Rural Broadband - National Broadband Plan

celtic_oz · 08-08-2014 12:46pm #1

MOD: This thread will be kept exclusively for the discussion of rural broadband and the national broadband plan.

The plan, details of which have yet to be finalised and submitted to the European Commission for approval, is unlikely to begin a roll-out until 2016 at the earliest. A parallel plan by the ESB and Vodafone for the roll out of fibre broadband will not provide services to rural Ireland. - See

more at:
http://www.independent.ie/business/personal-finance/rural-broadband-customers-are-facing-180-price-hikes-30491963.html#sthash.NRHMAIrV.dpuf

SpaceTime · 08-08-2014 12:50pm

What matters in rural Ireland, or any other part of Ireland, is that customers get fast broadband.

In scattered developments, you might be best to do something like use FTTH and FTTC where possible i.e. towns / clusters of more than say 40 homes.

Then you use the same fibre infrastructure to host a very high speed wireless network to connect to the homes that aren't economically reachable by fibre and FTTC.

There are technologies out there that could provide extremely high speeds to homes in those areas.

What I wouldn't like to see though is customers in villages, towns and cities being plonked onto wireless services that are intended for low density rural areas. If you do that, you swamp the system.

Wireless spectrum should be reserved for dealing with in-fill where fibre and wireline services are not practical and not as a competitor for fixed lines.

Jhcx · 08-08-2014 1:25pm

What is the whole point so of this fiber esb if we're not going to get. The urban areas already have their fiber broadband where as myself who lives meters away from the urban boundary suffers with broadband slower than that of the stone age. Would it not make a lot more sense to get more customers out here in rural lands. Lot of us are already Vodafone customers for the simple fact it's cheap than eircoms prices. Why do we have to keep paying a fortune for nothing. My mobile broadband which is edge is faster than the landline and that's just a sad truth.

Would signing a petition to have this disgrace rectified?

garroff · 08-08-2014 1:55pm

roll on the general election

bk · 08-08-2014 2:20pm

Ok, so lets discuss rural broadband. Let me try and give people an idea of the issues with rural broadband and the real costs of it.

First of all people need to understand that most forms of high speed broadband are fundamentally distance constrained. For instance, VDSL2 only really gives you excellent speeds out to 1km and quickly falls off beyond that distance, beyond 2km it performs only the same as ADSL2+

The same with cable, which is why UPC doesn't typically operate outside of urban areas. Even wireless technology like 3G and 4G are distance limited and deteriorate quickly the further you are from the mast.

We also need to define exactly what "rural" means. Many people seem to think rural means a one off house on the top of the mountain. You will often hear people say that they are only 3km from the village and/or in a cluster of 30 homes.

But for most brodband technologies, that makes them very much rural, as I mentioned above VDSL really only operates out to 1 or 2km, beyond 2km from a village you really are rural. Also a cluster of 30 or even 60 homes often isn't economic to service. For instance Eircoms VDSL cabs can support 192 homes. Realistically Eircom doesn't expect 100% of homes to sign up, they are lucky to get 50% in the long term. So I expect Eircom needs about 400 homes to be in a serviceable distance of a VDSL cabinet to make it worth their while to install. So no, even your cluster of 30 or 60 homes, 3km outside a village, still makes it very rural.

The biggest problem is that Ireland has such a large and dispersed rural population. 40% of Irelands population is classed as rural, one of the highest percentages in Europe. For example in France, only 10% of the population is rural.

This high number, dispersed all over the country makes getting high speed broadband to everyone in rural Ireland a terribly difficult and expensive problem.

There is a shining light however and that is Fibre. Fibre is ideally suited to rural areas. Fibre doesn't suffer from the same deterioration of speeds of the other technologies we talked about above. Fibre can typically reach 20km at full speed and can be extended almost indefinitely with repeaters at every 20km.

If every home in Ireland had Fibre, we wouldn't be talking now, there wouldn't be a rural broadband problem.

The problem is that it is horribly expensive to install Fibre in rural areas. A 1km run of Fibre in urban areas will pass thousands of homes. A 1km run of fibre in rural Ireland will pass only tens of homes.

Because of this, the average cost of installing Fibre in urban areas is about €1,000 per home. The cost in rural areas, at least €10,000 per home!

To give you some idea, based on these figures it will cost in the region of €8 billion to connect every premises in Ireland with FTTH, with the bulk of that cost (about €6.5 billion) being the rural homes.

Realistically that just isn't going to be spent over night. To put it in perspective that would cost more then the entire motorway network!

People will often point out that we were able to bring electricity to every home in Ireland and a phone line too. But what they conveniently forget is that the electrification of Ireland project took 40 years to complete and the telephone network was likewise built over decades.

I absolutely believe that every home in Ireland will one day have FTTH and that should be our long term goal. But people need to be realistic and realise that it will likely take 40 years too! Just like the electrification of Ireland. The government aren't just going to spend 8 billion over night. However 8 billion spread over 40 years is 200 million a year, a much more achievable and affordable goal.

But of course that doesn't help people in rural Ireland who are crying out for decent broadband today. And I think we also need a short term, realistic goal. I think a more realistic short term goal is as follows:

- Bring fibre to every village in Ireland

- Use this fibre as backhaul to Eircoms exchanges and have Eircom bring VDSL to every exchange. The means all the people living in the villages and the businesses, schools, community centers, etc. will get up to 100mb/s speeds, a very welcome upgrade. Those people living between 2km and 5km from the village will see a jump to ADSL2+ type speeds, also a very welcome improvement for them.

