NBP: National Broadband Plan Announced

Johnboy1951

NewClareman wrote: »

I agree with you that eir customer service is abysmal. However, that doesn’t justify the above rant re the CEO. Her remarks quoted in the post appear to be bang on the button.

It has been ...... but my recent experience with it was excellent.

The Cush

Contract could be signed before the ploughing championships in Sept

"We know that if we sign this contract, we can have it signed in time for the ploughing match [championships].

https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/varadkar-slams-sinn-fein-idea-to-use-esb-for-broadband-plan-as-political-stunt-923401.html

tsue921i8wljb3

The Cush wrote: »

Thanks for posting. Good interview again from Adrian Weckler with Carolan Lennon.

Just a few points from the interview in relation to the NBP
- she wasn't aware, read it … , renationalising eir for €5bn as an option considered
- selling off eircom infrastructure back in 1997 probably wasn't a good idea but we are where we are
- when debate gets heated in the Dáil, let the ESB do it or privatisation of eir are the lines rolled out "instead of continuing down the road the government are on"
- the €500m original figure for the rollout was never a real figure, it was just a number

On the €1bn subsidy over 25 years
- the regulated pricing for pole and duct access, eir make just over an 8% return, unchanged since 2016
- poles cost €600, 1.2m poles in the intervention area, over 30 years all of those poles will have to be replaced
- Storm Ophelia 2,500 poles had to be replaced
- mostly an overhead network, a lot of money goes into maintaining it
- eir has a lot copper customers in the intervention area whose revenue maintains the existing network
- these customers will most likely migrate to NBI's network with a resulting loss of revenue to eir for network maintenance
- the revenue lost will be equivalent to the money received via the NBP for pole and duct rental

On the overall cost of the plan, economics vs. society

He wasn't nearly thorough enough. I don't care if she or her kids uses WhatsApp or what she thinks about driverless cars.

He should have asked why are eir trialing 5G FWA in rural areas. Do they see it as a competitive route against NBI.

Do eir have any plans to extend their own rural network seeing that the taxpayer and NBI will be funding the upgrading of their poles and ducts?

Will eir join the NBI network as a retailer? (I'm sure they will but at least ask)

How do eir feel as an entity about their decades long hold over rural Ireland being snatched from them?

What is her opinion of NBIs capability to deliver this project on time? She said herself that she felt eir were the best option so obviously NBI are inferior in her view. How inferior though?

tsue921i8wljb3

If you have kids I'd be advising them to avoid CIT if this guy is head of research!

It’ll be beamed back to us much more efficiently than it can be transmitted via underground cables

https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/views/analysis/satellite-broadband-will-soon-be-way-above-fibre-optics-923429.html

tsue921i8wljb3

More critical coverage from the Irish Times:

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/will-we-regret-national-broadband-decision-in-years-to-come-1.3888018

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/broadband-plan-a-missed-chance-to-create-a-great-public-owned-utility-1.3887962

plus the Independent have a go at poisoning the well:

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/every-holiday-home-to-get-broadband-under-plan-38100934.html

jimmycrackcorm

The Cush wrote: »

Just a few points from the interview in relation to the NBP
- she wasn't aware, read it … , renationalising eir for €5bn as an option considered
- selling off eircom infrastructure back in 1997 probably wasn't a good idea but we are where we are
- when debate gets heated in the D, let the ESB do it or privatisation of eir are the lines rolled out "instead of continuing down the road the government are on"

People have such short memories when it comes to telecom Eireann (pre eir) who never advanced anything unless they were forced into it by Competition. I remember they only began DSL near me because NTL were starting to run out cavle internet.

One thing I don't think has been properly explained is the issues with not getting the ESB to provide the fibre infrastructure using their poles / pylons.
Theta been a blasrgument something to do about EU competition law, but I cannot see how this is the case given that private enterprise refuses to provide this without subvention and also that the actual BB provision would be wholesaled.

Unless of course it's uncompetitive for the ESB to do it because their workers are overpaid.

listermint

NewClareman wrote: »

Couldn’t agree more, this is spending billions on electioneering, nothing else. Nothing about it stands up to scrutiny. If you look at the proposed benefits, most don’t even need high speed broadband.
The few use cases that truly need this level of speed do not justify the cost of serving the one off houses.

Let's live in the now, for a second.

You've heard of driverless cars, home help, automation. These things will rely on connectivity.

Connectivity such as 5G which encompasses fibre back haul.

These things are now. But they are also the future. What I mean by that is that in order to support such systems and growth you have to provide the infrastructure for it.

So clareman if you want Ireland to have some semblance of the future that is economic activity supposes to have then we have to future proof our infrastructure.

Connectivity is key and the government is well aware.

The Cush

jimmycrackcorm wrote: »

One thing I don't think has been properly explained is the issues with not getting the ESB to provide the fibre infrastructure using their poles / pylons.
Theta been a blasrgument something to do about EU competition law, but I cannot see how this is the case given that private enterprise refuses to provide this without subvention and also that the actual BB provision would be wholesaled.

