SIRO - ESB/Vodafone Fibre To The Home

ED E

Impetuous doesn't live in the same world as the rest of us.

Just to explain to the rest of this threads readers how it works:

ONT(like a small modem for light) in your house connects to a single frequency link on the fibre drop running into your house from the distribution point. These distribution points will use one or several multiple phase fibre links that have a much greater capacity back to the core network. If they lay a few extra optical links when the do the installs they can then have plenty of bandwidth for decades by A. lighting more spare fibre and B. putting more advanced ent terminations on either end.

Eg install at 10gb limited to 1gb from houses to nodes. 200 or 1000gb from nodes to core network points and huge amounts from there. This leaves a ton of spair bandwidth and when they need more, slot in a better fibre card or ONT.

Mr. G

godskitchen wrote: »

Is it just me or is the current ESB fibre network not all that impressive?......

From the published map it looks like they have a lot of fibre to run.

ESB Telecom provide wholesale fibre. Their target market is different to Eircom's. Or was.

http://www.esbtelecoms.ie/default.htm

murphaph

Where do the MANs come into this, if at all? It would seem crazy as part of a large scale rollout of FTTH for the JV to ignore the existing MANs, which are fibre only networks with open access.

football_lover

murphaph wrote: »

No it doesn't. Have you read anything about the JV? They have named the towns they wish to target in Phase I. They are largely provincial towns with more than 4,000 buildings, so yes, it is going to involve lots of digging in estates which aren't ducted for electricity (lots and lots of them!!).


But they aren't doing any of this in Phase I. It's also definitely not cheaper to connect 50 one off houses over 10km² than 50 houses in a single estate, with ducting or not.


What are you on about? They don't have "one" fibre serving 100k subscribers. I think you're just trying to knock this project for some weird reason. Google "ESB FTTH" and check out the praise for this project in the industry. It is a huge step Ireland is taking going down this road now. The other providers will be forced to upgrade their last miles to FTTH as well.

Ireland will have the best broadband in Europe and most of the world in 10 years if this all goes to plan.

You are living in a fantasy world if you believe that Ireland will have the best broadband in Europe in ten years time.

There are large numbers of people in this country that are not getting broadband with an acceptable level of service.

They have no intention of building rural networks in Ireland that can allow people living in the countryside to have fast broadband.

There are even people on this forum that will respond with move to urban areas.

It would be easier at this point to do FTTX than in rural settings than in urban settings and probably cheaper.

football_lover

PeadarB wrote: »

I currently receive 100/20 e-fibre from eircom so what implications does this new scenario present for me. It will jump me and initially a potential 500,000 premises into a new age of connectivity.

I remember back in 1985 when I built my first home being annoyed that I had to pay the ESB so many hundred of pounds to connect my house to the network. Several new poles were required to string the cable to "my poll" from the nearest transformer. A large (1 or 1 1/2 inch) diameter heavy duty black pipe was taken down that pole and routed 30 meters underground, at my expense I might add, to my white box at the side of the house. I was living 5 km from the centre of Letterkenny at the time.

Electric Ireland Networks connect to every home and business in the country, using the various power providers, on their own infrastructure. They already have the backhaul in place on their 1,300km figure of eight fibre optic network to main population centres. In Letterkenny it terminates at Lurgybrack, 3 or 4km from the town and has remained dark for years. It will not be too onerous a task to run their fibre cabling to every premises in the town and to outlying areas using the existing distribution system. The fibre can for the most part be strung on existing poles to terminate where the power line runs down that fat pipe into each premises.

Compared to building a new fibre network the costs should be moderate as the infrastructure is practically in place. A project of this magnitude requires capital investment. A return on this investment can only take place over time. €450 million is small change to both these companies, who with a little bit of foresight(mostly the ESB's) have now the potential to flood the country with a world beating new age comms system. This still requires EU approval and if eircom whinge as much as their opposition did to ComReg in the run-up to the e-fibre roll-out we could be in for a good wait. Though Electric Ireland Networks, as a semi-state company are in a strong position to ride out any opposition.

No contention, no concerns about SNR or crosstalk or latency, no concerns about distance to the cabinet.

Let the fun begin...

