Irish Broadband WiMax?

mehmeh12

Hey i got an email from Irish Broadband that they are rolling out new wireless service called WiMax..does anyone know when they will release the details for this? Or will the the new chorus ntl service be a better option?

watty

UPC (Chorus/NTL) better.

Wait and see what KIND of WiMax Imagine/IBB do.

pistolpetes11

I think I remember something back in 2005 where they were going to offer Wimax or a roll out of some sorts to 14 different areas, I would be very interested in this if it is on course , I think they were proposing speeds along the line of 12meg !

pistolpetes11

Just searched it on google , here is the press release from November 2005 !!!!

http://www.irishbroadband.ie/documents/Irish%20Broadband%20launches%20major%20national%20WIMAX%20rollout.pdf

pistolpetes11

watty wrote: »

UPC (Chorus/NTL) better.

Wait and see what KIND of WiMax Imagine/IBB do.[/QUOTE

I dont see an mention of UPC (Chorus/NTL) doing WiMax in the SBP article in the following link :

http://www.sbpost.ie/computersinbusiness/broadband-battles-42847.html

do you have any further info on what UPC will be offering and when , looks like an Autumn launch from Imagine/IBB,
I hope so anyway !!!

gingerGiant

pistolpetes11 wrote: »

looks like an Autumn launch from Imagine/IBB,
I hope so anyway !!!

Early - Mid September I believe is the time-frame they hope to launch in

mehmeh12

Just got a phone call from Irish Broadband. A engineer or guy is coming over on Thursday evening at 3 pm to install a Wimax service to my house. He said he would have to connect things to my laptop. What does this all mean? he said it would be 4g..what does that mean?

Is this new Wimax service good? am nervous.

mehmeh12

Just got a phone call from Irish Broadband. A engineer or guy is coming over on Thursday evening at 3 pm to install a Wimax service to my house. He said he would have to connect things to my laptop. What does this all mean? he said it would be 4g..what does that mean?

Is this new Wimax service good? am nervous.

watty

What have you got from IBB/Imagine at the minute?

mehmeh12

Ripwave- it is ****!

Will the new 4g connection be any better?

pistolpetes11

mehmeh12 wrote: »

Ripwave- it is ****!

Will the new 4g connection be any better?

I just got Breeze IBB/Imagine installed yesterday and was quizzing the lads up on the WiMax but they were giving nothing away although he did say the roll out in Dublin is 2 months behind schedule and that they have stopped taking orders for Breeze in Dublin !

They gave me a breeze max signal box which they said is in the middle of breeze standard and WiMax and that the breeze max does not need line of site to the High site

Feidhlim

I'm also confused...

Is this just applicable to the out of the box BB?

I have the fixed wireless - any idea whether Wimax would be faster or again, does it depend on the type?

Cheers,
F

watty

mehmeh12 wrote: »

Ripwave- it is ****!

Will the new 4g connection be any better?

If it uses outdoor fixed aerial yes. Faster.

If it's Mobile WiMax, then it may or may not be faster depending on location, but would be lower latency.

Ripwave was originally a Wireless "ISDN replacement", though much worse latency as it's S-CDMA (like 3G in disadvantages without the advantages). Ripwave is poorer than GSM's EDGE in some ways (a 2.5G tech)

mehmeh12

watty wrote: »

If it uses outdoor fixed aerial yes. Faster.

If it's Mobile WiMax, then it may or may not be faster depending on location, but would be lower latency.

Ripwave was originally a Wireless "ISDN replacement", though much worse latency as it's S-CDMA (like 3G in disadvantages without the advantages). Ripwave is poorer than GSM's EDGE in some ways (a 2.5G tech)

What is lower latency?

The guy i was talking to said he would not need to access the roof but that he would have to hook things up to my laptop-15 mins...god i hope this dosent turn out to be trite! As it stands im aleady looking for a new isp..maybe BT on their 'unlimited download' broadband deal.

MagicMarker

mehmeh12 wrote: »

What is lower latency?

