eircom removed the carrier from my line!

andmoreagain

My local exchange was enabled for broadband 2 weeks ago. I’ve had a carrier (aka pairgain, splitter, dacs ) on my line for years since my neighbour got a phone line, even though I’m only 200 metres from the exchange. Dial-up was always around 32k. I ordered ISDN 3 yrs ago to see if they would remove the carrier but they said due to lack of copper they could not supply it.
Anyway after the exchange was enabled they rang and told me my line was amber(!) and asked did I want to order broadband. I said to the sales guy it couldn’t be amber because I’ve got a carrier on the line and can’t ever get broadband, so he said why not order it and see what happens. I was reluctant as I did not want to get my hopes up, but then I said why not try it and see what happens, cause he said no foal no fee.
The appointed day came and went. As I expected nothing happened. I rang eircom and they said we’re still working on it. Imagine the shock I got 2 days later when I was about to ring them again and there’s a guy on the pole outside my house REMOVING THE CARRIER! One hour later I’m on line. I have to give credit to eircom where it is due and I really hope this signals a new policy of giving people a proper phone line which is what they are paying for.
I’m still left wondering how did my line show as amber when it had a carrier on it? Could it be that I am so close to the exchange?

Sponge Bob

they most likely identify areas where they have sufficient pairs ( d-sides) then take the orders then plan the pairgain jiggy jiggy which often means they put empty houses or older people on a pairgain instead.

Sometime they fix things and sometimes they merely move the problem around the neighbourhood

Either way it beats the old eircom who simply dug in and refused to do anything for you , they now accept that people want broadband everywhere in Ireland

watty

As well as that at Privatisation over 82% of households had phone line and now under 69%. Maybe the neighbour ditched eircom.

mumhaabu

The usual method is to talk directly to a local eircom technician and usually they will oblige by switching the pair as Sponge Bob said to someone unlikely to order broadband.

Sponge Bob

Many people do not know who their local technican is , the only way to get them out to explain the situation is by raising a fault about 'noise' on the line .

Then leave them sort it out ...removing the pairgain will magically solve the 'fault' and everybody is happy :cool:

It is rare that the technician is not obliging once you explain it nicely to them but ringing 1901 customer 'service' is a total waste of time .

It may take a week or two but so what .

Slutmonkey57b

The fundamentals are that eircom engineers are helpful and professional - Customer Service are clueless and rude, and the policies put in place by management have always been counter-productive.

As mentioned above, the reason we now have a co-operative attitude from eircom is because people have been ditching fixed phone lines like flies. This is all because of competition from mobiles, and to a smaller degree cable. No doubt some incompetent in the department is drafting a press release stating that it's all down to their brilliant policies increasing competition however.

Fogmatic

Please tell me Eircom isn't really sacrificing some customers on the grounds of their being older people! If they are, just excuse me while I go outside to explode with incandescence (I may be some time).

ardmacha

Please tell me Eircom isn't really sacrificing some customers on the grounds of their being older people!

Older people may well be less likely to order broadband or even dialup. If they only use voice then the split line may not be sacrifice for them at all. Perhaps Eircom can identify people using dialup and those who never have.

Fogmatic

Well, I hope they can identify them, ardmacha. I've got used to not fitting into pigeonholes, but getting this bad line hobbled further just for being an 'older person' would be the last straw! (Hoprfully, Eircom's admin doesn't believe, like some young people, that computers sprang up overnight like mushrooms).

Fogmatic

Can anyone point me to a comms glossary/encyclopedia, that gives a bit of explanation/history?

For example, I'm confused by the word 'carrier'. There's the 'Carrier line' example I have in a speed comparison chart, looking about 1/3rd the speed of 'Normal Dialup'. There's the British Secret Service in the opening scenes of Doctor No in 1962, losing contact with their man in Jamaica or wherever because the 'carrier line' is dead. There's the 'no carrier' that my modem log sometimes records, and the carrier that andmoreagain saw the engineers removing. And there's the 'carrier' defined in a web glossary simply as (roughly) any wire that can transmit data.

Any resource that could sort that lot out for me would be ideal for all the comms terms I'd like to understand.

By the way, if there isn't a comms glossary here, has it been considered? Perhaps it would save time in the long run, especially for those patient folk explaining something in more than one place.

cgarvey

Carrier Line is a telephone line pair (telephone lines are always in pairs) that has been split so that one phyiscal pair of wires provides more than 1 phone line. The pro is that where copper is scarce, more users can avail of a phone line. The con is that it affects non-voice services (and renders DSL unavilable in most cases, though newer carrier lines can support DSL). It's also know as split lines, or lines with a pairgain.

