National Broadband Ireland : implementation and progress

I've already placed an order with Eir, 50euro for 24 months for 1gb, cheaper than others

The problem is that I've been given a default install date of March 1st as my order was still a pre order, since January 31st the service is live and my neighbours are getting connected but I still have to wait, disappointed but I could get a new install date possibly

Is there evidence for this @Shoog ?

Same lad beating the same drum.... A single issue TD there's many like him.

Lets just say i saw it personally.

Sectogmc where doing much of their surveying until they had a falling out.

Shoog

I think I posted here regarding the same issue before, however I'm just wondering has anyone had any success with a similar situation recently. Basically, we are not in the NBI intervention zone even though we can only get a max of 17Mbps download. Our road is a cul-de-sac road and the fibre lines are live and come as far as a manhole right outside our gate. The two houses which are further on past our gate are the only two houses out of 14 on our road that are getting the NBI broadband. I contacted the broadband government department a few months back, they were still waiting to hear back from a re-review in November and I'm currently waiting to hear back from a recent email to ask if there's any further updates. Thanks.

When it comes to NBI and money, they're damned if they do, damned if they don't.

We expect them to make the most efficient use of the large amount of money the taxpayers have handed to them, but.... we complain when when we don't like the fact they're trying to save money wherever possible?

I don't mind TDs like Fitzmaurice raising the speed issue to keep the pressure on, but it's ironic his complaining about the pace of the rollout for his constituents, given that both the Roscommon and Ballinasloe DAs are in his constituency and are two of the earliest deployments.

I don't even know where to start with that.

What was the nature of the 'falling out'?

Contracts regarding the surveying will have been in place for 2 years at this point. Were Secto looking for more money or NBI looking to pay less? What justification was there for this?

Then that's an indictment of Secto, not of NBI 'penny pinching and falling out with subcontractors' really.

If Secto didn't live up to their end and instead provided incorrect or misleading survey data it's hardly surprising that NBI would be pissed at them and want to possibly withold payment until the surveys were improved.

All this is speculation admittedly but there's a lot of FUD about NBI lately regardless.

Twice you've said that and twice being asked for elaboration. And twice ignored to elaborate.

Would you care to this time...?

A TLI van was around my house last week. Had the bushes and trees cut around my house today for broadband poles. But the NBP website says install is March-May 2023. Is that right or should I be hopeful of sooner install?

There's an awful lot of speculative stuff in this thread. I guess in the absence of clear info from NBI, people have a tendency to fill in the gaps themselves, which isn't always helpful.

I live in the Carrigaline deployment area so am one of the fortunate ones - we have been connected since July last year. I will say that the whole thing has been a mixed bag, but the end result for me at least has been hugely beneficial. I've thrown down some of my thoughts and my experiences so far, hopefully it brings some clarity to some people. I am happy to answer questions people might have about my experiences of the whole process.

Positives:

The end product is genuinely fantastic. We opted for a 500Mbps package, which incredibly is the entry-level offering. I genuinely would have been delighted with a solid 100Mbps connection. Anyway, it's been absolutely bulletproof since the day it was installed. I have performed a few speedtests and it's never clocked less than 520Mbps Download, 55Mbps Upload. Latency pings at between 11-13ms every time. I can now download a 40GB game to my console in 15 minutes or so.

Combined with a mesh WiFi system, we have high speed connection everywhere in our house. Given that most people mostly use wireless devices these days, and most wireless devices don't support 1Gbps currently, I would say that a 500Mbps connection would be more than fast enough for most households. If you want to shell out extra for the 1Gbps or even the newly available 2Gbps connection, have at it, but I don't see the justification currently for most users. That said, it's fantastic that the future-proofing aspect of the network is there.

Prior to NBI, we had a copper DSL connection that was incredibly unreliable - it was supposed to be 12Mbps but in reality maxed out at 6, and any kind of upload would kill it entirely. To all intents and purposes, using it to work from home was useless, and we live in an area with little to no mobile reception for 4G etc. Imagine called out and basically told us we had no chance of getting a good connection with them. So this has been a gamechanger for us. I will say that if we hadn't gotten NBI connection by now, I would have been looking into Starlink as an option. As a straight choice between the two though, from what I can see, NBI is far superior: it's a lot cheaper in terms of up-front and recurring costs, it's less hassle to install, and ultimately is faster and more reliable.

I actually have experience of having 2 different houses connected to NBI. My in-laws live nearby so I organised their connection too as they are elderly. On both occasions I found the KN crews to be very helpful and easy to deal with. They called out when they said they would, listened to what I wanted in terms of locating the Optical Network Terminals and went out of their way to facilitate it.

So ultimately, I am delighted with the end result.

However, I'm not an NBI cheerleader - far from it. I think the company can do a lot of things better.

Negatives:

It was January 2020 that we first saw crews surveying in our area. At that point, we were advised it would be the end of 2020 that we'd be connected. In fairness, Covid lockdowns hit not long afterwards, which I'm sure impacted NBI as it did nearly everyone and everything in the country for a while, but at the same time, I remember that the word from NBI at the time was bullish, and timelines weren't adjusted on the NBI website. So coming towards the end of the year, our window was still showing as "Dec 20 - Feb 21". Indeed, in Oct 2020 we received an email from NBI re-iterating this window.

In January 2021, billboards started appearing in Carrigaline stating "Fibre Is Here". A house in Shanbally was featured in the media as being the first home connected by NBI. We were still waiting to have our eircode move from "Network Build In Progress" to "Ready to Order", but we thought surely it can't be far away. But then January became February and February ticked towards March - our window was closing and still no change or update from NBI. At some point over the last weekend in February, our window changed from "Dec 20-Feb 21" to "Mar 21-Jun 21". This happened with no communication from NBI - I only noticed it as I had become accustomed to checking the website regularly in search of updates.

I was dismayed by this, and my dismay turned to anger when a couple of weeks later I received an email from NBI. It began with “we are pleased to confirm that the premises associated with your eircode”... and my heart soared. Then I continued reading. It turned out that they were pleased to confirm that my eircode was in the intervention area (I had known this for well over a year) but went on to say that our expected connection date had changed to “March 21 - June 21” (I had known this for over 2 weeks). Aside from the “bait-and-switch” intro to the email, which was almost comically cruel in how effectively it raised and then dashed my hopes, the format of this email was not good - a mixture of fonts and repetition that made it appear like it had largely been cut and pasted from other stock emails.

In April 21, our window was changed again, this time to "Jul 21-Aug 21". Again, this happened with no communication from NBI.

Finally, in June 21, our premises changed to "Available to Pre-Order". Well, what a load of nonsense that is. If you are waiting for your area to go-live, I would recommend ignoring the Pre-Order stage. I believe it's nothing but a way for NBI to boost their "Premises Available to order" stat - from what I can see, it means nothing in real terms. Many suppliers won't process orders when an eircode is at that status, and even the ones that will confirmed to me that there's no actual benefit to pre-ordering. You won't get an appointment quicker - all it does is tie you into an order with a supplier that may not be the most price competitive. I would recommend waiting until you can actually order - you should then be able to get the absolute best deal available.

NBI's communication is appalling. Propaganda about pre-ordering. Stock answers. Purposely vague info. Treating everyone like they don't know anything about how fibre works. And as I said at the start, the lack of info is resulting in people speculating wildly. NBI could do a lot more to own this and be clearer about how things work.

For those of you still waiting... you have my sympathy. It's a really frustrating experience and I feel very fortunate that we only had 18 months of it before coming out the other side. I have friends who are looking at delivery dates in 2025 - there's probably a question mark over whether the project will still be going by then, given the delays and increasing pressure from politicians and the media.

I'm not saying they should be beyond scrutiny. Public funds are being used for this and proper oversight is needed but ultimately, my experience of what is being delivered is fantastic. I think it would be a real shame to jettison it now. You'd hope things will begin to ramp up over the coming months and years. Whether any other company could have delivered it better, I honestly don't know. My gut feeling is that they probably could, but we are where we are so there's not much value in raking over those coals. Also, I would take anything the likes of Eir say with a pinch of salt. They are not the paragons of virtue that some commentators in this thread and beyond seem to portray them as.

NBI definitely need to be more honest and up front about the challenges they are facing. Otherwise they leave themselves wide open to criticism. Some of the criticism is completely fair, some seems well wide of the mark.

Anyway that's been my experience. Happy to answer any questions people might have.

When scrap goes up in price there is always robbery if these types of scrap, whether it is copper aluminium or steel.

During COVID there was a downturn in these activities especially during lockdowns like other criminality. But the cousin's are back in business.

Eir still have a large amount of landlines. Remember that cable going through there intervention area go out to households beyond the 300k intervention area. There would be older people who only still have a LL and no BB.

I can only post about my experience to date. Perhaps the connection speed will disimprove as more premises get connected and if contention ratios increase accordingly, but my understanding of FTTP is that it tends to have far fewer issues with contention than FTTC or DSL. We shall see, but I am fairly confident that the speeds I've experienced to-date will be maintained.

In fact, I've not seen any feedback from anyone who has been connected to an NBI service suggesting they have been disappointed with the actual end product - all of the frustration seems to be with the rollout delays and clarity around it. Certainly that's been my experience.

With regard to chickens coming home to roost... maybe, maybe not. From where I'm sitting, it appears that NBI have subbed out all of the actual engineering work, and that most of the contractors involved (KN Circet, TLI) have established track records in the delivery of such infrastructure. It's the ancillary stuff - PR/communications, marketing, project management etc - where they seem to be falling down.

You can't be agnostic to them if you are disregarding then undermining the bidding process at the time of tender and then ditching out of the entire thing. It was most likely the new French owner that saw to that.

That's not agnostic, that's rewriting actual recorded history. It respect your agnostic claims if you were upfront about how EIR has acted throughout the entire process.

As above the work is being done by contractors with decades of civil works in the space. It's not John's telecoms from ballyhack...

I don't care how this gets done as long as its done. The nation simply can't grow into the next decades if the nation isnt connected. Its a small island we should be cutting edge at this. We have so much scope to be and do better. And frankly I think the investment in this will be paid back ten times over through growth.

Lets just say overhead routing of fibre optics is not a sensible strategy given the vulnerability to idiots with hedge cutters/diggers, adverse weather and the constant ongoing cost of tree cutting (which will be neglected given time). It will mean that outages will be common. I am not certain that there is any other alternative - but it makes for a very delicate system.

Shoog