If they do not offer this fiber optics out to people in rural areas then it should not be happening in areas near to urban areas.

football_lover

MajesticDonkey wrote: »

I admire your enthusiasm but I strongly believe that what you're hoping for is completely and utterly not going to happen by 2020. I would however love to be proven wrong.

If we started today then 2020 would be realistic but we are not starting today that is my real fear.

By about 2018 which is four years away it will start to become apparent in agriculture and rural businesses that they do not have a proper communications system to be able to deal with the technology requirement of intense agriculture.

It will probably take on top of that an other four to five years to get action done and by that stage it will be too late.

We could be looking at 2030 before we get a realistic FTTX but that will to late.

Once we lose our agricultural competitiveness it will be so hard to try and get it back and I would bet it would be too late.

I find Ireland overall direction scary at best. Ireland needs a good mixed economy but clearly our governments/politics is only interested in foreign investment (while important) which is really putting all our eggs in one basket.

There is more to this than what most people realize.

football_lover

fergus1001 wrote: »

I can see eircoms network becoming redundant over the next 10 years and the company itself get into serious trouble because of the lack of line rental and income from other operators using there network

The scary thing is that Eircom networks and exchanges will not become redundant because they will still be our primary communications systems right out to 2025.

At this point we are still relying on overhead copper cables and copper exchanges which are at saturation point and would cost too much money to upgrade using copper technologies.

We are now at a point where we should be upgrading our networks over completely to fiber all around the country but instead we are still going to be using copper.

It could be 2030 by the time we reach anything near to what we require but that will not be population wide capabilities that could take another 10 years on top of that.

We could be looking at 2040 before we have complete FTTX in Ireland that is 100% population coverage.

But do you think this is going to happen?

dalta5billion

football_lover wrote: »

By about 2018 which is four years away it will start to become apparent in agriculture and rural businesses that they do not have a proper communications system to be able to deal with the technology requirement of intense agriculture.

How does Agriculture especially need fibre? I can't think of any farming activity that requires high bandwidth. LTE should more than suffice.

hallo dare

dalta5billion wrote: »

How does Agriculture especially need fibre? I can't think of any farming activity that requires high bandwidth. LTE should more than suffice.

You're obviously not a farmer. There's now more paperwork and Internet work for a farmer to do more than ever!

same ol sh1te

dalta5billion wrote: »

How does Agriculture especially need fibre? I can't think of any farming activity that requires high bandwidth. LTE should more than suffice.

Well cameras for one, LTE isn't suitable because of the low monthly limits
.

murphaph

football_lover wrote: »

You are living in a fantasy world if you believe that Ireland will have the best broadband in Europe in ten years time.

Time will tell. The Eircom VDSL rollout however bodes well for my prediction.

football_lover wrote: »

There are large numbers of people in this country that are not getting broadband with an acceptable level of service.

Hence the 3 large scale projects designed to address that: Eircom's VDSL, ESB's FTTB and the national broadband plan to bring fibre to 1000 towns and villages. I'm not aware of any other country with such ambitious plans in play right now.

football_lover wrote: »

They have no intention of building rural networks in Ireland that can allow people living in the countryside to have fast broadband.

Do you mean one off houses or people in rural Ireland?

football_lover wrote: »

There are even people on this forum that will respond with move to urban areas.

Or not build isolated one off properties. Farmers are a special case. Most people living in isolation don't need to. They choose to. Still, eventually even these lines will be upgraded to FTTB.

football_lover wrote: »

It would be easier at this point to do FTTX than in rural settings than in urban settings and probably cheaper.

Nonsense on both counts.

football_lover

dalta5billion wrote: »

How does Agriculture especially need fibre? I can't think of any farming activity that requires high bandwidth. LTE should more than suffice.

Good question.

Genetics in farming is becoming very important to the point that it is shaping right now how high intensity farming is performing.

But that is only going to keep increasing to a point that real time analysis of genetics, soil, rain fall and disease will all need broadband.

And that does not take into account automation that small industry such as manufacturing at SME level will require.

If it could be done using other delivery methods such as copper or wireless then that would be the way to go.

But to be honest only fiber will allow this and at the same time allow for future expansion.

Copper and wireless are not realistic options. Wireless could be integrated with fiber to over come the last mile problem.

