Eircom's promise to enable 100 exchanges in 2007

db

Last year Eircom issued a press release stating that they would be enabling 100 exchanges for broadband in 2007. See this thread for details http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055005172
Does anyone know if any of these exchanges have been broadband enabled yet or if there is a schedule for the work to be completed ?

zugvogel

Hello DB,
As far as I am aware none of these 100 exchanges have been upgraded yet. If some have been done it would be great if people could let us know. My local exchange is on the infamous 100 list (Nurney, Kildare) and I have contacted Eircom press office a few times about a time schedule for this work. Anyway I have received no definite information despite being told a couple of times by the press office that if I could leave it with them for a while they’d get back to me, and guess what they never did!!

I also rang Eircom broadband directly and they said December 07 which is a bit of a joke given that the announcement was made in Oct 06 I think!

Zugvogel

Higgsy

Eircom for me is a shambles of an organization.

If Eircom are not going to enable my local exchange, why cant they just say so and let me get on with paying big money for crap Satellite service instead.

Companies of this size must have a plan for the way forward even if it is only 3 months in advance so they are just refusing to provide information.

Eircom are typical of any state run or former state run organisation, they dont answer to their customers.

Sponge Bob

None have been completed as yet ( 7 months later) but the primary objective was to piss off wireless operators and derail their expansion plans by creating some FUD and not to actually supply people in rural areas with Broadband at all. This seemed to have an effect and they announced another 330 ( none of which will be done in 2007) to really piss the wireless operators off.

They also announced VDSL+ in the big cities to piss UPC off ...although UPCs glorious incompetence has made them uncompetitive anyway meaning that eircom are now in no hurry at all to roll out VDSL+ to their customers in the 5 big cities . Country people were never going to get VDSL+

We never got no upgrade this year either so eircom are not feeling too much pressure these days.

The only exchanges enabled this year...a dozen maybe 20 .. are on foot of a small scale unannounced plan from late 2005 or early 2006, maybe 50 exchanges nationwide .

If a wireless operator ANNOUNCED a big plan in your area by end August then that exchanges would be immediately prioritised for an upgrade .

BarryM

Apropos, pity that Irleand Offline has gone belly-up.... I had an exchange with Damien a while back when he 'praised' eircon for their announcement of their LLU improvements..... He said why not join the Ireland Offline committee, I offered, but.....

BTW your Dempsey link doesn't work with advanced browsers like Opera.....typical.

Bye, Barry

Sponge Bob

here is Noels Fabulous Universal Broadband Configurator for Ireland in a tinyurl

http://tinyurl.com/398w8m

double click on your location
zoom in
double click again to centre
zoom in again

and hey presto you are now (late) in the 20th century

Higgsy

Eircom answer to no one, and that is the problem.

You could lobby your local TD but what good will that do? Probably none.

Its a joke.

Has anyone had any success by chasing Eircom?

If I could just understand the rational that Eircom are using, I might not be so p*ssed off with them.

Sponge Bob

They are protecting their monopoly on copper lines . We have the most useless regulator on the planet helping them along daily .

You get success by threatening eirocm rather than chasing them. If you sign a load of neighbours up for wireless BB and they hear you are proposing to take their customers then they act.

Their investment plan is there to primarily to protect existing revenue and NOT in order to provide essential services to Irish people in a modern economy . They do not see their function as keeping Ireland abreast with modern comms technology .

All monopolies tend to behave like this and only back down when faced with tough but fair regulation or competition law enforcers . Our regulators are tossers so eircom can do what they want .

zugvogel

Sponge Bob I would tend to agree with you. I take it that there is no advertising law to stop Eircom from making these types of statements e.g. dangling carrots/promises in front of peoples eyes but placing them just out of reach. What ever about home users it must be a nightmare for small businesses who are making decisions based on this type of propaganda from Eircom.

But looking on the positive side, in rural Kildare at least slowly but surely alternatives (wireless, mobile) to Eircom are appearing. Personally if I could get a reliable wireless broadband/phone service from the likes of Digiweb I’d drop Eircom like a shot.

Zug

zugvogel

Sponge Bob I would tend to agree with you. I take it that there is no advertising law to stop Eircom from making these types of statements e.g. dangling carrots/promises in front of peoples eyes but placing them just out of reach. What ever about home users it must be a nightmare for small businesses who are making decisions based on this type of propaganda from Eircom.

But looking on the positive side, in rural Kildare at least slowly but surely alternatives (wireless, mobile) to Eircom are appearing. Personally if I could get a reliable wireless broadband/phone service from the likes of Digiweb I’d drop Eircom like a shot.

Zug

smellslikeshoes

Adding to what sb has already said about their primary objective of these announcements being to piss of wireless operators the obvious secondary objective is to string customers along thinking they gonna have their exchanges enabled soon and have them stick on dialup till it is, rather than sign a long contract with a wireless provider

Higgsy

So if you where going to make a complaint, then who should you complain to, Comreg? Eircom?

Is it worth the effort at all?

govinda

db wrote:

Does anyone know if any of these exchanges have been broadband enabled yet or if there is a schedule for the work to be completed ?

I know the Summerhill, Meath one has definitely not been done as I am off that one. Phoning Eircom was a complete waste of time, I was told October 2006, November 2006, End January 2007 etc.

Yesterday, I had my ISDN line removed as I am now using 3's HSDPA modem and refuse to pay Eircom a cent more than I absolutely have to. The engineer said "Summerhill is on the list, but no date"; apparently he was very interested in why we were having ISDN taken out but no-one in the house at the time could explain what alternative access we now have.

