Eircom to roll out 1Gb/s FTTH to 66 towns

Hackery · 28-10-2014 4:36pm

bk wrote: »

Both Eircom and ESB are currently trialling FTTH in rural areas (Mayo and Cavan).

I assume the eircom trial is actually a direct relation to the low density NBP and the ESB/Vodafone trial is to do with there own roll-out in medium density regional towns?

ED E · 28-10-2014 4:42pm

Eircoms original FTTH was waterford afaik, urban/Suburban.

Manc Red · 28-10-2014 4:49pm

How is this going to work? ESB/Vodafone are implementing FTTH and now Eircom will be. Who installs the fibre wire to the home now? Will they both be installing their own fibre wire to each persons home?

bk · 28-10-2014 5:15pm

Manc Red wrote: »

How is this going to work? ESB/Vodafone are implementing FTTH and now Eircom will be. Who installs the fibre wire to the home now? Will they both be installing their own fibre wire to each persons home?

Well that is the question.

In the ESB's case I assume they will run the fibre down the street and then if you order FTTH from them they will come out and run the fibre into your home from the street.

With Eircom I kind of expect that they will have a website where you sign up for your interest in it. Once enough people in your area show interest, then they come to your street and run fibre to each house that ordered it.

I assume there will be a 1 to 2 year contract for these services. If after the contract ends, then you could order FTTH from the other company and potentially end up with a second fibre drop being run to your home!

SpaceTime · 28-10-2014 5:21pm

It's vital that Mayo is used to keep Enda happy lol

Kristopherus · 28-10-2014 6:00pm

SpaceTime wrote: »

It's vital that Mayo is used to keep Enda happy lol

Yea, his home is out the Belcarra Rd from Casylebar.:):):)

godskitchen · 28-10-2014 6:39pm

This business of Eircom saying "25" customers won't work.

The 66 towns they have listed, a lot of overlap with ESB/Vodafone.

Eircom are either going to pull fibre to the building or use the ESB network and pay for it.

They are then left with an expensive VDSL infrastructure that will be a white elephant. They will have to go the last mile, or in the case of VDSL, the last few hundred metres with fibre.

Also the "premium" price won't work. As far as I am aware esb/Vodafone are not going to charge a premium price.

Eircom have to compete on price and performance or its over for them in large areas of the country.

murphaph · 28-10-2014 7:01pm

Anyone moaning about this because "it's not in my area" should cop on a bit and see the bigger picture. FTTH is the ONLY real show in town for any form of quality BB in rural Ireland (and yes, that includes people who "only" live 5 mins drive from the edge of a town) and FTTH was NEVER going to be rolled out to lower density and low density areas first. This is a seismic shift from Eircom however and they are more or less admitting that copper can't cut it long term, either for bandwidth or cost of maintenance.

This shift in mentality means FTTH for rural Ireland is more likely than it has ever been.

I wish there were announcements like this being made in Germany. We're building a new house in a town of 12k people in the Berlin commuter belt and currently only ADSL2 is available @ 12Mbps and that's only because we will be building around 1km from the exchange. The poor souls further away get maybe 2Mbps.

There are around 10 towns in the whole of this country of 80 million people where Deutsche Telekom offers FTTH and it's only 100Mbps!! VDSL is currently only vectored in a handful of areas. For almost everyone VDSL tops out at 50Mbps (what we have in our apartment now). Some small private operators offer it apart from that. It's still almost completely a commercial product.

bk · 28-10-2014 7:03pm

godskitchen wrote: »

They are then left with an expensive VDSL infrastructure that will be a white elephant. They will have to go the last mile, or in the case of VDSL, the last few hundred metres with fibre.

Also the "premium" price won't work. As far as I am aware esb/Vodafone are not going to charge a premium price.

I have to disagree, the VDSL network is not a white elephant. The FTTC cabs and the fiber that feeds them, will also be the basis for Eircoms FTTH rollout.

It seems a lot of people don't understand this point! Even if Eircom had gone direct to FTTH and skipped VDSL, they would still have had to install the same or similar cabs in much the same locations and feed the same fiber to them.

The only "wasted" money would be the extra VDSL DSLAM cards in the FTTC cabs and a VDSL modem on the customer site. A relatively small expense compared to the labour costs, FTTC cabs and fiber backhaul to them.

The FTTC network was future proofed for FTTH from the start and is a key part of Eircoms FTTH rollout plan.

