upc to cover 90% of the population with new service

everdead.ie

"UPC is set to start a price war in broadband, the Sunday Times says. The company is planning the launch of a national wireless broadband network and is currently negotiating with ComReg to get the service off the ground. UPC claims it will cover 90 percent of the population with the new service."
http://www.enn.ie/story/show/10124988
Wonder what they plan on using wimax, lte?
They could also bundle that in with there current broadband offerings like eircom do with there wireless hotspots.

watty

LTE is a mobile system, no spectrum for it.

Wimax comes in two versions with very different performance, The mobile version is only a little better than HSDPA/3G, about 1/8th LTE performance. Not really any suitable spectrum for it here. (3.5GHz is terrible for Mobile or Nomadic).

The Fixed Wimax is used already by various companies. Better than Breez and not as good as Metro.

So far the only two national Wireless Data Licences are eircom's and Digiweb's. I'm not sure what NATIONAL block of spectrum they think that they can get. None of the non-eircom FWALA allocations are national.

When their cable upgrades are done, that may cover about 70% of population.

thefinalstage

watty wrote: »

LTE is a mobile system, no spectrum for it.

Wimax comes in two versions with very different performance, The mobile version is only a little better than HSDPA/3G, about 1/8th LTE performance. Not really any suitable spectrum for it here. (3.5GHz is terrible for Mobile or Nomadic).

The Fixed Wimax is used already by various companies. Better than Breez and not as good as Metro.

So far the only two national Wireless Data Licences are eircom's and Digiweb's. I'm not sure what NATIONAL block of spectrum they think that they can get. None of the non-eircom FWALA allocations are national.

When their cable upgrades are done, that may cover about 70% of population.

When the heck are those upgrades gonna be done? I wanna tell eircom to pee off....

GerardKeating

everdead.ie wrote: »

"UPC is set to start a price war in broadband, the Sunday Times says. The company is planning the launch of a national wireless broadband network and is currently negotiating with ComReg to get the service off the ground. UPC claims it will cover 90 percent of the population with the new service."
http://www.enn.ie/story/show/10124988
Wonder what they plan on using wimax, lte?
They could also bundle that in with there current broadband offerings like eircom do with there wireless hotspots.

They already have a trial in Swords area for this, basically us the network of mmds masts for wireless bb.

smellslikeshoes

I'm guessing they will use a similar set up to Digiweb's metro, DOCSIS 2 or possibly 3 by the time its rolled out. I'm only guessing mind, but it would make sense since they would be more familiar with it since its essentially just Cable with the last mile over wireless.

watty

DOCSIS 3 is about aggregation of whole DOCSIS channels to a single user. It's not a Wireless possibility unless you had a GHz or so. It's rare for Wireless for a sector to have more than 60MHz. That's a shared resource to a lot of people.

DOCSIS 3 uses fibre to drive short pieces of coax, maybe one street or a 1/2 of one side of a street.

smellslikeshoes

Sorry I didn't take spectrum requirements into account, what sort of future system upgrades would a product based on DOCSIS2 have?

Sorry for going a little off topic, but curiosity usually gets the better of me

watty

There is not a huge difference in security and none in spectrum between DOCSIS 1.1 and 2.0 Some non 2.0 CMTS support the 2.0 VOIP QOS though only 1.1 certified.

The data rate on Wireless is lower than on cable for same spectrum to have decent range, 64QAM rather than 256QAM is typical. Mobile systems generally run 16QAM for reasonable distance to QPSK (like 4QAM) at cell edge. On Wireless 256QAM would be a range of about 150m or less.

Assuming FEC is identical and symbol rate is the same (identical bandwidth channel), then if 256QAM gave shared bandwidth of 45Mbps, then 16QAM is close to 2.8Mbps. This is why MOBILE systems are fast close to mast (64QAM) and rubbish at cell edge (QPSK x16 slower than 64QAM!).

On DOCSIS the traditional North American channel is 6MHz and in Europe is 8MHz channels, the actual spectrum used by the DOCSIS signal is less and depends on Symbol Rate. Generally for Satellite or Cable the bandwidth is maybe 10% to 20% more than the the Symbol Rate. However there tends to be a fixed size guard band so smaller spectrum channel width has a disproportionally lower Symbol rate. The operational limits for Symbol rate for Cable TV or Modem seem to be similar. About 1500k sym/s is the minimum I could get a Motorola cable TV box to run.

Upstream doesn't use the same system as it doesn't need to be compatible with TV. You can read all about this stuff at Cablelabs' site http://www.cablemodem.com/

Virtually all DOCSIS is 1.1 or 2.0. Ver 3.0 is simply really adding aggregation or bonding of channels. The spectrum per channel on 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0 is identical. All use a DVB-c MPEG2-TS for the Downstream.

Sponge Bob

They may be poking Comreg into a licencing round between 3.6ghz and 3.8ghz now that CEPT has given the go ahead for it .

Another possibility is that they intend to retire MMDS and re-use the spectrum between 2.5ghz and 2.6ghz that they have in that band

lmimmfn

jebus would they just finish rolling out last years promised cable network first. For me anything but eircon and the more options the better

skywalker_208

I presume the majority of this will be like Digiwebs/Net1s product - wireless requiring direct line of site?

gerryo

Sponge Bob wrote: »

Another possibility is that they intend to retire MMDS and re-use the spectrum between 2.5ghz and 2.6ghz that they have in that band

Hmm.. any possability they intend to keep MMDS going & combine it with a wireless service? Seems like they could use the most of the existing boxes, just replace the antenna + electronics with a new one that does RX + TX.
Does not make huge sense to cut off existing MMDS users & drive them into the arms of $ky while trying to interest new subscribers in a wireless BB box with no TV.

Not sure how much BW that system would give users, but if it was tacked onto the existing cost of the MMDS TV bill, it might be cheaper than a seperate wireless or BB connection, as long as you were happy with the reduced BW (& higher ping times).

thebman

skywalker_208 wrote: »

I presume the majority of this will be like Digiwebs/Net1s product - wireless requiring direct line of site?

Hopefully, the only way to get a decent service from wireless IMO.

Sponge Bob

Thay may only be doing an MVNO deal with three like BPI Telecom just did