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

fat-tony

This thread is about eircom fibre rollout (allegedly).

smelly sock

fat-tony wrote: »

This thread is about eircom fibre rollout (allegedly).

Get over it....


VF = vodafone.

ofcork

Ah-Watch wrote: »

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

Im about the same distance from the cab,have vf fibre around 5 months and getting consistent speeds of 47 and 13.

fat-tony

smelly sock wrote: »

Get over it....


VF = vodafone.

Hey I know VF stands for Vodafone.

You posted "Hows the Eircom VF looking" - what's that mean?

SweetCaliber

Hey guys,

Just wondering what speeds I could be expecting when I get Fibre in March.

I'm 700m from the cabinet and as far as I can tell, from the eircom manhole covers, the lines go directly down a straight path and take one turn and then straight to my house.

Cheers

Nonoperational

Based on what Eircom told me, they only do eFibre if you're less than 150M from the exchange. I am 200M and they won't give me fibre!

http://www.boards.ie/ttfpost/88513841

jd

Nonoperational wrote: »

Based on what Eircom told me, they only do eFibre if you're less than 150M from the exchange. I am 200M and they won't give me fibre!

http://www.boards.ie/ttfpost/88513841

The original range was 1km from cabinet and extended reach is up to about 2km .

fat-tony

SweetCaliber wrote: »

Hey guys,

Just wondering what speeds I could be expecting when I get Fibre in March.

I'm 700m from the cabinet and as far as I can tell, from the eircom manhole covers, the lines go directly down a straight path and take one turn and then straight to my house.

Cheers

Possibly around 40Mb, but it's dependent on the actual length of the run and the line quality. I'm about 350m from the cabinet and I get 70Mb sync and 66Mb downloads and 17Mb uploads (from Vodafone). The previous post from eircom is ill-informed or based on a misunderstanding. I have seen posts from customers who are over 1km from the cabinet and are getting 20Mb, but I think that's probably the limit.

TheChizler

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.

Nick

Hi Nick it's an honour to have you here making such informative posts!

Are there any (free!) tools you can recommend that might give more informative results? Ones that could break down the steps in the routing to identify weak links etc. Based on my understanding utp/ip tier2/3 networking I imagine this would require cooperation with the providers due to hidden links and proprietary encapsulation methods, and possibly corresponding software at the destination for full accuracy?

Capt'n Midnight

fat-tony wrote: »

I have seen posts from customers who are over 1km from the cabinet and are getting 20Mb, but I think that's probably the limit.

From Cisco



Beyond about 1 - 1.25 Km you might be better off staying on a 24Mb ADSL package, there's not a lot in it. Depends on price / cap / ping / contract length / hassle of install.
BTW at 4.5Km you might as well be on 8Mb , regardless of which type of ADSL you use.


The reason is that over longer distances you can't use the higher frequencies needed for extra bandwidth.
And anyway a longer line picks up more noise as well has loosing more of the signal.



It also depends on how direct a route the wires take and how many junctions they pass through, and cross talk and insulation and background noise like picking up radio stations in times past.

It really is an UP TO technology, and when ordering or enquiring remember that you may need to take another 20% off the speed to get a more stable connection.


But if you are outside a UPC / other cable area and there isn't rock solid fixed wireless service using external directional antennas and you are close to the cabinet then it's worth looking into now in case they run out of ports later on.


How often are the cabinets on http://irelandoffline.org/map/ updated ?

byte

I was looking at the eFibre map, and I notice Donegal Town has went from Feb '14 to "Now available"

Surprised Vodafone haven't contacted me to see if I'd upgrade. Will call them tomorrow.

wheresmybeaver

My parents were hooked up to fibre early in December, they have about 12 - 14 down and 1 up (if i remember correctly). Their cabinet is about a 15 minute walk away! Its a fair bit better than the old 2mb download they got with adsl2.. Couldn't even manage reliable skype on that, whereas now everything flies and is 100% reliable. Thank god eircom are allowing connections at more than 1km!

nickhilliard

TheChizler wrote: »

Are there any (free!) tools you can recommend that might give more informative results? Ones that could break down the steps in the routing to identify weak links etc. Based on my understanding utp/ip tier2/3 networking I imagine this would require cooperation with the providers due to hidden links and proprietary encapsulation methods, and possibly corresponding software at the destination for full accuracy?