- Also use this fibre to backhaul to 4G masts and fixed wireless access masts in the village which can help bring a decent quality wireless broadband to the homes lying further to the village.

By doing this, I believe it should be possible to bring a decent, stable, uncapped 30mb/s broadband connection to almost everyone in rural Ireland. And it would be very welcome.

I believe all of the above is probably doable for the 500 million proposed as part of the National Broadband Plan.

It should also be pointed out that bringing fibre to every village would be a pre-requiste to do FTTH in rural areas. Fibre to every village is the backbone on which future rural FTTH plans would be built.

bk · 08-08-2014 2:24pm

Jhcx wrote: »

What is the whole point so of this fiber esb if we're not going to get.

............

Would signing a petition to have this disgrace rectified?

The point is for them to make a profit!

This is purely a commercial venture, the ESB and Vodafone are using their own money to fund this project, no money is coming from the government.

The average cost of a rural install is €10,000 per home. The average cost of an urban install is €1,000. So for the cost of just one rural install, they can do 10 urban installs and thus earn 10 times as much revenue and profits.

The economics of all this are very simple. So no, crying and signing a petition isn't going to make an ounce of difference.

You would be better served focusing your energy on the National Broadband Plan and seeing that the government spend their money wisely. See my last post for details on this.

jimd2 · 08-08-2014 2:38pm

garroff wrote: »

roll on the general election

and what effect is a general election going to have on rural broadband?

MBSnr · 08-08-2014 2:39pm

Interesting news release from the UK Gov here.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/superfast-broadband-reaches-1-million-more-homes-and-businesses

"The £1.7 billion nationwide rollout is firmly on track to extend superfast broadband to 95% of UK homes and businesses by 2017. The rate at which the fibre technology is being rolled out under the programme is rapidly accelerating, with up to 40,000 premises gaining access every week.

The UK-wide rollout is a key part of the government’s long-term economic plan to secure Britain’s future by providing access to superfast broadband in areas the private sector would not otherwise have reached. The current rural programme will deliver returns of £20 for every £1 invested, representing tremendous value for money."

bk · 08-08-2014 2:53pm

MBSnr wrote: »

Interesting news release from the UK Gov here.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/superfast-broadband-reaches-1-million-more-homes-and-businesses

The UK is ahead of us by about 2 years with getting high speed broadband to everyone.

They are basically giving lots of money to BT to connect up as many homes as possible.

I expect the National Broadband Plan will do something similar here, giving lots of money to Eircom to hook up as many rural homes as possible. Though I hope they will also make money, expertise and licensing available to companies and communities to do quality fixed wireless access too. VDSL won't be good enough to reach all homes, FWA will likely need to be an important part of the mix too.

One positive thing about us being 2 years behind is that Eircom is using much newer and better VDSL2 and vectoring technology. Most people in the UK can only get a max of 40mb/s from VDSL, with a smaller number of people getting up to 70mb/s. No sign of them doing vectoring yet.

Interestingly we are also ahead of the UK for cable broadband. The max Virgin Media (now owned by UPC) offers in the UK is 150mb/s, compared to the 200mb/s we can get from UPC here.

Also no sign of a big FTTH rollout in the UK like the ESB are about to start here.

It is shocking that we have leap frogged the UK so quickly, at least in urban areas. We jsut need to do the same for rural Ireland now too.

MajesticDonkey · 08-08-2014 2:56pm

bk wrote: »

Though I hope they will also make money, expertise and licensing available to companies and communities to do quality fixed wireless access too. VDSL won't be good enough to reach all homes, FWA will likely need to be an important part of the mix too.

That's my major concern with the NBP - that the government will only rollout the fibre to the list of towns/villages that need it and stop there.

celtic_oz · 08-08-2014 3:37pm

when the Government announced the ESB\Vodafone venture they did say that it would focus initially on rural towns and villages ...

"He added that the recent announcement of a joint venture between ESB and Vodafone would result in further deployment of high speed networks in 50 towns, providing the possibility of direct fibre connectivity for 500,000 premises.
“The Government is committed to an ambitious plan which involves ensuring the delivery of broadband services to those parts of rural Ireland which will not be served by the commercial sector,’’ he added."

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/oireachtas/consultation-to-take-place-on-high-speed-broadband-1.1869381

bk · 08-08-2014 5:06pm

celtic_oz wrote: »

when the Government announced the ESB\Vodafone venture they did say that it would focus initially on rural towns and villages ...

And as we have been over dozens of times already, the ESB/Vodafone JV was always going to be urban, it was never planned to target rural areas.

Either confused journalists or politicians got the ESB/Vodafone JV and the National Broadband Plan mixed up and it was misreported.

I can 100% assure you that the ESB have been planning this for the last three years or so and all that time the plan has ALWAYS been to target urban areas.

marno21 · 09-08-2014 1:41pm

The problem in a lot of places isn't delivering broadband to a one off farmhouse 2km from any other house, it applies in large to villages too.

