Cost of deploying DSL

dahamsta

Anyone know the actual cost of deploying DSL in an exchange? By Eircom, that is. Anyone projected required subscriber figures?

adam

Mr_Man

According to a document which Muck provided recently (from the Western Digital Corridor) a telco needs 100 users on an exchange to make DSL profitable. There is also something called a 'pizza box' implementation which I understand requires fewer users to make profitable.

M.

spongebob

Western Development Commission .....right TLA Mr_Man

This is it Here , researched 6 months ago or more.

The 'pizza box' is a small DSLAM which can handle up to 8 users on a given exchange, probably with copper backhaul and not fibre. With Eircoms mangy contention ratio, a copper pair running a bog standard 2Mb line could handle 192 users.

The 100 user threshold , suggested by the WDC ...when taken together with the 2000 line threshold which is what Eircom considers to be a minimum exchange size to qualify for a DSL upgrade....... indicates that Eircom/WDC considered that the takeup of DSL on a given exchange would be around 2000/100 or 5%

We simply cannot believe Eircom. They say that DSL is available to 500,000 lines or 700,000 lines ...depending on that they are smoking that week or depending on who they are trying to cod.

If we assume that the lower of these figures may be correct then the following crude analysis is indicative of whether the rollout will go beyond 150 exchanges as promised.

5% of 500,000 is 25,000

We had around 2,000 or 2,500 DSL lines in Ireland in March 2003 before the RADSL product was launched. I hear that the order level for DSL in April was 500 a week at least.

At that rate of takeup Eircom will hit 25,000 DSL lines, 5%, after 45 weeks or so, February 2004. In other words, 5% of lines will be DSL enabled out of the 500,000. If Eircom chose not to ignore the takeup of Cable and Wireles in certain parts of Dublin, and nominally counted them into the Broadband pool, I believe that 5% of households in Dublin will have Broadband by the end of 2003.

IMO The first magic number for Ireland is the 14,000 Broadband connections mark. That should be reached in the Autumn of 2003 by combining the WISP operators along with NTL Eircom Netsource and ESAT. 14,000 is 1% of Households in Ireland.

M

flav0rflav

The main deployment cost is the DSLAM. The copper and fibre is all there, having being paid for by the state, in various forms. DSLAM prices usually mention about 100 euro/dollar per port, but that'll be for bigger numbers of ports. The 'pizza box' 8 ports would be at least a grand or two. There will be labour cost installing it.

After that, the running costs come into play - maintenance, leccy, rent, etc. One thing I would like to point out is that to eircom, whether you have a 1M/2M/8M adsl line, the cost is basically the same, given the amount of fibre that seems to be in the ground.

ednwireland

shurley there is some cross charging between eircom and eircom.net which will include the cost of putting in the backhaul network esp with leased line prices in somewhere like donegal and somewhere the isp has to pay for internet access?

can't imagine eircom missing that in their pricing

flav0rflav

As discussed in this thread

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=96979

with info from infrastructure.ie and the WDC report, there is a whole lot of fibre for backhaul all around the country.

The operating cost difference between using 1% of 2.5G fibre link and 10% of it is, I would suggest, very small.

With eircom's bitstream wholesale radsl service, the ISP merely has to pay for a single link between the eircom network and the ISP net. The location of the handover point can be a any of about 10 exchanges around the country. Only one is needed, as eircom do the backhaul from around the country at the same price per subscriber.

We may want to discuss the cost difference between eircom deploying dsl and an LLU'er (OLO'er, CLEC'er) doing it. It is much more expensive for the latter, and hence no one (without public grant) is doing it.