New wireless licenses to reach 80% of population?

Ripwave

I just came across Irish Broadband's press release about the the recent allocation of 3.5GHz licences.

Among other things, the statement says "Irish Broadband can now deliver broadband to 80% of the population within six months." (It says "can", not "will". It'll be interesting to see how things develop).

That sounds like a vindication of IOFFLs decision to focus on alternative delivery modes, such as wireless.

The statement also says "While the traditional DSL connections are shared with between 24 and 48 other users, Irish Broadband's customers only share the service with between 4 and 8 other users, so customers have superior speeds, and quality of service". Though discussion on that particular part of the statement probably belongs in the Broadband forum, where people will be well aware that the residential services (that IBB will presumably be selling to that 80%?) have 20:1 and 40:1 contention ratios.

SkepticOne

Assuming IBB can get their customer service in order (based on reading boards), and achieve what they say they can do, this should mean many sleepless nights for Phil Nolan as Eircom experiences for the first time true competition.

Contrary to what some have suggested, this should also be good news for ISPs like UTV. Real competition from the likes of IBB and the other wireless operators should force down Eircom's retail prices and consequently their wholesale prices making broadband more attractive. In Britain, where there is substantial infrastructural competition, there's a plethora of ISPs selling broadband services.

Wireless ISPs in Ireland will take the place of cable in other countries however they will have the advantage of much cheaper rollout costs and more bandwidth flexibility.

Fallschirmjager

its worded very weird i think or maybe i am reading into it too much but does he mean 80% of ireland or 80% of the areas they want to deal with...it reads like the latter to me.

Fallschirmjager

sorry, one other thing,

i emailed a few of these that i could get a name for (as far as i see some who won the mobile licenses for from comreg dont have a website) and to date i have had had not one reply.

any one else have any better luck?

spongebob

IBB are claiming they will be able to service 80% of the population = 3.2 Million .

I think that is total crap myself. Its like an Eircom 800,000 line claim.

M

Ripwave

Originally posted by Fallschirmjager
its worded very weird i think or maybe i am reading into it too much but does he mean 80% of ireland or 80% of the areas they want to deal with...it reads like the latter to me.

80% of the people. By servicing the 5 largest population centres in the Republic, they will be able to "reach" 80% of the population.

SkepticOne

I would have my doubts about 80% of the population. A fair proportion will be blocked by hills and other obstacles even with non-line of sight equipment assuming they roll out in all their licence areas. But even 40 or 50 percent would have a huge competitive impact. Then there are the other licencees.

Ripwave

Originally posted by Muck
IBB are claiming they will be able to service 80% of the population = 3.2 Million .

I think that is total crap myself. Its like an Eircom 800,000 line claim.

80% of the population will live within range of one of their transmitters. They won't have enough transponders to deal with 80% of the population, but they should be able to deliver broadband (using NLOS technology) to most of the people in their areas.

If between them the 5 or 6 3.5GHz licensees got 0.8% of the population online, never mind 80%, it would make a huge difference, and transform the marketplace.

Fallschirmjager

i cant help it...its like a drug...but six months the marketing says...anyone know how likely this is or is it the usual BS?

SkepticOne

Originally posted by Fallschirmjager
i cant help it...its like a drug...but six months the marketing says...anyone know how likely this is or is it the usual BS?

AFAIK, they have a year to provide services from each of their licenses otherwise they lose their deposit. It would be in their interest to act quickly, because in most of their areas there are other operators with licences. The press release says 'can' roll out in six months but makes no committment to do so, however, and there have been instances of people being assured that certain sites would be up and running within a certain time only to be delayed. Personally, I think they will be spending the year upgrading all their areas, with some areas getting it sooner than others.

Ripwave

Originally posted by SkepticOne
AFAIK, they have a year to provide services from each of their licenses otherwise they lose their deposit. It would be in their interest to act quickly, because in most of their areas there are other operators with licences. The press release says 'can' roll out in six months but makes no committment to do so, however, and there have been instances of people being assured that certain sites would be up and running within a certain time only to be delayed. Personally, I think they will be spending the year upgrading all their areas, with some areas getting it sooner than others.

