ESB/Voda JV is official

bealtine · 02-07-2014 9:19am #1

This project has been officially announced:

Some background
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/best-practice-%E2%80%94-vodafone-and-esb-cooperation-fibre-broadband-network-ireland

http://www.independent.ie/business/technology/what-will-esbvodafone-fibre-network-do-to-entice-new-punters-30108429.html

Can't find any official PR at this time however seemingly various journalists have been informed.

clohamon · 02-07-2014 1:03pm

Voda press release.

http://www.vodafone.com/content/index/media/vodafone-group-releases/2014/esb-vodafone-ireland.html

Carlow, Carlow
Cavan, Cavan
Ennis, Clare
Shannon, Clare
Ballincollig, Cork
Carrigaline, Cork
Cobh, Cork
Cork City, Cork
Mallow, Cork
Midleton, Cork
Letterkenny, Donegal
Balbriggan Dublin
Skerries / Rush, Dublin
Swords /Malahide/Portmarnock, Dublin
Little Island, Cork
Galway City, Galway
Killarney, Kerry
Tralee, Kerry
Celbridge, Kildare
Leixlip, Kildare
Maynooth/Kilcock, Kildare
Naas/Johnstown/Sallins, Kildare
Newbridge, Kildare
Kilkenny, Kilkenny
Portlaoise, Laois
Carrick-on-Shannon, Leitrim
Limerick City, Limerick
Longford, Longford
Drogheda, Louth
Dundalk, Louth
Ballina, Mayo
Castlebar, Mayo
Westport, Mayo
Navan, Meath
Leitrim Monaghan, Monaghan
Tullamore, Offaly
Roscommon, Roscommon
Sligo, Sligo
Clonmel, Tipperary
Tramore, Waterford
Waterford City, Waterford
Athlone, Westmeath
Mullingar, Westmeath
Enniscorthy, Wexford
Gorey, Wexford
Wexford, Wexford
Arklow, Wicklow
Bray, Wicklow
Greystones, Wicklow
Wicklow, Wicklow

dfdream · 02-07-2014 1:56pm

This is all Bull.

All the towns are already or planned to have fibre rolled out to them.
The whole idea (from the government) was to sort out broadband for rural Ireland.

All these are towns with thousands of residents. Wheres the rural in that...

clohamon · 02-07-2014 2:03pm

dfdream wrote: »

This is all Bull.

All the towns are already or planned to have fibre rolled out to them.
The whole idea (from the government) was to sort out broadband for rural Ireland.

All these are towns with thousands of residents. Wheres the rural in that...

ESB never characterised this as a rural roll-out. It was always for towns of 4000 or more residences.

Its the NBP that rolls out to rural villages. That will not start until 2016 at the earliest.

Gonzo · 02-07-2014 2:57pm

more fast broadband to areas some of which have multiple fibre providers, absolutely useless:(

yop · 02-07-2014 3:03pm

Pure BS, all the towns have solid and upgrading networks, its like putting a new surface on a 5 lane motorway, yet 80% of the country live on cobblelock roads.
Wasting more money on the same thing.

dfdream · 02-07-2014 3:49pm

I see that but say a person in Ennis or Shannon (near me) will have Vodafone fibre (via Eircom) and Vodafone fibre (via ESB) passing their door while 1.3m of the 2.3m houses in the country have nothing....

Each provider would average a split or 50% of the houses that actually take fibre which is probably 20-30% at best.

Where as if they went for the other 1.3m homes where there is no competition..

clohamon wrote: »

ESB never characterised this as a rural roll-out. It was always for towns of 4000 or more residences.

Its the NBP that rolls out to rural villages. That will not start until 2016 at the earliest.

OneEightSeven · 03-07-2014 1:25am

dfdream wrote: »

I see that but say a person in Ennis or Shannon (near me) will have Vodafone fibre (via Eircom) and Vodafone fibre (via ESB) passing their door while 1.3m of the 2.3m houses in the country have nothing....

Each provider would average a split or 50% of the houses that actually take fibre which is probably 20-30% at best.

Where as if they went for the other 1.3m homes where there is no competition..

You have a simplistic understanding of how broadband and business works. 1 million of those houses are located in urban areas. It costs too much money to roll it out to rural area because the houses are spaced too far apart and you have to dig up roads along with planning permission for public and private property. Eircom and ESB won't roll it out to areas where there is no return on investment.

If people want high speed broadband, they need to move house to an urban area.

dfdream · 03-07-2014 8:12am

But the ESB project doesn't have to dig up the roads.
Was that not the whole idea.
Or feed 100-200mb link to a repeater that people could connect to wirelessly. It works for TV upto 50miles. Surely smaller hubs covering 100-200 houses would be feasible.

