Dave plays coy and hints at speed upgrade....

Mr_Man

The SB POst
carried an article about the lack of speed in the Irish sector compated to our EU neighbours. No surprise there, but what was interesting was that Eircom and some of the other ISP's admitted that it was just a matter of turning a dial to ramp up the speeds as there was little extra cost in providing increased speeds.

However, harking back to the old there is no demand cliche McRedmond claimed that there was little demand for increased speeds. But Dave boy did hint that there were some upgrades in the pipeline.

M.

damien

I've heard the same from two independent sources. Upload speed increase on the way too.

dahamsta

damien.m wrote:

Upload speed increase on the way too.

'bout fscking time. I couldn't give a toss about download, but the 128k upload is torture.

TimTim

Inspired by that article I made a comic.

byte

Yeah, I agree with Ken Shabby, my 2mbit download is fine, but the 128k upload speed needs to be addressed.

Blaster99

I'm of the view that the only broadband market in Ireland that matters is Dublin. The last time Eircom got a bit of hyped up competition in Dublin, they doubled the speeds. Now Digiweb is making a lot of noise and Eircom are talking about speed upgrades again.

Eircom are of course in a pretty nice position. They are by far the largest ISP and they can **** over the rest of the ISP's by doubling the speeds without that costing them all that much. If they made 4Mbps available for a reasonable penny then they would take a lot of wind out of Digiweb's sails. The main competitors are using cable and wireless and both are typically technically inferior in Ireland in terms of what speeds they can carry and in the wireless guys' case, they probably have to fit new aerials to people's houses to get the speeds up, etc. Digiweb might be ok. I got bored reading their press releases so I can't remember what it was that they were promising that their platform can do.

OfflerCrocGod

Upload speed increases are the only ones I'm really interested in. If Digiweb's Metro covered my area I'd go for it solely on the 512K upload; mind you I would love the sort of uploads that we see in the rest of the EU i.e. 5Mb+ that would simply be lovely. Still I find it unlikely that Eircon will a) go that far b) increase any speeds at all until late next year. Sure what reason is there?

SkepticOne

It is the same tired old "no demand" story we've been hearing for years from Eircom.

Eircom don't care about demand. What they care about is competitive threats (as Blaster99 says: Smart, Digiweb etc.) taking away their business by offering potentially better services. Eircom will move even when there is only a slight chance of competition since losing their near-monopoly status is something they don't want to have to report to shareholders and potential buyers. To date, there have been few such competitive threats and consequently we see the sort of services Eircom are content to deliver.

Not only low speeds and high prices (look at the prices for 3 and 4 meg broadband), but since there are few genuine infrastructural competitors, Eircom are happy to underinvest in their network. The lack of proper regulation guaranteeing minimum standards to everyone doesn't help either, of course.

I would expect another drip-feed increase in speeds in the next update, however we will still be well below the capabilities of even the old RADSL standard currently in use which goes up to 8mbit/sec.

flamegrill

about the wireless peeps:

We looked at offering a wireless product in the south east. Most of the CPE is only limited in speed by the software. The basic package can do say 3mbps, the next one can do 6mbps etc. These are purely software/licence upgrades so neither IBB or Digiweb should have to upgrade anyones equipment.

Paul

Praetorian

That is brilliant Tim Tim. I love pinky and the brain

oscarBravo

Blaster99 wrote:

I'm of the view that the only broadband market in Ireland that matters is Dublin. The last time Eircom got a bit of hyped up competition in Dublin, they doubled the speeds. Now Digiweb is making a lot of noise and Eircom are talking about speed upgrades again.

With respect, that's a perfectly valid view if you happen to be in an area that has a broadband service, and your only concern is the quality of that service.

A large percentage of the population have no access to broadband of any kind, and they don't give much of a damn about speeds, upload or otherwise. They just want broadband.

Blaster99 wrote:

Eircom are of course in a pretty nice position. They are by far the largest ISP and they can **** over the rest of the ISP's by doubling the speeds without that costing them all that much.

Agreed, but...

Blaster99 wrote:

...in the wireless guys' case, they probably have to fit new aerials to people's houses to get the speeds up, etc.

Depends on the technology in use. Some WISPs actually plan ahead.

bk

Blaster99 wrote:

The main competitors are using cable and wireless and both are typically technically inferior in Ireland in terms of what speeds they can carry and in the wireless guys' case

This is simply not true, cable is technically far superior to POTS. Cable use fibre optics to your local CMTS (it gets much closer to you then your local telephone exchange).
From their it is carried on shielded coaxial cable to your home, on the other hand POTS uses unshielded twisted pair (UTP) cable from the exchange to your home.

