National Postcodes to be introduced

TheBustedFlush · 10-10-2014 10:07am

ozmo wrote: »

I was expecting Eircode that took so long to develop - to use some of the features of modern codes such as these - like inbuilt verification - the ability to locate a non postbox - offline usage without database - variable precision for protecting your security - you know, everything they were originally asked to produce.

Were all these requirements put into the tender? If so, then they have fallen way short.

Sam Russell · 10-10-2014 11:04am

Eircode is yet another poor decision based on a poor design.

How much did the Government have to pay for the West Link bridge that cost £10 million to build? Was €500 million or was that the discounted cash value of the price? Cannot remember, but a fantastic return on investment, considering they were getting a toll for every vehicle that crossed it in the meantime.

How much will it cost the state to buy-out the rights to Eircode in the future? Again, private company profiting from state enterprise.

eVoting - we paid for the out of date hardware, but did not own the software and then had to scrap the lot.
PPP Toll roads, we pay if not enough tolls are collected.
PayPars - we paid many millions for software that had to be scrapped because it did not work.
We paid millions for advice on the Anglo bail out, but ignored it and it cost us €60 billion which we will be paying for the next century.
We have just committed to install water meters in EVERY house in Ireland and it will take years to get the cost back from the water bills before any of the money goes to fix the infrastructure.

When we ever learn?

TheBustedFlush · 10-10-2014 11:25am

Sam Russell wrote: »

Eircode is yet another poor decision based on a poor design.

How much did the Government have to pay for the West Link bridge that cost £10 million to build? Was €500 million or was that the discounted cash value of the price? Cannot remember, but a fantastic return on investment, considering they were getting a toll for every vehicle that crossed it in the meantime.

How much will it cost the state to buy-out the rights to Eircode in the future? Again, private company profiting from state enterprise.

The clue is in the name - Postcode Management Licence Holder. It's a licence, not a deed of ownership. Everything belongs to the State already.

Sam Russell · 10-10-2014 11:31am

TheBustedFlush wrote: »

The clue is in the name - Postcode Management Licence Holder. It's a licence, not a deed of ownership. Everything belongs to the State already.

How much of the €25 cost of Eircode went to An Post for the Geodirectory?

ukoda · 10-10-2014 11:54am

Sam Russell wrote: »

How much of the €25 cost of Eircode went to An Post for the Geodirectory?

I believe it was close to 10 million for a 10 year deal to access. i stand to be corrected tho

TheBustedFlush · 10-10-2014 12:13pm

ukoda wrote: »

I believe it was close to 10 million for a 10 year deal to access. i stand to be corrected tho

Nope - it was a fixed price of €8.27m for the ten years. Capped at a maximum of €950k to be paid each year.

So An Post would have received a max of €475k so far from the Dept. They only own 50% of the GeoDirectory. OSI gets the other 50%.

Tow · 10-10-2014 12:26pm

TheBustedFlush wrote: »

So An Post would have received a max of €475k so far from the Dept.

That will only pay the salaries of around 10 people in the Rubber Room...

TheBustedFlush · 10-10-2014 12:29pm

Tow wrote: »

That will only pay the salaries of around 10 people in the Rubber Room...

Ok - I'll nibble....

The Rubber Room??

yuloni · 11-10-2014 6:11pm

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my3cents · 11-10-2014 6:31pm

yuloni wrote: »

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Well it goes to show how well are emergency services are run if they are complaining about it now.

yuloni · 11-10-2014 6:54pm

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11-10-2014 8:15pm

TheBustedFlush wrote: »

Ok - I'll nibble....

The Rubber Room??

Don't know, but google comes up with this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rubber_Room amongst other things.

The film documents the daily routines of teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence. Several days, weeks, months, or even years are spent in these "Kafkaesque"[1] rubber rooms waiting for some kind of resolution; the filmmakers estimate that the average wait time is three years, but cited cases lasting as long as ten years. During this time in "exile", the teachers receive their full pay and benefit packages at the cost of up to 65 million dollars per year to the city,[2] spending each day reading, playing cards, balancing checkbooks, sleeping, or simply staring blankly at the walls. Interviewed teachers from the rubber room describe the high tensions that develop between teachers angry at their inexplicable situations that curiously lead to a "prison-like" environment in which teachers largely separate themselves into fiercely territorial cliques, sometimes even resulting in physical altercations.

a65b2cd · 11-10-2014 9:36pm

yuloni wrote: »

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This kind of nonsense is embarrassing especially when it is uttered by an important service delivery body. He eulogises about LOC8 codes so presumably they must be allocated sequentially. Are they? Do next door buildings have sequential LOC8 codes?