This is about the rules around giving state-aid/public money to any company, commercial or semi-state, without first going through a competitive tender process to ensure the state gets best value for that public money on these big projects. The European Commission regulations around state-aid has been confirmed by legal advice to government from the Attorney General here.

The ESB in a joint venture company with Vodafone, SIRO, and separately open-eir are spending their own money on the rollout of fibre to the more commercially viable areas, but neither the ESB nor the commercial operators consider it commercially viable to rollout fibre to the intervention areas, hence the reason for the government's state-aid intervention.

FF and SF have been going on all week about mandating the ESB to do this. The ESB cannot afford to this on their own, the rollout cost will be similar, and so they would require state funding to do this and without another competitive tender process any state-aid given would be illegal as per the legal advice.

Lets not forget the ESB (w/ Vodafone) already took part in the current tendering process and even then didn't consider it commercially viable to continue, a process that would given them access to a cash pot of up to €3bn.

The Cush

Adrian Weckler: 'Separating the myth and reality in big debate over €3bn rural network plan'

1. We're funding an asset that won't be owned by the State.

This is true. And left uninterrogated, it sounds dreadful. What sort of idiot signs off on a multi-billion funding deal where they don't have even a small chunk of equity when it's completed?

As is often the case, the position is a lot greyer when looked at in more detail.

Here's the problem: what will the actual network be? The answer is, mostly, fibre cable and poles (on plots of land). These will physically bring broadband to each of the 540,000 rural premises. But what will the National Broadband Plan bidder own when the 25 years is up? Nothing but the cable: not the poles and not the land. You see, these are owned (or controlled) by Eir. I'm talking thousands and thousands of them. The NBP is merely renting them. If it decided to build its own, the additional cost would probably be staggering: it is already committing to paying Eir close to €1bn to rent them over the 25 year period.

So even if the State did get ownership of the thing it was funding, the fibre cable, it would have to keep paying Eir for using that company's poles.
That is still worth something, to be sure. But €3bn? Nowhere close. To put it in context, Eir was recently acquired at a value of €3.5bn. Eir owns most of the country's (profitable, urban) telecoms infrastructure. So a bunch of cables (without poles) in the most rural, uneconomic parts of the country would be worth a fraction of that.

2. But if the network will be worth so little when finished, why is it costing €5bn to build and run it? Why are we ploughing in €3bn?

Because this is a massive State subsidy to build something that will never be built otherwise. It's not a venture capital investment, expected to immediately pay dividends to government. Economists will argue that it may (or may not) stimulate economic activity in those rural regions or through the ability to substitute home support for otherwise costly medical supervision in hospitals.

But this is a socio-economic intervention. The amount it costs to build and run will cost way more than its initial return. Otherwise a commercial company would do it.

3. If the final network might be worth so little, why is the bidder (Granahan McCourt) interested in it? Why is it bothering to do all this in the first place?

The company's chief executive, Peter Hendrick, told the Independent.ie podcast 'The Big Tech Show' that it hopes to make a long-term business out of it. But this is totally dependent on take-up being medium to high. In this context, National Broadband Ireland (NBI) is betting that some of the recent predictions of 'low take-up' are woefully wrong.

"After 15 or 20 years, we're comfortable that the take-up is going to be 80pc," said Mr Hendrick. If it does hit that level, NBI may see a profitable rural broadband network. The idea would then be that the company would have a good reason to keep investing in its cables, even if it never owns the poles, so that future rural generations retain a modern service.

That said, this debate is not well served by the financial terms of its deal being kept from the public, even if all of it is due to be published when the deal is formally signed in coming months.

4. If it really costs that much, shouldn't we consider something cheaper? Why is wireless or 5G being ignored?

It's not completely ignored: a tiny percentage of the absolute extreme remote rural premises will be connected via wireless technology. But this will be at least as expensive as rolling out fibre directly.

There is a massive misunderstanding about what wireless or 5G technologies can achieve. A wireless service - typically, a large mast in the countryside with a small aerial or box on your roof - can deliver high-speed broadband to a small number of premises. But when applied to every home that wants it, it degenerates. Ask any rural broadband scheme user who depends on wireless or mobile connectivity: the service (which is typically a basic one anyway) slows down at peak times. Sometimes it cuts out if there's a storm. It's simply not as good.

It is possible to boost a wireless service to something approaching a fibre standard. But to do that, under the quality metrics set by the plan, would require up to 20,000 new masts in rural communities. It would also be expensive over a 25-year period to keep upgrading. All three NBP bidders - Eir, Siro and Granahan McCourt - looked at this as an option. All three decided against it for quality and cost reasons.

The irony about wireless solutions is they need a rollout of fibre to work anyway.

Ten Pin

The beginnings of privatisation of Telecom Eireann...
Irish Times article from 1996
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/privatisation-of-telecom-begins-1.21551

KOR101

Lennon said that Eir is permitted an 8% return on it's investment in the poll infrastructure. I know the €1bn for Eir includes ducks, exchange rentals, dark fibre etc.

