Canadian MAN system almost finished.

spongebob

While we await the lighting of our Fibre Rings I thought I would point yiz to an article on the original model for the Fibre Rings project the Alberta Supernet.

The tranche of announcements from Dermot Ahern before Christmas indicate we will have 100 fibre rings by 2007 or so.

Alberta has almost 422 already and that is in an area the size of Spain and Portugal together but only with THREE QUARTERS the population of the Republic of Ireland and it will be finished in July 2004 for €130 Million or so. We have spent about half that for 20 towns....and none of it is switched on yet

A snippet from the article

Monthly rates will be the minimum needed to provide enough revenue for continued investment and upgrading—CA $50 per guaranteed Mb/s.

Thats about €30 per megabit per month .......... anywhere.

C'mon Dermot finger out.

M

SkepticOne

Originally posted by Muck
The tranche of announcements from Dermot Ahern before Christmas indicate we will have 100 fibre rings by 2007 or so.

19, I thought.

spongebob

20 not 19 (why does everyone forget Kiltimagh ) by end 2004 .

+ the announcement from Dermot Ahern in December

= 100 or so......by 2007

M

SkepticOne

Originally posted by Muck
+ the announcement from Dermot Ahern in December

= 100 or so......by 2007

I thought these were getting the "Community Broadband Exchanges", not fibre rings.

oscarBravo

Originally posted by Muck
20 not 19 (why does everyone forget Kiltimagh )

Because Kiltimagh is a suburb of Ballina.

thegills

Muck,
I had a read of this article. It appears that Bell Canada built a fibre ring connecting 27 towns paid for by themselves and the then the Govt. spent €145M connecting the fibre ring to 395 towns using ATM over SDH radio. The radio has limitations so you could have a town of 1000 people with an STM-1 connection (155Mb/s). Will this really offer broadband to this town, is it future proofed. There's also no mention of what Bell Canada paid to build the fibre network.

What the DCMNR are doing / planning is on a higher scale than this. They have built 20 fibre MAN's, are planning 100+ or more so that nearly every town with say 1500+ people has fibre connectivity.

The final pieces of the jigsaw are 1) Fibre connectivity between these 120+ fibre rings 2) wireless broadband to those towns without fibre and 3) A company to manage the whole lot.

I would be fairly confident that all 3 will be addressed;
1) ESBT, Aurora, are already looking to do this. EsatBT and eircom already have done this and you can be sure that their prices will drop at some point in the future.
2) Early days but funding is being set aside for this
3) Axia.

In say 5 years Ireland will have a network that will put AlbertaNet to shame.

Thegills

iwb

Gills,
I certainly hope you are right but that is a tall order.
Your assessment of the Alberta SuperNet isn't quite correct. Remote areas where it either isn't feasible or cost effective will get wireless links. The rest is all done directly with fibre. That is fibre all the way to over 3,000 Government locations and perhaps as many as 4,000. The maximum current bandwidth available to each lcoation is 100Mbps but the whole network is scaleable with very little extra cost to at least ten times the current capacity. (this was part of the understanding) That includes fibre and wireless links. While right now, some of the remote towns will get a 155Mb link, the committed bandwidth is less than the total. SuperNet promises no contention ratios, very high QoS and CoS and five nines uptime. The radios used can be aggregate for a total of 7x155Mbps and you have to understand that most of these towns are very small. The definition of a town for SuperNet was anywhere there was a school, hospital, library or other gov't building. Some of these have a population of less than 100!
ISP's who buy SuperNet bandwidth in the towns will of course decide how they want to contend it but that is a commercial decision and if a customer wanted dedicated bandwidth, the limitation would be with the local access provider, not with SuperNet.
As for the base network, what does it matter what it costs Bell to build it? The beauty of it is that it provides Bell with guaranteed usage of a network it hoped to build in Alberta anyway and provides competition where it didn't effectively exist before.

spongebob

Originally posted by iwb
Gills,
Remote areas where it either isn't feasible or cost effective will get wireless links. The rest is all done directly with fibre.

I noted that one remote community mentioned got a 120Km long wireless SDH link form the nearest fibre enabled town. As it happens I dont think that anywhere in Ireland is 120Km from a fibre ring in the current round of 20 under way......except maybe the very extremities of Kerry/Cork

Nowhere in Ireland is more than 80km from the ESB network if you take the towers with 155Mbit SDH into account along with the fibre.

Dermot is still holding back on a pricing announcement for backhaul at the towers having announced a price for the fibre late last year BUT the local elections are drawing close and FF released a LOT of press statements today including a timely announcement about wireless technology ....... Here while Dermot Ahern found time for a statement on leading edge technologies Here .

That finger minister apply !

M