BB Demand in the EU starting to Peak Off

Sponge Bob

at 60% of ALL households, even higher than that where the prices are most reasonable. Story on BBC

Compare this to Ireland where

1. Only 60% of ALL households Could get BB

and

2. Where the entry level always on package from the incumbent line monopoly costs €40 a month on top of €24 a month line rental .

Gurgle

Sponge Bob wrote:

1. Only 60% of ALL households Could get BB

Distributed population.
Easier & cheaper to supply to a city of 12 million people than a city of 1 million + 3.5 million more all over the place.

Sponge Bob wrote:

2. Where the entry level always on package from the incumbent line monopoly costs €40 a month on top of €24 a month line rental .

ESAT: Line rental + BB at €40 pm
Smart: Line rental + BB at €35 pm

Still not great but getting better.
A business only exists to make profit.
With a larger customer base, its economic to run at lower profit margins.

Cable operators need to get off their asses and get some serious competition going.

Sponge Bob

Gurgle wrote:

Distributed population.
Easier & cheaper to supply to a city of 12 million people than a city of 1 million + 3.5 million more all over the place.

This argument is codswallop nowadays , its Easier and Cheaper for Eircom to keep the population on high margin per minute Dialup is why.

The cost of enabling an exchange nowadays is pretty low with only 350 exchanges in Ireland being uneconomic (out of 1200) . NTL, on much lower revenues than Eircom , will be able to offer all their cable customers BB by the end of 2006 . Their revenues will pay for it and they do not charge for the connection only the service ....unlike Eirocm who charge €24 a month for the line.

Nevertheless, at this point, only some 300 exchanges from the 850 exconomic ones have been done. Another 150 will be done by the end of next summer.

Thats leaves 400 exchanges that are economic but will have no DSL service anyway and 350 which are not economic and will also (unsurprisingly) have no DSL service .

Funnily enough I have heard of people served from small rural exchanges in Finland who do have DSL , and thats above the ARTIC CIRCLE !

Solair

DSL will never be a complete sollution in Ireland due to our rather unique population distribution.

60% of the population lives in rural areas and, unlike most of the rest of the planet, a large proportion of those people live in homes that aren't in towns or villages but are scattered randomly throughout the countryside.

Also, many of our so-called urban residents ... i.e. those who claim to live in Dublin, Cork etc.. actually live in rural areas in one off developments and are being driven to these locations by insane house prices.

In Finland, or in many other European countries the majority of people in rural areas live in villages / small towns.. ribbon development doesn't really happen on any sort of scale similar to Ireland. (nor does it in Northern Ireland and Scotland)

What needs to be focused on is providing high quality DSL coverage in ALL cities, towns and villages. Absolutely every exchange should be enabled, even if the uneconomic ones need a bit of state assistance. However, there is going to be a large percentage of people in this country who will have to use wireless technologies to access broadband, this is just a fact of life given the population distribution. The Government needs to look at ways of making sure that all areas of the country have access to wireless services.

DSL equipment's becoming cheaper and easier to roll out, so there's really no reason why all exchanges can't be enabled in a more timely way.

Lack of DSL in genuinely urban areas however is a totally unacceptable situation. Eircom have to be seriously penalised for non-availaiblity of DSL in any urban environment. There should simply be a requirement that DSL is available with in X KM of any given exchange (defining an exchange as any switching system ... be that a main exchange or an RCU [remote concentrator unit]) Failure to provide it should cause an automatic penalty to kick in after X months.

I would argue that the state should look into making it easier for Wireless providers to piggy back their equipment onto existing towers (e.g. mobile phone, ESB, eircom microwave masts, RTE transmission sites, MMDS masts etc). This should apply particularly in areas that arn't served well by DSL / Cable access.