But if esb are in towns where efibre and UPC already exist then they are only competing for a portion of the customer base who actually want fibre installed (not alone all the resellers of fibre that exist that they would have to compete with.)

In the village I live there is no high speed (1mb eircom or 3mb wireless) with about 200 houses and nearly all have broadband. The ratio of uptake would be far higher than in say Ennis where there is so much completion...

I know its simplistic but 10 miles from Limerick, 10 from Shannon and 10 from Ennis is hardly the outback...

watty · 03-07-2014 10:05am

Broadband Fixed Wireless is possible. But not at 50 miles. At least not without huge expense and line of sight and suitable mountain. TV is broadcast only and uses high sites and low frequencies.

To have decent speed wireless for more than one person you need very many channels much wider than 3G channels at very much higher frequencies (MMDS is the lowest practical) and view (LOS or Line of Sight) of a Mast. I'm 13km from my mast. Some properties here are blocked by trees or other buildings. If there was the will and subsidy from the majority of fibre users, (a USO provision) then indeed everyone could have a minimum 15Mps to 20Mbps (not the easily 0.15Mbps Mobile with an "up to" of 21Mbps) via fixed wireless up to about 20km when too far from fibre or copper (less than 900m) fed by fibre.

The Wireless masts would need 200Mbps to 1Gbps fibre feed unless for less than 10 people when perhaps 100Mbps can feed it. If we scrimped a bit then at peak times the contention would reduce the 20Mbps package to a real 15Mbps to 18Mbps. On my fixed wireless 8M/1M package worst is about 7.4M down and 0.85M up. Too slow and too low a cap for cloud applications. A video upload (B&W, SD resolution 13 minutes) takes a few hours.

To have 120G to 300G transfer caps needs fixed wireless with about x5 capacity that's installed today, or have about 1/5th the customers on existing equipment. Cap is used to reduce congestion caused by contention. If you doubled the cap on the fixed Wireless I have the speeds might drop to 3Mbps at peak times.

With one 8MHz TV channel on UHF at 50 miles (80kms) you could have about ONE user with about 7Mbps down and 0.25Mbps up as the long path means lower QAM. On coax cable on 8MHz channel can easily give about 8Mbps to 20 users simultaneously as the QAM can be much higher due to almost no noise and stronger signal.

oscarBravo · 03-07-2014 10:43am

OneEightSeven wrote: »

If people want [electricity|running water|roads|education|postal service], they need to move house to an urban area.

Apparently there are enough vacant houses in Castlebar, Ballina and Westport to accommodate the entire rural population of Mayo. Who knew?

OneEightSeven · 03-07-2014 10:49am

dfdream wrote: »

But the ESB project doesn't have to dig up the roads.
Was that not the whole idea.

I would imagine they would have to dig up some roads and footpaths to get to houses. Looking at the estates in my area, I don't see any houses attached to telephone poles with wires. The ESB cables must run underground. Digging would be involved.

Or feed 100-200mb link to a repeater that people could connect to wirelessly. It works for TV upto 50miles. Surely smaller hubs covering 100-200 houses would be feasible.

I wouldn't know much about the technology, but many others on the broadband forum are advocates of it as long as there's adequate backhaul to support it. ESB should have this and and it would be cost-effective for rural areas.

But if esb are in towns where efibre and UPC already exist then they are only competing for a portion of the customer base who actually want fibre installed (not alone all the resellers of fibre that exist that they would have to compete with.)

What do you mean a portion? 1 million people is nearly half of 2.3 million. The reason why they're are targeting the 1 million is because it's cheaper and easier to roll it out to urban areas and their product is superior to what Eircom and UPC are currently offering.

In the village I live there is no high speed (1mb eircom or 3mb wireless) with about 200 houses and nearly all have broadband. The ratio of uptake would be far higher than in say Ennis where there is so much completion...

That may be so, but rolling it out the rural areas is more expensive. Rural areas will always come last. Are you aware fibre runs and a constant supply of electricity? It's no a simple as attaching wires to a house and away she goes like copper. This is why Eircom will be very reluctant to bring to rural areas because at least ESB are a source of electricity in Ireland.

I know its simplistic but 10 miles from Limerick, 10 from Shannon and 10 from Ennis is hardly the outback...

Then you might get it before others but urban areas will always come first because that's where the profit is to be made.