Inter mesh systems could also be used for wireless but again they will have bandwidth limitations.

football_lover

murphaph wrote: »

Time will tell. The Eircom VDSL rollout however bodes well for my prediction.


Hence the 3 large scale projects designed to address that: Eircom's VDSL, ESB's FTTB and the national broadband plan to bring fibre to 1000 towns and villages. I'm not aware of any other country with such ambitious plans in play right now.


Do you mean one off houses or people in rural Ireland?


Or not build isolated one off properties. Farmers are a special case. Most people living in isolation don't need to. They choose to. Still, eventually even these lines will be upgraded to FTTB.


Nonsense on both counts.

VDSL is perfect for urban coverage or rural that is within a urban range.

But due to attenuation and degradation of signals it is not practical for rural application.

One of builds simply are not going to go away. To move everybody into urban center range would probably cost hundreds of billions of Euro's.

Where as it would just be easier to invest 3 billion into the countries communications networks.

Some of that may include copper and wireless infrastructure but would also include fiber for long distances.

Wireless that is integrated into a fiber optics structure could over come the last mile.

We as an economy require FTTX capabilities not everybody may use this but it should be there even if it means a dweller has to pay for final connections.

At least people should have the option.

Costs if we do not address this are massive where is Ireland going to get the extra 20 billion GDP to make up for agriculture.

murphaph

we are actually now moving towards FTTB. The ESB/Vodafone JV will get 25% of all premises in the state on FTTB in Phase I alone (by 2018). Phase II (AFAICT) aims to add another 25% and assuming it takes a little longer but not much longer than Phase I then within 10 years Ireland will have 50% of all premises in the state equipped with FTTB. I promise you now that no other sizable (the likes of Andorra & Lichtenstein excepted) country in Europe (depending on how the Latvians continue with their extensive FTTB programme) will match this level of penetration and that's before we even consider the effects of the ESB's plan on Eircom and UPC. These 2 companies (especially UPC) will be forced to replace their last miles with fibre and as the ESB intends avoiding UPC areas initially, we can expect that this will push the number of premises with FTTB to over 60% in 10 years.

That would be simply phenominal and would leave most of Europe in our dust. The critical mass would have been achieved and there would be high quality fibre backhaul densely spread around the country to provide REAL wireless broadband options to our farmers and those who choose to live in isolated one off properties. Make no mistake the ESB's plan here is revolutionary stuff. Will there still be one off properties in Ireland in 20 years who can't access "decent" broadband? Yes, probably, but very few I suspect.

Edit: Just on the VDSL thing. Yes, it is only going to provide service to those within 2km of the cabinet (at present) BUT these cabinets are FTTB ready. Eircom knows they will have to replace the last miles from these cabinets with fibre at some point (though they were probably hoping for that to be at least 5 years away). When they start doing that (and they will now be forced to commercially after this ESB thing) then the 2km limit imposed by copper last miles vanishes and Eircom are not going to arbitrarily draw a circle around the cabinet and say "no FTTB beyond here". Why would they do that? They'll use these cabinets to push fibre deeper into the countryside around the towns and villages they are located in as part of general upgrades of the lines served by that cabinet (and/or the copper cabinet beside it).

same ol sh1te

murphaph wrote: »

we are actually now moving towards FTTB. The ESB/Vodafone JV will get 25% of all premises in the state on FTTB in Phase I alone (by 2018). Phase II (AFAICT) aims to add another 25% and assuming it takes a little longer but not much longer than Phase I then within 10 years Ireland will have 50% of all premises in the state equipped with FTTB. I promise you now that no other sizable (the likes of Andorra & Lichtenstein excepted) country in Europe (depending on how the Latvians continue with their extensive FTTB programme) will match this level of penetration and that's before we even consider the effects of the ESB's plan on Eircom and UPC. These 2 companies (especially UPC) will be forced to replace their last miles with fibre and as the ESB intends avoiding UPC areas initially, we can expect that this will push the number of premises with FTTB to over 60% in 10 years.

That would be simply phenominal and would leave most of Europe in our dust. The critical mass would have been achieved and there would be high quality fibre backhaul densely spread around the country to provide REAL wireless broadband options to our farmers and those who choose to live in isolated one off properties. Make no mistake the ESB's plan here is revolutionary stuff. Will there still be one off properties in Ireland in 20 years who can't access "decent" broadband? Yes, probably, but very few I suspect.