€1bn over 25 years, is €40m per year. If €40m is 8%, then the NBI's share of Eir's infrastructure investment is €500m. If you took a 50:50 spilt on rental costs between EIR and NBI, that makes €1bn of an investment in total in that infrastructure.

Lennon said the polls alone cost €600, and there are 1.2m of these, so that is €720m.

If the copper lines are eventually removed would NBI's share of the infrastructure costs would go to 100%?

Do any of the documents (or earlier Comreg ones) spell out how the figures were calculated.

Wanderer78

Yeaaa, privatisation of critical public infrastructure, what could go wrong! Maybe we should all buy shares in this company!

glucifer

Definitely not something that would solve the current rural broadband situation but definitely interesting tech for the future. Not endorsing it as a solution in any way.

I have heard talk that in the future latency will be lower than subsea fibre but I haven't seen any evidence to back that up. Does anyone know of any further information on LEO? Not in it's current form but rather what its foreseen to be


FROM THE IRISH TIMES

It’ll be beamed back to us much more efficiently than it can be transmitted via underground cables, writes Niall Smith.

The announcement that the National Broadband Plan (NBP) will be rolled out later this year should be a cause for celebration. Yet concerns expressed by the secretary general of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform about the cost of the project, and about the lack of compatibility with the spatial strategy outlined in Project Ireland 2040, make for uneasy reading.

The accepted plan will use tried-and-tested technologies. Most Irish internet consumers will be connected using fibre-optic cables carried in ducts underground or alongside existing electrical and utility lines. The wisdom of a fibre backbone infrastructure is that it will remain future-proof for 35 years.

In rural regions, new routes for fibre cables will incur additional expense and be time-consuming for the provider to install. For many of the most isolated communities, a wireless technology system will supplement the fibre backbone.

While, for the past four years, we have been deliberating who should install our fibre broadband network, the global space industry has been taking leaps and bounds towards a new way of achieving the same goal without using fibre. We ignore this at our peril.

As we have engaged in the excessively leisurely rollout of fibre-based broadband below our feet, above us, a revolution has been raging. In space. Or in low-earth-orbit (LEO), to be more precise, somewhere from 350km to 1,000km high.


Traditionally, it has been very expensive to put satellites in space; they have tended to be very big and very heavy.

The advent of miniaturised electronics has made it possible to build smaller, lighter satellites and this has attracted private industry into a domain that was once the preserve of governments and their agencies. Some companies, such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ (founder of Amazon) Blue Origin, have been developing new rockets to take these small, but powerful, satellites into orbit.

They saw the possibility of putting not one, but tens of small satellites on a single rocket. And, from a commercial viewpoint, that starts to get very interesting, as economies of scale begin to make space commercially viable. With lots of small satellites in orbit, you can do many things that have real impact back here on Earth.

One of the most interesting is the provision of high-speed broadband services to low-density and rurally isolated areas, transforming the lives of billions of people in India and Africa.

But with this model, the same satellites that provide broadband to Africa can beam broadband to Ireland as they fly overhead.

In much the same way that we use cloud services where the servers are in various locations across the world, without our knowing it, we will, in the future, be able to take advantage of satellite broadband systems servicing much larger markets than our own.


Many of us may be familiar with some of the antics of Elon Musk — sending a Tesla car towards Mars is an illustration — but this is mere window-dressing to a relentless determination to use space for commercial purposes. Which is why, on May 15, SpaceX is set to launch dozens of internet broadband satellites into LEO in the ONE launch.

To put this into context, in 2015, as the bids were being sealed for our NBP, the number of internet broadband satellites launched in the whole year was less than 10, with each one requiring its own rocket.

And these were in high orbits, where the round-trip time (so-called latency) was up to one second (think of the delay on those TV broadcasts from reporters in US or Asia, for example).

The new SpaceX LEO satellites have latencies that are ten times smaller, comparable to fibre (although, this week, I heard a minister refer to latency as a reason not to select satellite broadband as part of the NBP, which seems to refer to older broadband satellite technologies).

The May 15 launch by SpaceX represents the first element in a “constellation” of broadband satellites, numbering 4,425, that has already received permission from the US Federal Communications Commission to operate. This number is planned to rise to more than 12,000 by 2024. Both Google and a company called Fidelity have invested $1bn in this venture.

At the same time, Amazon is planning to launch 3,236 satellites and another company, OneWeb, is rolling out their one-satellite-a-day production line and a target of 2,000 satellites. All to bring high-speed internet to new markets … sound like a familiar objective?


Although at a relatively early stage, the development of satellite broadband seems inevitable; notwithstanding there will be winners and losers along the way.

The pace of technological change, and the scale of commercial opportunities, are simply too great to imagine a future without it. Yet we seem to have a blindspot when it comes to considering these disruptive broadband technologies.

Perhaps it’s too late to change the NBP, perhaps the Government will use some of the flexibility in the funding to stay abreast of developments in space internet, but if I was a broadband provider, or a government, I’d be keeping one eye firmly on what’s happening above and worrying a little less about what’s happening below.

Niall Smith is head of research at CIT and head of Blackrock Castle Observatory. He is also a member of the steering group for the National Space Strategy for Enterprise.

