Eircom's network shambles -front page news

bealtine

Yes finally the media is waking up to the thieves in Eircom and the doublespeak they have been peddling.
Sunday Business Post front page
rock on Kathlenn Barrington and Eamon Quinn we need lots more of this to make/force Eircom to wake up and to be dragged kicking and screaming into the nineties errr 21st century

Eurorunner

In fairness, the Sunday Bizz Post has been wide to the €ircon rip-off for some time now - giving various aspects of it weekly coverage.
Would be great to see the others provide this level of coverage.

spongebob

The article is based on data supplied by a mid-senior level operational manager ....not a paper pusher . It appears that some of these lads were diddles out of bonuses last year as their performance targets required them to maintain a crumbling network with no money. They did not met these targets and did not get a share of Dave and Phils fat wedges because of that. They can never meet the performance targets as there is no money and there will be no money.

It will cost €1 BILLION to bring the access network back up to international standards. Remember we pay more than any other country for our access network, thats where the line rental is supposed to go. The current level of investment in the access network is not maintaining it at its current (sh1t) level. This amounts to €110m a YEAR at present even though €ircon get about €35m a MONTH in line rental alone , including ISDN lines.

8% of all lines are pairgained. 28% are substandard (and cannot sustain Broadband or ISDN) and the figure is rising.

The network is basically rotting. €ircon get almost 18k faults reported in a week or 920,000 a year for 1.7 million lines. The number of faults is growing annually (good news for Biddy , she now has some work to do logging the faults) . 40% of repairs faulted again with 24 hours as the repair was a bodge the last time.

The higher voltages used on pairgained lines (between the pairgain and the exchange) is further damaging the remaining copper because they are putting 120v through copper designed for 50v

Eircom have faults on 16 out of 100 lines per annum ...... at present.

The next worst are Telstra and Telefonica with 10 out of 100. BT have 8.5 out of 100 faulting and the rest of the peers have FEWER faulty lines, €ircon has the worst record by far. As I have often said, we pay the highest line rental in the developed world for the ****tiest lines in the developed world.

Naturally, nobody in €ircon supplied the report to Comreg and Comreg never asked for ANY of this data, not even as part of the USO 'deliberations' ......the useless tossers. The INTERNAL €ircon data says it would cost €1B to fix. They told Comreg it would cost €2.5B to fix during the USO deliverations. They lied outright to Comreg but hey, what the ****, Comreg won't do anything about it because they are muppets.

Now you know why Comreg decided that the Internet is Functional in Ireland at 0k, our lines cannot take any more and never will as long as Comreg are presiding over this fiasco .

Resign you useless bastids.

M

Mr_Man

It's interesting to compare these revalations with Dermot Ahern's assertion on the Agenda program a few weeks back that we have one of the most advance telecommunications infrastructures in the world, and this is why we have to pay such high line rental.

Now either Dermot has his head up his arse, or he was misinforming us.... either way this report confirms what we all knew that the setup here is third world (at best), and getting worse by the day.

M.

eircomtribunal

Originally posted by Mr_Man
It's interesting to compare these revalations with Dermot Ahern's assertion on the Agenda program a few weeks back that we have one of the most advance telecommunications infrastructures in the world, M.

Excerpt from the AGENDA interview (from comwreck):

David McWilliams: But we don't have an excellent telephone system… we do not…
Minister: We were one of the first in Europe to have total digital telecommunications, in this country…
David McWilliams: digital telecommunications is last years technology…
Minister: …this was a number of years ago… and we have invested…
David McWilliams: what I'm saying, is now… we do not have broadband. You and I know that, the viewers know that, we have not invested, private companies have not invested, Eircom has not invested in broadband. Eircom has used it's monopoly in the fixed line business to increase, what's called "sweating the assets", for it's investors. We'll come back to that in a second, and the consumer has lost out. We do not have a state of the art telecoms system…
Minister: We do, we do - except in the area of broadband. No, again, the demand, isn't… is to a certain extent… not there. Because the… while some people might demand broadband, and a number of people who require it, generally speaking the demand in Ireland for broadband is not what it is in other countries. Eircom have enabled nine hundred thousand users, they have enabled the phones, but the demand has not come…
David McWilliams: but… but minister, how...