You're counting chickens......

crawler

dalta5billion wrote: »

How does Agriculture especially need fibre? I can't think of any farming activity that requires high bandwidth. LTE should more than suffice.

I can think of loads

1) Remote animal diagnistics and medicine
2) High definition imaging of cattle for track and trace
3) Land a soil analysis and sampling
4) Heard tracking & tracing
5) Real time monitoring of activity levels, feed levels and yield production
6) Security, health and safety compliance
7) Remote monitoring and control of sensors, heat controls, climate control
8) Monitoring of calving cattle

Just because many of these things are not done today, does not mean that there are massive opportunities to create new busienss models and make agriculture more productive, effective and rewarding.

I also agree that LTE will suffice in some instances in fact, I tihnk Fibre and LTE are extremely complimentary - one for the heavy lifting (fibre) and one for convenience and mobility (LTE)

murphaph

same ol sh1te wrote: »

You're counting chickens......

I've qualified everything by saying "if the plans are implemented". So far Eircom have done astonishingly well in their rollout and proves it can be done in Ireland and UPC already provide superior speeds over their coax last miles than the likes of Kabel Deutschland (max 100 Mb) or Virgin Media (162Mb I believe).

What else can we do on this thread other than speculate? If we can't speculate, then we close the thread until Phase I of the ESB rollout is complete and ask ourselves "did it work?"...I don't think so.

I'm living in central Berlin right now and we have VDSL (but not vectored and "only" 50/10). We are however in the process of buying a site in a suburban town about 10km from Berlin. It's a town of 11k people but it only partially has VDSL (about 3k people can get it) and a handful (maybe 1k people) can get cable internet (100Mb). The rest can get a max of 16Mb ADSL2 and there are no immediate plans to upgrade or build either the VDSL or Cable networks further. I'm looking on at Ireland with envy! My mother lives 650m from a cabinet and recently got VDSL and it's just as fast as ours (thanks to vectoring) despite the fact we're only ca. 150m from our cabinet. Her upload is almost twice as fast as ours.

The rollout is also a thousand times more transparent in Ireland. People on here give Eircom stick for slipped (estimated) go live dates. In Germany there are no nice maps with existing and planned cabinet locations. It's a case of calling Telekom and hoping they tell you something. The Eircom Wholesale website in comparison is awesome stuff.

Ireland does a lot of stuff really badly but it's getting its broadband sh!t together. Anybody but the most pessimistic person can see that.

crawler

same ol sh1te wrote: »

You're counting chickens......

In fact you are BOTH right...

Europe will also move BUT Ireland has a unique opportunity.....Infrastructure competition is the best form of competition in telecoms.

same ol sh1te

murphaph wrote: »

Ireland does a lot of stuff really badly but it's getting its broadband sh!t together. Anybody but the most pessimistic person can see that.

Nonsense, the digital divide is getting worse, the communications regulator doesn't regulate broadband and only exists to make money. The government lets the market fend for itself and then gifts a mobile phone company money for a band aid fix to build a network they were going to build anyway, to go along with the 3 mobile networks we already have, with no stipulations for future infrastructure sharing. We are far from clapping ourselves on the back.

Edit, I'm not knocking this JV, it's a great move, it's just I don't have faith in this country doing the joined up thinking that's required to get to a stage where we can start giving ourselves credit.

murphaph

same ol sh1te wrote: »

Nonsense, the digital divide is getting worse, the communications regulator doesn't regulate broadband and only exists to make money. The government lets the market fend for itself and then gifts a mobile phone company money for a band aid fix to build a network they were going to build anyway, to go along with the 3 mobile networks we already have, with no stipulations for future infrastructure sharing. We are far from clapping ourselves on the back.

Come to Germany and see that there's a "digital divide" here as well! Of course there is. Infrastructure is simply easier to implement in urban areas. Dial up or 64kbps ISDN is still used here too!