The guy i was talking to said he would not need to access the roof but that he would have to hook things up to my laptop-15 mins...god i hope this dosent turn out to be trite! As it stands im aleady looking for a new isp..maybe BT on their 'unlimited download' broadband deal.

Stick with WiMax, it will be much much cheaper than the likes of BT, you'll also be able to able get the phone through WiMax, ergo, no line rental!

mehmeh12

MagicMarker wrote: »

Stick with WiMax, it will be much much cheaper than the likes of BT, you'll also be able to able get the phone through WiMax, ergo, no line rental!

Phone services via Wimax- like actual phone service as in a physical phone in the wall or through applications like Skype?

MagicMarker

mehmeh12 wrote: »

Phone services via Wimax- like actual phone service as in a physical phone in the wall or through applications like Skype?

An actual phone, you can keep your current number too.

mehmeh12

MagicMarker wrote: »

An actual phone, you can keep your current number too.

Eh..i have an eircom landline at the moment..does wimax include phone calls without a landline charge?

MagicMarker

There will be a monthly charge, but nothing close to Eircom's line rental, probably in the region of 5-10 euro a month.

mehmeh12

MagicMarker wrote: »

There will be a monthly charge, but nothing close to Eircom's line rental, probably in the region of 5-10 euro a month.

I take it you have wimax youself..the 5-10 euro aside, how much does making calls cost? and is the actual phone service audible and reliable?

MagicMarker

mehmeh12 wrote: »

I take it you have wimax youself..the 5-10 euro aside, how much does making calls cost? and is the actual phone service audible and reliable?

Don't have WiMax but know a small bit about it, don't know specific call rates but it would be cheaper than Eircom (wouldn't be hard as Eircom are a rip off). IBB are part of the Imagine Group, Imagine generally say they are 30% cheaper than Eircom for calls. There shouldn't be any issues with the phone service in terms of reliability.

mehmeh12

pistolpetes11 wrote: »

I just got Breeze IBB/Imagine installed yesterday and was quizzing the lads up on the WiMax but they were giving nothing away although he did say the roll out in Dublin is 2 months behind schedule and that they have stopped taking orders for Breeze in Dublin !

They gave me a breeze max signal box which they said is in the middle of breeze standard and WiMax and that the breeze max does not need line of site to the High site

Ok i live in Dublin..so if breeze has stopped being ordered in dublin..what am i getting on thursday?

MagicMarker

WiMax:)

I'm really not up on the technical side of things tbh.

This little vid seems good - http://www.wimax.com/education

mehmeh12

Thanks for the video link .

So Wimax is still technically mobile internet access? ugh i guess the speeds will be quite slow. Although in that video the woman was able to watch a film and play a game..exaclty how fast will Irish broadband wimax be? and not just in theory but the speeds actual users get.

Cant find any info on speed on the irish broadband website and my google searches only turn results on news reviews, no info from consumers.

MagicMarker

The speed will match any DSL speed (broadband via landline) you will get from Eircom or B.T.

Obviously there will be different speeds available at different prices.

mehmeh12

MagicMarker wrote: »

The speed will match any DSL speed (broadband via landline) you will get from Eircom or B.T.

Obviously there will be different speeds available at different prices.

God i hope your right..worse case scenario i could get bt ireland installed and cancel irish broadband...ugh

watty

MagicMarker wrote: »

The speed will match any DSL speed (broadband via landline) you will get from Eircom or B.T.

Obviously there will be different speeds available at different prices.

Absolutely untrue for Mobile WiMax. Only true at lower DSL speeds for Fixed WiMax.

You'll not have very many customers on more than 3Mbps Fixed Wimax unless Imagine/IBB has suddenly got a big bunch of new licences. Speed depends on cell size & Spectrum. WiMax can't break the laws of physics.

Also DSL can be very low or uncontended quite easily just by increasing exchange backhaul.

Wireless uses limited shared spectrum on each mast, so the contention can only be improved by less customers, lower caps or lower speed packages.

What Speeds/ Prices/Contention ratios?

pistolpetes11

watty wrote: »

Absolutely untrue for Mobile WiMax. Only true at lower DSL speeds for Fixed WiMax.

