Irish Rural Link - Broadband Seminar 20/03/09

clohamon

Meeting Notes Irish Rural Link 20/03/09


Speakers
Damien Gallagher 3 Ireland
Peter Mandal Progression.ie (IRL technical advisor ex eriksson)
Seamus Boland CEO IRL (chair)
Jason Coyle Mr Crumb
DCENR Not present.

DCENR unable to attend “due to cutbacks” in travel budget. IRL indicated they would have been prepared to fund their travel .

Damien Gallagher – 3 Ireland

Reasonable guy and prepared to answer questions directly, though he was definitely there to sell his product

1700 homes – ready to go.

Clifden Galway
Woodford Galway
Inistioge Kilkenny
Rathmore Kerry


Dispute/service

5 day resolution mandatory.
Comreg to settle resolutions if escalation.
Comreg cannot enforce a satellite remedy.
Will try not to charge for overcap usage. (?)
Cannot control contention.
No residential priority.
Satellite – no upgrade path under consideration.
No Satellite capability before June.
Ethernet microwave reduces latency ( Help please Watty)
Full roll out details in June. All Councils have to be dealt with.


Confirmed BT were building 3’s network
Claimed Eircom NBS solution was also a mobile one.
Satellite still on the ground.

Monitoring.
Analysys Mason to do it
No monitoring of user experience. All analysis will be done from base station data.

Contract /Payments
They get paid for each Electoral District when they have 95% coverage and satellite capability.

Foresee overspill coverage outside of NBS areas due to RF technology. They are not precluded from signing up customers outside NBS.

Network Roaming
He seemed to be saying this would be possible without a hardware issue if you were using a 3 device. But I got the impression it may not be possible the other way around. (open to correction)

Planning
Kerry a problem due to 1 km exclusion condition.
Westmeath – agricultural land excluded. (12 new sites planned) Negotiations underway

Most new sites in Mayo (46), Galway(44), Cork(46)

Peter Mandal - IRL tech advisor

Gave a high level summary of broadband options. Politely queried some of 3’s assertions about QOS. Mostly already discussed on threads here.

Jason Coyle – Mr Crumb (case study)

Tales of woe in the world of crumbing. Business lost. Some new customers insist on broadband for supply chain management. Office staff having to drive into Mullingar to download large Files. Satellite underperforming. Eircom not interested. Etc etc, etc.


All very polite and well mannered. Some satellite providers also present who took the opportunity to make their pitch. (400ms latency possible apparently)

Free tea and sambos.

Sponge Bob

I got this mail about a 3 presentation down the country last week .

It expands on aspects of the above

"1. The contract is per ED. They roll out the first 15% of 1028 EDs in June and 5% ( about 50) a month thereafter each and every month. They will show ones programmed in the following 2 months as amber on their website ( they are all red right now)

2. Fractional Drawdown follows fractional rollout . Mason are to verify . They only got c.€400 per ED in that supervision contract so nobody will be sent onto the ground .

3. Mason will pull metrics of some sort off 3 to verify coverage . DCENR pays out on Masons say so.

4. Up to 5% of the population of a given ED may get satellite , not 5% of the total scheme aggregated . This means 95% of households in each claimed ED must be able to get 1mbit at the service cell edge ...and that will be fun when it breathes. I have heard 8% mentioned elsewhere but the roadshow says 5% .

5. EDs were selected on the basis that that only 60% of households or less could get broadband . If an ED was 'deemed' to have over 60% coverage at cutoff then it was not included. Of course we all know the DCENR did not pay any heed to the maps they were sent and they did not send anyone down the country to verify , yes that was Mason ...again !

6. 3 are on a tour of local authorities right now looking for high sites, particularly in Kerry Galway Mayo and Donegal, Kerry last week, Galway tomorrow and Mayo coming soon .

7. I got the impression that they will give up the ghost on certain EDs towards the end and will take the financial clawback, of course we don't know which ones these are but you guys may guess.

8. They claim that c.1/3 of the country can be done from 388 sites and with 95% 3g coverage .

Let me repeat that .

At least 95% of the population of some 20000 square kilometres ( possibly 25000) of land area can be served from 388 sites in total with guaranteed 1mbit and so say 3 and Mason !

Of that 95% most will be on usb dongles and some at the outer edge will get 3g repeaters, femtocells . It will be fun when they unexpectedly hit unexpected outcrops of K Glass"

watty

It's my understanding that
- eircom would indeed have been making use of Meteor. So not much better.

- ethernet rather than ATM/ISDN/E1 backhaul helps latency, but it's still terrible. Like 80ms to 1950ms instead of 120ms to 2000ms (I get better than 25ms to www.heanet.ie on Fixed Wireless, FWALA)

- Satellite on Ground: Are they REALLY waiting for Hylass 1, no installs off Avanti's IS903 service? It could be q2 2010 or not at all then. There isn't even a launch date yet. The Falcon9 hasn't flown yet and there are 4 payloads to launch 1st.
- Satellite: 400ms is ONE WAY latency. Best possible "ping" or conventional round trip latency (which is what counts) is 790ms.

- Network Roaming: "3" have a 3G licence. It's online and can be read. They can't whatsover limit masts to data only or NBS. It's purely a 3G phone network that can do data. Any MVNO must have access to all sites, any 3 Modem or phone handset user must have access to all sites.

Neither of the two remaining bids left on NBS tender were BB solutions, so claiming eircom would be not much better doesn't help them.

clohamon

watty wrote: »

- ethernet rather than ATM/ISDN/E1 backhaul helps latency, but it's still terrible. Like 80ms to 1950ms instead of 120ms to 2000ms (I get better than 25ms to www.heanet.ie on Fixed Wireless, FWALA)

I think he said also that they were relying on Comreg to release more spectrum for this.

clohamon

IRL got the figure of 12,000 excluded from the Department.

Mr. Seamus Boland: I thank members for their questions and comments. I will ask Mr. O’Leary to explain where we got the figures.

Mr. Seán O’Leary: The figure of 12,000 emerged from discussions we had with the Department. It is in our document and the Department is happy with it. The date of 1 July was picked as the cut-off point for which electoral divisions would be in or outside of the national broadband scheme. The situation could have changed since then and some exchanges may have been enabled, but they are still in the broadband scheme. Up to 12,000 houses and business premises are in electoral divisions. They are outside the national broadband scheme, but cannot access any broadband. The Department has stated that these 12,000 homes and businesses are in what it considers to be already substantially covered areas, but that they will have difficulties for technical and other reasons, such as typography, long lines, no line of sight, etc. One option is satellite, but it is very expensive compared to other options. If these areas were in the national broadband scheme, there would be a possibility of getting a subsidised satellite, but it is not an option for those excluded from the scheme.

http://debates.oireachtas.ie/DDebate.aspx?F=MAJ20090325.XML&Ex=All&Page=1