I expect Eircom will price VDSL at an entry level price (e.g. €30 to €40), with FTTH at a higher price (e.g. €50 to €60). I expect at those prices, many people will opt to stay on "good enough" VDSL for a long time to come.

I doubt ESB/Vodafone will be able to match the price of cheap VDSL. Obviously they will want to get as many customers as they can, but FTTH isn't cheap and it needs to be paid for. An urban FTTH install costs 5 times more then VDSL/FTTC install. So I expect ESB FTTC will also be at a higher price point.

I would say that Eircom actually has a very clever marketing plan here.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this.

godskitchen · 28-10-2014 7:17pm

bk wrote: »

I have to disagree, the VDSL network is not a white elephant. The FTTC cabs and the fiber that feeds them, will also be the basis for Eircoms FTTH rollout.

It seems a lot of people don't understand this point! Even if Eircom had gone direct to FTTH and skipped VDSL, they would still have had to install the same or similar cabs in much the same locations and feed the same fiber to them.

The only "wasted" money would be the extra VDSL DSLAM cards in the FTTC cabs and a VDSL modem on the customer site. A relatively small expense compared to the labour costs, FTTC cabs and fiber backhaul to them.

The FTTC network was future proofed for FTTH from the start and is a key part of Eircoms FTTH rollout plan.

I expect Eircom will price VDSL at an entry level price (e.g. €30 to €40), with FTTH at a higher price (e.g. €50 to €60). I expect at those prices, many people will opt to stay on "good enough" VDSL for a long time to come.

I doubt ESB/Vodafone will be able to match the price of cheap VDSL. Obviously they will want to get as many customers as they can, but FTTH isn't cheap and it needs to be paid for. An urban FTTH install costs 5 times more then VDSL/FTTC install. So I expect ESB FTTC will also be at a higher price point.

I would say that Eircom actually has a very clever marketing plan here.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this.

What I was getting at was this: take castlebar, currently fttc covering most of the town.

Its on the ESB list for ftth.

Its also on the list for Eircom ftth

If Eircom want to keep customers they will have to go the last mile or have a white elephant on their hands, or a very underutilised one at best.

If ESB push into a few housing estates around castlebar and offer 200+mbps where Eircom can only currently offer 50mbps, Eircom can't turn around and say "well if 25 of you sign up we will offer fttc, at a premium".

If they do, customers will jump ship.

I know I would.

AlanS181824 · 28-10-2014 8:28pm

This is great news for the consumer regardless imo.

If Vodafone/ESB weren't rolling out FTTH then I can guarantee you that Eircom would've milked the absolute most out of their FTTC network as physically possible, much like how they're dragged their feet with DSL to begin with!

Yay for competition!

SpaceTime · 28-10-2014 8:35pm

FTTC wasn't a waste of time by any means, it's provided very quick rollout of what is vastly better broadband.

FTTH takes longer to rollout because it involves individual cables pushed to every house.

The whole idea of FTTC is that it's an interim step towards FTTH.

marklazarcovic · 28-10-2014 8:41pm

well if eircom are serious about this then they need to spend a fair chunk on customer services aswell,because theirs is appalling, not much good if they cant even provide services they advertise already and then shift blame from one section to the next.

Mayo Yid · 28-10-2014 8:45pm

marklazarcovic wrote: »

well if eircom are serious about this then they need to spend a fair chunk on customer services aswell,because theirs is appalling, not much good if they cant even provide services they advertise already and then shift blame from one section to the next.

To be fair Eircom are the least complained about on here, UPC would have more customer service complaints

murphaph · 28-10-2014 8:46pm

marklazarcovic wrote: »

well if eircom are serious about this then they need to spend a fair chunk on customer services aswell,because theirs is appalling, not much good if they cant even provide services they advertise already and then shift blame from one section to the next.

You' re mixing up 2 different companies. The Eircom that will roll out FTTH is a wholesale provider of bitstream network access-they don't deal with end users at all. Their customers are large ISPs. The Eircom you deal with as a customer pays the network operator Eircom to use it's physical infrastructure, just as Vodafone or Sky does.

timmydel1 · 28-10-2014 9:15pm

"Eircom to roll out FTTH to 66 towns" " ESB/Vodafone to roll out FTTH to 55 towns"----Blaa Blaa Blaa... same old places connected over and over again ! Many towns/areas bypassed once again ! Most if not all on these lists of towns already have fibre available.How about giving fibre to some new areas !:mad:

galait · 28-10-2014 9:16pm

The Eircom guy on the radio this evening did not give me much hope as a rural dweller ,
He said this is not Singapore or South Korea where people live in high rise apartments making 100% penetration easy , He simply said Ireland is the most rural economy in Europe and reaching everyone in Rural Ireland was impossible due to cost...

