Is Eircom ever going to upgrade speed beyond 3mb/s?

aidanodr

Hi Guys,

Are all of us stuck in Eircom B/Band land ever going to get options on higher speeds greater than 3mb/s?

BT are currently starting to roll out 8mb/s - in Dublin only at the moment.

The rest of Europe is at around 20mb/s and Japan is now at 61mb/s fibre all round.

I know - go to another provider - been their already - Got caught in the Smart mess. Until real alternatives arive if ever I am staying with Eircom, not out of love, just pragmatism. Other operators currently are piggy backing on the copper owned by Eircom. As long as this is the case we are hostages to fortune.

Cheers
Aidan

SkepticOne

Yes, lack of proper competition. If Eircom were to offer, say 8 meg to consumers, this would destroy their revenue from their 6 meg service offered to businessesco for 204 euros (inc. VAT) a month.

Lack of competition means Eircom offer a highly tiered set of services with the affordable consumer level product being highly crippled and a hefty premium being paid for anything making use of the full potential of the technology.

Competition is increasing in Ireland, but only very slowly and so we are still seeing this sort of behaviour from the monopolist.

kaizersoze

The simple fact is that Eircoms copper network is already creaking at 3 meg and most of it wouldn't handle much more.

There are higher speeds in the pipeline but they will be restricted to large urban areas close to the exchange or where they run fibre to the cabinets. They'll also need to upgrade from plain ADSL.

Tbh I'd rather see them roll out more exchanges and get some form of bb to everyone than concentrate on getting higher speeds to a limited few.

bk

If the recent rumours of LLU migrations becoming easier * are true, then I expect competition from LLU should start to take off from the likes of BT and Smart and that Eircom will be forced to roll out ADSL2+ with higher speeds, but mostly only in urban areas due to the bad quality copper in most areas.

* It would seem that automatic migrations from any bitstream resellers with little downtime and your phone number transferred could help LLU really take off.

Sponge Bob

they propose to go to VDSL2 in urban areas ( 5 big cities) and ADSL2+ elsewhere. If close enough to the customer it could be very fast in the big cities . At least one other carrier is considering offering it at 30mbits in the next few months.

ADSL2+ has the advantage of stabilising connections on longer lines like Ireland and providing a speed bump, nothing mega like.

assuming 3mbit 2mbit and 1mbit is

35db 10 margin
45db 10 margin
70db 10 margin

you then get the following with adsl2+ firmware in the exchange

http://www2.farina1.com/ADSL/default.aspx

3mbit now 12.5mbit then
2mbit now and 6.5mbit then
1mbit now and 1mbit then

watty

bk wrote:

If the recent rumours of LLU migrations becoming easier * are true, then I expect competition from LLU should start to take off from the likes of BT and Smart and that Eircom will be forced to roll out ADSL2+ with higher speeds, but mostly only in urban areas due to the bad quality copper in most areas.

* It would seem that automatic migrations from any bitstream resellers with little downtime and your phone number transferred could help LLU really take off.

Not at nearly 18Euro a month per person going to eircom, before you even pay for backhaul every month... Which is even more of a problem for low contention 20Mbps+ speeds. A lot of exchanges unless you put your own dish on the roof, you have to pay eircom for backhaul.