Anteayer

Ultimately, the copper network will need to be replaced anyway and Eir is just another private company.

So unless you rentionalised OpenEir, whether it's a fibre access system owned and run by Eir or someone else isn't all that relevant (unless you're Eir).

The problem is that Eir's existing network will just become redundant. It wouldn't seem reasonable to continue to force them to be the universal service operator in the areas where someone else is subsidised to do that though. So I think it would be reasonable to allow Eir to shut the copper services and switch off the exchanges as soon as the fibre alternative is there and to place the USO on the fibre provider.

I don't really see the point of forcing them to maintain decades old PSTN infrastructure and life expired switching hardware and DSLAMs that wouldn't have much uptake.

Eir could continue to serve its own customers over the new network much like Sky or Digiweb does. It would just no longer be an access infrastructure provider in that area.

Looking at rural French rollouts of fibre to home, the uptake isn't that great and you've a lot of elderly and not very tech savvy customers who've only switched over if it's cheaper than what they have, or where it's been driven by slick IPTV offerings.

If it's sold as a premium product at a high price, I can't see the uptake being that spectacular.

Ten Pin

Radio 1 discussion on now

One lady said that she heard that fibre "fills up" and service degrades with congestion. Wonder who told her that...she has a wireless service in Kildare.

As others have said before, it's difficult to listen to such misinformation, especially on RTE who are letting down the licence payers by not getting a competent person on to explain it properly. Adrian Weckler can't be on every program and even when he is, it seems the interview is rushed and the important points are drowned out by some other bluffer in the studio.

Anteayer

Well if you get the misinformed debating with the ill informed, you get something akin to the debate around the EU in Brexit Britian.

ussjtrunks

Wont fibre have some congestion to some degree too, I doubt we will all see 150mb constant even at peak times.

Anyone actually have a ftth connection atm and can chime in on how it fares?

zapitastas

glucifer wrote: »

Definitely not something that would solve the current rural broadband situation but definitely interesting tech for the future. Not endorsing it as a solution in any way.

I have heard talk that in the future latency will be lower than subsea fibre but I haven't seen any evidence to back that up. Does anyone know of any further information on LEO? Not in it's current form but rather what its foreseen to be


FROM THE IRISH TIMES

It’ll be beamed back to us much more efficiently than it can be transmitted via underground cables, writes Niall Smith.

The announcement that the National Broadband Plan (NBP) will be rolled out later this year should be a cause for celebration. Yet concerns expressed by the secretary general of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform about the cost of the project, and about the lack of compatibility with the spatial strategy outlined in Project Ireland 2040, make for uneasy reading.

The accepted plan will use tried-and-tested technologies. Most Irish internet consumers will be connected using fibre-optic cables carried in ducts underground or alongside existing electrical and utility lines. The wisdom of a fibre backbone infrastructure is that it will remain future-proof for 35 years.

In rural regions, new routes for fibre cables will incur additional expense and be time-consuming for the provider to install. For many of the most isolated communities, a wireless technology system will supplement the fibre backbone.

While, for the past four years, we have been deliberating who should install our fibre broadband network, the global space industry has been taking leaps and bounds towards a new way of achieving the same goal without using fibre. We ignore this at our peril.

As we have engaged in the excessively leisurely rollout of fibre-based broadband below our feet, above us, a revolution has been raging. In space. Or in low-earth-orbit (LEO), to be more precise, somewhere from 350km to 1,000km high.


Traditionally, it has been very expensive to put satellites in space; they have tended to be very big and very heavy.

The advent of miniaturised electronics has made it possible to build smaller, lighter satellites and this has attracted private industry into a domain that was once the preserve of governments and their agencies. Some companies, such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ (founder of Amazon) Blue Origin, have been developing new rockets to take these small, but powerful, satellites into orbit.

They saw the possibility of putting not one, but tens of small satellites on a single rocket. And, from a commercial viewpoint, that starts to get very interesting, as economies of scale begin to make space commercially viable. With lots of small satellites in orbit, you can do many things that have real impact back here on Earth.

One of the most interesting is the provision of high-speed broadband services to low-density and rurally isolated areas, transforming the lives of billions of people in India and Africa.

But with this model, the same satellites that provide broadband to Africa can beam broadband to Ireland as they fly overhead.

In much the same way that we use cloud services where the servers are in various locations across the world, without our knowing it, we will, in the future, be able to take advantage of satellite broadband systems servicing much larger markets than our own.


Many of us may be familiar with some of the antics of Elon Musk — sending a Tesla car towards Mars is an illustration — but this is mere window-dressing to a relentless determination to use space for commercial purposes. Which is why, on May 15, SpaceX is set to launch dozens of internet broadband satellites into LEO in the ONE launch.

To put this into context, in 2015, as the bids were being sealed for our NBP, the number of internet broadband satellites launched in the whole year was less than 10, with each one requiring its own rocket.

And these were in high orbits, where the round-trip time (so-called latency) was up to one second (think of the delay on those TV broadcasts from reporters in US or Asia, for example).