Mayo Yid · 28-10-2014 9:23pm

Smaller town and rural areas will need government funding, these companies are in it to make money

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup · 28-10-2014 9:37pm

no consumer needs 1Gb for the foreseeable future. 70Megabit is more than enough. 4k streaming would be about 15Megabits so eFibre should handle it easy. and there's no new medium that needs that bandwidth unlike when we got 1Megbit whichwas great for music but looking forward to 5Megabit for video.

eircom should concentrate on building out rural broadband and getting everywhere up to 5Megabits at least.

inb4 abuse from people salivating at the thought of 1Gb like a petrolhead yearns for a car that does 0-60 in 3 seconds.

galait · 28-10-2014 9:43pm

Mayo Yid wrote: »

Smaller town and rural areas will need government funding, these companies are in it to make money

Thanks for that in depth analysis :rolleyes:

bk · 28-10-2014 10:56pm

First of all you are all going off topic talking about rural broadband.

timmydel1 wrote: »

"Eircom to roll out FTTH to 66 towns" " ESB/Vodafone to roll out FTTH to 55 towns"----Blaa Blaa Blaa... same old places connected over and over again ! Many towns/areas bypassed once again ! Most if not all on these lists of towns already have fibre available.How about giving fibre to some new areas !:mad:

You mean like places like Cavan and Mayo!!!

Plenty of places on those list with terrible broadband and no fibre.

If your town isn't on the list, then you should be looking for it to be included in the National Broadband Plan where the government will subsidise the roll out of very high speed broadband in non economic areas.

galait wrote: »

The Eircom guy on the radio this evening did not give me much hope as a rural dweller ,
He said this is not Singapore or South Korea where people live in high rise apartments making 100% penetration easy , He simply said Ireland is the most rural economy in Europe and reaching everyone in Rural Ireland was impossible due to cost...

And everything he said is 100% correct.

Ireland has one of the hishest rural populations in Europe. 40% of the Irish population lives in rural Ireland. To compare that only 10% of people live in rural France.

FTTH to low density areas will be shockingly expensive (think north of €10,000 per home!) and it will only happen if subsidised by the government or paid for by people in rural Ireland themselves.

georgiecasey wrote: »

no consumer needs 1Gb for the foreseeable future. 70Megabit is more than enough. 4k streaming would be about 15Megabits so eFibre should handle it easy. and there's no new medium that needs that bandwidth unlike when we got 1Megbit whichwas great for music but looking forward to 5Megabit for video.

eircom should concentrate on building out rural broadband and getting everywhere up to 5Megabits at least.

inb4 abuse from people salivating at the thought of 1Gb like a petrolhead yearns for a car that does 0-60 in 3 seconds.

The thing is it isn't really about speed.

Almost all existing broadband technologies with the exception of FTTH are limited by distance, making them unsuitable for rural bb. Only FTTH doesn't suffer from these issues.

The high speeds of FTTH is a happy side effect of using FTTH. Unfortunately there isn't really any cheaper middle ground. It pretty much comes down to FTTH or shockingly bad BB (1 - 2mb/s)

PeadarB · 28-10-2014 11:39pm

From Silicon Republic 21/02/2013 - http://www.siliconrepublic.com/comms/item/31582-eircom-next-gen-network-is

“We’ve architected our network to actually go FTTH. Where we’ve built the cabinets we’ve got enough fibre to serve not only the cabinet but push it out further to premises.”Hribar said that at present the economics don’t add up.
Installing fibre to every home in Ireland would be an investment that could amount to billions of euros.
“I’m sure that Ireland will one day enjoy FTTH across a large part of the country, but it could take a long time to get there but we’re building our network in anticipation of evolving it to that point.
“This is not a single fibre but multiple fibres and the splice points are in the cabinet that we can pick up and push fibre all the way out to the distribution points and we then have the capability of bringing fibre to the home,” Hribar said.