Population density = more profit. These companies are not charity organizations, they have employees and taxes to pay. ESB's technology is superior than Eircom's and UPC's current technology, so they're obviously planning to grab their customers. ESB technology is proper fibre, whereas, Eircom's and UPC's is just fibre-powered copper.

dfdream · 03-07-2014 11:07am

I agree wireless has limitations but if a group of 50-100 houses shared 200 or 300mb it would be far superior to what we have now.
I understand urban users are thinking100-200-300mb but rural and Im talking 10 miles from a city 10-20-30mb is mostly what we are looking for.

watty wrote: »

Broadband Fixed Wireless is possible. But not at 50 miles. At least not without huge expense and line of sight and suitable mountain. TV is broadcast only and uses high sites and low frequencies.

To have decent speed wireless for more than one person you need very many channels much wider than 3G channels at very much higher frequencies (MMDS is the lowest practical) and view (LOS or Line of Sight) of a Mast. I'm 13km from my mast. Some properties here are blocked by trees or other buildings. If there was the will and subsidy from the majority of fibre users, (a USO provision) then indeed everyone could have a minimum 15Mps to 20Mbps (not the easily 0.15Mbps Mobile with an "up to" of 21Mbps) via fixed wireless up to about 20km when too far from fibre or copper (less than 900m) fed by fibre.

The Wireless masts would need 200Mbps to 1Gbps fibre feed unless for less than 10 people when perhaps 100Mbps can feed it. If we scrimped a bit then at peak times the contention would reduce the 20Mbps package to a real 15Mbps to 18Mbps. On my fixed wireless 8M/1M package worst is about 7.4M down and 0.85M up. Too slow and too low a cap for cloud applications. A video upload (B&W, SD resolution 13 minutes) takes a few hours.

To have 120G to 300G transfer caps needs fixed wireless with about x5 capacity that's installed today, or have about 1/5th the customers on existing equipment. Cap is used to reduce congestion caused by contention. If you doubled the cap on the fixed Wireless I have the speeds might drop to 3Mbps at peak times.

With one 8MHz TV channel on UHF at 50 miles (80kms) you could have about ONE user with about 7Mbps down and 0.25Mbps up as the long path means lower QAM. On coax cable on 8MHz channel can easily give about 8Mbps to 20 users simultaneously as the QAM can be much higher due to almost no noise and stronger signal.

bk · 03-07-2014 3:15pm

Let me explain the economics behind all of this.

- Average cost for Eircom to do VDSL per premises in urban areas: €200
- Average cost to do FTTH per premises in urban areas: €1000
- Average cost to do FTTH per premises in rural areas: €10,000

So Eircom can do VDSL to 50 homes for the cost of just one rural FTTH install!

So that means Eircom will make 50 times as much profit doing 50 VDSL installs as just one rural FTTH install.

Even for the ESB/Vodafone, they can do 10 urban FTTH installs for the cost of just one rural FTTH install!

This is why they are targeting urbans areas. The ESB want to be the UPC of non-UPC areas.

Where UPC service, they have managed to take 40% of Eircoms customers. I expect the ESB want to do the same in all the non UPC areas.

If they succed in doing this, taking 40 to 50% of Eircom customers, then that means they will have 4 to 5 times as many FTTH customers as they would a single FTTH rural customer and therefore 4 to 5 times as much profit.

The economics of all this are very simple.

The reality is rural FTTH is horribly expensive to do and I think the reality is that people of rural Ireland will have to pay for it themselves if they want it. Perhaps in a system similar to rural electricity, where you pay more to install electricity in rural areas and you then pay a more expensive rate too, to cover the extra costs.

In the meantime, I agree that fixed wireless connected to quality fibre backhaul can help temporarily fill the gap at a more reasonable cost, until FTTH eventually comes to rural Ireland.

dfdream · 03-07-2014 4:41pm

Rural people are not looking for FTTH.
Are the current efibre being rolled out FTTH ?
I connected one for my brother in law (100mb ish) and its a phoneline jobbie.

Fibre isn't justifiable at the prices of the packages, it was hardly viable to put in at work at €1000s per month rental.

From the governments point of view they should just give something like Section 23 tax breaks (only on the investment) to national suppliers that put in services (and maintain them with uptodate speeds ) in areas that have nothing. Something like the imitative that had every joe soap build 1000s of empty hotels around the place but with something that might benefit some tax payers...

With tax breaks anything can be done...

oscarBravo · 03-07-2014 6:26pm

bk wrote: »

- Average cost for Eircom to do VDSL per premises in urban areas: €200
- Average cost to do FTTH per premises in urban areas: €1000
- Average cost to do FTTH per premises in rural areas: €10,000

Do you have sources for those numbers, or are they chosen to illustrate a point?

Because I think you're overestimating the difference between the cost of urban and rural FTTH. Getting fibre into an urban home isn't necessarily easy, and getting it into a rural one isn't necessarily hard.

The reality is rural FTTH is horribly expensive to do...