Take for example a village near me, Ballydesmond in Co. Cork. The Ballydesmond exchange was on the famous 2007 eircom DSL rollout but never got upgraded. The village is in a small hole also meaning that Fixed Wireless from Bweeng, Clara & Slieve Mish are out of the question. In 2008, Ripplecom set up a mast on a nearby business owner's land (presumably the business owner was in great need of internet connectivity too) and provide service to the village. At the moment this is limited to 8Mbit/1Mbit with a 70Gb cap and has been since January 2011. The other options are mobile internet from 3 (who added cells in 2009) and Vodafone (who brought HSDPA to the village in July 2014). I believe O2 and Meteor may also have 3G but that's outdated now too.

As of right now, the majority of people in the village have 3 service and a few (a lot of businesses) have Ripplecom, as Ripplecom is 2x the price of 3. If there was a cabinet with 1km range at the exchange it would not only cover the whole village but a few houses outside the village. 192 customers would likely not be an issue as there is very little competition and for a reasonable price people would have no problem availing of the service. Due to backhaul issues and costs Ripplecom's service, although reliable and consistant will likely never be able to provide much faster services or more download bandwidth.

murphaph · 09-08-2014 8:22pm

The focus has to be on getting all the Ballydesmonds on VDSL and as a by product of that providing good quality fixed wireless to outlying properties.

Johnboy1951 · 09-08-2014 10:59pm

garroff wrote: »

https://us.v-cdn.net/6034073/uploads/attachments/404622/317624.pdf

Extract from ESB inhouse magazine re fibre roll out.

I love to read such statements as .......

"It will reverse the digital divide between city and rural"

Now that is what I call positive for us rurals on 3MBs and less!

Lord Arsraptor wrote:

I read that there would be the capability for UPC/Eircom to make use of ESB's infrastructure, when they make it available, to provide FTTH for their customers too? Or am I delusional

If you read the pdfs (in the post linked to above) you will see the details of where they are rolling out initially and yes it will be an 'open network' for all service providers to utilise (wholesale pricing).

bk · 10-08-2014 3:42pm

Exactly, the Ballydesmonds can be relatively easily and affordably * fixed by getting fibre backhaul to them and a VDSL cab and also by using the fibre to feed the fixed wireless and 3G/4G

Now I saw affordably, well it will probably cost about 500 million being proposed by the governments National Broadband Plan, which is a lot of money, but a much more realistic sum then the €8 billion or so that rural FTTH would cost.

Having said that, I expect the 500 million not to be spent on just fibre backhaul, but also helping to subsidise VDSL rollout and Fixed Wireless Access rollout feed by this fibre.

bk · 10-08-2014 3:59pm

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

I love to read such statements as .......

"It will reverse the digital divide between city and rural"

Now that is what I call positive for us rurals on 3MBs and less!

Well some people think anything outside of Dublin is rural!

But seriously, I think this is where a lot of the confusion comes from. Amongst the Irish civil service and politicians, I believe anything outside the big cities is considered rural.

Thus as the ESB bringing FTTH to 40 towns and villages outside of the big cities, it is thus bringing broadband to rural Ireland, at least by this definition and in the minds of politicians.

But that isn't really the definition we use for rural here in this forum and amongst the ISP industry. When we talk about the urban versus rural divide, I suppose we are really talking about a "high versus low population density divide".

Generally speaking * it is just as easy and economical to bring high quality broadband to a so called "rural" town which has a high enough population density such as Cavan Town as it is to a city.

* As long as the town isn't too far from the national fibre backhaul networks.

Yet somewhere in the countryside just 10km from Dublin might get no broadband due to being low density.

So yes, the ESB is helping bring high quality broadband to many parts of rural Ireland, but just the higher density parts. However I do hope the ESB's fibre will be opened up to be used as quality backhaul for Fixed wireless ISP's servicing areas around these towns.

In the long term, this project is very good news for rural Ireland.

ED E · 10-08-2014 4:14pm

bk wrote: »

Yet somewhere in the countryside just 10km from Dublin might get no broadband due to being low density.

This is a key point which often catches people out. Two great examples are Wicklow(little more than 10K but you get the point) where the exchanges are coastal and everyone else has next to no bandwidth and west of Swords other than the few towns there. People there work in Dublin, consider themselves dubs but put up with 3-4Mb connections. Its not just "The pale vs the countryside".

SpaceTime · 10-08-2014 4:35pm

People also forget that large areas of County Dublin, especially North Co. Dublin is actually properly rural in every sense of the word yet will probably get overlooked in any rural broadband schemes under the mistaken assumption that Dublin = urban.

Also the (01) area doesn't mean "urban".
I had a discussion with someone living in a remote house in Co Kildare (ribbon development) who seemed to think that because he'd an (01) phone number it meant he would get fibre ahead of " Down the Country" places like Kerry.

He was complaining that they had it in Tralee and not in his house in the sprawling metropolis right next to the cow sheds and the tractor.

celtic_oz · 11-08-2014 2:27pm

Its not hard to understand that providing FTTH in a sparsely populated area would be more costly. Thats obvious.

Whats hard to take is the imminent ending of the NBS (rubbish though it was imo) and the lack of any successor. Meanwhile politicians\media blather on about a solution that can never be used to solve the current rural issue.

When an article comes out that we highlight the lies , everyone rushes in to say how we are all mistaken, that rural FTTH is an expensive fallacy.

eh great.., now where is the plan for rural Ireland? Not vague .. well maybe we could do this or that but an actual plan.

bk · 11-08-2014 3:45pm

celtic_oz wrote: »

When an article comes out that we highlight the lies , everyone rushes in to say how we are all mistaken, that rural FTTH is an expensive fallacy.

eh great.., now where is the plan for rural Ireland? Not vague .. well maybe we could do this or that but an actual plan.