The UTP used in POTS can typically only give you less then 1Mhz of bandwidth.
Coaxial cable typically can give you up to 850MHz of bandwidth (in common use in western Europe, NTL Ireland seems to use up to about 550MHz at the moment).

Cable has vastly superior capabilities.

DOCSIS 1.0 can give you about 10Mbit/s per channel.
DOCSIS 2.0 can give you about 30Mbit/s per channel or 51Mbit/s per channel in EuroDOCSIS (we have wider channels in Europe due to the higher needs of PAL over NTSC).
DOCSIS 3.0 actually combines 4 channels to give you 160Mbit/s, DOCSIS 3.0 was actually designed to compete with Verizons Fibre To The Home network and it actually can!!! People should be seeing speeds of about 20 - 50 Mbit/s with this.

To put this into perspective, 4 Channels x 8MHz per channel equals a total of 32MHz out of 850MHz!!! Now sure a lot of it is already being used by analogue and Digital TV channels, but you get the drift.

Sure NTL will need to install new equimpent and give customers new modems to support this, but it is actually the same thing Eircom will need to do when rolling out ADSL2+.

As for Digiweb, they offer upto 6m/2m at the moment, however there is no reason why they can't upgrade.

Blaster99

If you read that SBP article you'll see that the NTL Ireland guy says that their network needs a lot of work to carry higher speeds. Or that was at least my reading of it. I'm sure cable networks in general work quite well, but this is Ireland.

bk

Personally I would much prefer to see Eircom offer cheap (€20 - 25 always on) 1Mbit/s BB to everyone in the country, then to offer 24M ADSL2+ to a few in urban areas.

Really the higer speeds aren't really that important, I've gone from 56k dial-up to 512k DSL to 2m DSL to 3m cable.

Now while the jump from 512k to 3m is nice, it really isn't that big of a deal, big files download a little bit faster, but it isn't a major difference and again 24 Mbit/s probably wouldn't make that big of a difference either. What was truly revolutionary from me was the jump from dial-up to BB. I went from slow, expensive and very unstable internet, to fast, pleasant, always on and fixed price BB. This was a much more important step.

I believe Eircom is making this move because it is getting very worried about NTL, plus the others like Digiweb, Magnet and Smart all of whom will be shortly offering very attractive triple play packages of BB, phone and TV. These are very high value services, specially when they start to do Video On Demand and pay TV. These companies will make a lot of extra money off the rental of movies and pay per view sports events. Really IPTV and VoD are really the only current use amd need for high speed BB services.

So it will be interesting to see if Eircom not just offer ADSL2+ BB, but if they also start offering TV services using IPTV over BB. This will make things very interesting in the market and funnily it will see Eircom come full circle. Years ago when Eircom first started working on DSL and were very afraid of NTL, they started working on a TV over DSL technology and had even bought very expensive encoding equipment for it. However it was way ahead of it's time and very expensive and when NTL went bankrupt, Eircom scrapped the whole plan and went with the cheaper DSL that we have now.

We have interesting times ahead of us.

bk

Blaster99 wrote:

If you read that SBP article you'll see that the NTL Ireland guy says that their network needs a lot of work to carry higher speeds. Or that was at least my reading of it. I'm sure cable networks in general work quite well, but this is Ireland.

That is right, but what he was saying is that a lot of the Dublin network is very old and isn't actually a proper, modern, hybird fibre coax network (HFC). The parts of the network that already have BB available are already HFC and upgrading speeds on those parts is trivial. However converting the older parts of the network to HFC isn't easy. But it will need to be done to allow them offer BB to everyone. This is equivalent to Eircom needing to put DSLAM in an exchange and lay fibre to the echange.

BTW I believe all of the NTL Galway and Waterford networks now have BB and 100,000 of the 300,000 customers in Dublin are in BB enabled areas and that work on the rest of the remaining areas is underway.

My point is, if you are in a cable BB area, you will benefit from much faster speeds in the future.

Blaster99

I seem to recall that what NTL has done is to use relatively long cable loops to deliver broadband on. Assuming this is correct, it means that (a) they're limited in terms of what speeds can be delivered on the network because of signal/noise ratios (b) they need to share the available bandwidth between a lot of customers on the cable loop. ADSL certainly doesn't have the latter problem. Wireless also has this problem in that you can only provide some maximum amount of speed per sector, and that maximum speed isn't that great in the scheme of things. With ADSL2+ you can give everyone a theoretical 24Mbps.