Not really. Expensive; not necessarily horribly expensive. Fibre is cheap. Digging is expensive - and rural FTTH involves much, much less digging than urban.

...and I think the reality is that people of rural Ireland will have to pay for it themselves if they want it. Perhaps in a system similar to rural electricity, where you pay more to install electricity in rural areas and you then pay a more expensive rate too, to cover the extra costs.

Rural people don't pay a more expensive rate. The installation charge isn't necessarily higher, either.

dfdream wrote: »

Rural people are not looking for FTTH.

Speak for yourself... :pac:

bealtine · 03-07-2014 7:10pm

Well the whole point of "fibre wrap" on the ESB lines is to avoid the prohibitively expensive civils is it not?

I simply can't see rural FTTH costing 10k, granted it could be expensive but I don't think that figure is correct...fibre is cheaper than copper however running the fibre is expensive

Eircom have lots of underground ducting too so they can do it too (except where the ducting is crap obviously) If you can run a phoneline or ESB to a house then fibre shouldn't be more expensive then that ... our grandfathers did it, we can too:)

VDSL is much cheaper granted however VDSL is only a stopgap measure until we as a country bite the bullet and run FTTH

Gonzo · 03-07-2014 9:05pm

I know that doing bringing decent broadband to rural areas is alot more expensive than urban areas but how many more years or decades do we have to listen to that argument. With each passing day, the digital divide in Ireland is growing more than ever before.

This also applies to many semi-rural locations such as locations within 2km of a town, they are plenty of people living there but still no fibre.

I understand that 100-300mb broadband is probably not going to reach most locations beyond current Efibre zones for at least another 10 years, but it would be good to think they could up the current 512k-8meg speeds of customers beyond the town/village boundarys.

If installing small pole mounted fibre solutions to semi-rural locations is too much for ask, surely they can make use of all the un-used ADSL2+ gear around urban areas and move this gear outside of towns and villages where most of us could get anything from 8 up to 24meg broadband?

dfdream · 03-07-2014 9:13pm

FTTH would be nice but fibre to the local exchange or local box and copper to house with 50-100mb speeds would be fine...

cgarvey · 03-07-2014 10:36pm

dfdream wrote: »

FTTH would be nice but fibre to the local exchange or local box and copper to house with 50-100mb speeds would be fine...

Except that in the case of most rural exchanges or, rather, the local town exchange will be too far for any rural customer to get anywhere near those speeds. Once you start with FTTC cabs, then you quickly run in to the "sure it'd be as cheap to do full FTTH".

Really, this is all talk about talk about hogwash. Until the last X metres connectivity has been discussed, then there's little point in talking about FTTC/FTTH or the costs thereof. Getting fibre to villages is cheap. It's where it goes from there where the real costs are.

bk · 04-07-2014 10:50am

oscarBravo wrote: »

Do you have sources for those numbers, or are they chosen to illustrate a point?

These are actual figures.

The €200 and €1000 figures are what I've heard from Eircom.

The €1000 figure to do urban FTTH would be backed up by the ESB/Vodafone FTTH project, they say they will connect 500,000 premises at a cost of €450 million. That is €900 per premises, close enough.

The rural FTTH figures are harder to come by, because so few companies/countries have actually done it. Which should be suggestive in it's own right.

The €10,000 figure comes from a report done into the average cost of rural FTTH in Europe by the FTTH Council. Note that the FTTH council is made up of companies who sell FTTH gear, so it is in their interest to promote FTTH, so if anything this figure maybe on the low side.

This figure is backed up by the cost of BT UK's Fibre On Demand project.

BT charge £3.50 per meter, so £3,500 per km
+ £750 fixed install charge
+ £99 + VAT per month for service.

So for a 2km run (pretty short in rural standards), you are looking at a cost of £7750 or €9,700

4km run costs €18,900

Could the ESB do it for cheaper? Maybe, but I don't see any particular reason why? BT UK are also using their overhead telephone poles to run the fibre in rural areas, so I don't see any major cost difference there.

The only difference would be that this is an order on demand system, while if the ESB/government decide to do a big project to cover every rural home, they could maybe structure it differently and benefit from reductions in cost due to scale.

So it might come in a little cheaper, but certainly not much off this ball park figure.

I'd love to be proven wrong on this and I'd love to see some real world figures from the ESB trials, but I doubt it is too far off.

dfdream · 04-07-2014 11:25am

Its not going to get solved here anyway.

A half baked effort from all government parties just let this go on and on.

Im 10 miles from Ennis (the information age town back in 1995) and nearly 20 years later we have gone from dialup to 1-2mb DSL.

Rock on....

ESB/Voda JV is official

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