Are any of these Eircode unique identifiers sequential? YAX9, YAY0, XYYY, Y000, Y001

The Eircode website states that nearby properties will have Eircodes that are deliberately different to each other. If a caller provides an Eircode to an emergency service call centre, it will be used to extract a text address from the ECAD file. The call centre will confirm that the text address is correct with the caller. If the caller has given an incorrect Eircode then it will be in a very different location and the mistake can immediately be identified.

The check digit in a LOC8 code should tell you that it is a valid LOC8 code, IT WILL NOT TELL YOU THAT THE CALLER GAVE THE CORRECT LOC8 CODE. How could that happen? Well suppose I am an intensive user of LOC8 codes. How do I remember which LOC8 code relates to which location?

Can you explain to me how a person who comes across an accident while driving along a country road can pull over and provide the LOC8 code to an emergency service?

yuloni · 11-10-2014 9:42pm

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MBSnr · 11-10-2014 10:14pm

yuloni wrote: »

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Dream on....

So we install the app before dialling 999....?

Also my phone with GPS off can be at a location up to 7km away on a rural mast. GPS fix takes 5 mins to fix at times and I'm on an EDGE data network.

Am I really going to do the above or just phone 999?

a65b2cd · 11-10-2014 10:27pm

Mr. Kidd was an avid fan of postcodes back in January 2010:

... They will save lives by ensuring that emergency services can pinpoint a specific address. John Kidd of National fulltime Fire-fighters, SIPTU said:

..........“It is no exaggeration to say lives will be saved”.

yuloni · 11-10-2014 10:40pm

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SPDUB · 12-10-2014 7:43am

yuloni wrote: »

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You ( in the general sense ) may have been looking at those systems but the Minster at that time was talking about a code with a database lookup

yuloni · 12-10-2014 8:00am

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recedite · 12-10-2014 9:01pm

a65b2cd wrote: »

This kind of nonsense is embarrassing especially when it is uttered by an important service delivery body. He eulogises about LOC8 codes so presumably they must be allocated sequentially. Are they? Do next door buildings have sequential LOC8 codes?

The answer to your question is "No" and nobody said they did.
What Loc8 has is adjacency in its 3.5 Km square zones. This is what matters, because it is not humanly possible to memorise an entire database of numbers, but it is very possible to get to know the numbers of several zones of that size in your own local area.

It is worth looking at what Mr. Kidd actually said, just to see where this strawman of the "sequential" numbers originated from.
From this link in yuloni's post I have extracted the quote following it;

yuloni wrote: »

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John Kidd, chairman of the Irish Fire and Emergency Services Association, said the “mainly random nature” of the Eircode system would mean errors by users would go unnoticed, as well as cause confusion and may be “catastrophic” in terms of sending services to the wrong location....

Mr Kidd claimed the random number system was flawed, but pointed to cross-border services as an example of best practice.
“they are used to postcodes that can be learned and are predictable so that they can find localities easily from memory,” said Mr Kidd. “Eircode does not offer that capability and will not be visible on street signs to help the public raise the alarm.” [/QUOTE]So Mr. Kidd does not advocate a "sequential" code at all. He wants one that is "not random" has local zones that are arranged in some sort of order, and can be memorised by emergency workers and/or put up on a street sign. This would show you when you are moving from one zone in the grid into the next. An extra requirement that he has not mentioned is the "unique identifier" aspect at the level of the individual house.
These are all reasonable points, and the fact that Loc8 has already done it proves that these features are fairly easily achievable in any proper 21st century "National" code.

Where did the "sequential numbers" strawman come from then? Further down in the same article;

Communications Minister Alex White this week said “a sequential postcode structure is not feasible or necessary”.

Sadly, this statement tells us two things.
1. The new minister hasn't much of a clue about this stuff.
2. He has gone into defensive mode and is not going to interfere with the implementation of eircode as initiated by the previous minister.

A "sequential structure" is only relevant to a line. It would only be relevant here if all the houses in Ireland were on one long street, and all on the same side of the road. What we are actually talking about here is "adjacency" in two dimensions, x and y axis, which is harder to achieve.
See points 3, 6 and 7 here to see how it can be done, and has been done already.

a65b2cd wrote: »

The Eircode website states that nearby properties will have Eircodes that are deliberately different to each other.

"Deliberately" different my ar$e.
What possible advantage is there in sowing confusion among people by assigning random numbers to their houses (which aren't even "codes" as such, because there is zero info encoded in them)

a65b2cd · 12-10-2014 10:55pm

recedite wrote: »

"Deliberately" different my ar$e.