You'll not have very many customers on more than 3Mbps Fixed Wimax unless Imagine/IBB has suddenly got a big bunch of new licences. Speed depends on cell size & Spectrum. WiMax can't break the laws of physics.

Also DSL can be very low or uncontended quite easily just by increasing exchange backhaul.

Wireless uses limited shared spectrum on each mast, so the contention can only be improved by less customers, lower caps or lower speed packages.

What Speeds/ Prices/Contention ratios?

I am on IBB breeze with a 24/1 contention ratio €55 a month

It is supposed to be 4Mb upload and download, but the best the lads were getting when setting it up was 3.2Mb upload and 3.8Mb download (They said it was cause they were using a non line of site VL radio)

I would presume that Wimax will offer better speeds ?

watty

Why? If you are on Ripwave, maybe you would see a significant change. Or maybe not.

Breeze is Fixed Wireless and the performance is limited by Terrain, distance and number of users. If Fixed WiMax is in the same channel size, same band and same number of users on a mast Sector it will not be much different.

4Mb each way would be package speed. Since the the system is contended (Up to 48:1 allowed by ComReg), and could not be economical otherwise you'd rarely get full speed on ANY wireless system except maybe at off peak times.

WiMax at higher Frequencies (3.6GHz to 22GHz) where there is Line of Sight can actually be 10% less efficient than other systems as it uses OFDM (good for Non-LOS, Lower frequency Multipath, into Building reception) and OFDM needs a 10% "dead time" between symbols to allow the Multipath mitigation to work.

Basically the best advantage on WiMax is Mobile/Nomadic 2GHz and lower Non-LOS systems. Which is still inferior speed/spectrum efficency to Fixed Wireless on LOS (Line of Sight).

If everything else is equal, a Fixed Wireless system can give about x8 to x20 extra capacity (Sum of users @ speed per user) per cell/sector compared with Mobile/Nomadic.

On LOS (Line Of Sight) outdoor aerial/radio systems there is really little or no advantage to WiMax (the OFDM being the significant feature).

BigMoose

There are comments in the press about the IBB/Imagine role out giving speeds of 10Mb/s and up to 40Mb/s in the future. Is this marketing nonsense? I'm currently out of contract on a breeze 2Mb connection and would like to upgrade to something faster. They want a new 12 month contract to upgrade me to the 4Mb service which I am not going to do if something much faster will be available to me soon. Although being in Wicklow, I assume it'll be a long time before any IBB network upgrade gets that far so maybe I should lump the new 12 month contract.

watty

On the current IBB/Imagine licences 40Mbps is fantasy. Even 10Mbps at any reasonable customer base is fantasy.

Metro on 10GHz, in terms of Mbps per MHz is the most efficient system there is. It can deliver close to 100Mbps total on all channels in a ComReg single Licence Allocation. The spectrum to do this simply doesn't exist at 3.6GHZ FWA. IBB/Imagine has some, but not a lot of 10GHz allocations.

At the number of customers a Mast needs to be viable, most of the packages need to be 2Mbps to 4MBps. Maybe some 7 to 10Mbps packages, but very few. Try selling any quantity of 10Mbps (or 40MBps) packages and peak time speed will fall to about 6Mbps!

Even one 40Mbps package will suffer contention horribly.

So, yes without a massive nationwide increase in IBB/Imagine using currently non-existent spectrum this is Marketing hype.

Like LTE 100Mbps. On LTE that is a peak speed for 5% of the sector near mast. Cell edge would be possibly as low as 1Mbps. Shared average Sector throughput maybe 8Mbps. So if you had 20 simultaneous downloads on 100Mbps LTE you might get 400kbps. However current 3G/HSPA in same scenario is only 40kbps! Typically to make LTE economical they need about 1,800 total customers on a mast, or 600 per sector, on average, of course not all are online at once (maybe 1/4 at peak time if sold as fixed "Broadband" and of those "online" most may be reading a web page) so with LTE you can have about 1/30th of your customer base watching YouTube at same time.