The new SpaceX LEO satellites have latencies that are ten times smaller, comparable to fibre (although, this week, I heard a minister refer to latency as a reason not to select satellite broadband as part of the NBP, which seems to refer to older broadband satellite technologies).

The May 15 launch by SpaceX represents the first element in a “constellation” of broadband satellites, numbering 4,425, that has already received permission from the US Federal Communications Commission to operate. This number is planned to rise to more than 12,000 by 2024. Both Google and a company called Fidelity have invested $1bn in this venture.

At the same time, Amazon is planning to launch 3,236 satellites and another company, OneWeb, is rolling out their one-satellite-a-day production line and a target of 2,000 satellites. All to bring high-speed internet to new markets … sound like a familiar objective?


Although at a relatively early stage, the development of satellite broadband seems inevitable; notwithstanding there will be winners and losers along the way.

The pace of technological change, and the scale of commercial opportunities, are simply too great to imagine a future without it. Yet we seem to have a blindspot when it comes to considering these disruptive broadband technologies.

Perhaps it’s too late to change the NBP, perhaps the Government will use some of the flexibility in the funding to stay abreast of developments in space internet, but if I was a broadband provider, or a government, I’d be keeping one eye firmly on what’s happening above and worrying a little less about what’s happening below.

Niall Smith is head of research at CIT and head of Blackrock Castle Observatory. He is also a member of the steering group for the National Space Strategy for Enterprise.

Whenever I hear Musk talking I immediately think in monorail for some reason

ED E

ussjtrunks wrote: »

Wont fibre have some congestion to some degree too, I doubt we will all see 150mb constant even at peak times.

Anyone actually have a ftth connection atm and can chime in on how it fares?

It's a shared medium but it's 2500Mb for 31 homes vs say imagines 150Mb for 400 homes. In theory yes but thats like saying if every house in all of Dublin flushed their toilet at exactly the same time the sewers would flood.

ED E

zapitastas wrote: »

Whenever I hear Musk talking I immediately think in monorail for some reason

You really really needed to quote the entire piece didn't you :rolleyes:

Wheeliebin30

Ten Pin wrote: »

Radio 1 discussion on now

One lady said that she heard that fibre "fills up" and service degrades with congestion. Wonder who told her that...she has a wireless service in Kildare.

As others have said before, it's difficult to listen to such misinformation, especially on RTE who are letting down the licence payers by not getting a competent person on to explain it properly. Adrian Weckler can't be on every program and even when he is, it seems the interview is rushed and the important points are drowned out by some other bluffer in the studio.

Slating the government is all these stations have to get listeners.

No one wants to hear positive stories.

Really makes sense how Trump tapped into a certain demographic who were sick of the media and their one agenda.

tsue921i8wljb3

KOR101 wrote: »

Lennon said that Eir is permitted an 8% return on it's investment in the poll infrastructure. I know the €1bn for Eir includes ducks, exchange rentals, dark fibre etc.

€1bn over 25 years, is €40m per year. If €40m is 8%, then the NBI's share of Eir's infrastructure investment is €500m. If you took a 50:50 spilt on rental costs between EIR and NBI, that makes €1bn of an investment in total in that infrastructure.

Lennon said the polls alone cost €600, and there are 1.2m of these, so that is €720m.

If the copper lines are eventually removed would NBI's share of the infrastructure costs would go to 100%?

Do any of the documents (or earlier Comreg ones) spell out how the figures were calculated.

The €10 pole cost per year is based on two cables per pole so one NBI fibre and one open eir copper. If the copper is removed NBI must pay €20 per pole. I assume similar applies to duct access.

However over time I foresee open eir extending their own rural fibre network especially in exchange areas where they have started but not completed as part of the 300k. With the infrastructure being repaired for NBI the capital costs to do this should not be as great and longterm this could be an issue for both NBI and the Government.

Anteayer

ED E wrote: »

It's a shared medium but it's 2500Mb for 31 homes vs say imagines 150Mb for 400 homes. In theory yes but thats like saying if every house in all of Dublin flushed their toilet at exactly the same time the sewers would flood.

Also every service is contended to some degree but it doesn't mean you won't get peak speeds when you want them. Wireless services have had less bandwidth than fibre and are more likely to have issues with contention.

Have a look on the Siro thread - people are getting the speed they expect and that's using pretty much identical technology

ussjtrunks

Anteayer wrote: »

Also every service is contended to some degree but it doesn't mean you won't get peak speeds when you want them. Wireless services have had less bandwidth than fibre and are more likely to have issues with contention.

Have a look on the Siro thread - people are getting the speed they expect and that's using pretty much identical technology

So we'll all be off streaming 4k netflix then, suppose the usage limits would become a problem though

westyIrl

Siena Gigantic Backyard wrote: »

The €10 pole cost per year is based on two cables per pole so one NBI fibre and one open eir copper. If the copper is removed NBI must pay €20 per pole. I assume similar applies to duct access.

However over time I foresee open eir extending their own rural fibre network especially in exchange areas where they have started but not completed as part of the 300k. With the infrastructure being repaired for NBI the capital costs to do this should not be as great and longterm this could be an issue for both NBI and the Government.