I'm just guessing here, but I imagine the 3.5GHz gear will be higher power than the gear being used in the 2.4GHz and 5.7GHz bands, so there won't be as many towers in each city. That may also mean that they won't/can't be placed on top of nursing homes and apartment blocks. It means that they won't need to arrange multiple fibre tails (or SDH links) back to their main centre in each city.

Clearly, managing this rollout in multiple locations is going to be a big job for all of the licensees (most of which have licenses for multiple cities). Even without having to deal with eircom, there's bound to be hiccups along the way. We'll see what happens.

nahdoic

Originally posted by Ripwave
That sounds like a vindication of IOFFLs decision to focus on alternative delivery modes, such as wireless.

There are many people in this country who need to be vindicated for their actions or lack thereof, (Etain, Mary how you doing?) but IOFFL is not one of them. How about we recognise the crucial voluntary, unpaid massive amount of effort that has been given instead of talking about the need to vindicate?

Irish Broadband Press Release
Irish Broadband can now deliver broadband to 80% of the population within six months.

I can deliver Fibre To The Home for all Irish citizens within the next six months. I just need a few 100 billion euros. Alright? I can also get rid of all the bad things in the world. I just need the power of God. Anybody want to patent a bullsh1t detector for all things in Irish Telecoms? There is a great need for one. (We did have one for a while it was called eircomtribunal - come back to us )

If Irish Broadband were inclined to build a network that could service 80% of the population it would effectively bankrupt eircom, and would there be any need for GPRS or 3G? We could all just have real broadband as we moved about the country.

And hippies and lawyers could dance in one big circle all over the world (Lionel Hutz Attorney at Law nightmare scenario from the Simpsons )

spongebob

So the 3.5Ghz IBB network will also allow the 80 % of us to move from population centre to population centre. It will be Nomadic then ?

nahdoic

Originally posted by Muck
So the 3.5Ghz IBB network will also allow the 80 % of us to move from population centre to population centre. It will be Nomadic then ?

Don't forget about the holding of hands, flowers and dancing across the world.

spongebob

cue short monograph on where Ripwave got his name in the first place !

Ripwave

Originally posted by Muck
So the 3.5Ghz IBB network will also allow the 80 % of us to move from population centre to population centre. It will be Nomadic then ?

The Comreg announcemnet refers to "Fixed Wireless Access Local Area licences".

RipWave is "nomadic", and I have my fingers crossed that some pedantic git in ComReg hasn't decided that this means IBB won't be allowed use RipWave.

I've no idea whether IBB would allow you to use a Limerick unit on it's Cork transponders. There are technical, commercial and political cases that can be made for and against permitting that, but in reality it's not likely to make much difference to the market - very few people will actually care.

Ripwave

Originally posted by Muck
cue short monograph on where Ripwave got his name in the first place !

It's been there in my profile since I signed up. I don't work for IBB (or National Toll Roads), but I think that RipWave at €30/month is a winner, assuming that 3.5GHz allows IBB to put the right infrastructure in place to support the market.

It's a pity the licenses weren't issued a few months earlier, in time for the Christmas market, but maybe it's just as well.

nahdoic

As SkepticOne said earlier the competition from Irish Broadband and other wireless operators is going to be fabulous. It will be the first time eircom will be up against real competition. The benefit to Ireland Inc will be enormous.

To give an ambiguous impression in a press release that Irish Broadband could wirelessly service 80% of the Irish population in 6 months is utter tripe. Dancing with pixies tripe.

Ripwave

Originally posted by nahdoic
As SkepticOne said earlier the competition from Irish Broadband and other wireless operators is going to be fabulous. It will be the first time eircom will be up against real competition. The benefit to Ireland Inc will be enormous.

To give an ambiguous impression in a press release that Irish Broadband could wirelessly service 80% of the Irish population in 6 months is utter tripe. Dancing with pixies tripe.

It doesn't give that impression, unless you believe that 100% of the population even want broadband. You don't have to install a million ripwave units to truthfully claim that you can cover 80% of the population.

It might be optomistic to suggest that 80% of the population will be within range of an IBB transmitter within 6 months, I'll give you that. It might take 9 months, or 12 months. But that hardly puts it in the "dancing with pixies" league.

All of the above also applies to the other licensees too (except chorus, who do great radio ads, but not much else).

spongebob

Originally posted by Ripwave
RipWave is "nomadic", and I have my fingers crossed that some pedantic git in ComReg hasn't decided that this means IBB won't be allowed use RipWave.