Without a full technical specification, channel size, number of customers etc, any press releases about Roll outs are fairly meaningless. Just read Three's about the NBS

Cap is used to control contention on Wireless. If you calculate percent of your 30 days you can be online at fulll package speed at the 5G/10G/30G or whatever cap. I think 160G byte (far more than any wireless operator will allow would be 250kbps down + 250kbps up 24x7). Some DSL, Cable and Fibre packages will let you have that.

You can see why a rolling 30 days cap rather than calendar Monthly cap benefits the customers in reduced contention at start/end of month.

BigMoose

The annoying thing is that any hope of DSL improvements also seem fantisy. I take it there's no commitment for Eircom to upgrade exchanges to ADSL2+ any time soon? I cant work out where the Wicklow Town or Merrymeeting exchange is (for if I were to re-enable the line to the house) to see if I'm likely to get anything better from them. There's talk of a new exchange in the Broomhall industrial estate, but I cant find any concrete evidence of when that'll be available or even if it's possible to get the existing line (that I dont use) connected to an exchange of my choice or if I'm stuck with whever it currently goes... I'm ranting off topic, so to bring back to IBB, if their new WiMax roll out speeds are fantisy, any Eircom decent speeds are fantisy, UPC in Wicklow/Rathnew is fantisy, I'm thinking 4Mb Breeze is the best it'll be for a good while yet.

IBB Breeze (wireless) doesn't have any cap and I've never heard of people getting a slap for over usage either. Assume if you go full pelt 24/7 all month they might object...

watty

It will have a Cap. Already been done on Ripwave since Imagine took over and unsurprisingly it improves the service. Otherwise 5% to 15% (depending on area) of users will eat 70% to 90% of the traffic (torrents and live streaming video).

ADSL2+ is better than plain ADSL at less than average distance. Again on phone lines you can't beat the physics of distance. Higher speeds only work on short lines.

So Small percentage can get 24Mbps ADSL2+ or 100Mbps VDSL.

Majority can get > 1Mbps and less than 7Mbps

A small percentage get 0.5M to 1Mbps. About 10% to 20% can't get DSL at all due to distance, pairgains, or line quality even if every exchange was 100% ADSL2+

mehmeh12

Ok from what ive read from some of the new posts the wimax service i get tomorrow will probably be some crappy wireless service :mad:

On a slightly different note eircom sent me a lettter today saying that my landline has changed to perlico-after a month of waiting. However while my phone service is usable, when i turn on my modem i cant get any dsl signal at all. Should i cancel perlico altogether and get back my eircom landline? will i have to pay extra to be disconnected?

daffy_duc

If you do get this new WiMax service from Irish Broadband, could you post your results?
I'm sure I'm not the only one thats curious to see how this turns out...

mehmeh12

Got another call from chorus upc-this guy tells me that my house can get their broadband..yes! I might in the near future arrange for a engineer to call out...

Could not get through to perlico..no one will pick up the phone. I was thinking of canceling perlico and the landline...how do people survive without an eircom landline?

Irish broadband guy is coming over tomorrow as planned.

My head is about to crash..i hate the way that all these offers/upgrade of broadband all came within the last few days

oneilj29

Would be really interested in hearing how the wimax thing goes. Can you post and let us know how you get on

RoyalMarine

mehmeh12 wrote: »

Got another call from chorus upc-this guy tells me that my house can get their broadband..yes! I might in the near future arrange for a engineer to call out...

Could not get through to perlico..no one will pick up the phone. I was thinking of canceling perlico and the landline...how do people survive without an eircom landline?

Irish broadband guy is coming over tomorrow as planned.

My head is about to crash..i hate the way that all these offers/upgrade of broadband all came within the last few days

chorus ntl offer a landline phone.

mehmeh12

oneilj29 wrote: »

Would be really interested in hearing how the wimax thing goes. Can you post and let us know how you get on

Oh my god!! Engineer came..tried 2 new separate modems and could not get a signal..despite the fact that signal station is practically down the road from me..akward as ever...came back empty handed.

I guess its time for me to call chorus ntl for the 10mb deal...god i hope that works:)

daffy_duc

mehmeh12 wrote: »

Oh my god!! Engineer came..tried 2 new separate modems and could not get a signal..despite the fact that signal station is practically down the road from me..akward as ever...came back empty handed.