How things have changed since then.

lmimmfn · 28-10-2014 11:43pm

bk wrote: »

The high speeds of FTTH is a happy side effect of using FTTH. Unfortunately there isn't really any cheaper middle ground. It pretty much comes down to FTTH or shockingly bad BB (1 - 2mb/s)

Its not just that though, its the potential that it provides for futureproofing( if that can be a thing ).
In 2005 i had 3Mb broadband, i was happy with it, played loads of BF2 online, listened to podcasts and surfed the web. Roll on 2013 and i was still on 3-4Mb broadband and it was shockingly bad. Waste of time watching youtube, had to ad block all web sites due to the delays in loading them, and i really could have only 1 device in the house connected to the internet at any 1 time.

Then VDSL came along and its utterly fantastic, have 2 PC's, laptop, tablet and 2 phones connected all the time without issue. Thats fine for now but in 7 or 8 years 100Mbit wont be enough. The web changes so quickly and becomes more and more demanding. FTTH means it will be good for the next 10-15 years at least until something better comes along( i doubt it will for a long time though ).

Its Only Ray Parlour · 29-10-2014 12:02am

lmimmfn wrote: »

Thats fine for now but in 7 or 8 years 100Mbit wont be enough. The web changes so quickly and becomes more and more demanding. FTTH means it will be good for the next 10-15 years at least until something better comes along( i doubt it will for a long time though ).

15Mb is about enough to stream 4K. FTTH can do around 1000Mb. There's fibre optic cables out there that can do 99.7% of the speed of light, which could circumnavigate the earth at least 7 times in one second. Nothing is faster than the speed of light.

Johnboy1951 · 29-10-2014 12:23am

Its Only Ray Parlour wrote: »

15Mb is about enough to stream 4K. FTTH can do around 1000Mb. There's fibre optic cables out there that can do 99.7% of the speed of light, which could circumnavigate the earth at least 7 times in one second. Nothing is faster than the speed of light.

I'll wait for that so

Bog Standard User · 29-10-2014 12:46am

its not as complicated for eircom to roll out ftth. the main barrier is cost of optical cable. but at least eircom have the option of selling the old copper cables for recycling to offset some of the cost of optic cables

the current fttc cabs can easily be converted to ftth. all it involves is swapping out the copper based cards for optical based cards.

bk · 29-10-2014 1:03am

Bog Standard User wrote: »

its not as complicated for eircom to roll out ftth. the main barrier is cost of optical cable. but at least eircom have the option of selling the old copper cables for recycling to offset some of the cost of optic cables

I'm afraid you are mistaken on both points.

The main cost of rolling out fiber is labour/civils. It represents 70 to 80% of the cost of rolling out FTTH. The cost of fiber is relatively irrelevant.

Also Eircom can't just pull up the copper cable, they are required to maintain it for the foreseeable future to enable other companies deliver LLU, etc.

I'm sure they will eventually be allowed to decommission the copper, but that is many years if not decades in the future!

Doddy · 29-10-2014 1:10am

Eircom is company in a strong market position looking to leverage more control over its weakening dominant position. It is essentially a late intuitive step by the company, I would like to know how much aid all these companies are reviving in grants from the TAX payers.

In the end the companies and government will screw us all with extra charges and taxes...

Doddy · 29-10-2014 1:13am

Eircom is a company in a strong market position looking to leverage more control over its weakening dominant position. It is essentially a late intuitive step by the company, I would like to know how much aid all these companies are reviving in grants from the TAX payers.

In the end the companies and government will screw us all with extra charges and taxes...

Bog Standard User · 29-10-2014 1:27am

bk wrote: »

I'm afraid you are mistaken on both points.

The main cost of rolling out fiber is labour/civils. It represents 70 to 80% of the cost of rolling out FTTH. The cost of fiber is relatively irrelevant.

Also Eircom can't just pull up the copper cable, they are required to maintain it for the foreseeable future to enable other companies deliver LLU, etc.

I'm sure they will eventually be allowed to decommission the copper, but that is many years if not decades in the future!

actually thats what i meant. (cost of optical cable) it cost alot money to buy and lay that cable. and yes they can replace the copper for optical. they simply do it on an order basis.

customer A wants ftth instead of fttc so they go pull out customer A's copper line and replace it with an optical line.

the cabs will have both copper based card (for pstn only / llu customers) and optical cards in them for a while for ftth customers

the beauty about optical is it is all or nothing. so if u pay for 200mb you get 200mb not 30mb or upto 200mb you get 200mb because distance is no longer a factor with optical so long as the distribution point along the ducting has an optical repeater on it.

another factor for eircom delaying ftth is due to irish water. they have damaged an unbelievable amount of lines through careless digging. not checking before digging

Eircom to roll out 1Gb/s FTTH to 66 towns

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