Measurement is really only useful if you know your baseline. This means that whatever software you install, it needs to stay running permanently so that you can see trends and unusual events. You also need to have a good idea of the network topology you're trying to measure so that you can make good decisions about what network end-points you're going to use as beacons.

Two things that are easy to measure are packet loss and round-trip time. RTT is the time it takes to send a packet from your computer to a remote host and get a reply (but you should note that the network path from A to B is not necessarily the same as the path from B to A). Most network engineers use smokeping for this, as it produces slick graphs which are easy to read. So for example, several people in the networking community noticed with smokeping that there was a submarine cable problem last week because their long term latency figures between here and the UK suddenly jumped a couple of milliseconds - this will happen if their network connectivity providers have redundant links and fail over to a longer path. Obviously if you're pinging an address, make sure that the owner of that address is happy for it to be pinged. Many people are fine about this, but others aren't.

Throughput is more difficult. If you're going to attempt measuring it, you need to ensure that the link is otherwise quiet, i.e. no-one else is using netflix or uploading spam or downloading windows updates. You also need to use UDP because TCP completely fails to measure nominal throughput if there is any packet loss. iperf is good for this but due to security/authentication concerns, no-one ever leaves iperf listeners enabled, as they are ripe for abuse. So if you want to measure throughput, you need admin control at both end points. This is not always possible, although if you want to spin up an amazon VM for 20 minutes to do some testing, I'm sure that would work well.

Re: provider encapsulation and all that, it's ubiquitous but is usually well managed (dropped packets means unhappy customers which means lower revenue). Access users won't generally ever have any visibility into this so there's no real way for a DSL user to measure this meaningfully. Only the service provider can do this.

Nick

Nonoperational

And still the official Eircom response is that eFibre is only possible under 150M from a cabinet. Extraordinary.

http://www.boards.ie/ttfpost/88563405


From this thread... http://www.boards.ie/ttfthread/2057123908/2

Zith

Has anyone seen an improvement where they are directly connected to the exchange and cannot get fibre? So estates further out get fibre but that relieves some of the crosstalk closer to the exchange for those not connected to a cabinet?

Why I'm asking is that my village is on the 2016 list to get fibre, but I am way too far out to avail of fibre when it lands (unless some kind soul puts a new cabinet in my actual village). I am hoping my contended to hell ADSL will improve when many of those in range of fibre get off the ADSL.

mailsanchu

Zith wrote: »

Has anyone seen an improvement where they are directly connected to the exchange and cannot get fibre? So estates further out get fibre but that relieves some of the crosstalk closer to the exchange for those not connected to a cabinet?

Why I'm asking is that my village is on the 2016 list to get fibre, but I am way too far out to avail of fibre when it lands (unless some kind soul puts a new cabinet in my actual village). I am hoping my contended to hell ADSL will improve when many of those in range of fibre get off the ADSL.

I am connected directly to exchange and i am having no luck so far .. My area is live since September.

jca

Nonoperational wrote: »

And still the official Eircom response is that eFibre is only possible under 150M from a cabinet. Extraordinary.

http://www.boards.ie/ttfpost/88563405


From this thread... http://www.boards.ie/ttfthread/2057123908/2

It's 1500 metres not 150. I'm about 550 metres from the cabinet and getting great speeds.

Nonoperational

jca wrote: »

It's 1500 metres not 150. I'm about 550 metres from the cabinet and getting great speeds.

Well just now again, the Eircom rep told me it's official policy that 150-200M is the maximum distance for eFibre.


Unreal shower.

http://www.boards.ie/ttfpost/88578214

pistolpetes11

I dispair ,

Having backed up Nonoperational in his conversation with the Eircom rep and providing the REP / Talk to board with a copy of there OWN training literature the REP went off and found out he was indeed spouting Sh$te.

Absolutely baffling stuff , I still can find out why most of my estate can get the service and I can't ,

Is it possible to order a new line completely ?