I guess its time for me to call chorus ntl for the 10mb deal...god i hope that works:)

Thats disappointing...
Well, at least you weren't left paying for a service that sorta/almost worked

Feidhlim

Well, considering UPC might bump up the speeds when they roll out their 120mb BB, I would go with them.

Unfortunately they aren't in my area...

gingerGiant

IBB are currently moving all ripwave customers in certain parts of Dublin to Breeze, this will allow then to shut down the ripwave transmitters as they would cause interference with the Wimax when it goes live, as has already been posted the roll-out is now running about two months behind schedule.

Was it a breeze antenna they tried, did they get on your roof.

watty

Imagine must have deep pockets. Inc labour and gear that's near €800 a user I think!

gingerGiant

watty wrote: »

Imagine must have deep pockets. Inc labour and gear that's near €800 a user I think!

If using new gear it would be, but they have lost that many breeze customers lately that they will soon have to move to a bigger warehouse to store all the de-installed equipment.

This equipment can be reused for new customers so the cost would be much lower per customer, it would be basically be labour for the two installer guys for an hour and a bit of cat5 and other consumables.

Still a big cost for them but not as bad as a new radio for each customer.

JanusGeminius

gingerGiant wrote: »

If using new gear it would be, but they have lost that many breeze customers lately that they will soon have to move to a bigger warehouse to store all the de-installed equipment.

This equipment can be reused for new customers so the cost would be much lower per customer, it would be basically be labour for the two installer guys for an hour and a bit of cat5 and other consumables.

Still a big cost for them but not as bad as a new radio for each customer.

Is there a specific reason for that as Breeze looks like an attractive option to me?

watty

Mis-sold 3G Mobile Flat rate Dial up Internet @ €20 a month I'd think. Maybe in a year (when contract ends) half those will be coming back. For non-critical light browsing (little or no video/downloads) and occasional email the 3G/Mobile can be a good economic solution.

spongebob wrote:

Calendar quarters

PSTN lines fell by 12k in Q4 2008
PSTN lines fell by 20k in Q1 2009
PSTN lines fell by 24k in Q2 2009

They are probably going to lose at least 100k in the next year , going below 1.5m for the first time since the 1990s

ADSL Growth . I predicted long ago it would go q on q negative in q2 2009 but it didn't , by a whisker .


ADSL Growth 21k Q3 2008
ADSL Growth 25k Q4 2008
ADSL Growth 19k Q1 2009
ADSL Growth _7k_ Q2 2009

From
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055665274

daffy_duc

gingerGiant wrote: »

IBB are currently moving all ripwave customers in certain parts of Dublin to Breeze, this will allow then to shut down the ripwave transmitters as they would cause interference with the Wimax when it goes live, as has already been posted the roll-out is now running about two months behind schedule.

Was it a breeze antenna they tried, did they get on your roof.

I don't believe this to be the case.
Especially considering that Ripwave is a Nomadic service, and Breeze is very much a fixed service. It'd be like me coming along and "replacing" your apples with oranges, and calling it an upgrade.

gingerGiant

JanusGeminius wrote: »

Is there a specific reason for that as Breeze looks like an attractive option to me?

No specific reason, just customers getting to end of contract and going for cheaper alternatives such as 3G etc.

gingerGiant

daffy_duc wrote: »

I don't believe this to be the case.
Especially considering that Ripwave is a Nomadic service, and Breeze is very much a fixed service. It'd be like me coming along and "replacing" your apples with oranges, and calling it an upgrade.

While it's true that Ripwave is nomadic the percentage of customers who use it in this way is smaller than tiny, and as such they are been upgraded to a better service, for those that do roam with their Ripwave in the Dublin area there will be as far as I know no coverge when Wimax goes live.

BigMoose

I would imagine a large enough % of ripwave users got it due to not being allowed to put breeze masts up in appartment blocks etc. They're not going to be easily moved to breeze... That said, maybe many of them have moved to cheaper "mobile" products.