All this is vapour, though, as all the ISP's have turned down the speeds for marketing reasons. Maybe as you say, triple-play will be the thing that will bring speeds up.

Praetorian

I mostly agree with you bk but...

Now while the jump from 512k to 3m is nice, it really isn't that big of a deal

It is a huge deal to lots of people. When we moved from 512 (barely broadband) to 2m/bit and to obviously a lesser extent 1m/bit, all sorts of new internet based goodies became available to us. Proper high quality video streaming. Proper high quality audio streaming. I remember streaming audio back with 1/2 m/bit, and then being unable to do anything else with my connection for fear of losing the audio feed. A half m/bit was enough to do the bare minimum. The whole idea with broadband is that you can do more, and you can do it quicker. I could go on and on.

dahamsta

I found that comment about jumping from 512k to 3m a bit weird tbh. If you're talking about the recent bitstream upgrade, that was from 512k to 1m on the base product. You'll pay a /hell/ of a lot more for 3m from the same provider.

bk

Ken Shabby wrote:

I found that comment about jumping from 512k to 3m a bit weird tbh. If you're talking about the recent bitstream upgrade, that was from 512k to 1m on the base product. You'll pay a /hell/ of a lot more for 3m from the same provider.

In the past Netsource had two 512k packages, a lower and higher one. I was on the higher, so when they upgraded I got 2m, then two weeks later I switched to the NTL 3m Broadband Max product and it ended up costing €10 per month cheaper then Netsource

But my point was that the differnce is nice but evolutionary, rather then the revolutionary jump from dialup. Video will really be the only use for speeds above 3m IMO.

dahamsta

Fair enough. It was a bit misleading is all; you're the exception rather than the rule, most people went 512k to 1m. It's not really a big jump, and it's nothing to write home about.

Video is the way we're going too, very rapidly. Last year everyone was trading jpegs and stupid little spreadsheets, this year more and more video is going around; by email, on forums, on websites, etc. Not being able to view something "cool" because you're on dialup these days is "uncool"; and more importantly, frustrating.

That's obvious to anyone, and of course as more and more people get broadband, more and more people are going to be able to do that. The next logical step, though, is quality and size, and (as you suggest) multiple services, and that's going to need higher and higher speeds. As you say, it's going to get interesting. What are /our/ chances of being part of the revolution though?

adam

RangeR

bk wrote:

But my point was that the differnce is nice but evolutionary, rather then the revolutionary jump from dialup. Video will really be the only use for speeds above 3m IMO.

bk,

While this may be true for the mainstream, non technical, user. Don't forget about us lot, probably the minority, that work from home using the interent.

The jump from 512k to 2Mb was revolutionary for me. I work from home all of the time, constantly VPN'd to USA. It is such a pain to download anywhere upto 2GB daily on even a 2mb connection. This is why I intially went with IBB, and subsequently why I left them. A jump to 6Mb, 8Mb, 10Mb or even 20Mb would be a [work] dream come through. Productivity would go through the roof.

Currently, I have two internet connections, BT [1mb:128Kb, my phone line can't handle 256Kb] and Clearwire[2Mb:256Kb]. They are shared out between servers, desktops and IP hard phone. I'm am forever grateful to the boards member who suggested that idea

At this stage I am comfortable with my 2Mb wireless ISP but what would be more revolutionary to me at this stage would be a bigger step in upload. Currently, I'm on 256Kb. I wouldn't really notice too much of a difference being stepped up to 512Kb. But 1Mb upload or more would make my days more bareable.

Agreed, I am probably in the majority, in that I work from home and actually NEED huge up and downlowd speed, but I may benefit from the mainstream usage if video over IP comes to fruition in Ireland.


Keith

bk

IrishTLR wrote:

While this may be true for the mainstream, non technical, user. Don't forget about us lot, probably the minority, that work from home using the interent.

Funny thing is I'm a very heavy user, I work from home often using VPN, VNC, Samba and VoIP over my NTL 3m/300k service and I also share the same connection with two other software engineers

I'm not saying that we don't need faster speeds, for people like you and me, we certainly do, however we are in a very small minority.

For the majority of users 1 - 2m should be fine, it will only be the introduction of IPTV and VoD that will drive the need for higher speeds amongst the majority users.