If you can't see that Eircom bringing (vectored!) VDSL to 1.4 million premises in a country the size of Ireland is positive then I don't really know what to say. Eircom have plans (you can see them on their site) to locate cabinets in hundreds of really small places, many with a handful of houses. Coupled with the ESB project to bring FTTB to 500k premises and the government's subsidised 1000 small town/village rollout how can you say that broadband is not improving?

same ol sh1te

Ninja edited my post above while you were posting. Yes I do see this and Eircoms plans as good moves, but without joined up thinking (and using wireless technologies) we will never tackle this digital divide. The problem is the lack of a long term plan, every new minister only cares about the next four years

hallo dare

murphaph wrote: »

Come to Germany and see that there's a "digital divide" here as well! Of course there is. Infrastructure is simply easier to implement in urban areas. Dial up or 64kbps ISDN is still used here too!

If you can't see that Eircom bringing (vectored!) VDSL to 1.4 million premises in a country the size of Ireland is positive then I don't really know what to say. Eircom have plans (you can see them on their site) to locate cabinets in hundreds of really small places, many with a handful of houses. Coupled with the ESB project to bring FTTB to 500k premises and the government's subsidised 1000 small town/village rollout how can you say that broadband is not improving?

It's not improving in my area or for thousands of houses in this and neighbouring parishes!

murphaph

hallo dare wrote: »

It's not improving in my area or for thousands of houses in this and neighbouring parishes!

So it's not worth doing anything if it doesn't immediately benefit your parish? Or what was your point?

murphaph

same ol sh1te wrote: »

Ninja edited my post above while you were posting. Yes I do see this and Eircoms plans as good moves, but without joined up thinking (and using wireless technologies) we will never tackle this digital divide. The problem is the lack of a long term plan, every new minister only cares about the next four years

To be honest so long as the fibre keeps getting blown then we should be broadly happy that things are progressing. Quality wireless solutions need that fibre back haul so if it's put in to service VDSL it will also be there for wireless base stations. We could also see small pole mounted VDSL units but again, the fibre has to be brought to them first.

hallo dare

murphaph wrote: »

So it's not worth doing anything if it doesn't immediately benefit your parish? Or what was your point?

It's brilliant and fair play to both parties on it. It will never benefit my parish cos it's in the sticks miles from anything broadband related, bar FWA comes into play as laying of fibre would simply cost too much. Simple as that!

same ol sh1te

murphaph wrote: »

To be honest so long as the fibre keeps getting blown then we should be broadly happy that things are progressing. Quality wireless solutions need that fibre back haul so if it's put in to service VDSL it will also be there for wireless base stations. We could also see small pole mounted VDSL units but again, the fibre has to be brought to them first.

The problem with wireless is that Comreg are making a pigs ear of it, getting in the way, they see it as a cash cow. Licensed links are a ridiculous annual fee (last I heard it was over €1000 pa where it was ~£50 in the UK) and Fwa licences are limited to 20km circles. This pushes Wisps to use unlicensed frequencies

murphaph

same ol sh1te wrote: »

The problem with wireless is that Comreg are making a pigs ear of it, getting in the way, they see it as a cash cow. Licensed links are a ridiculous annual fee (last I heard it was over €1000 pa where it was ~£50 in the UK) and Fwa licences are limited to 20km circles.

No argument from me there but the fibre is permanent. Comreg can be removed from the equation at the stroke of a minister's pen. It is strange for sure that the country built those MANs which are pure fibre open access low cost and then the same country has barriers to wireless like you mention above.

same ol sh1te

murphaph wrote: »

No argument from me there but the fibre is permanent. Comreg can be removed from the equation at the stroke of a minister's pen. It is strange for sure that the country built those MANs which are pure fibre open access low cost and then the same country has barriers to wireless like you mention above.

Therein lies the problem. Comreg are the ones dictating to the Minster, a middle aged man who knows nothing about communications.

We need a long term plan, longer than the 4 years a government is in power. We need some joined up thinking. The discussions need to be public and include members of the industry. This history of letting the market fend for itself had proven to get us nowhere. The last mile in rural areas will need proper planning and massive funding

Liamario

murphaph wrote: »

...ESB intends avoiding UPC areas initially...

Can you clarify what you mean by this. Mullingar for example has UPC (it's patchy, but it's there), but it's on the list of 50 for this venture.

bealtine

Liamario wrote: »

Can you clarify what you mean by this. Mullingar for example has UPC (it's patchy, but it's there), but it's on the list of 50 for this venture.

Essentially it means the ESB will be avoiding most of Dublin city and some surrounding areas