Now that isn't fair, I think I and others have laid out a very workable plan for rural Ireland:

1) Carrier neutral fibre backhaul to every town and village in Ireland

2) Eircom to put VDSL in every rural exchange, using the fibre from step 1 above. Enabling every rural exchange may require some government subsidy to make up the difference.

This will give you 100mb/s speeds to everyone in the village, including shops, business, schools, community centers, etc. And it can deliver reasonable ADSL2+ speeds out to 4 to 5km from the village.

3) The fibre backhaul used to feed 3G/4G and most importantly Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) towers in the village to service the surrounding community for a few km's around the village.

With fibre backed FWA I believe it should be possible to service the majority of homes in rural Ireland with minimum 30mb/s no cap, quality broadband.

Maybe not 200mb/s UPC, but I think good enough for most people for the short to medium term.

It would also be good if Eircom looked into VDSL reach extenders, repeaters and mini VDSL cabs to help reach deeper into rural areas. i.e. get creative

We also need to support the FWA industry better with much cheaper and easier access to licensed frequencies for FWA in rural areas.

Finally I'd love to see either Eircom or the ESD running a scheme similar to the BT Fibre On Demand scheme they have in the UK. Where anyone in the country can order FTTH, but they pay the full costs of installation from the nearest VDSL cab (or Fibre connected village from step 1 above).

I'm hoping that this is what the National Broadband Plan will entail.

I'd love to hear if anyone disagrees with me and/or has alternative realistic suggestions.

MBSnr · 11-08-2014 4:09pm

bk wrote: »

.
It would also be good if Eircom looked into VDSL reach extenders, repeaters and mini VDSL cabs to help reach deeper into rural areas. i.e. get creative
.

Early days but as I mentioned in a previous post, there are approx 150 lines that appear out of the ground (after travelling under power lines) about 2Km from our local exchange that are all terminated on a pole. This would be the perfect place for a pole mounted VDSL cab and (by pure chance) at the perfect distance (2Km) for the 100 odd houses connected directly off the exchange on those lines, where the line would otherwise be 4 or 5 Km....

I hope they do get creative!

ED E · 11-08-2014 4:29pm

DSL reach nodes were a thing, though there weren't many of em built. When phase 1 is done, and maybe phase 2 also, it could be something they try.

bk · 11-08-2014 4:31pm

MBSnr wrote: »

Early days but as I mentioned in a previous post

As you say, early days. Eircom is currently rightfully focusing on the low hanging fruit, get as many people in urban areas hooked up to VDSL, enabling vectoring and getting direct feed exchange only VDSL up and running (will add hundreds of thousands more people to VDSL speeds).

Once this easier work is done, I hope they turn their attention to the more difficult cases and as you say use creative ideas to range even more people.

Johnboy1951 · 11-08-2014 4:32pm

Looking at the map of proposed cabs in my closest village, there will be one about 2.5Kms from me.

Now almost all the houses served along the roadside between there and me have a pole outside the house, and apparently the wire comes up from underground ..... in a couple of places the pole serves two or three houses if they are close together.

The wires from the village remain underground past my property (actually I gave them permission to bring the duct across my property because there is bedrock at the roadside ..... many many years ago).
I connect to that 'manhole' via underground duct into my house.

So as I see it, they 'could' easily bring fibre to my property using existing ducts, and serve maybe 50 to 100 homes with high speed broadband ....... if they 'had a mind' to do it.

Actually considering the area there are probably a lot more homes that would benefit ...... including the local National School which is further out than me.

Unfortunately that is not in the plans it seems ......

MBSnr · 11-08-2014 4:47pm

^^^
Question for the more knowledgeable here! Is there a restriction on running fibre cables using the existing Eircom poles? The reason I ask is that most cabinets in urban areas are fed by ducted fibre right? Therefore the cost is high as streets have to be dug etc. If a cabinet was placed in a rural location (assuming power was readily available) could it not be fed via fibre directly strung from the exchange via the existing poles? If so doesn't this dramatically reduce the installation cost?
I realise that the state of poles in a rural area are bad/leaning/falling down, but if a pole was damaged and/or a tree fell through lines, the net effect would be the same for those lines regardless if there was fibre or copper strung up there.

MajesticDonkey · 11-08-2014 4:51pm

bk wrote: »

This will give you 100mb/s speeds to everyone in the village, including shops, business, schools, community centers, etc. And it can deliver reasonable ADSL2+ speeds out to 4 to 5km from the village.

What are typical realistic ADSL2+ speeds, at 4-5km from the cab?

Also, I hope IrelandOffline are gonna be campaigning for everything you said in your post, because unless some national body makes noise, nothing will happen

ED E · 11-08-2014 5:27pm

MajesticDonkey wrote: »

What are typical realistic ADSL2+ speeds, at 4-5km from the cab?

Also, I hope IrelandOffline are gonna be campaigning for everything you said in your post, because unless some national body makes noise, nothing will happen

4km gives 3-4Mb, any further and it drops off more.

bk · 11-08-2014 5:31pm

MBSnr wrote: »

^^^
Question for the more knowledgeable here! Is there a restriction on running fibre cables using the existing Eircom poles? The reason I ask is that most cabinets in urban areas are fed by ducted fibre right? Therefore the cost is high as streets have to be dug etc. If a cabinet was placed in a rural location (assuming power was readily available) could it not be fed via fibre directly strung from the exchange via the existing poles? If so doesn't this dramatically reduce the installation cost?
I realise that the state of poles in a rural area are bad/leaning/falling down, but if a pole was damaged and/or a tree fell through lines, the net effect would be the same for those lines regardless if there was fibre or copper strung up there.

I don't know for a fact, but from what I hear many of Eircoms poles in rural areas are in bad condition and may not be able to take the extra weight of fibre additional fibre cables and mini cabs on them.

That is why Eircom have been making noise about getting access to the ESBs poles and ducts with the news of the ESB doing FTTH. The ESB poles are typically in a much better state and of a much better quality, thus more capable of carrying fibre and mini cabs, etc.

BTW it isn't true that Eircom have to dig in urban areas to lay fibre to VDSL cabs.
All of the VDSL cabs are being installed next to existing copper cable junction boxes. These junction boxes are almost all served by existing large underground ducts that run to the local exchange and contain large bundles of copper telephones cables. It is relatively trivial to blow fibre down these existing ducts from the exchange to the new VDSL cabs next to the junction boxes.

Certainly in all the VDSL/efibre installs I've seen in Cork and Dublin, it has all being just blowing fibre down existing ducts, no digging involved (other then max 1 meter between the existing junction box and the VDSL cab).

Ok there probably are the odd exception where a new junction box has been placed, but pretty rare.

It is MUCH cheaper to blow fibre down an existing duct, then string it along poles. It is also cheaper to maintain, less storm/weather damage, car hitting pole damage, farmers shotgun, etc.

Yes, digging a new duct is more expensive then running along poles, however most urban areas are already covered in ducts.

Interestingly when they finally decommission the copper network (at least the backhaul element between the VDSL cab and exchange) and pull out the copper cable, these ducts are going to be very empty as fibre will takes up a fractino of the space. Also these reclaimed copper cable could be worth a pretty penny to Eircom as recylced copper, which is currently at an all time high!

MajesticDonkey wrote: »

What are typical realistic ADSL2+ speeds, at 4-5km from the cab?

About 5mb/s at 4km. Which might not sound like much, but to a person on ADSL1 connected to a microwave linked bandwidth starved exchange and currently only getting 1 to .5mb/s, that would be a great jump.

But these are the vanilla VDSL2 speeds, I believe with various forms of vectoring and some other tricks like reach extenders, channel bonding, etc. they might be able to eck a few more mb/s out of it.

Even more exciting might be Eircom running fibre on their own or the ESB poles and using mini cabs (20 to 40 ports) to service people further out. They could then see jumps to proper VDSL speeds 40mb/s+

No indication of this happening yet, but the quality and speed of the VDSL2 + vectoring rollout caught many of us pleasantly off guard, so lets hope there are more pleasant surprises to come.

MajesticDonkey wrote: »

Also, I hope IrelandOffline are gonna be campaigning for everything you said in your post, because unless some national body makes noise, nothing will happen

Yes, but I think it is important for us to discuss it here first, to see if it is actually a good idea and if anyone has any better ideas?

MajesticDonkey · 11-08-2014 7:07pm

bk wrote: »

About 5mb/s at 4km. Which might not sound like much, but to a person on ADSL1 connected to a microwave linked bandwidth starved exchange and currently only getting 1 to .5mb/s, that would be a great jump.

I think 5Mb should be the absolute minimum anyone should be getting, in the short term, ideally 8Mb.

bk wrote: »

Yes, but I think it is important for us to discuss it here first, to see if it is actually a good idea and if anyone has any better ideas?

Yep, that's a good idea.

I think another important point is the price that these services will cost. People in towns/cities get these awesome packages, maybe phone and 100Mb broadband for €30-40/month, albeit understandably, particularly when there's plenty of competition. I'm currently paying €30/month for a 3Mb connection, and will probably upgrade to 5Mb when it becomes available, which will cost €40/month. Realistically, these prices would not want to go any higher than this as the speeds further increase.

Gonzo · 11-08-2014 7:52pm

MBSnr wrote: »

Early days but as I mentioned in a previous post, there are approx 150 lines that appear out of the ground (after travelling under power lines) about 2Km from our local exchange that are all terminated on a pole. This would be the perfect place for a pole mounted VDSL cab and (by pure chance) at the perfect distance (2Km) for the 100 odd houses connected directly off the exchange on those lines, where the line would otherwise be 4 or 5 Km....

I hope they do get creative!

This is exactly what is needed up to 2/3km beyond the town boundary. This pole mounted vdsl solution would be perfect for my area, there are 60 houses or so in my area (most of them are side by side on both sides of 3 roads) and some of the houses are only 800 meters from the nearest cab but none of them are connected to the cab. A VSDL pole cab could easily be centrally located feeding all the houses. There are about 3 other locations with similar small distances away from Dunshaughlin each with about 40-70 houses, none of them have fibre. All in all there must be at least 200-300 houses just marginally beyond the town boundary around the town. 2 or 3 pole mounted VDSL installs would give everyone within 4km of the center of Dunshaughlin fibre broadband, where currently it's limited to some people within 600 meters radius of the town centre.

Im sure this scenario is similar to most other towns and villages, particularly those in Meath, Kildare, Wicklow and other parts of the country.

murphaph · 11-08-2014 9:20pm

Yes but Dunshaughlin village has VDSL. The priority has to be getting fibre itself to all the towns and villages in Ireland and working out from there. It's the fastest way to get the most people onto decent speeds. Once fibre has been pushed to all or most villages...then they should start penetrating deeper into the surrounding countryside. They should have some plan for this but implementation should follow only after fibre is pushed to all these VDSL less villages.

nilhg · 12-08-2014 12:19am

bk wrote: »

Ok, so lets discuss rural broadband. Let me try and give people an idea of the issues with rural broadband and the real costs of it.

First of all people need to understand that most forms of high speed broadband are fundamentally distance constrained. For instance, VDSL2 only really gives you excellent speeds out to 1km and quickly falls off beyond that distance, beyond 2km it performs only the same as ADSL2+

The same with cable, which is why UPC doesn't typically operate outside of urban areas. Even wireless technology like 3G and 4G are distance limited and deteriorate quickly the further you are from the mast.

We also need to define exactly what "rural" means. Many people seem to think rural means a one off house on the top of the mountain. You will often hear people say that they are only 3km from the village and/or in a cluster of 30 homes.

But for most brodband technologies, that makes them very much rural, as I mentioned above VDSL really only operates out to 1 or 2km, beyond 2km from a village you really are rural. Also a cluster of 30 or even 60 homes often isn't economic to service. For instance Eircoms VDSL cabs can support 192 homes. Realistically Eircom doesn't expect 100% of homes to sign up, they are lucky to get 50% in the long term. So I expect Eircom needs about 400 homes to be in a serviceable distance of a VDSL cabinet to make it worth their while to install. So no, even your cluster of 30 or 60 homes, 3km outside a village, still makes it very rural.

The biggest problem is that Ireland has such a large and dispersed rural population. 40% of Irelands population is classed as rural, one of the highest percentages in Europe. For example in France, only 10% of the population is rural.

This high number, dispersed all over the country makes getting high speed broadband to everyone in rural Ireland a terribly difficult and expensive problem.

There is a shining light however and that is Fibre. Fibre is ideally suited to rural areas. Fibre doesn't suffer from the same deterioration of speeds of the other technologies we talked about above. Fibre can typically reach 20km at full speed and can be extended almost indefinitely with repeaters at every 20km.

If every home in Ireland had Fibre, we wouldn't be talking now, there wouldn't be a rural broadband problem.

The problem is that it is horribly expensive to install Fibre in rural areas. A 1km run of Fibre in urban areas will pass thousands of homes. A 1km run of fibre in rural Ireland will pass only tens of homes.

Because of this, the average cost of installing Fibre in urban areas is about €1,000 per home. The cost in rural areas, at least €10,000 per home!

To give you some idea, based on these figures it will cost in the region of €8 billion to connect every premises in Ireland with FTTH, with the bulk of that cost (about €6.5 billion) being the rural homes.

Realistically that just isn't going to be spent over night. To put it in perspective that would cost more then the entire motorway network!

People will often point out that we were able to bring electricity to every home in Ireland and a phone line too. But what they conveniently forget is that the electrification of Ireland project took 40 years to complete and the telephone network was likewise built over decades.

I absolutely believe that every home in Ireland will one day have FTTH and that should be our long term goal. But people need to be realistic and realise that it will likely take 40 years too! Just like the electrification of Ireland. The government aren't just going to spend 8 billion over night. However 8 billion spread over 40 years is 200 million a year, a much more achievable and affordable goal.

But of course that doesn't help people in rural Ireland who are crying out for decent broadband today. And I think we also need a short term, realistic goal. I think a more realistic short term goal is as follows:

- Bring fibre to every village in Ireland

- Use this fibre as backhaul to Eircoms exchanges and have Eircom bring VDSL to every exchange. The means all the people living in the villages and the businesses, schools, community centers, etc. will get up to 100mb/s speeds, a very welcome upgrade. Those people living between 2km and 5km from the village will see a jump to ADSL2+ type speeds, also a very welcome improvement for them.

- Also use this fibre to backhaul to 4G masts and fixed wireless access masts in the village which can help bring a decent quality wireless broadband to the homes lying further to the village.

By doing this, I believe it should be possible to bring a decent, stable, uncapped 30mb/s broadband connection to almost everyone in rural Ireland. And it would be very welcome.

I believe all of the above is probably doable for the 500 million proposed as part of the National Broadband Plan.

It should also be pointed out that bringing fibre to every village would be a pre-requiste to do FTTH in rural areas. Fibre to every village is the backbone on which future rural FTTH plans would be built.

Just catching up with this thread, there's a lot I agree with here but also some statements and assumptions that don't seem to accord with facts on the ground or have any commonly quoted public data to back them up, the few bits I've bolded above struck me for a start, just a few comments on them in order.

My local exchange, Rathangan, Co. Kildare went live for VDSL last month and happily I'm one of the lucky one's who got connected, currently getting 40/8mb from the nearest cab to me. I really do seem to be one of the lucky ones though because I'm 3.5km out in the countryside from the village and my cab is 2.7km or so out, no matter what way I count I can only get to about 30 houses within 2km of the cab. In the village as a whole the Eircom wholesale site reports that VDSL is available to 730 premises, the thing is they have 9 cabs installed to provide that service. There are plenty of comparable town/villages scheduled on the map to have VDSL rolled out, TBH I can't see any of them having 400 premises per cab so maybe the economics for Eircom aren't quite as bad as your figures predict.

