Will Eircom/BT ever offer more then 3mb?

Rob_T

I was wondering if anybody had any the insight on whether we will ever enjoy speeds approaching our European brethren?

8mb is now the standard in most EU countries while we continue to pay through the nose for 1/2/3mb connections.

Has anybody heard if ADSL+ ADSL2 ADSL+ or whatever the next great technology is are being planned for us here?

I know Magnet and NTL offer faster services but Magnet won't have full services available in my area for at least another 14 months and NTL can FOAD if I have anything to do with it;) .

Cabaal

While it will happen I wouldn;t hold your breath,

Rob_T

Yeah, I've been working on the principle "Not in My Lifetime" but was hoping someone could give me more hope.

RangeR

Eircom, BT and all of the bitstream resellers will allways lag behind the LLU's, Smart, Magnet etc.

Cabaal

Rob_T wrote:

Yeah, I've been working on the principle "Not in My Lifetime" but was hoping someone could give me more hope.

Personally I give it 6-12 months and they'll be offering 4MB +/-, although due to very bad quality phonelines throughout the country the vast majority of people will not be able to get these speeds imho

dublinmark3072

Wich speed is enough to listen to internet radio from a site like <SNIP>?

[MOD EDIT] Please don't try to advertise your site this way

RangeR

dublinmark3072 wrote:

Wich speed is enough to listen to internet radio from a site like <SNIP>?

That should n't be a problem on ANY broadband connection [speedwise]

Rob_T

So is it an matter of a new phonelines having to be laid before we see decent speeds? And are they likely to bother their arses doing it? I thought we used to have one of the most up to date networks in Europe????

jor el

I think it was the late 1980s when Telecom Eireann starting putting fibre up and down the country. But that was the 80s, it can't still be on top 25 years later without anything being done to it. I'm not sure if much was done about the copper lines between exchanges and houses and this is where a lot of the current problems lie. Crappy line coming to your house means poor dial-up speeds and greater chance of failure when checking for broadband. If you can get broadband, the poor line quality often limits the speeds (some people are limited to 1Mbps on their lines even though it should be possible to get 3M).

I can't see anything being done about the poor lines just yet. As with everything else in eircom, they're in complete denial about the quality of the lines.

I thought I read somewhere that eircom were trialing ADSL2+ somewhere in Dublin, maybe this was fud or maybe I read wrong. Anyway, I think they will have to upgrade their current DSLAMs soon enough as the current ADSL1 is at it's limit in terms of speed and reach. As mentioned though, ADSL2+ might not help much given the state of the lines.

Funny how we pay the highest line rental in Europe and yet have among the poorest quality lines.

bushy...

Why did they upgrade exchanges with adsl gear when adsl2 gear has been available for a good while ?

zod

BB went down in my area for a few hours a while back and immediately after it came back the connection speed felt really fast.

I attempted a download and it rocketed down .. so fast that the stats didn't make sense .. I then checked on speedtest.ie and it measured 10Mbs down :eek: ( I have 3Mb/s BT BB ) .. after a half hour the speed returned to normal.

Seems to me like they can ramp up these speeds if they had to.

jor el

bushy... wrote:

Why did they upgrade exchanges with adsl gear when adsl2 gear has been available for a good while ?

Ah yes, why use relatively new technology when you can push ISDN as if it were something special? It's the eircom way, that's why :rolleyes: I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see ADSL2+ till 2008, at the earliest.

Gonzo

jor el wrote:

Ah yes, why use relatively new technology when you can push ISDN as if it were something special? It's the eircom way, that's why :rolleyes: I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see ADSL2+ till 2008, at the earliest.

and thats only 11 months away, ur being optimistic:)

Skatedude

There was an article in the times a few months ago with a statment from eircom that they are planing to upgrade their current 5 meg to about 10 meg within a year, it seemed a bit confusing as they dont normally have 5 meg lines,

bk

Skatedude wrote:

There was an article in the times a few months ago with a statment from eircom that they are planing to upgrade their current 5 meg to about 10 meg within a year, it seemed a bit confusing as they dont normally have 5 meg lines,

You can get up to 5m on Eircoms business products.

qwertplaywert

what is average speeds in uk?

Liam Byrne

they are planing to upgrade their current 5 meg to about 10 meg within a year

I wonder will they match Smart's price - what's it these days....€49.99 for line rental + 8Meg BB as posted elsewhere ?

