Broadband Tender to be announced next week (or maybe week after)

damien

Expect lots of electioneering hoopla as Dempsey annonuces the tender for "broadband for all".

From the Tribune:

THE Department of Communications and the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) will start discussions this week to finalise the scheme for national broadband coverage to provide a service for the remaining 10% of the population which lacks broadband access.

The department is expecting to issue a call for tenders in early May, according to a spokesman.

A source close to the process said that it is "a long way along the path" and no final decision on the design of the scheme has been made yet. He did confirm that the procurement competition will be vendor and technology neutral . . . meaning it will not favour DSL, wireless or satellite . . . and the evaluation criteria will not be limited by cost.

Eircom has indicated its intention to bid for the contract. Industry sources say Eircom will propose to enable those lines which are net yet connected to broadband exchanges, but which are too costly to upgrade in the absence of government funding. In areas where the copper network is too badly degraded, it is expected that Eircom will offer wireless broadband or, where wireless would be too expensive, much slower satellite broadband.

Other possible contenders for the contract include UPC (owners of NTL/Chorus), BT, Digiweb, Irish Broadband, and mobile operators 3, Vodafone and O2.

Industry sources say 3 has already been in talks with the department over the tender. UPC has confirmed its interest, too. The fact that the scheme will apply mainly to rural areas means that cable and wireless offerings may not be sufficient to fulfill its terms, however.

A spokesman for lobby group Ireland Offline said the government should try to emulate the national broadband tender process that took place in Northern Ireland in 2005.

In addition to being technology neutral, the scheme stipulated minimum speeds and maximum charges and preferred DSL to "inferior" products, such as satellite.

Er, I never said preferred DSL. BT went for DSL.

lucernarian

Before Dempsey gets notions of grandeur, is he going to stipulate important items like a deadline for 100% broadband availability? There's no real point including satellite in the scheme except in extreme cases. Sure people can already get satellite if they want it.

Instead of leading people down the garden path with an overblown satellite dish, as can be seen on many primary schools already, they should consider the DSL repeater option more carefully. Even if standards-compliant, line powered units are expensive, it will pay for itself when compared to a satellite broadband install. If BT could use them, eircom can too.

It could also have some sort of regionalised theme, e.g. people like Digiweb might be better suited to provide it than the likes of Last Mile etc.

I'm not sure if it would be better to have 3 companies involved, one for DSL provision, one for wireless provision and one for satellite provision, or have a company in control of all means of supplying it, over a limited area. Thoughts?

thebman

I think the most important thing is to ensure we don't just create a monopoly over the last mile where speeds are slow while prices and contention ratio are high. Also they should have to provide service to people within a reasonable amount of time.

In my area Last Mile are the only wireless operator available. We signed up to the service in January and they still have not even contacted us. We contacted them and we keep getting brushed off. At this point, we don't even really want the service as our exchange is on eircoms list to be enabled and we'd rather wait and get reliable broadband over the phone instead of getting a service from a company that over charges for a poor service and can't even give it to us within a 3 month time frame.

Last Miles service is pathetic and they only get away with it because there is no competition so speeds are 512KB/s with 40:1 contention ratio for 40 Euro a month.

If its going to be a single company then to retain the rights to the lines/service they should have to commit to improving the service over time with specific targets to be met with regard to speed, download limits etc...

You should also be able to use VOIP and gaming with it.

Not that it'll make much difference. eircom will just get this. Already I heard Noel saying in a radio interview that if re-elected they'll get eircom to enable the rest of the exchanges. Some tender process.

Also as Fianna Fail are saying they will deliver on any reasonable request for broadband then I am skeptical that this won't disappear down the list of priorities for the party if they are re-elected. There needs to be a deadline for when this will be in place.


edit

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Got a call from lastmile today, they are calling out tomorrow to install the service. So its about 3 months I'd say since we sent in the subscriber agreement as it was near the end of Jan.

watty

Important to realise that ON ITS OWN, 100% of exchanges may be only 65% to 75% Broadband availability at 1MBit and perhaps only 55% or less at 3Mbps. This is due to
* Use of ADSL instead of ADSL2+
* Average distance of population from exchange
* Pair gains
* Poor wire

But we don't know for sure, because eircom won't release these kind of vital statistics.

Since with the rise of eircom line rental and no rise in quality, the number of households actually with a line has fallen to under 69% from pre-privatisation high of 82%, then obviously the actual percentage of domestic households that can get Broadband, without a line install, from 100% exchange enablement is nothing like Universal Broadband.

Obviously QUALITY wireless solutions are needed as well as 100% exchange enabled. Any tender should only give a small proportion to eircom given their extremely high line rental and inability to cover more than probably 60% of households, taking into account those who do not have a line.

I'll be surprised if eircom don't get the lion's share as that is what has been suggested really since the Dept strangled the GBS scheme. Some of which the Dept. still has not paid for. No wonder it had a poor take up. It should never have been in phases, but a continuous apply when you have a plan basis.

lucernarian

IIRC, in a SEC filing over a year ago, eircom said that 88% of lines connected to existing broadband exchanges would be able to handle either 256 kbps or 1 Mbit. Now, the line distance increases occurred since then, so that figure has increased a bit. I *think* that 7% of lines are served by pairgains. With the fact that roughly 94% of lines can handle dialup >/= to 28.8 kbps, and that the remaining exchanges have longer lines on average, I'd say that the new overall pass rate will reach ~89%, including the dodgy lines between 66dB and 80dB attenuation.

Science aside, the most important strategy to be published for consumers waiting for broadband since eircom was privatised, has no consumer input. Now I know that the civil service likes working without distractions from the public, but I think that the customer should have a say in what should be done. We're paying our taxes into this thing. I won't stand by to watch satellite being forced down people's throats. Not a penny is to touch those solutions, considering you can get satellite already. Subsidised ****e is not going to help rural Ireland. If anyone from the DCMNR reads all this, let them cop on to themselves and realise that they aren't the ones who pay their wages. We, the taxpayer, do. We should have some say.