The same kind of radical approach as was taken during the days of Rural Electrification or Telecom Eireann's digitalisation projects of the 1980s has to be taken to this issue. Otherwise we'll end up with urban areas with a large choice of DSL, Cable and Wireless providers while rural areas will either have no access at all or uncompeditive access via a single wireless provider.

excaliburhc

seemingly in the states the electricity companys were in the process of testing broadband through the powerlines , differing frequencies and all that with a special plug that seperated the live current from the broadband one , but i have no idea what happened to it , seemed a viable option ( but then that would rely on the esb to get off their arse and do something ,)

Gurgle

€ircom are proceeding very slowly with the upgrades because they have nothing to worry about - the wireless, satellite and cable operators are going even slower.

They're all following the slow investment, low risk, maximum margin business model thats so popular in Ireland.

The cable companies could have rolled out BB before €ircom's first DSL enabled exchange, but they didn't. They waited to see if €ircom could sell broadband before they even started on it. Instead of investing in a bit of market research, they just took the wait and see option.

€ircom didn't even start to make DSL available until they were ordered to by the minister.

Gurgle

excaliburhc wrote:

seemingly in the states the electricity companys were in the process of testing broadband through the powerlines , differing frequencies and all that with a special plug that seperated the live current from the broadband one , but i have no idea what happened to it , seemed a viable option ( but then that would rely on the esb to get off their arse and do something ,)

Actually, the ESB were doing similar studies here about 2-3 years ago.
AFAIR, it was perfectly viable but it was scrapped due to the risks (read: court cases) involved in people trying to do 'self-installs'.

(Picture some twit with a modem plug on one end of a cable and a 3-pin plug on the other)

Sponge Bob

Solair wrote:

DSL will never be a complete sollution in Ireland due to our rather unique population distribution.

I agree wholeheartedly .

60% of the population lives in rural areas

The definition of urban for Ireland in the CSO is 1500 persons in a town. 60% of the population live in Urban areas not in the country.

40% live in or near a town with a population of less than 1500.

and, unlike most of the rest of the planet, a large proportion of those people live in homes that aren't in towns or villages but are scattered randomly throughout the countryside.

Usually not at the arse end of the parish in fairness Solair. Were these scattered in the UK they would nearly all be within 10km of their local telephone exchange anyway ....meaning they could get DSL . You are making too big a deal of the scattering effect given how the technology works.

Like I say, 350 exchanges out of some 1200 are too small to justify the installation of DSL . We also know that some extremely small exchanges are perfectly viable , Dunkineely in Donegal has 1600 persons living within c. 7Km of the exchange and is on the current Eircom DSL exchange rollout , from Eircoms own resources not from any grant aid .

I am sick of listening to this blather about unique Irish population dispersal when the Eircom Exchanges have Alcatel 7300 systems with READSL Line cards installed already.

bealtine

Sponge Bob wrote:

I am sick of listening to this blather about unique Irish population dispersal when the Eircom Exchanges have Alcatel 7300 systems with READSL Line cards installed already.

I just read a report where Greenland (yes the cold place) is now rolling out ADSL2 to the entire population, this is so people will not have to use satellite connections.

All remote setlements will now have ADSL2 connections....

I wonder do they dig up the ice flows to put in the cables?

bk

Gurgle wrote:

€ircom are proceeding very slowly with the upgrades because they have nothing to worry about - the wireless, satellite and cable operators are going even slower.

Not true, the cable and wireless companies seem to be actually rolling out faster then Eircom, they just started off much later then Eircom.

Gurgle wrote:

They're all following the slow investment, low risk, maximum margin business model thats so popular in Ireland.

The cable companies could have rolled out BB before €ircom's first DSL enabled exchange, but they didn't. They waited to see if €ircom could sell broadband before they even started on it. Instead of investing in a bit of market research, they just took the wait and see option.

That isn't what happened, NTL started rolling out cable BB 5 years ago, roughly around the same time as in the UK, however NTL:UK went bankrupt and they couldn't afford the very expensive rollout so they stopped it to save money. It had nothing to do with Eircom.

Gurgle wrote:

€ircom didn't even start to make DSL available until they were ordered to by the minister.

