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

Cheerful Spring

starviewadams wrote: »

UPC's entry level broadband (50mb download/5mb upload 500gb usage cap) is €46.88 per month if you just get broadband on it's own without TV or phone.If you take the phone it's €44 per month.

Eircom's basic (up to 8mb download,a measly 10gb usage cap) is €40 for the first 6 months then €45 per month thereafter.

So for a €1 less with UPC you get a far,far superior service and a much bigger download allowance.

The price for having broadband with Eircom is way higher than that.

I pay 32 a month before taxes for a non NGB package.

Th speed i meant to get is 7 down and 312kb up (but only get 5 down)

You can't get fixed DSL broadband without having a phone line. So that adds 50 euros to the bill.

Every bill is two months. So 32+32+51 (line rental) plus vat taxed at 21%.

Broadband with Eircom is a rip off

Edit I have a 50GB allowance not sure 10GB cap is right?

Sponge Bob

starviewadams wrote: »

Eircom's basic (up to 8mb download,a measly 10gb usage cap) is €40 for the first 6 months then €45 per month thereafter.

eircoms 7.6mbits package, available from most of the 500 Non NGB exchanges, costs even more.

starviewadams

Just going off what the Eircom and UPC websites said.

https://secure.eircom.net/talktime/talktime-evolution-flow?execution=e1s2

http://www.upc.ie/deals/broadbandandphone/fibrepower50Mb/

aindriu80

starviewadams wrote: »

Just going off what the Eircom and UPC websites said.

https://secure.eircom.net/talktime/talktime-evolution-flow?execution=e1s2

http://www.upc.ie/deals/broadbandandphone/fibrepower50Mb/

it should say €52 instead of €50 thereafter.

has eircom any plans to upgrade the existing service ? Why is it more expensive than UPC ?

Liamario

starviewadams wrote: »

Just going off what the Eircom and UPC websites said.

https://secure.eircom.net/talktime/talktime-evolution-flow?execution=e1s2

http://www.upc.ie/deals/broadbandandphone/fibrepower50Mb/

All those eircom prices are excluding line rental. So you can add another 15 quid on top of those prices.

chriss745

Sponge Bob wrote: »

UPC can only reach 500k homes with their higher speeds and around 800k homes with any form of cable ( some quite old and analogue only even today) . UPC are not present in Business Districts, mainly only residential areas.

There are 2m homes.

I am 25 meters away far from UPC area. I asked them to connect UPC to my semi-detached house. They said no. There is no newly built apartment/house in Ballincollig where they would cable in. Why? Ballincollig is a big town. The cable goes in front of my housing estate, the whole block is already fully ducted. It would be a minor effort to cable in.

I don't understand them at all.

bk

Liamario wrote: »

It's not much of an answer, if they don't expand their network. If the ESB roll out goes ahead, it could potentially screw UPC...

Err, how is that, the ESB don't even plan to roll out fibre in areas where UPC are available!!

UPC cover about 1/3 of homes in Ireland and over night they are offering 50 to 150mb/s bb to those people TODAY

Even if it actually happens and everything goes perfectly, it will likely take 3 to 4 years for the ESB to reach the same number of homes.

It would be relatively straightforward for UPC to expand their network to new areas during this period. Perhaps even easier and cheaper then the ESB.

Two other things, first the ESB are looking for a joint partner to do this project with and when they do, they won't be selling it to customers, instead they will act as wholesalers, other telcos will rent capacity on it and sell it to customers.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if UPC could become the joint partner or at the very least rent capacity on this network to reach homes not currently on their network. After all UPC are already the ESBs current national fibre networks biggest customer.

BTW This is indirectly really good news for people living outside UPC's network. Because UPC are so competivly strong, Eircom and the ESB aren't even bothering to try and compete with UPC on their own turf, instead they seem to be building their networks in areas not serviced by UPC. If UPC were less aggressive, Eircom and the ESB might be tempted to duplicate UPC's network and focus on those areas firs, to the detriment of the rest of the country.

I will say though that I do think UPC are leaving money on the table. I think there really is a place in the market for a entry level broadband product for €20 to €30. This is currently being serviced by wireless "midband" 3G providers, but a wired solution would be far better for them.

While by far the best value for money, UPC's prices have certainly been creeping up due to the lack of competition to them.