Gonzo

Ive seen someone here before claim they are receiving Eircom E-Fibre up to 2700m from a cabinet getting a stable 7meg. 150/200m will give you the full upload and download speed of efibre!

bk

Gonzo wrote: »

Ive seen someone here before claim they are receiving Eircom E-Fibre up to 2700m from a cabinet getting a stable 7meg. 150/200m will give you the full upload and download speed of efibre!

I believe they only sell eFibre out to 1,500 meters max.

However it is possible for VDSL2 to operate beyond these distances, but you will only get ADSL2+ type speeds at beyond these distances.

That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, if Eircom are allowing it, that might still be a welcome upgrade for many people further out for the following reasons:

- You might be closer to the cabinet then you were to the exchange, thus you might get faster and more stable speeds.
- The exchange might only be ADSL enabled, so going to ADSL2+ speeds might be a significant boost.
- When you get VDSL they clean up your house wiring, which can help give higher and more stable speeds.

dalta5billion

This is a cabinet *really* near me. I've seen Eircom working at it in the past. However, it does not look like the regular old cabinets. Any ideas on what it could be?

byte

byte wrote: »

I was looking at the eFibre map, and I notice Donegal Town has went from Feb '14 to "Now available"

Surprised Vodafone haven't contacted me to see if I'd upgrade. Will call them tomorrow.

To further my post from a few days ago, I rang Vodafone yesterday to get the efibre, but was told I'd have to call the next day, as that was the earliest they could take orders from my exchange...

Anyway, rang them today, and have it all sorted. I was told I'd get a maximum of 40Mbit from my line, which is OK.

Something I had not realised, is that when you go for BB-only on eFibre, it means you can no longer make use of the phone for incoming or outgoing calls, as is the case when you only pay for BB with ADSL setup. So, I had to upgrade to the slightly dearer package to keep calls and added 100mins to landline and mobiles.

Was supposed to get a text about when a tech would come out to replace my master socket, but still waiting on that.

AlanS181824

I really hope Sky launch fibre soon, getting sick of 10/1...

red_bairn

dalta5billion wrote: »

This is a cabinet *really* near me. I've seen Eircom working at it in the past. However, it does not look like the regular old cabinets. Any ideas on what it could be?

It is just one of the old ones. They will replace it with one of the cross hatched ones. They did this for the 1970s TE ones in our town.

Villain

byte wrote: »

To further my post from a few days ago, I rang Vodafone yesterday to get the efibre, but was told I'd have to call the next day, as that was the earliest they could take orders from my exchange...

Anyway, rang them today, and have it all sorted. I was told I'd get a maximum of 40Mbit from my line, which is OK.

Something I had not realised, is that when you go for BB-only on eFibre, it means you can no longer make use of the phone for incoming or outgoing calls, as is the case when you only pay for BB with ADSL setup. So, I had to upgrade to the slightly dearer package to keep calls and added 100mins to landline and mobiles.

Was supposed to get a text about when a tech would come out to replace my master socket, but still waiting on that.

Makes sense re phone because as I understand the VDSL connection is terminated in the cabinet but the voice is still back to the exchange so if you only want broadband it saves that part of the setup.

nilhg

nilhg wrote: »

So KN networks are pulling fibre into ducts around the local town and yesterday someone spray painted a big number 6 on the cabinet nearest me (it's 3 km out from the actual town/exchange), should I be getting excited?






And yes, I will ask them when I get a chance.

Well, I met the lads on the road this morning and they confirmed that they are pulling ducting out for the fibre to the cab closest to my house, we'll have a couple of months (at least) to wait but things are looking up.

smelly sock

nilhg wrote: »

Well, I met the lads on the road this morning and they confirmed that they are pulling ducting out for the fibre to the cab closest to my house, we'll have a couple of months (at least) to wait but things are looking up.

How far are you from that cab?

Any further than 3 meters and your in trouble.

jca

smelly sock wrote: »

How far are you from that cab?

Any further than 3 meters and your in trouble.

..? I presume you're being sarcastic.

nilhg

smelly sock wrote: »

How far are you from that cab?

Any further than 3 meters and your in trouble.

Sure everyone should have a fibre cabinet at their back door.

jca wrote: »

..? I presume you're being sarcastic.