The other prob is, of course, contention.......while you may never have to share with all 47 neighbours, you will probably regularly be sharing with at least 4 or 5......

Yakuza

bk wrote:

You can get up to 5m on Eircoms business products.

Which was upgraded to 6m just after Christmas.

smergger

5mb "business" connection package been available for quite some time , and at a high premium , think i started when it was 2mb
169 ex vat per month for 5mb dl/ 512k up / no limit up+down quota / think is 8 or 16-1 contention
add vat tho and looking at ~410 euro every 2 months
been quite happy with the actual service , not the value

exiztone

Don't they usually upgrade their services around February/March every year?

Junior

I was going to ask this question myself after posting my other thread about the bothers I had with DNS Issues, there was a couple of upgrades last year in the accounts speed wise, I thought. So I was wondering was there any plans to upgrade the speeds again.

I'm sure they've had more market penetration so maybe a blast of new packages mightn't go astray - or are they just happy to sit on their arses as per usual ?

smergger

happy to sit on arses i think , but in truth , is still so few places i able achieve full 500k a sec dls , (need much better upload) i not sure if on 5 or 6 now even oO

edit- cayman admin tells me i now have 6144 downstream , still 512 up

Sponge Bob

there are plans to offer VDSL iin the 5 main cities but otherwise there are no improvements in the pipeline

Gonzo

I think most of us are gonna have to wait another 12 months before we see the next upgrade as only the top end package got upgraded from 5mb to 6mb just before christmas, if there was an upgrade for the rest of us we wuda gotten it by now along with the top tier package.

Sponge Bob

the top end package upgrade was an effort to protect themselves form the MAN competition in the larger towns.

fluppet

What about this story about eircom upgrading the network?

Liquidus

The link above suggested that it will be introduced in the next three years.

Sponge Bob

fluppet wrote:

What about this story about eircom upgrading the network?

That IS the plan to offer VDSL in the 5 main cities . It will not apply outside the 5 main cities.

Liquidus

So it will be about 10 years before it is available nationally.

probe

Sponge Bob wrote:

there are plans to offer VDSL iin the 5 main cities but otherwise there are no improvements in the pipeline

Is eircom saying that it will use VDSL to offer a miserly 25 Mbits/sec over an FTTC platform – this speed is well within the scope of ADSL2+, especially when they are talking about FTTC, which is what eircom appears to be spinning about to the naïve at comreg.ie etc, in an attempt to justify higher line subscriptions and a whole raft of new year price increases to pay Rex Comb’s AUD 1,000,000,000 year end bonus….

They are getting up to 28 Mbits/sec in France on short loops with ADSL2+. While this speed may not be achievable in many parts of North America (where they use sub-standard gauge copper pairs) or in parts of GB (where they use cheap aluminium cable pairs – 0 Mbits/sec DSL), it doesn’t mean that the rest of the world has to use VDSL to provide HDTV and fast download speeds in an FTTC environment with ADSL2+.

Not that one has anything against VDSL (52 Mbits/sec down and 16 Mbits/sec up) in FTTC deployments. Yes please! In fact, it is sad to see that eircom only proposes to offer 25 Mbits/sec to FTTC subscribers. Two HD TVs would use all this bandwidth up even with an MPEG4 encoded feed.

They have been selling 261 cm HDTVs in a local TV store since before Christmas (Panasonic TH-103PF9) which weigh in at 220kg. While one mightn’t even want to try to fit one of these bandwidth sucking monsters in one’s bedroom, 25 Mbits/sec is not enough for the multi-user, HD multi-TV, multi-media household.

If you look at hard disk capacities. A 20 GB hard disk will hold all the letters and spreadsheets and virtually anything else textual that people generally need to store. But when you move into multi-media the entire bandwidth / storage capacity game changes. An increasing number of home video cameras on sale are HD. Throwing out up to (and sometimes above) 300 Mbits/sec in the raw. www.dailymotion.com (and their late arrival copycat Americans such as youtube.com) are squirting zillions of bits/sec into the net. Broadcast TV (you watch it when they decide to show it to you) is dead. The system needs to be engineered for multi-media on demand, capable of serving multiple clients in each household, at high quality, at the same time. This will take more than 25 Mbits/sec!

.probe

Freddie59

bk wrote:

You can get up to 5m on Eircoms business products.

Or 6 Megs for a mere €39.99 a month with NTL.:D