We will get faster speeds if you live in urban areas as competition heats up amongst the various companies and that is great. However I'm far more concerned about all the people in rural (and some urban) areas who are still stuck on crappy dialup, then the guy in Dublin with 3m NTL bb complaining that we aren't getting 10m bb like in the uk (which is probably only 6 months away anyway).

All I'm trying to say is that as a member of IOFFL I'm more worried about avialability then products at the moment.

IrishTLR wrote:

At this stage I am comfortable with my 2Mb wireless ISP but what would be more revolutionary to me at this stage would be a bigger step in upload. Currently, I'm on 256Kb. I wouldn't really notice too much of a difference being stepped up to 512Kb. But 1Mb upload or more would make my days more bareable.

Digiweb's Metro Plus wireless service has a 4m down, 1m up product for €110 (inc VAT), it might suit your needs:
http://www.digiweb.ie/broadband_metro_index.asp?i=80&i2=81&i6=90&zzz=hm

Also NTL Broadband Max 3m/300k for €45 is well worth getting if available.

cgarvey

bk wrote:

All I'm trying to say is that as a member of IOFFL I'm more worried about avialability then products at the moment.

Hear hear! Speed upgrades are always nice, but for the majority of users, and potential users, that is not the biggest issue right now, IMO.

.cg

bk

cgarvey wrote:

Hear hear! Speed upgrades are always nice, but for the majority of users, and potential users, that is not the biggest issue right now, IMO.

For me the two major issues are:

1) Availability of at least entry level BB to all, in particular in rural areas.

2) Price of entry level BB, whiel it has greatly improved recently, I still think BB is still a little too expensive for the majority of users, specially when line rental is included. I'd like to see BB head towards €20 always on.

Also I still think LLU is very important to drive competition in urban areas, even with cable and wireless greatly improving.

SkepticOne

If you want greater availability in rural areas then government needs to be involved. Competitive tendering should be accepted for those areas still without broadband and for those areas that are underserved (i.e. "covered") by Eircom.

The GBS schemes are a small step in this direction but don't go far enough.

I think a lot of time is wasted discussing technology. The technologies have been around for ages; we just need to put them to use.

crawler

cgarvey wrote:

Hear hear! Speed upgrades are always nice, but for the majority of users, and potential users, that is not the biggest issue right now, IMO.

.cg

I agree with ye both....one will the in turn fuel the other...This is the point I believe Digiweb were trying to get over the in SB post bit, may not read exactly that way though

damien

Hmm, would one class that last post as "big pimpin" "medium pimpin" or "lil pimpin"?

Answers on a postcard to: Arthur Murphy, Mailbag, RTE, Donkeybrook, Dublin 4.

crawler

damien.m wrote:

Hmm, would one class that last post as "big pimpin" "medium pimpin" or "lil pimpin"?

Answers on a postcard to: Arthur Murphy, Mailbag, RTE, Donkeybrook, Dublin 4.

Probably all 3 - Sorry ( Slap!) Jeeesss...the banner ad only ran out yesterday - I promise to be good!

Pimpin = bad. Me bad.

As an aside - is mailbag still around...is Arthur Murphy still around?? Bring back wanderly Wagon/40 coats and Pat's chat....ah the good old days

cgarvey

Crawler, you're on the verge of being branded a vapourware provider!! When ye start making good inroads into availability (even in cities), and triple play (and some incentive to encourage eircom bb enchanced customers! ), then come back and chance your pimping arm. Right now, you've nothing to pimp, so refrain !
.cg

crawler

cgarvey wrote:

Crawler, you're on the verge of being branded a vapourware provider!! When ye start making good inroads into availability (even in cities), and triple play (and some incentive to encourage eircom bb enchanced customers! ), then come back and chance your pimping arm. Right now, you've nothing to pimp, so refrain !
.cg

CG - as always - I wont argue with you - open public forum and you are rightly entitled to your opinion..

But vapourware? - We provide DSL everywhere eircom do, Wireless broadband in an ever growing portion of the country (including the rural places many others will not go), satellite broadband everywhere and phase 1 of Metro (and voice services) in the main cities and we will publish full coverage maps for Metro in the next few weeks (being plotted currently). We also provide web hosting, software devleopment, domain registration and full corporate and business services.

On triple play - we never said we would do triple play this year so hardly fair to take the big stick to me on that one

I note your point on the top eircom packages (which in fairness to you, you have mentioned before) and can confirm it is being looked at - as pointed out already here, eircom are about to change their packages so maybe best to wait?

Point on pimping taken - was not deliberate and will not happen again, in any form.

damien

BTW, I was kidding about the pimping. Thus the Mailbag reference.