Either way all this new investment and news is really good news for the Irish broadband market.

aindriu80

Liamario wrote: »

All those eircom prices are excluding line rental. So you can add another 15 quid on top of those prices.

no thats it, i checked my bill. It was around €47 or so for the first six months then it went up to €52.63

PeadarB

Jeeze folks so much for the op. Eircom have missed the damn boat so many times over the past couple of years it's become really sad for all us mere mortals in 8meg land. With UPC upping the ante today with their upgraded speeds, eircom is beginning to look farsical.
Fibre roll-out my ^^se.

chriss745

chriss745 wrote: »

I am 25 meters away far from UPC area. I asked them to connect UPC to my semi-detached house. They said no. There is no newly built apartment/house in Ballincollig where they would cable in. Why? Ballincollig is a big town. The cable goes in front of my housing estate, the whole block is already fully ducted. It would be a minor effort to cable in.

I don't understand them at all.

I just called UPC again to ask them about their plans. They don't have any plan to extend their coverage outside Dublin. That's insane!

bk

PeadarB wrote: »

Jeeze folks so much for the op. Eircom have missed the damn boat so many times over the past couple of years it's become really sad for all us mere mortals in 8meg land. With UPC upping the ante today with their upgraded speeds, eircom is beginning to look farsical.

Funny thing 10 years ago I told the at time CEO of Eircom exactly this. That cable would eventually eat them alive if they didn't invest heavily in their network.

Well obviously they didn't listen and look at them now!!

Interestingly one area that Eircoms new VDSL2+ products can remain competitive is the upload speeds.

Their 25mb product is 8mb up and 50mb is 20mb up. This compares very well to UPC's max 10mb up.

Upload speeds are becoming increasingly important due to cloud services like icloud, dropbox and people uploading high def pictures and videos to facebook, youtube, etc.

I think UPc needs to try and do better with their upload speeds.

bk

chriss745 wrote: »

I just called UPC again to ask them about their plans. They don't have any plan to extend their coverage outside Dublin. That's insane!

UPC are already in many places outside Dublin, like Cork, Galway, etc.

The customer service staff won't have any idea if management actually plan to expand their network further. That is something that UPC would want to keep confidential until it actually happens as they wouldn't want to show their hand to their competitors.

Not saying they will expand, just that they certainly aren't going to tell anyone.

Solair

The biggest problem with UPC in urban areas is that it sometimes skips buildings and housing estates.

They really need to fix the gaps left by their predecessors' rollouts.

chriss745

Solair wrote: »

The biggest problem with UPC in urban areas is that it sometimes skips buildings and housing estates.

They really need to fix the gaps left by their predecessors' rollouts.

Agreed, here in Ballincollig the UPC coverage is:

- Houses older then 8 years old: almost 100% coverage
- Houses/apartments newer than 8 years old: 0% coverage

Sponge Bob

bk wrote: »

The customer service staff won't have any idea if management actually plan to expand their network further.

UPC Customer Service is notoriously clueless, a legacy from good old Chorus who were the most inept operation in the history of Telecoms in Ireland. The CS hasn't improved much since then. Chorus were near bankrupts 8 years ago and probably abandoned Ballincollig back then.

Contact the network team if you want to offer UPC a ducted estate or building 1800 940240 Network upgrade team or rebuildcomplaints@upc.ie

iMuse

bk wrote: »

Interestingly one area that Eircoms new VDSL2+ products can remain competitive is the upload speeds.

Their 25mb product is 8mb up and 50mb is 20mb up. This compares very well to UPC's max 10mb up.

Upload speeds are becoming increasingly important due to cloud services like icloud, dropbox and people uploading high def pictures and videos to facebook, youtube, etc.

I think UPc needs to try and do better with their upload speeds.

Not much good having 8mb upload when you have a 100GB cap, yet another area eircom fall behind in with most of their competitors offering higher caps.

Sponge Bob

The ESB plans to spend around €300m ( along with its JV partner). At a guesstimated cost of around €700-€1000 per premises I would reckon they can do around 400k buildings. Around a fifth of the housing stock or so. None in Dublin for now.

Hogzy

Solair wrote: »

The biggest problem with UPC in urban areas is that it sometimes skips buildings and housing estates.

They really need to fix the gaps left by their predecessors' rollouts.

+1, There are 22 houses in our estate, 3 of them cant get UPC and the rest can. It makes zero sense and is infuriating because I am one of the 3.

bk

Hogzy wrote: »

+1, There are 22 houses in our estate, 3 of them cant get UPC and the rest can. It makes zero sense and is infuriating because I am one of the 3.

Usually this means one of your neighbours wouldn't allow UPC on to their property to replace the cable with new higher quality cable required for broadband.

Liamario

bk wrote: »

Usually this means one of your neighbours wouldn't allow UPC on to their property to replace the cable with new higher quality cable required for broadband.