I think they will allow Nomadic within an 'area', being an area of about 700Km2 centred on a tower, but Comreg will go space job ballistic if they find that a Unit ' issued' to a Dublin customer appears to work in Galway too.

3G licencees will sue their fat asses you see.

M

bminish

Originally posted by Ripwave
That may also mean that they won't/can't be placed on top of nursing homes and apartment blocks.

There is no problem with any of the current generation 3.5 Ghz solutions in this regard. Not by a very wide margin

COMREG regularly commission surveys of transmission sites and the results are published Here

Cellular base stations operating at much higher power levels than the various wireless Internet solutions easily meet current regulations by a wide margin (usually under the exposure limits by a factor of 10,000 or so )

.Brendan

nahdoic

Originally posted by Ripwave
It doesn't give that impression, unless you believe that 100% of the population even want broadband. You don't have to install a million ripwave units to truthfully claim that you can cover 80% of the population.

*sigh* I said ambiguous impression and yes it is a very ambiguous impression.

It might be optomistic to suggest that 80% of the population will be within range of an IBB transmitter within 6 months, I'll give you that. It might take 9 months, or 12 months. But that hardly puts it in the "dancing with pixies" league.

Except that the press release made no mention of being within range of a wireless base station. It said it can now deliver broadband to 80% of the population within 6 months.

Believe me, I really, really want this Ripwave technology to succeed. And I hope it does. I've read as much as I can about the Ripwave technology that I can find but most of the reports seem to be glowing endorsements without stating any disadvantages. So I’ve tried looking at the basic technology they are using.

Ultimate scalability - the Navini MCSB (Multi-Carrier Synchronous Beamforming) solution has industry-unique, advanced technology attributes that lead to unparalleled capacity and coverage benefits and is able to consistently deliver high data rates

I’m not a physicist but from what I can see Synchronous Beamforming is very exciting. In the oldie days, the signal was just blasted out in every direction. But this allows the same frequency to be sent in many different directions allowing the network to scale limitless it would appear.

But every network has a limit though, but there doesn’t seem to be any mention of a limit on this Ripwave technology which leaves me wondering. (Anyone remember the no-limits fiasco that formed IOFFL).

I find it extremely hard to believe that Irish Broadband could service 80% of the population of Ireland over this frequency band in the next 6 months. If this was possible I don’t understand how it isn’t deployed everywhere in the world already. There is an absolute fortune to be made.

I hope Irish Broadband do, but I’m reserving my doubts as to the limitless scalability of the network. I wonder just what the limit is. In any case – the competition will be fantastic for Ireland Inc.

sixtysix

do ibb pay for the publicity they get on this board and if not why not?

bminish

Originally posted by nahdoic

Ultimate scalability - the Navini MCSB (Multi-Carrier Synchronous Beamforming) solution has industry-unique, advanced technology attributes that lead to unparalleled capacity and coverage benefits and is able to consistently deliver high data rates

I’m not a physicist but from what I can see Synchronous Beamforming is very exciting. In the oldie days, the signal was just blasted out in every direction. But this allows the same frequency to be sent in many different directions allowing the network to scale limitless it would appear.

I am a radio guy and I have a bit of a problem with some of the claims Navini are making for Ripwave.

Synchronous beam forming has been around for a long time in applications such as Phased array radar where I think it was in use for Airborne radar by the end of the second world war.

Basically what it does is allow the Antenna pattern to be steered electronically, however the amount of extra capacity this can give you in a system is down to how clean and how tight the antenna pattern is, You need a big array to get a clean pattern and you only get some of the gain that the equivalent un-steered array would have had.
With the smallish antenna panels navini appears to be using I doubt they are much better than about 30 degrees and frankly in this application the main advantage to beam forming is getting a single (for example 60 degree) sector to deliver most of the capacity that two 30 degree sectors would have delivered on the same site. It is a useful saving for the operator but certainly does not provide almost limitless bandwidth. It also helps in a Non-LOS environment by reducing unwanted multi-path signals somewhat.
A smarter Non-LOS plan is to use a multi-rake receiver that can extract useful information from the various multi-path signals, of course this would raise CPE costs somewhat.