I've been giving this some thought over the past couple of days also and hypothesizing where the chips may fall in the intervention areas.

Is there anything restricting OE competing for connections with NBI in those NBP areas over the course of the contract? i know it may not be in OE interests initially as they upgrade their passive infrastructure. However, one would have to say its a reasonable possibility that in the long term OE would, at least in my head, stand in a stronger position that NBI. I realise that most likely it'll develop in a way that none of us could probably foresee at this stage anyway.

Jim

tsue921i8wljb3

westyIrl wrote: »

I've been giving this some thought over the past couple of days also and hypothesizing where the chips may fall in the intervention areas.

Is there anything restricting OE competing for connections with NBI in those NBP areas over the course of the contract? i know it may not be in OE interests initially as they upgrade their passive infrastructure. However, one would have to say its a reasonable possibility that in the long term OE would, at least in my head, stand in a more 'efficient' position that NBI. I realise that most likely it'll develop in a way that none of us could probably foresee at this stage anyway.


Jim

There is nothing preventing them competing in intervention areas. I think it will come down to how much they value their wholesale business. The retail sector is highly competitive, the wholesale one less so. Obviously they will know the figures and whether it would make financial sense for them to compete on a wholesale basis with NBI.

oscarBravo

glucifer wrote: »

It’ll be beamed back to us much more efficiently than it can be transmitted via underground cables, writes Niall Smith.

[...]

Niall Smith is head of research at CIT and head of Blackrock Castle Observatory. He is also a member of the steering group for the National Space Strategy for Enterprise.

I would say the same thing to Niall Smith that I proposed saying to yer man from a hosting company who was pimping 5G as the answer a while back: when you disconnect CIT from its fibre connections and use LEO satellites instead, then you can start preaching to us about how much better satellite is than fibre.

pegasus1

Siena Gigantic Backyard wrote: »

There is nothing preventing them competing in intervention areas. I think it will come down to how much they value their wholesale business. The retail sector is highly competitive, the wholesale one less so. Obviously they will know the figures and whether it would make financial sense for them to compete on a wholesale basis with NBI.

They must be restricted for the 25 yr plan though..otherwise it makes no logical sense for Eu/irl gov. money to be used to connect someone and a year later openeir run there own fibre to that premises

tsue921i8wljb3

pegasus1 wrote: »

They must be restricted for the 25 yr plan though..otherwise it makes no logical sense for Eu/irl gov. money to be used to connect someone and a year later openeir run there own fibre to that premises

They are not. How can a Government restrict a private entity investing it's own money in an area? I assume NBI know this and that risk is built into the contract that they wish to sign.

tsue921i8wljb3

As suspected this encroachment has been considered.

tsue921i8wljb3

ussjtrunks wrote: »

Wont fibre have some congestion to some degree too, I doubt we will all see 150mb constant even at peak times.

Anyone actually have a ftth connection atm and can chime in on how it fares?

Anyone who tells you fibre is not the answer either has a vested interest or does not know what they are talking about.

The previous 30 days of a 300/50Mb FTTH connection:

Anteayer

Praetorian wrote: »

This is somewhere between €507 and €731 per home / business. That's before they spend a sizeable chunk of it on setup costs, bonus schemes and another sizeable chunk to "experts" for "consultancy". Esb / voda are planning to spend €455m to hit 500,000 addresses, but these are in towns and cities. The numbers don't add up.

You're looking at the 500,000+ most difficult to reach addresses in Ireland vs urban / small urban / outer urban for the commercial rollouts. In many cases you're talking about long runs of new wiring to reach a single property.

The reason Eir and Siro wouldn't touch it is precisely because it would cost huge money and can't be done commercially.

A lot of Irish commentary tends to also write off anything smaller than the 5 cities as "non-urban". That's absolutely not the case. FTTH is quite commercially viable in even the smallest villages, if they're already on ducts and fibre to backbone networks, and in a lot of cases there'd already be a small exchange with that kind of gear in place.

If you're looking at sizeable towns (1000+ inhabitants) it's really not vastly more difficult than suburban FTTH. Most of them are quite well connected to backbones and are totally stable for FTTH and CATV HFC networks without any issues.

It's the very scattered rural stuff that gets extremely expensive.

In a lot of countries this kind of housing is either not allowed very much or is considered to be off-grid. If you only have to deal with a very small number of remote farm houses it's quite a different story to having to deal with relatively large numbers of scattered premises.

I don’t get this. I live in the ar*e hole of south Tipperary and last month we were connected to high speed broadband. It’s available to all in our area for a small charge. What difference will the proposed system make?

Anteayer

Deleted User wrote: »

I don’t get this. I live in the ar*e hole of south Tipperary and last month we were connected to high speed broadband. It’s available to all in our area for a small charge. What difference will the proposed system make?

Are you in / near a village or along a main road per chance?

And what are you calling high speed broadband in mbit/s ?

tsue921i8wljb3

[Deleted User] wrote: »

I don’t get this. I live in the ar*e hole of south Tipperary and last month we were connected to high speed broadband. It’s available to all in our area for a small charge. What difference will the proposed system make?