So IFESA are not looking to solve the problem of non-unique addresses. They will drive to these zones and sit in the fire tender until they see the flames or leave the siren on hoping the phone caller will loc8 them!

… and the Freight Transport Association are not looking for sequential codes?

… “Take, for example, two adjacent houses in Glasnevin, Dublin. One could be D11 ZXQ8, the other one D11 67TR. The four-character unique identifier is completely random, with no sequence or algorithm linking one house to the other.”

Can you give us an example of this adjacency concept in Dublin city centre. You stated that they are areas of around 3.5 square km. So let us say the area bounded by Capel Street/Dorset Street; North Circular Road; Phibsborough Road; and the Liffey. Do the zones have street and roads as boundaries or are they rectangles with random bits of roads on them? If the latter then I hope the IFESA guys have outstanding memories. Are they contiguous with the boundaries of Dublin Postal Districts?

yuloni · 13-10-2014 12:56am

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tvc15 · 13-10-2014 9:05am

yuloni wrote: »

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What if a road goes diagonally through the grid? I thought you could put these codes on street signs?

recedite · 13-10-2014 9:26am

tvc15 wrote: »

What if a road goes diagonally through the grid? I thought you could put these codes on street signs?

You mean like "Dublin Road, Portlaoise"? It will go through a lot of zones. Street signs are currently put up only at strategic locations, such as at junctions in urban areas. It would be easy to add in the code for that location at the end of the street name.

my3cents · 13-10-2014 9:37am

recedite wrote: »

You mean like "Dublin Road, Portlaoise"? It will go through a lot of zones. Street signs are currently put up only at strategic locations, such as at junctions in urban areas. It would be easy to add in the code for that location at the end of the street name.

Once the Emergency Services have the name of the road why are they going to want a less accurate code to tell them where the emergency is? Given the road name the next thing they need to know is the exact spot to stop not half of some over thought out code.

ukoda · 13-10-2014 10:10am

yuloni wrote: »

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seriously the general public are not going to give a flying hoot about any of this adjacency nonsense and no one is going to start working out adjacent codes of any sort when calling 112 in an unfamiliar area

If the emergency services are serious about saving lives then they should have launched an app years ago that can be used to call them and transmit the callers location

seriously the fricking AA have an app that does this!

In the example above about opening the Point8 app and getting location and then calling 112 is totally backwards. what it should be is...

Open the 112 app on phone and press call*

the call centre immediately knows your location. nothing else needed

*if someone had real brains they do a deal with the manufactures or carriers to pre install this tech in the background so the customer doesn't even need to install anything. It should automatic is this day and age to send your location to the emergencies when you call.

SpaceTime · 13-10-2014 10:21am

They have that in Iceland
You could even log your location with them by sms through the app if you were hiking in remote areas in case something happened. So they'd know your last known location.

ukoda · 13-10-2014 10:30am

SpaceTime wrote: »

They have that in Iceland
You could even log your location with them by sms through the app if you were hiking in remote areas in case something happened. So they'd know your last known location.

this is exactly the kind of initiatives the emergency services should be putting their efforts into instead of bitching about eircode.

if there are privacy concerns, then a simple pop up when you dial 112 with the question "submit your location? yes or no"

Sam Russell · 13-10-2014 10:55am

ukoda wrote: »

this is exactly the kind of initiatives the emergency services should be putting their efforts into instead of bitching about eircode.

if there are privacy concerns, then a simple pop up when you dial 112 with the question "submit your location? yes or no"

You are assuming everyone has a smart phone and there is adequate coverage.

The first project should have been to solve the lack of precise addresses in rural Ireland - that has not been done.

The actual design chosen, from the little we know about it, is flawed in many ways. It is a pity there has not been public discussion about the design.

In my opinion, a numeric post code has overwhelming advantages, and following the phone numbering system also has advantages. A 5 digit code that gets down to 100 or so addresses would be good to start with, and leave the precise code for Government use, and let them pay for the maintenance of it.

ukoda · 13-10-2014 11:02am

Sam Russell wrote: »

You are assuming everyone has a smart phone and there is adequate coverage.

My post was to show how backward the idea of opening the point8 app and getting a location before calling 112 is, it's a step in the wrong direction for the emergency services. Both need a smartphone but my suggestion is 100 times better.

And let's be realistic, a vast majority of people have smartphones so it's stil a good idea. And as also another user pointed out, location can be sent via sms.

National Postcodes to be introduced

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