As for online resource.. are you offering? It sounds like a good idea, just in need of volunteer effort. If you are offering, PM me and I'll see that it gets up on the IoffL website (with credit, of course).

watty

Fogmatic wrote: »

Can anyone point me to a comms glossary/encyclopedia, that gives a bit of explanation/history?

For example, I'm confused by the word 'carrier'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_gain

carrier is an old term. pair gain is a newer generic term.

Audio, direct RGB video are Baseband. Any higher frequency they are modulated on for transmission via cable over long distances or aerial is called a Carrier.

Long ago when all was analogue they used SSB modulation to carry multiple audio channels on one pair or coaxial cable
"SSB was also used over long distance telephone lines, as part of a technique known as frequency-division multiplexing (FDM). FDM was pioneered by telephone companies in the 1930s. This enabled many voice channels to be sent down a single physical circuit, for example in L-carrier. SSB allowed channels to be spaced (usually) just 4,000 Hz apart, while offering a speech bandwidth of nominally 300–3,400 Hz."

see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-channel_carrier_system

In actual fact the power saving and space saving aspect of SSB is that the carrier itself is usually not transmitted.

All digital broadcast and phone systems use carriers to carry the digital information in analogue form. Morse code is a quaternary system in the time domain, but the carrier is digital, only on or off. All modern forms of digital communication use multiple analogue states of the Carrier, each is a symbol. The speed these are changed is the symbol rate. The maximum symbol rate is roughly half the bandwidth of the channel as the signal will extend a frequency either side carrier equal to the symbol rate.

The more symbols there are the higher the data rate. 64QAM means 64 symbols. This means 6 bits can be sent simultaneously. The more symbols the "closer" together they are for the same power, thus the limit is the noise in the channel as one symbol at receive is mistaken for another.

DSL, DVB-t/DTT/DVB-h, DAB, DRM (radio), homePlug, WiMax, Flash and LTE all use a system called OFDM. instead of a carrier per audio channel like FM Radio or old Analogue carrier pair gains it uses 100s to 1000s of carriers. If there are 250 carriers instead of one then each may use a symbol rate 1/250th so overall the system uses the same bandwidth and the same data rate.

Modern "pair gains" are digital and can use either ISDN or DSL types of carrier technology.

Fogmatic

Thank you, cgarvey and Watty, for the very helpful details!

I wondered if an IoffL glossary would save people like you spending so much time on these postings, though.

In no way would I be qualified to contribute directly! I'm still looking for websites that would help us comms non experts (perhaps a comms glossary/FAQ could include any good links we might be able to add?)

watty

Wikipedia is very like the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and I have found mistakes on comms/RF/Telecoms articles (sometimes my corrections stick ), but it does cover most technical subjects well enough for the lay person. I'd not recommend it for details for MSc studies or such. And official College textbooks are mostly better for most engineering.

There are other sites with glossaries but these are basically acronym dictionaries and knowing that COFDM stands for Coded Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing is not much help. This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_frequency-division_multiplexing is more helpful even if it might be inaccurate or lacking in some important detail. Compare OFDM with this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_frequency-division_multiple_access OFDMA

Google
Compare articles.

There are not enough days for me or anyone to write a comprehensive glossary for IoffL. If I take a 6 month break from reading journals they invent new acronyms to taunt me.

Fogmatic

Thanks for the pointers, Watty. I hadn't tried Wikipedia for this subject, but have found helpful little articles on other things.

andmoreagain

To add to the confusion, they seem to prefer the term DACS (Digital Access Carrier System) in the UK. Faq here http://frank.gwc.org.uk/~ali/dacs/
The eircom technician I spoke to referrred to it as a carrier.

RedLedbetter

Oh man! Don't talk to me about carrier lines - check out my post below. This is my failed attempt (today) to have my line removed from a carrier line, eventhough the line is total crap:

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=59150856#post59150856

Duiske

watty wrote: »

Modern "pair gains" are digital and can use either ISDN or DSL types of carrier technology.

Watty, are eircom using these digital devices yet ? Would cost prohibit them from installing them in an area where, say, only a couple of properties would benefit ?

watty

What I mean is that the pair gain is implemented using ISDN or DSL type of technology "carriers". Then you can't have ISDN or DSL yourself as the spectrum on the line to the "splitter" is already used up.

It's as if you had a VOIP PABX running off a 2Mbps SDSL line. You could have 20 simultaneous voice calls / phones active.