It will mean nothing for you or your neighbours. The scheme is to provide connectivity for over 500000 premises that were not as fortunate as yourself to be covered by commercial rollouts.

Wheeliebin30

[Deleted User] wrote: »

I don’t get this. I live in the ar*e hole of south Tipperary and last month we were connected to high speed broadband. It’s available to all in our area for a small charge. What difference will the proposed system make?

Will you admit you’re wrong when people put forward a credible argument?

Doubt it.

Anteayer

Looking at the comparisons from around Europe this is fairly unprecedented. Most countries simply don't have the kind of scatter development in rural areas that we do and the ones that have some degree of it, for example France, have drawn the line at rolling out FTTH to every last hamlet, even though they're also spending billions on various rural fibre schemes, it looks to me like the Irish one is a lot more ambitious about reaching every last connection.

tsue921i8wljb3

Anteayer wrote: »

Looking at the comparisons from around Europe this is fairly unprecedented. Most countries simply don't have the kind of scatter development in rural areas that we do and the ones that have some degree of it, for example France, have drawn the line at rolling out FTTH to every last hamlet, even though they're also spending billions on various rural fibre schemes, it looks to me like the Irish one is a lot more ambitious about reaching every last connection.

That is true and if completed will put us at the top of percentage of premises passed by fibre certainly in Europe and likely the world.

Anteayer

Hopefully the Huawei issue doesn't blow up in our faces in the meantime. The US is really banging on about it and they've been a major supplier in the access networks for both Eir and Eiro's FTTx rollouts and I would assume would be an active contender in this bid too.

It wouldn't be unique to Ireland though - they're a huge player in FTTx around Europe.

Wheeliebin30

Wheeliebin30 wrote: »

Will you admit you’re wrong when people put forward a credible argument?

Doubt it.

What’s wrong with being confused? I had assumed that the upgrade that we got last month was being made available to everyone.

tsue921i8wljb3

Anteayer wrote: »

Hopefully the Huawei issue doesn't blow up in our faces in the meantime. The US is really banging on about it and they've been a major supplier in the access networks for both Eir and Eiro's FTTx rollouts and I would assume would be an active contender in this bid too.

It wouldn't be unique to Ireland though - they're a huge player in FTTx around Europe.

Nope. Nokia will be providing the hardware.

Anteayer

Deleted User wrote: »

What’s wrong with being confused? I had assumed that the upgrade that we got last month was being made available to everyone.

If it's FTTH it's quite hit and miss and tends to be in areas with relatively 'high' density. South Tipp wouldn't be exactly the middle of nowhere compared to some the areas that this project's trying to reach e.g. really far flung parts of the West and midlands that are practically off grid.

In general population densities in places like rural Co. Cork and Tipp, a lot of the Pale and so on tend to be relatively dense (and my threshold for dense is extremely low btw..)

Try parts of Leitrim, Sligo and rural Donegal for example. I know people living in some of those areas and they are barely on the grid for electricity never mind data services.

A lot of these areas may not have even had telephone service until the late mid to late 80s, which was when the last big rural communications rollout happened btw with small digital exchanges that could deal with 20-100 lines.

Grab All Association

You can’t fool the people forever and it would eventually blow up in the faces of these so called tech journalists when in 2025 there’d have to be another NBP due to contention and objections to the many, many masts/feeds needed to facilitate a “5G” rollout.

Sindo/indo, IT and Silicon Republic need to bear in mind that it’s the digital age too, with web pages archived and the ability to take screenshots of these articles. Whether they took the thirty pieces of silver from Bolger or not, they’ve lost what little credibility they had.

Anteayer

Well, if you look back at the 1980s there were similar arguments being made about the spend by TÉ on digitalisation of the telephone network - waste of time / money etc.. mobiles might come along ...

You'd have been a LONG time waiting in rural Ireland for Eircell to be ubiquitous if TE hadn't started rolling stuff out in the 80s.

The way I'm looking at is is that the copper access network in general is no longer suitable for modern communications needs and needs to be replaced entirely anyway.

Even if you look at the voice network, it's not going to be able to remain in service indefinitely. You've digital exchanges that are so old at this stage that they're not even supported by their vendors - I'm talking 80s technology. So, that stuff has to go one way or the other.

Either we make a big jump, or we forever go on about a digital gap between rural and urban areas that simply will not close.
The alternative is endless patch up jobs.

The main thing I would like to see accompanying this rollout though is a strategy to ensure that the infrastructure actually gets used to make an impact - so a focus on trying to help businesses get online and reach bigger markets and all of that. It can't just be a case of rolling out wiring and hoping.

ECO_Mental

ussjtrunks wrote: »

Wont fibre have some congestion to some degree too, I doubt we will all see 150mb constant even at peak times.

Anyone actually have a ftth connection atm and can chime in on how it fares?

I have Eir FFTH 1 Gb/s connection for the past 3 years and what I think one of the biggest advantages is its just is a rock solid stable connection that has never once been down on me over these past few years. The quality of service is second to none. You can rely on it 100% of the time.