Nope, DSL was available in very limited areas, but it cost far too much (over €100 per month). At the time, IOFFL was talking with the Minister for Communications to get him to order Comreg to force Eircom to introduce FRIACO products (flat rate internet access on dial-up and ISDN). IOFFL was succesful, one of their biggest achievements and Eircom was forced to introduced FRIACO. Now Eircom knew that FRIACO would cut into their very valuable dial-up goldmine and that they would prefer to have people on DSL then FRIACO, so they dropped the price of DSL to €55 and started a much faster rollout and ad campaigns. Of course the people in IOFFL always knew this would happen and is why they pushed so hard for FRIACO to be introduced.

Gurgle wrote:

Actually, the ESB were doing similar studies here about 2-3 years ago.
AFAIR, it was perfectly viable but it was scrapped due to the risks (read: court cases) involved in people trying to do 'self-installs'.

(Picture some twit with a modem plug on one end of a cable and a 3-pin plug on the other)

Most people agree that this technology isn't feasible:

1) It creates an incredible amount of RF interference that effects all sorts of radio and transmission equipment.

2) It need a great deal of very dangerous and expensive line work to set it up. In fact some studies have shown that it would actually be cheaper to just run fibre to each persons home.

Solair

The scattering is a HUGE deal. It means that a lot of services in Ireland are uneconomic and explains much of our infrastructural mess.

Aprox 60% of the population live outside true urban areas. (40% are officially in "rural ireland") The level of urbanisation in this country is extremely low by Western, never mind European standards.

The newly populating quasi-urban areas, particularly West Dublin are a total planning disaster. They've no proper infrastructure.... massive tailbacks due to inadequate road networks, a train service that isn't anywhere near catching up with the size of the population, pollution being caused by inadequate waste water treatment facilities in sprawling housing developments, inadequate water supplies, no cable tv, no DSL...

Dublin is something like 3 to 5 times less densily populated than an equivilant European city and rather than becoming more densely populated it's just sprawling ultra low population settlements along roads in a 50km radius around the city.

The whole thing is unsustainable and totally nuts.

DSL availaiblity is a symptom of a much deeper problem in Ireland that isn't going to go away unless planning is improved drastically.

bk

Solair, while I agree with most of what you say, I just want to point out that the problems with rural Ireland really aren't that unique and these problems are being faced by telecos around the world.

Because of this, the telecoms supply companies are developing DSL solutions to try and solve the problems, for instance Alcatel (Eircoms DSLAM) supplier, has a mini version of Eircoms DSLAM that can be fitted in road side cabinets:
http://www.alcatel.com/products/productsummary.jhtml;jsessionid=WVOPYE2WUWJPQCTFR0HHJHAKMWHI0TNS?relativePath=/com/en/appxml/opgproduct/alcatel7300advancedservicesaccessmanagercompactunittcm228116391635.jhtml

In Australia they are working on mini DSLAMs that can be hung on telephone polls and they use multiple bonded telehphone lines for back-haul at distances of up to 20km.

If the will was there at Eircom, they could do it. Also from the cost perspective the price of DSLAM gear has fallen drastically in the last 12 months and is running at about $50 per customer at the moment.

However wireless maybe a better solution for Ireland.

Interestingly I came across this very interesting article on DSL coverage around the world including Ireland, it is an eye opener as to how many people in Ireland will actually be able to get 5mb/s bb (less then 10%!!!):
http://www.adslguide.org.uk/newsarchive.asp?item=2260

Ireland: 1mb = 65% 2mb = 51% 4mb = 10% 8mb = 0%

Sponge Bob

Solair wrote:

The scattering is a HUGE deal. It means that a lot of services in Ireland are uneconomic and explains much of our infrastructural mess.

But most people still live close enough to the exchange to get a 512k connection so its irrelevant Solair.

If we were putting every bungalow on a sewer it would impact as you describe but most of the copper was installed ..or should have been.... in the 1980s .