Dermot is defiant - just try and tickle him with your mouse in that Comwreck article - but sadly seriously mistaken in this instance...
Peter

spongebob

http://www.sbpost.ie/web/DocumentView/did-790162385-pageUrl--2FThe-Newspaper-2FSundays-Paper-2FNews-Features.asp

SkepticOne

The problem here is that Eircom can now go to the regulator for another line rental hike. The regulator will no doubt overlook the 300M paid to financial consultants since privatisation managing the changes of ownership with more to be paid with the upcoming flotation, not to mention the enourmous dividends and multi-million bonuses for their directors.

Interestingly, Eircom said to ComReg that it would cost them 2B euro to remove the splitters on their line so that people can have basic dial-up internet access. The annoying thing is that for far less than 2 billion, the whole country could have full broadband access with multiple voice lines, through the bypassing of Eircom's rusty out-dated network.

spongebob

Originally posted by SkepticOne
Interestingly, Eircom said to ComReg that it would cost them 2B euro to remove the splitters on their line so that people can have basic dial-up internet access. The annoying thing is that for far less than 2 billion, the whole country could have full broadband access with multiple voice lines, through the bypassing of Eircom's rusty out-dated network.

The guys running the network said €1 Billion to Mc Redmond and Mc Redmond told Comreg €2 Billion and Comreg believed him.

€ircon lied to Comreg about the cost of the USO , adding a BILLION to the figure, thats the interesting bit

M

shinzon

the interesting bit here is that comwreck believed them

sigh

shin

crawler

Why is this news to anyone? It has been sticking plaster and bubble gum for a number of years now....and Sticking plaster V2.0 is not going to make things better - it really is a case of standing still ( at best )

The pairgain thing is a joke - it's simply melting the copper or at best killing it's ability to carry data - this is physics , nothing else - any of the good eircom ( there are lots of them!! ) engineers will tell you this.

Even the core transmission is a mixed bag of SDH and even old PDH stuff - and piles of ATM and then a new overlayer of Ethernet on Extreme kit in places.....Some good , some really bad!

A mess - a real mess - If I was a large financial would I Invest? I dont think so.

po0k

Originally posted by Muck
8% of all lines are pairgained. 28% are substandard (and cannot sustain Broadband or ISDN) and the figure is rising.
...
...
The higher voltages used on pairgained lines (between the pairgain and the exchange) is further damaging the remaining copper because they are putting 120v through copper designed for 50v

I'd imagine that the pairgain figure would have been far higher.

I've experienced what I believe to be evidence of the parigain degredatin of copper on my own line at home in Moycullen.
about 4 years ago voice was fine, then ~1-2months before we got a new PC (with modem => net access) we noticed the phone going quieter and it being harder to hear people.
When I first dialed up I was expecting to get a decent 56K connection. I was greeted with a 28.8K. For about a year I tried everything I could to remedy the "problem", thinking it was hardware/driver/settings related. Bought 3 different modems because of it.
Then I heard of pairgains through boards.ie and went out to check our pole.

I was a *little* angry.

Last christmas I went home for the holidays and tried dialing up. Was getting terrible connects (9.6K at times) which were unstable at best and often wouldn't even connect. Also voice quality on the line was terrible, all crackly and noisy, almost as though the line going up to the exchange was loose at one end or something.
Afaik the mother rang up eircom and gave them an earful and apparently it's been "fixed".

The current situatoin is a disgrace, is - and has been for a long time - public knowledge, this report only serving to confirm what we've all rightly suspected for years.
I'm curious as to why this hasn't been raised at a national level, in the government or on the news and I can only speculate that there is an awful lot of skeltons in Fianna Fáil members closets.
I fully expect there to be another long drawn out enquiry and tribunal ciruculating this scandal when it finally breaks, which will be the focus of weekly updates and highlights presented by Ann Doyle in the coming year.

This sort of "fuck your neighbour over to increase your own lot" attitude is typical Irish and I am ashamed to say I'm not surprised to see it again.

Shameful