SBP: "Broadband: The wait goes on"

sceptre

Eurorunner has kindly posted links to the latest telecoms-related articles in the Sunday Business Post here but I thought this one was worth highlighting on its own.

Some choice snippets:

Broadband: the wait goes on
Sunday Business Post
14/03/2004

Eircom customers face a slow roll-out of broadband becaus e the dilapidated phone network fails to support the key service, according to internal documents released to The Sunday Business Post.

Large parts of Cork, Galway and Limerick, and areas of Leinster, cannot support broadband internet services unless carrier devices are removed. Carrier lines boost and split voice lines on telephone poles and at distribution points.

The confidential documents show that 40 per cent of distribution points in the Eircom West region have carriers.The carrier lines account for a huge amount of all reported faults.

[...]
Published figures from the company indicate that around 8 per cent of lines have carriers installed. However, a consultancy project involving senior Eircom managers focused on the number of carriers on distribution points. It was found that the carriers caused "hot spots" which could affect all lines running from distribution points, even if the lines themselves did not have carriers installed.

[...]
The group concluded that the cost of bringing the network to the "first quartile" of best practise was a "prohibitively expensive" €563 million. It rejected the option of spending €256 million to have the networkperforming toan average standard.

A spend of €177 million would keep the phone company's network in the lower third quartile of international performance, the group con-cluded.

The strategy group advocated improving the network performance and capability in urban areas. In rural areas, it was satisfied with increasing functionality only, and in very rural areas, the phone company's strategy was stated as reducing costs, according to the documents.

The group proposed to spend just €48 million over six years on replacing carriers mainly on the urban networks.

[...]

Worth reading the whole article. Any paragraph could be quoted and be damning.

Interesting reading John Doherty's comments though:

... when we were trying to charge €119 a month for the broadband...


Q: What about the consumers facing a 25 per cent rise in line rental charges?

We have introduced a whole range of new products and directions because in the particular market there is quite strong regulation. The context is that calls in the UK are more expensive.

Has Doherty managed to swing a secret job at Eircom or something? "We have introduced..." Am I missing something? Does his wife know?

spongebob

Originally posted by sceptre
The confidential documents show that 40 per cent of distribution points in the Eircom West region have carriers.The carrier lines account for a huge amount of all reported faults.

Jeez, I though only 35% had pairgains installed. As the number of pairgains in the larger towns such as Ennis / Galway / Sligo is quite small that would tend to indicate that EVERYBODY in a rural area in the West is a high risk pairgain victim.......probably 70-80% likely to have one on your line.

M