On the €10k per house for FTTH via the ESB poles network I've seen nothing official (could have missed it) from Irish sources to confirm this, there have been some quotes from sources abroad but local conditions and practices vary so much it must be hard to apply these to Ireland, hopefully some firm figures will come once the rollout starts in Ireland.

Ovbiously getting fibre into the villages and towns is essential but I was struck today while driving from home down to North Wexford and back home again via Carnew, Shillelagh, Tullow, Castledermot, Athy and Kildare town that none of them are (to my mind any way) are ideal sites for wireless base stations, almost all of them are in hollows in river valleys, located in rolling countryside. Some of the wind turbine sites in North Wexford/South Wicklow mightn't be bad though.

Just a few observations, not meant as criticism in any way I do appreciate the knowledge you and the other regular posters bring to this forum.

murphaph · 12-08-2014 8:33am

Just shows how amazingly well Ireland's broadband is progressing...you essentially have the same speeds as I do in an apartment in Berlin, despite your rural location.

celtic_oz · 12-08-2014 9:51am

bk wrote: »

Now that isn't fair, I think I and others have laid out a very workable plan for rural Ireland

Great..., is there a documented plan by a political party that aligns with any of these plans ? We need to know which way to vote ..

Fine Gael in 2011: "Investing in Next Generation Broadband: Fine Gael in Government will co-operate and co-invest with Eircom, UPC and other telecommunications companies to provide Next Generation Access (high-speed broadband) to every home and business in the State. This will be achieved by delivering fibre to the home or kerb for 90% of homes and businesses in Ireland with the remaining 10% provided with high-speed mobile or satellite broadband. "

MajesticDonkey · 12-08-2014 10:16am

celtic_oz wrote: »

This will be achieved by delivering fibre to the home or kerb for 90% of homes and businesses in Ireland with the remaining 10% provided with high-speed mobile or satellite broadband. "

L.O.L. As if that was a solution. Do these people, that are still in government, actually know what they're doing?

same ol sh1te · 12-08-2014 10:33am

MajesticDonkey wrote: »

L.O.L. As if that was a solution. Do these people, that are still in government, actually know what they're doing?

No, most of them are school teachers. They expect the public servants in the departments to advise them as to what's best so changing Govt in fact doesn't change anything. These public servants got influenced somehow and listened to the mobile companies dress up their technologies, this lead to the National Broadband Scheme.

This is why we need a long term plan, much longer than the 4 years any party is in power and we need it to be public so the mobile telecoms industry don't dress their technologies up to be better than they are and we get more of the same

Villain · 12-08-2014 11:11am

nilhg wrote: »

Ovbiously getting fibre into the villages and towns is essential but I was struck today while driving from home down to North Wexford and back home again via Carnew, Shillelagh, Tullow, Castledermot, Athy and Kildare town that none of them are (to my mind any way) are ideal sites for wireless base stations, almost all of them are in hollows in river valleys, located in rolling countryside. Some of the wind turbine sites in North Wexford/South Wicklow mightn't be bad though.

Just a few observations, not meant as criticism in any way I do appreciate the knowledge you and the other regular posters bring to this forum.

Pretty good high sites around Tullow and Shillelagh anyway and while I support the concept of getting Fibre to towns like Tullow (my nearest) trying to deliver the last mile via wireless isn't really a long term solution.

The amount of spectrum is pretty small and there are already a lot of WISP providers fighting for it and now with AC devices coming available and 80Mhz channels when you push for throughput you eat a LOT of the available spectrum.

Comreg need to open the unlicensed spectrum more but that still is only going to buy you time. I would love to see rural communities coming together and finding solutions i.e. work with land owners to connect to fibre pops.

The B4RN project in the UK http://b4rn.org.uk/ is something to be admired. Sadly I think we may be one Generation away from achieving the same in Ireland.

same ol sh1te · 12-08-2014 11:22am

Villain wrote: »

Pretty good high sites around Tullow and Shillelagh anyway and while I support the concept of getting Fibre to towns like Tullow (my nearest) trying to deliver the last mile via wireless isn't really a long term solution.

The amount of spectrum is pretty small and there are already a lot of WISP providers fighting for it and now with AC devices coming available and 80Mhz channels when you push for throughput you eat a LOT of the available spectrum.

Comreg need to open the unlicensed spectrum more but that still is only going to buy you time. I would love to see rural communities coming together and finding solutions i.e. work with land owners to connect to fibre pops.

The B4RN project in the UK http://b4rn.org.uk/ is something to be admired. Sadly I think we may be one Generation away from achieving the same in Ireland.

Unlicensed? It needs to be licensed, 3.5Mhz is perfect and isn't utilised to it's full potential, Comreg haven't really done a good job of allocating it. Imagine are also wasting 3.5 spectrum on mobile Wimax that doesn't work

Villain · 12-08-2014 11:31am

same ol sh1te wrote: »

Unlicensed? It needs to be licensed, 3.5Mhz is perfect and isn't utilised to it's full potential, Comreg haven't really done a good job of allocating it. Imagine are also wasting 3.5 spectrum on mobile Wimax that doesn't work

Most WISP are sticking masts on farmers in exchange for connection etc, need to be removing costs not adding them.

Wireless is not the solution long term.

murphaph · 12-08-2014 11:35am

Fixed wireless is the medium term solution that will have to do for several decades until FTTH has replaced copper everywhere. But that will take decades just as rural electrification and back then there were far fewer one off dwellings. That's a more recent phenomenon.

