clear reason - hence the speculation in this thread).

nickhilliard

lemon_remon wrote: »

Eh, why? What does Flash even have to do with anything? I couldn't give a **** what protocol my packets are being sent through. The point is I shouldn't have to care. This should be handled by my ISP and clearly there are problems with my ISP.

see post 6912, section 3. speedtest measures a combination of all these, namely the performance of 4 simultaneous tcp sessions from a low priority thread which is not optimised for performance diagnosis, embedded in a chunk of bloated code (your and my browser), over a 30 second time interval over a pile of separate infrastructure which you have no visibility into, to an unknown destination IP address with unknown loading. It does not measure your isp's performance. It doesn't even measure your computer's IP performance. In fact, it doesn't even measure your computer's tcp performance which is a separate thing again. Even if it did, the metric it provides is so general that it doesn't provide a meaningful data that can be used to pinpoint problems.

lemon_remon wrote: »

And again, why? Speedtest gives a clearer, then most services, diagnose of the problems that are experienced by end users. TCP is what 99% of users give a **** about. If you have any other reliable end user diagnostic tests then please do share but you appear to be caught up in ISP protocols and other irrelevant **** that no one could give a **** about. Would we have been taken more seriously if we've all ran "nc" commands and diagnosed our own problems? I hope not because it's plain as day that there's a more serious problem going on here and your bull**** basic net eng isn't going to change that.

Speedtest is as useful for diagnosing ip networking problems as your car's speedometer is good for advanced internal engine diagnostics. It's the wrong tool for the job.

lemon_remon wrote: »

(Excuse me if I sound angry because I've been putting up with a bull**** Internet connection for 2 months for no clear reason - hence the speculation in this thread).

Eircom have not been having international capacity problems for 2 months.

Separate to this, a reliable source has informed me that there was not just one but two simultaneous international fibre breaks which affected different cable systems over the irish sea in the last couple of days. One break is a drag. Two simultaneous breaks is a serious engineering problem, and I understand that this may have been related to packet loss on monday evening, but that the problems have both been worked around so that eircom are now operating on normal international capacity as of at least wednesday evening.

Nick

seanp_25

nickhilliard wrote: »

Separate to this, a reliable source has informed me that there was not just one but two simultaneous international fibre breaks which affected different cable systems over the irish sea in the last couple of days. One break is a drag. Two simultaneous breaks is a serious engineering problem, and I understand that this may have been related to packet loss on monday evening, but that the problems have both been worked around so that eircom are now operating on normal international capacity as of at least wednesday evening.

Thanks for this info and informative posts.

Cabaal

Lads can I ask people to attack the post not the poster, also please remain civil.

giggsy07

20 meg fibre download now down to 5meg :(Upload speed now greater than download speed

smelly sock

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That's my UPC tonight to Manchester. How's the Eircom VF looking?

fat-tony

smelly sock wrote: »

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That's my UPC tonight to Manchester. How's the Eircom VF looking?

smelly sock

Sorry my man. Not sure what happend there!!

It's at 200 down anyway.

fat-tony

Eircom VF?

O'Prez

Sky NGB on a 12 meg line: