National Broadband Ireland : implementation and progress

I'm with Eir, KN guy said he called it in but something to do "with first house in the area" that it needs a bit of work to link it all up and and NBI to activate it. Again, I'm not too worried. Off on holidays for a week so surely be active when back.

What mesh system did you go with? I will need one also to cover area of the house, circa 4,000 square foot. The office spaces have cat 5 but living areas don't.

Hi all,

Finally eircode went live for pre-order on Friday so ordered 2gb with Blacknight. The cable will be coming across the road from a pole, can anybody tell me what is the legal required height for cables over roads. I guessing I need to install a mast on the house for to receive the cable from across the road, the phone cable used to be on chimney but that's long gone now. Also will NBI put the box where you want it in the house if you prepare conduit and provide the ability to pull through the cable or do they insist on just drilling a hold through the wall and that's that?

Thats a bit of an odd speed unless you are loosing it over another device like a switch but if you loose one pair of conductors (one wire not connected or cut) then your Cat6 cable will drop to 100Mbps. If you bought your Cat6 cable on Amazon or similar then it might not be Cat6. Copper Covered Aluminum cable is often sold on Amazon and it doesn't come up to any of the cable standards. It does work OK but it can cause enough issues to avoid it.

First things I'd do is check for packet loss - use the Ping command to device on the internet or router and check packet loss. Check all your cabling. See if you can identify the cable you have. Check obvious stuff like DHCP and other TCP/IP network settings just incase you have done something daft - I've been there ;-(

Edit> Other obvious possible causes are bad connectors and poor terminations which might test out OK with a simple tester but not work the same with a network signal.

I have a patch panel and the house is cat6 wired in 2015 for many ethernet points all over the place, they all have been terminated but only a smallish percentage are in use on the patch panel. There is no cabling to check. Are you saying I should be getting the full 939 at my end points rather than 300?

On wired Ethernet you should get the full GB speed not 300Mbps.

100Mbps would be easy to diagnose at that means one of the pairs is damaged (GB uses 4 pairs 100Mbps uses 2 pairs)

Bad connection somewhere so plenty of things to check. First try a different point on the patch panel and see what that gives. @heavydawson's post is very valid as its possible that you are still connected on WiFi when plugged into ethernet.

100Mbps only actually uses 2 of the 4 pairs in an ethernet cable. Often a wiring fault doesn't result in no signal but rather the equipment will negotiate a 100Mbps link instead of 1Gbps if it has enough pairs to operate.

When you don't get full speed on 1Gbps ethernet its more common to see it be around the 100Mbps mark rather than the 300Mbps you are seeing.

Congrats! Do you mind me asking what your package speed is? 500mbps or 1gbps?

Initially the estimates were all over the place, but recent comments have suggested that they're even conservative, and you might see connection even slightly ahead of the estimated dates.

My address just became available for pre-order today, so now I'm off to choose an ISP. I'm not price-sensitive (within reason), but I do intend to use my own router, so I need someone who allows/supports that, as well as a static IPv4 address (not CGNAT).

IPv6 and phone service is nice to have, but not essential.

I have it narrowed down to Digiweb or Blacknight currently. Does anyone have experience of either on NBI fibre?

Have been using Digiweb for years (pre and post-NBI deploy). A little pricey but excellent support and rock-solid connectivity.

Ah they're mostly all the same after the first 12-24 months, but the on-boarding deals are better elsewhere I found. There's usually maybe €5-10 in it, but if you were going to get a TV+Broadband(+Mobile) package, you'd save a few more bucks.

Digiweb also have the benefit of not doing CPI-based price increases every year.

NBI map has some updates today. My area has gone to network build in progress.

I have an NBI installer coming out to me this week. A few questions for those who have been down this road -

• Will they work with you to use ducting, if it exists, to being the service to the house?
• If so, I don't have a pull cable for one of the ducts (5m in length) - do they arrive with push rods, etc?
• I would prefer to place the router in a central spot in the house, which would require running the cable through the attic and through a tight spot that would probably require two people working in tandem. Will they help with this?
• What's the diameter of the fibre optic cable?

Thanks for your answers.

My area went into preorder last week and I have preordered with my existing supplier. How long does it typically take to go from pre order to installation.

So 1 year in to my NBI connection with Vodafone Im soon out of contract and want to switch to Sky, which Bonkers said I could as did the Sky website when entering in my Eircode. But got off the phone to Sky just now who said they cannot connect it because NBI were supposed to do something to do with registration numbers but they never did, hence Sky cant connect. He said hes been working there 3 years and has come across this problem a fair bit.

Any ideas whats the story here? Sky are normally competitive enough but now seems like I cant get them over something the NBI didnt do or complete. Is there any recourse here into getting them to add Sky to my area or is it just tough luck? Seems very frustrating as Im not willing to pay Vodafone €60 a month and they wont give me anything less than that, have tried over two phone calls.

There was a long running issue here flagged by others. The long story short version was it's impossible to switch an NBI connection to sky from another provider.

Obviously with the comment here it's still unresolved by sky. They can set people up on NBI initially but not switch anyone in.

My installer got the cable into my attic and down into centre of house to where I wanted it. He had no problem doing it. He left plenty of slack also on the cable if I need to move it in the future. He was on site for maybe 3 hours and wasn't rushing or taking shortcuts by any means. He had a pain of a job to be fair and it was bucketing rain while running the cable overhead from up on the main road through the field and then onto the house.

Some difference on 1gb fibre now compared to Three Mobile broadband, zero drops during the work day running Citrix. And streaming TV is flawless!

Yeah, I got the email today too and as I mentioned a couple of days ago (above), my install had slipped by 6 months (Jul-Dec 2025).

If I didn't have Starlink, I'd be seriously pissed off.

Mines in network build and they're out putting up cables along our road.

Jul 25 -26 starlinks grand. It's not fibre though it'll be gone the second the road is live.

We had a power failure for a number of hours on Saturday and since then my 1GB Eir Fibre connection will drop randomly on WiFi and LAN. Would the power failure have damaged anything, ONT, Router etc? I've done troubleshooting the last 24 hours and various resets and still issue persists even when wired into router.

All lights apart from power light will go off on Eir router and Data light goes off on ONT.

I've contacted Eir and they're sending out a replacement router.

I got 900mbps download and the 100mbps upload when wired connection, work stations are wired in. Other connections then are 2.4GHZ mainly due to house size and range from 200mbps to 350mbps. The 1GB connection was €5 more a month so just went for it.