BeerWolf · 12-08-2014 11:39am

Wonder if the they could introduce community planning for pooling a down payment, either in full or instalments, for having FTTC in a rural area... and further individual cost for FTTH from there.

There's plenty of people in the country where money isn't much of an issue to accomplish this surely ?

same ol sh1te · 12-08-2014 11:40am

Villain wrote: »

Most WISP are sticking masts on farmers in exchange for connection etc, need to be removing costs not adding them.

Yes, because WISPs are starved of funding and have been ripped apart by the NBS with it's false promise of bringing broadband to everyone. Plenty of FWA customers disconnected working broadband connections to move to NBS. It costs money to go on or build masts. It also costs a huge annual fee to use licensed links, over €1000 per yr, where in the UK it's a 50 quid paper fee. Comreg are holding WISPs back by milking them for all they're worth, Comreg see it as a cash cow.

Villain wrote: »

Wireless is not the solution long term.

It's a perfect stop gap until we have fibre, 20-30mbit each way is easily possible if done right

Villain · 12-08-2014 11:45am

murphaph wrote: »

Fixed wireless is the medium term solution that will have to do for several decades until FTTH has replaced copper everywhere. But that will take decades just as rural electrification and back then there were far fewer one off dwellings. That's a more recent phenomenon.

Sadly I agree with you and rural areas will be left scrapping for what they can get, the main mind shift that needs to occur is that land owners stop seeing digs laying ducting as a money earning exercises and start to think of their future and the communities around them.

Villain · 12-08-2014 11:52am

same ol sh1te wrote: »

Yes, because WISPs are starved of funding and have been ripped apart by the NBS with it's false promise of bringing broadband to everyone. Plenty of FWA customers disconnected working broadband connections to move to NBS. It costs money to go on or build masts. It also costs a huge annual fee to use licensed links, over €1000 per yr, where in the UK it's a 50 quid paper fee. Comreg are holding WISPs back by milking them for all they're worth, Comreg see it as a cash cow.

It's a perfect stop gap until we have fibre, 20-30mbit each way is easily possible if done right

Oh I agree with you comreg are not helping this sector at all and it is a good stop gap as you say I just don't want to see it becoming a solution!

murphaph · 12-08-2014 12:41pm

Villain wrote: »

Sadly I agree with you and rural areas will be left scrapping for what they can get, the main mind shift that needs to occur is that land owners stop seeing digs laying ducting as a money earning exercises and start to think of their future and the communities around them.

To be fair eircom are pushing FTTC to little villages that could only dream of it here in Germany. Rural doesn't mean one off. An isolated village of 200 houses is rural too. Eircom are actually connecting such places to VDSL. I never thought I'd see that.

Villain · 12-08-2014 12:49pm

murphaph wrote: »

To be fair eircom are pushing FTTC to little villages that could only dream of it here in Germany. Rural doesn't mean one off. An isolated village of 200 houses is rural too. Eircom are actually connecting such places to VDSL. I never thought I'd see that.

True but they are only delivering VDSL within 2km of those villages and DSL up to about 5km but to be honest I don't think anything under 5mb should be considered "Broadband" in 2014. There are also still a lot of carrier lines and local issues which they can't afford to address.

OneEightSeven · 12-08-2014 1:23pm

Villain wrote: »

I don't think anything under 5mb should be considered "Broadband" in 2014.

Whether it's 50kb/s or 500kb/s, it's the technical name for the technology so it's not going to go away like dailup did. I'd call it "low-speed broadband" because then you'd get the point across that's it's obsolete.

I was doing some calculations yesterday and 5Mb would be good enough to stream live HD 720p for one person. In Australia, they're selling 25/5 fixed wireless so that sort of technology would be good enough for the vast majority of rural-dwellers.

Johnboy1951 · 12-08-2014 2:01pm

BeerWolf wrote: »

Wonder if the they could introduce community planning for pooling a down payment, either in full or instalments, for having FTTC in a rural area... and further individual cost for FTTH from there.

There's plenty of people in the country where money isn't much of an issue to accomplish this surely ?

If a local community outside a village paid for the fibre and cabinet in their locality, they would own that hardware and should have control over who uses it and how much it costs to connect to it etc.

I don't see that happening.

Neither do I see people paying a corporation the costs of putting in the hardware and handing ownership to the corporation.

MajesticDonkey · 12-08-2014 2:02pm

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

If a local community outside a village paid for the fibre and cabinet in their locality, they would own that hardware and should have control over who uses it and how much it costs to connect to it etc.

I don't see that happening.

Neither do I see people paying a corporation the costs of putting in the hardware and handing ownership to the corporation.

You'd be paying for the cost of installation, not hardware.

Johnboy1951 · 12-08-2014 2:05pm

OneEightSeven wrote: »

Whether it's 50kb/s or 500kb/s, it's the technical name for the technology so it's not going to go away like dailup did. I'd call it "low-speed broadband" because then you'd get the point across that's it's obsolete.

I was doing some calculations yesterday and 5Mb would be good enough to stream live HD 720p for one person. In Australia, they're selling 25/5 fixed wireless so that sort of technology would be good enough for the vast majority of rural-dwellers.

You reckon there is a difference between rural dwellers' and urban dwellers' needs, or that 25/5 is sufficient for 'the vast majority' regardless where located?

Rural Broadband - National Broadband Plan

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