Sounds depressingly familiar. Government announcement implied that the monetary obstacles for ISPs for situations such as this were going to be removed. Do you think this is the case- are UPC going to start digging up the roads and laying cables.

bk

Liamario wrote: »

Sounds depressingly familiar. Government announcement implied that the monetary obstacles for ISPs for situations such as this were going to be removed. Do you think this is the case- are UPC going to start digging up the roads and laying cables.

Well in some places UPC do dig, but mostly in old housing estates they hang the cables between houses.

Liamario

I'm just concerned that I'm never going to get a proper broadband provider. Unless another ISP serves mullingar, I'm going to continue to get ****ed over by stoppers who are quite happy to get ripped off by Eircom and stop me getting UPC broadband.
It's extremely frustrating when the less tech savvy and older generation are quite happy to screw me over because broadband doesn't factor into their lives.

Cheerful Spring

Eircom, is only in business because of rural Ireland. If another provider offered faster and reliable speeds the majority of customers would leave them, i believe.

Eircom, have lost the fibre battle to UPC sooner they face up to that fact the better. Rural Ireland needs the broadband upgrades.

Sponge Bob

The ESB will go for small town and rural fringe Ireland...what they call semi urban ...eg a lot of the population of Tuam are in the old Tuam RURAL district surrounding Tuam URBAN district that has a lower population.

You can visualise it here. http://census.cso.ie/TableViewer/tableView.aspx?ReportId=109240 Population. Pop density 2011 small areas.

aindriu80

Eircom has to match UPC with new packages or at least drop the price on their existing packages. They don't even compete with each other one way or the other. The mobile phone network at least has a choice for consumers.

As for the rural exchanges, they could at least be upgraded for basic broadband. I wouldn't really expect super fast speeds in a rural area but in towns and cities I would expect at least 1 cable company to be there and at least 2 broadband companies.

Sponge Bob

eircom cannot even offer 150mbits at present. The wholesale 'portal' is effectively down while it gets revamped and orders cannot be processed on VDSL and Fibre right now.

jmcc

bk wrote: »

Funny thing 10 years ago I told the at time CEO of Eircom exactly this. That cable would eventually eat them alive if they didn't invest heavily in their network.

Well obviously they didn't listen and look at them now!!

They knew well before you had your little chat with the CEO of Eircom. Cablelink had cable broadband in the late 1990s. However Cablelink was owned by RTE and Telecom Eireann. Cablelink demonstrated cable broadband in July 1998. Naturally Telecom Eireann got very upset and the Cablelink infrastructure was nearly left to rot.

Regards...jmcc

bk

jmcc wrote: »

They knew well before you had your little chat with the CEO of Eircom. Cablelink had cable broadband in the late 1990s. However Cablelink was owned by RTE and Telecom Eireann. Cablelink demonstrated cable broadband in July 1998. Naturally Telecom Eireann got very upset and the Cablelink infrastructure was nearly left to rot.

I know and yet they still decided to stick their fingers in their ears, extract as much money from Eircom as possible and screw over the people of Ireland.

Sponge Bob

jmcc wrote: »

Naturally Telecom Eireann got very upset and the Cablelink infrastructure was nearly left to rot.

Regards...jmcc

eircoms business model in 1997-8 was to give everyone a second line for dialup (pairgained with the first line on the pole outside naturally) and charge full line rental x 2 for a half service x 2 and with dialup charged by the minute on top ....no flat rate packages.

It made perfect sense, then these gobdaws in NTL offered them a fortune for Cablelink ...how could they lose when they were such geniuses ( even with a staff of 14000 on Civil Service contracts to pay.)

Now they are stripped back to a rump of under 6000 staff ( 10% of whom are in Donegal alone0 and had to get a pack of Chinese lads to design the VDSL rollout as they have lost so many engineers.

jmcc

Sponge Bob wrote: »

eircoms business model in 1997-8 was to give everyone a second line for dialup (pairgained with the first line on the pole outside naturally) and charge full line rental x 2 for a half service x 2 and with dialup charged by the minute on top ....no flat rate packages.

It even took them a while to roll out VPOPs for the early ISPs.

It made perfect sense, then these gobdaws in NTL offered them a fortune for Cablelink ...how could they lose when they were such geniuses ( even with a staff of 14000 on Civil Service contracts to pay.)

It was funny to see some of the waffle about triple play coming out of TE/Eircom when they had the equivalent of a last mile of wet string in many areas. The NTL deal looked good but required a lot of investment to get the network up to high quality. But once that network got the investment it needed, it was effectively all over for Eircom in its key urban markets.

Regards...jmcc