I have all my 20 years of family photos on OneDrive in the cloud and view upload videos etc in a breeze.

My wife works on a virtual desktop with her work and she says its faster at home than in work. As a result and you know with kids and school etc she works from home every now and then, even though she only 10 mins from work. She does Skype conference calls etc etc.

With me, I work with MS Office 365 and all that is in the cloud. Everything is stored in the cloud, I can acces everthing in a breeze and without a hickup. All our team work off one document, editing and collaborating seamlessly. I can work from home and do no problem with O365.

If I had a 4g or 5g connection I don't know would I have the same QOS as with FTTH....I do remember before I got it I had 40 then an 80meg FTTC connectin (I'm lucky I know) although it was good I do remember resetting that bloody modem all the time and it could have been down for an hour or two.

I mentioned previously I don't really need the 1Gbs but it's available to me and it's a nerdy thing for me. But 150mb is more than enough for 95% of the population. I've never had an issue with contention, down loads are NEVER slow.

Theanswers

Anteayer wrote: »

If it's FTTH it's quite hit and miss and tends to be in areas with relatively 'high' density. South Tipp wouldn't be exactly the middle of nowhere compared to some the areas that this project's trying to reach e.g. really far flung parts of the West and midlands that are practically off grid.

In general population densities in places like rural Co. Cork and Tipp, a lot of the Pale and so on tend to be relatively dense (and my threshold for dense is extremely low btw..)

Try parts of Leitrim, Sligo and rural Donegal for example. I know people living in some of those areas and they are barely on the grid for electricity never mind data services.

A lot of these areas may not have even had telephone service until the late mid to late 80s, which was when the last big rural communications rollout happened btw with small digital exchanges that could deal with 20-100 lines.

I live in North Sligo. We are certainly not in the back arse of nowhere, have received FTTH (rural area) and I work online from home. It's vital to my business as I often upload 1GB files, stream content etc.

This is the correct decision and will put Ireland well ahead of the competition. This investment will allow many intangible benefits to occur over the course of 30 years. Once we can't even imagine currently.

A great investment.

The Cush

KOR101 wrote: »

Lennon said that Eir is permitted an 8% return on it's investment in the poll infrastructure. I know the €1bn for Eir includes ducks, exchange rentals, dark fibre etc..

Comreg allows a reasonable rate of return (profit) of 8.18% on its recovery of costs via an annual access fee.

This is Comreg's most recent decision on wholesale access pricing for poles, ducts - https://www.comreg.ie/publication/pricing-of-eiras-wholesale-fixed-access-services-response-to-consultation-document-1567-and-final-decision/

westyIrl

Having listened to various opposition parties/TDs in recent days suggesting lesser solutions it made me think of the Australian NBN and while we learned from the NBS that mobile broadband is not the answer, we can certainly learn from the NBN that watering down from Fibre to lesser/hybrid technologies is certainly not the answer either.

It's 40 mins but well worth the watch imho especially for those who surmise that Fiber is not cost efficient. It is also a lesson in how not to do things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODUVjYi4j9o

Jim

The Cush

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6532997739448537088

The National Broadband Plan should be defined by its long-term potential and the reality that it will ultimately outlive many of its creators.

By investing in the most remote corners of Ireland, we must understand that this plan needs to be judged for its societal intangibles, not economic tangibles.

The recent ascension in media coverage has missed the point and focused on rigid economic principles which should not apply to the non-discriminatory provision of a critical service: high-speed broadband.

From an economic perspective, the effective failure of a gap funding model in its infancy is jarring. The same level of alarm can be afforded to the perceived opportunity cost of proceeding with an infrastructure project whose cost is unprecedented.

You see, economists and firms such as KPMG cannot predict the future of technology, and the vibrant ecosystems destined to develop in their presence.

It is these technological evolutions and even revolutions that enforce a seismic change in society, resulting in a tectonic shift in the way economies function.

With the #NBP connecting the disconnected in places deemed not commercially viable for private operators, people come before profit.

Focusing solely on value for money decimates precisely what the plan set out to achieve.

The Cush

Interview in the Sunday Times today with Peter Hendrick, CEO of NBI

Hendrick says the time for talking is over — and ‘we’ve got to go and build it now’

Broadband bidder Peter Hendrick bytes back

Hendrick is charged with delivering superfast internet across rural Ireland, and he’s chomping at the bit

By Wednesday evening, Peter Hendrick, chief executive of National Broadband Ireland (NBI), would have been forgiven for retreating to his office and hanging a do-not-disturb sign on the door. Twenty-four hours earlier, NBI was named preferred bidder for the long-running national broadband plan contract, putting it in line for up to €3bn in government subsidies and prompting expected outrage from opposition politicians, just weeks out from local elections.

The government then published hundreds of pages of internal documents relating to the contract award, including dire warnings about the deal from Robert Watt, the secretary-general of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. Watt strongly urged the government not to sign the deal, lacerated a cost-benefit analysis as “not credible”, and questioned why so much public…

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/broadband-bidder-peter-hendrick-bytes-back-552ng5dd2