A lot of claims are made by various equipment manufactures for Non Line of sight, what they actually mean is that their coding system can tolerate or even make some use of multi-path reflections (I.e Urban conditions. ) This is very useful but is certainly not the same as Non-LOS in a Rural area where potential users are the wrong side of bits of Bumpy Terrain.

The Ripwave system seems mainly geared towards operators wishing to reduce install costs and complexity in Urban environments (an Admirable goal ) but i don't think it is necessarily the best solution in all environments, lets see some deployment in conditions where users and operators are not under NDA and are free to discuss how it's working in the real world.

Personally my money is on systems that progress towards a unified 802.16 standard rather than propriety solutions such as ripwave.

.Brendan

Ripwave

Originally posted by bminish
Personally my money is on systems that progress towards a unified 802.16 standard rather than propriety solutions such as ripwave.

What sort of time scale are we looking at for commercially available 802.16 solutions, Brendan?

Applicants for the 3.5GHz licenses had to provide a business plan for rolling out a product within the next 12 months, I believe, with details of the prices they planned to charge. I don't believe any of this information has been made public, and I doubt that it would be available under FoI, because it would be deemed commercially sensitive, but RipWave is the only wireless broadband solution commercially available in Ireland that doesn't require a technician install (that I'm aware of. But I'm just a user, and Boards is my primary source of information). That gives it a competetive edge, provided it can deliver the performance that people expect. (I haven't been very successful using Netmeeting with friends in the US because of the high latency of the connection, for example - I hope that this will improve under 3.5GHz, but that might just be wishful thinking on my part).

If better 802.16 based solutions turn up later, I don't think that will necessarily be that big a problem - the Ripwave CPE is so unobtrusive and transparent that getting people to switch to an alternative solution will be straightforward (no re-wiring necessary, just swap the modem, for example). But building a market for Wireless broadband, before eircom has managed to poison the well, is an opportunity that shouldn't be missed, IMO.

SkepticOne

Technologies like Ripwave should be popular with those in rented accomodation and situations where getting a telephone line is difficult. There are many in cities who rely totally on mobile phones for communication. For these people, the main reason to get a telephone line would be for internet access. Provided the cost remains low, non-los wireless provides an alternative not just to wired broadband but also dial-up access. And no paying exorbitant Eircom line rental either.

I agree with bminish that it will mainly be in urban areas that Ripwave-like technologies take off.

nahdoic

Originally posted by SkepticOne
Technologies like Ripwave should be popular with those in rented accomodation and situations where getting a telephone line is difficult. There are many in cities who rely totally on mobile phones for communication. For these people, the main reason to get a telephone line would be for internet access. Provided the cost remains low, non-los wireless provides an alternative not just to wired broadband but also dial-up access. And no paying exorbitant Eircom line rental either.

That would have to be a lucrative target market for the likes of IBB. For almost the same price of a standard phoneline you can get broadband internet. That really must scare the bejeebers out of everyone’s favourite monopoly.

Competition is great. I wonder how many people their network can support though. Bminish I know it’s an almost impossible question. And we’ll have to wait for real field-testing like you said. But if you had to put a figure on it, how many users do you think the Ripwave network could potentially support?

Ripwave

Originally posted by SkepticOne
I agree with bminish that it will mainly be in urban areas that Ripwave-like technologies take off.

Nobodies going to make much money deploying wireless broadband to residential users outside of urban areas, so I certainly wouldn't argue that point.

A Ripwave base station costs in the region of €100K, so even in an urban area, it will need substantial takeup to justify the investment. Rural rollouts are likely to rely on older, cheaper technology for the simple reason that the market simply isn't big enough to justify the costs of equipment that will make more sense in urban markets.

That's part of the reason that eircom isn't using it's wireless licenses as much as they should be.

spongebob

Navini gouge the Wisps for the zero install cost by loading the pricing onto the base stations. They 'nominally' charge the same for the CPE, the Ripwave box, which only works with their basestations anyway.

The total equipment cost per customer is the same as the 'older' and often better stuff over a base of 200 customers, it may save money in a suburban area though.

Rural areas tend to have MMDS or deflector aerials, frequently pole mounted , unlike cabled urban areas. This lessens the cost and complexity of the CPE install over the same procedure in an urban area.

M