Sky Broadband -Opinions?

SpaceTime

The reason the city centre is slower is because unlike suburban areas, there are no distribution cabinets. EFibre cabinets are normally installed next to distribution cabinets and your line is connected to the VDSL service there.

In the city centre, lines are distributed in large underground vaults rather than cabinets.

The same delay is hitting large areas of central Dublin and Galway.

There's a lot of civil engineering work and reconfiguring the wiring required.

There's also a rumor that eircom could even use FTTH in those areas bringing fibre directly to end users. There's an FTTH spec in their wholesale documents.

gimmick

There are 2 cabinets within 500m of my place, and I do not live that far from the main eircom building, so I hope to see it pretty soon.

SpaceTime

All that matters is your proximity to the cabinets. There's no e-fibre / VDSL2 service from the exchange buildings at all.
Even if you're right next-door to the exchange, your service will still come from a cabinet.

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The way this stuff works is basically like this:

Good diagram here : http://www.powernet.co.uk/connectivity/fibre_to_the_cabinet.shtml

Only difference is that eircom's setup has the modem and router combined into one unit and the street cabinet and DSLAM are two separate boxes side-by-side. The layout is otherwise identical though.

gimmick

So its good the cabinets are nearby?

The area around the exchange is up and running as far as I know anyway.

What does DSLAM mean?

SpaceTime

Yup, all that matters is how close you are to the cabinet as that's where your e-fibre service comes from. The distance to the exchange is no longer relevant at all with e-fibre as you're not going to be directly connected to it anymore.

The DSLAM is just the device that your modem talks to in the cabinet if you're using e-fibre or in the exchange if you're using traditional ADSL.

It literally means "digital subscriber line access multiplexer" but, in reality it's just a device with hundreds of DSL modem ports that connect to each line and provide you with your ADSL from the exchange or the higher speed VDSL (e-fibre) service if it's coming from a cabinet.

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Basically your line connects to the cabinet which contains a small DSLAM that handles all the lines connected to that local cabinet and provides them with e-fibre VDSL services. That cabinet is connected back to the local exchange with fibre optic cables.

So, basically what it's doing is moving the 'exchange' closer to your house and making your line much shorter which is what allows for the much faster data rates.

For all intents and purposes, the cabinet is now your 'exchange'. So you can really just forget about the location of your local exchange building entirely.

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Depending on which provider and which package you go with, you can also opt to either keep your existing voice services from the old voice exchange or ditch your voice services entirely and just get broadband from the cabinet without a dial tone at all.

Where you opt to keep voice services, the line from the old exchange still runs to your house for voice, but the data services are spliced onto it at the cabinet. So, you have both the traditional phone service and the new e-fibre service sharing the same line into your house and being split off by the new phone socket they supply.

At the moment, it seems all the fibre providers except eircom are offering broadband-only options.

If you don't have a dial tone from the exchange, you can use VoIP for your phone using the broadband service or, you can just use your mobile and ditch the landline entirely.
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If you're not a big landline user, you can save quite a bit by going with a broadband-only product. Vodafone definitely does it and I think Magnet and Digiweb do too.

SpaceTime

One other thing:

The modem/routers they're all providing contain VoIP equipment. So, they can provide voice service straight from the router, much like the way UPC does it on cable lines.

As yet, eircom isn't using this but their modems have the capability of doing it. I don't think Vodafone's using it as yet either, but again their modems have the gear built into them. So, I would assume they'll launch something at some stage.

I think Digiweb and Magnet do use it though and offer pretty cheap phone packages. So, you can get voice, without actually having a traditional phone line.

The other option for phone is to go with something like Blueface or Goldfish and you can just provide your own VoIP phone or adaptor and plug it into the broadband. Typically you'd get a package for voice calls and a landline number for about €10 / month and it would work extremely well over a e-fibre broadband line.

It's all relatively easy to setup. They typically send you out pre-configured phones or whatever you opt to buy and you just plug them in to the router.

You can even just use Skype (Philips do Skype cordless phones for example)

Also, a lot of Android phones have built-in SIP VoIP clients that are compatible with Blueface and Goldfish and many other providers. So, you can just use your mobile on WiFi as a landline.

I use my HTC One phone as a landline like that and it's really handy!


NB:

Watch out for the caps. Some of them are genuinely unlimited, others have quite sneaky caps. Worth reading T&Cs carefully!

You can really blaze through a lot of data if you're watching TV and stuff online and when you've got fibre, you'll tend to do that a lot more. Especially if you've netflix or sky on demand etc etc.

Boots234

Anyone in the Douglas area using the SKY BB and if so what speeds do you get on it??

wonka

In Mount Oval and getting 3.5MB. same as what i got previously with UTV Connect. Very happy with the unlimited usage policy!

Faith

I'm in Turner's Cross and I'm getting 13Mbps download with Sky. So I guess it depends what side of Douglas you're talking about.

Boots234

Faith wrote: »

I'm in Turner's Cross and I'm getting 13Mbps download with Sky. So I guess it depends what side of Douglas you're talking about.

The Maryborough Woods area

SpaceTime

With Sky, it's ADSL2+ from the Douglas exchange (which is just beside the C of I Church in Douglas).

Depending on how long your line is, the speeds will vary. If you're in Mountoval / that far away from Douglas it's crap.

Get fibre instead! It will come from a near by cabinet and give you pretty decent speeds. There are cabinets right out to the very edge of the Douglas exchange foot print.

Or, get cable.

gimmick

Apparently the exchange I work off is Churchfield.

Anyone any idea when the roll out for there is? Or where it can be found?

EDIT: There is an eFibre map on the eircom website. Says Churchfield is available. But I throw in my address and says not available yet.

Beginning to think it will be the same as UPC which is just not available in our estate.

SpaceTime

Loads of the Cork City exchanges are fully enabled for e-fibre but what matters is how close you are to a cabinet and if your house is connected to one.

There are some addresses that may not be connected to a cabinet e.g. rural areas on the edge of the city with overhead feeds from multicore cable running along the road or, some housing estates which never had distribution cabinets and where lines were direct fed from the exchange instead.

Being in a particular exchange's footprint doesn't necessarily guarantee that your line's connected to a cabinet capable of VDSL service or to a cabinet at all.

Unlike ADSL services, this stuff comes from a local cabinet and not the exchange itself. So, the availability is entirely down to local issues. It would involve a fair bit of civil engineering work and wiring work, so I think they're possibly hitting 'low hanging fruit' first i.e. places that already had the distribution cabinets in place.

The rollout's still on-going though, so it's possible they may come back to retrofit cabinets in those pockets of housing that were direct-fed.