Sponge Bob

Govinda

there are 430 exchanges on 2 lists, no dates for any of them. Thats about 10% OF THE POPULATION being strung along ...pun intended.

Another 10% + of the population can go **** themselves unless the government coughs some money up . This so called national broadband plan is actually in doubt at this stage for reasons I cannot divulge at this moment .

BarryM

Sponge Bob wrote:

here is Noels Fabulous Universal Broadband Configurator for Ireland in a tinyurl

http://tinyurl.com/398w8m

double click on your location
zoom in
double click again to centre
zoom in again

and hey presto you are now (late) in the 20th century

Tnks, I meant the actual process didn't work in Opera, not the url, it worked when I dragged myself back a half century or so and used IE....:mad:

kmurph

Rosslare Harbour was finally enabled last week for anyone interested.

watty

BarryM wrote:

Tnks, I meant the actual process didn't work in Opera, not the url, it worked when I dragged myself back a half century or so and used IE....:mad:

Works in Firefox.

In 1957 there was only Mainframes, 75baud telex and Fortran. Also I remember Microsoft launching in late 1970s and they had one product, a port to 8080 CPU of BASIC ripped off from Dartmouth College. It was a Beginners version of ForTran. I had Apple, Research Machine, Spectrum, SC/MP and Z80 development boards and z80+CP/M card in Apple and even an Sirius 8086 PC all before MSDOS hit Ireland in maybe 1981. I'm sure I never saw IE till about 1994. I used Mozilla on 32bit TCP/IP on Windows 3.11 before I saw IE.

smellslikeshoes

kmurph wrote:

Rosslare Harbour was finally enabled last week for anyone interested.

Think you must have gotten the news for that a bit late. I know for a fact that rosslare harbour has been enabled for over 6 months now. It was on the list previous to the one with 100 exchanges, and was upgraded long before the 100 exchanges were announced.

BarryM

watty wrote:

Works in Firefox.

In 1957 there was only Mainframes, 75baud telex and Fortran. Also I remember Microsoft launching in late 1970s and they had one product, a port to 8080 CPU of BASIC ripped off from Dartmouth College. It was a Beginners version of ForTran. I had Apple, Research Machine, Spectrum, SC/MP and Z80 development boards and z80+CP/M card in Apple and even an Sirius 8086 PC all before MSDOS hit Ireland in maybe 1981. I'm sure I never saw IE till about 1994. I used Mozilla on 32bit TCP/IP on Windows 3.11 before I saw IE.

OK,ok, so maybe 10 years.....

I sometimes wonder why things work in one browser or two and not in another... There is a 'standard' html/xml/xxx code for web pages....which is NOT the one used by M$ frontpage.... I therefore wonder, in this case, what code Firefox recognises? Opera recognises only legit (i.e. not proprietary) code and offers a path to write to the page owner to say it isn't working properly.

I had occasion to tell the Revenue their pages weren't working, they wrote back and said their site only supported IE, I blew a fuse.... they changed the code.....;)

Bye, Barry

Grommet

ehh..back to the main theme of this thread for a second...

the eircom financial year runs to April (and is now changing to June to align with Australia) - I understand that eircom made the announcement in late 2006 in the middle of their financial year, without having properly allocated the capital finance for the roll out. So they only got the funding approved a few months ago and then started the work on these exchanges. So while the announcement was premature, I believe that the intent to extend their DSL footprint was genuine.

I happen to know that the programme is now well under way and they are planning to launch about 15 of the 100 exchanges every month from July 07 onward.

I also understand that eircom's plans are that the other 300 or so that were announced will follow in 2008, ramping up to about 25 sites per month and finishing up by early to mid 2009.

Shyboy

Hi,

Sorry if this has been answered before, but how often do the Online DSL Checkers (the thing you enter your phone number in) update their information? Are they updated as soon as a new exchange has been enabled?

Cheers
Jason

lucernarian

Once a month roughly.

Sponge Bob

Grommet wrote:

ehh..back to the main theme of this thread for a second...

the eircom financial year runs to April (and is now changing to June to align with Australia) - I understand that eircom made the announcement in late 2006 in the middle of their financial year, without having properly allocated the capital finance for the roll out. So they only got the funding approved a few months ago and then started the work on these exchanges. So while the announcement was premature, I believe that the intent to extend their DSL footprint was genuine.

So do I ...but in the absence of any money to do anything concrete between last November and Now (June) the primary effect was to nobble wireless operators as I said .

I happen to know that the programme is now well under way and they are planning to launch about 15 of the 100 exchanges every month from July 07 onward.

I shall take it that if only 7 exchanges are actually launched in July then it will take 100/7 months to complete the rollout of these 100 exchanges . Previously eircom bb sales always knew which exchanges were to be completed in the current and following quarters ...but not beyond that .

If 45 exchanges are to be completed in the July - Sept quarter then there appears to be a major communications hiatus with sales within eircom . Furthermore nobody seems to have told the eircom bitstream resellers .....who used to get the same heads up from eircom wholesale that eircom sales got.

eircom sales are still , as of last week, adamant that they know of no exchanges to be launced in the July - Sept quarter. Based on how these things worked under oreillys regime that means there are no launches planned .

I also understand that eircom's plans are that the other 300 or so that were announced will follow in 2008, ramping up to about 25 sites per month and finishing up by early to mid 2009.

One will watch with great interest . If eircom get their government funding under the national bb plan thingy the parameters will change no doubt

Thanks for the heads up grommet .