Urban Weigl

Solair wrote:

The scattering is a HUGE deal. It means that a lot of services in Ireland are uneconomic and explains much of our infrastructural mess.

It may be a huge deal if you wanted to roll out gigabit fibre to 100% of the population: the cost per capita would be higher than, say, doing the same in Holland.

But for RADSL/ADSL2, it is not going to be a huge deal at all, especially considering virtually everyone already has a telephone line and ESB. First of all, the very vast majority of people are no more than 10km away. The remainder could be served by using RADSL range extenders or "exchanges on a pole". The impact? We're not going to have ultra high speed broadband for everyone: some people are going to be stuck at 512k for a while.

Now if you had stated that rolling out fibre to the home to everyone would be more expensive in Ireland than many other countries, you'd probably have a valid point. As it stands, you don't.

Sponge Bob

Urban Weigl wrote:

Now if you had stated that rolling out fibre to the home to everyone would be more expensive in Ireland than many other countries, you'd probably have a valid point. As it stands, you don't.

Any maintenance cost differential is paid for out of the the highest line rental on the planet ....and then some !

Gurgle

Sponge Bob wrote:

Any maintenance cost differential is paid for out of the the highest line rental on the planet ....and then some !

... copper which we should own free & clear seeing as it was installed with tax money.

1huge1

Gurgle wrote:

Distributed population.
Easier & cheaper to supply to a city of 12 million people than a city of 1 million + 3.5 million more all over the place.
.

not on topic but i wonder count cork and limerick as all over the place theres other places than dublin
but i see your point but they still could do a lot better with the situation

Solair

Cork's actually better planned and more densily populated than Dublin (as a matter of interest) and has about 300,000 people

Sarsfield

Gurgle wrote:

... copper which we should own free & clear seeing as it was installed with tax money.

Except that we sold it for billions. Remember? That argument is worthless.

Capt'n Midnight

Gurgle wrote:

... copper which we should own free & clear seeing as it was installed with tax money.

not only did we pay for it, but company has been asset stripped twice for what it's worth and now we will probably have to pay again to subsidise it.

It would nearly be cheaper to roll another network again in parallel - we've €34 billion to spend on roads, so people can get to work and shopping mostly, telecommuting would have the same effect.

1huge1

Solair wrote:

Cork's actually better planned and more densily populated than Dublin (as a matter of interest) and has about 300,000 people

ta exactly as is limerick, dublin had so many people going to it though
in the greater limerick city area there about 150,000 including all suburbs
getting back on point once again i think the bb companies should do more research into were they distribute broadband first
like come on my cousin in galway lives in the middle of no were yet im in a big town of over 3000 people with much more in the surrounding area and all i can get is satellite

Gurgle

Sarsfield wrote:

Gurgle wrote:

... copper which we should own free & clear seeing as it was installed with tax money.

Except that we sold it for billions. Remember? That argument is worthless.

Em, what arguement ?

cgarvey

The argument whether or not we should own the copper.. you say we "should".. Sarsfield points out that we paid for it, but then cashed in on it, so we don't have a right to it now.

eircomtribunal

cgarvey wrote:

The argument whether or not we should own the copper.. you say we "should".. Sarsfield points out that we paid for it, but then cashed in on it, so we don't have a right to it now.

Copper ownership was sold. But that is not the deciding factor for our misery (other countries' broadband development thrives irrespective of copper ownership; Germany owns the copper and is a laggard); to have intelligent regulation (and in fairness to them: an empowered regulator) acting adequately for the situation a country is in, makes or breaks (in Ireland's case) success.

In our case ComReg (and former ODTR) has little power, is not acting intelligently and, worst of all, has decided to misinform systematically on its failure, thus hindering/disabling quick corrective action.

With other countries now coming to a plateau with broadband take-up, we will continually catch up. I can already see a steady feast of ComReg Quarterly Reports: Broadband growth:
South Korea: 1.2 %
Denmark: 2.2 %
Netherlands: 2.3 %
Ireland: 44 %

P.