National Postcodes to be introduced

yuloni

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ukoda

yuloni wrote: »

I'm looking at the eircode pricing posted here in the context of Nightline... but it's coming out quite high

Nightline will require the ECAD which includes the geo-coords... if they're to do things like route optimization and navigation

So say Nightline offices, depots and sort centres across the country will require 100 end-user licences.
Then, going on a post a few pages back, they process over 1 million items per month... so we'll say 15 million items per annum


Based on the screens below, the costs to Nightline will be as follows:

• Direct end-user licence: €500
  
  
• 100x user licences: (10*180) + (40*150) + (50*120) = €13,800
  
  
• 15M transactions: (100*0.05) + (900*0.045) + (9000*0.04) + (91,000*0.035) + (890,499*0.03) + (14,109,501*0.01) = €171,400.48
  
  
  
• TOTAL: €185,700.48

Can this be correct? Almost €200,000 to use eircode per year!? Adding the initial cost of upgrading their existing systems, scanning and sorting hardware, navigation systems and admin staff and you're looking at at least another €200K

It's hard to see how they could benefit from this considering they would need to be incurring costs of €400K per annum finding houses houses with non-unique addresses


So if my maths is correct, half a mill to get started give or take. That's... steep!

No it's wrong. Maximum transaction usage cost is capped at 30k

And why on earth would they need 100 licenses??

yuloni

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ukoda

yuloni wrote: »

I read it as the most one single user licence could knock up was €30K. So the most eircode can collect from any org is €30,000?

Re. licencing... 100 end-user seats would be optimistic for any nationwide organisation. Nightline will have back office staff with access, systems in their sort centres will be querying the API, localised depots will have licences. As enterprise software licencing goes, the eircode per user licence fee is on the low side so it's neither here nor there

If there OCR system is centralised (which I believe it is) then 1 API can cover the whole country which means one user licence. Once they query the database once then they can sort the info locally and do their route planning with the geo's

They will also maybe want 1 or 2 licences for staff to do manual look ups, again they take a picture of every package that comes in so this can be done centrally and not every hub will need a licence.

Anyway, I'm sure they have done their own maths and are happy with it

yuloni

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ukoda

The honest answer is I don't know, I'm reading it different To you,

Actually this is interesting.

If I was a company and I got my database of 2.2 million customers encoded....would I even need the transactions costs then? I mean my own database now has all eircodes and all geo codes in it...?

So is it a case of they will only ever need to query the database once per customer ever? And store what they get back locally? If that's the case then the maximum transaction would only ever be 2.2 million

This seems likely as at my work, we have encoded our database against the geo directory so we have locally stored all geo codes on our own database against our own customers, so it's likely that Nightline or others wouldn't have to query ECAD for every single package.

yuloni

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Bayberry

ukoda wrote: »

If there OCR system is centralised (which I believe it is) then 1 API can cover the whole country which means one user licence. Once they query the database once then they can sort the info locally and do their route planning with the geo's

That's funny, that is.

Two guys in the depot with scan guns, two licenses - every time they scan an eircode and trigger a lookup, they are "using" the system.

The maximum cost of per-user licenses is €30K:
10*€180 for the first 10, 40*€150 for the next 40, 50*€120 for the next 50 and 162*€100 for users 101 to 262. After that, additional users don't cost anything.

Data usage is charged on a Per User or Per Transaction basis.

€30K would buy you about a million transactions, so if you have a small staff making a lot of transaction, youd save money by buying per-user licenses - your staff of 20 would only cost €3,300 for unlimited transactions.
If you have a large staff that only need to do occassional lookups, you'd be better off doing it on a per-transaction basis. For instance if the 20 staff above are only likely to do 20,000 lookups (5 each per day), it'd only cost €755 on a per transaction basis.

Bayberry

ukoda wrote: »

So is it a case of they will only ever need to query the database once per customer ever? And store what they get back locally? If that's the case then the maximum transaction would only ever be 2.2 million

I'm pretty sure copyright law covers this - eircode retains copyright in the data, even if you make your own local copy, and the terms of whatever license you sign to access eircode will clarify that.

Even if you end up hitting your own local copy of the data, you'll still owe eircode for those accesses, either on a per-user or per-transaction basis

ukoda

Bayberry wrote: »

That's funny, that is.

Two guys in the depot with scan guns, two licenses - every time they scan an and trigger a lookup, they are "using" the system.

Are you sure about that? If Nightline has their own database, then the first thing would be to look up against exisiting records, then only query ECAD if you actually need the geocode?

Like I said, it's perfectly possible to have your own internal database encoded with geocodes and eircodes and not have to query ECAD every single time.

ukoda

Bayberry wrote: »

I'm pretty sure copyright law covers this - eircode retains copyright in the data, even if you make your own local copy, and the terms of whatever license you sign to access eircode will clarify that.

Even if you end up hitting your own local copy of the data, you'll still owe eircode for those accesses, either on a per-user or per-transaction basis

No I don't think this is true. I could collect eircodes directly from my customers and use ECAD to get the geocode and store it locally, that's only one transaction. It will work the same as the geo directory I assume and that's what's done at the moment.

Don't post things as fact if you aren't sure. Because no one actually knows at this moment in time so you can't claim exactly what is and isn't the case. Unless you've inside knowledge?

Bayberry

ukoda wrote: »

Are you sure about that?

Yes - that's the way "per-user" licenses always work, larger organizations pay more than smaller organizations, but they have the flexibility to chop and change within the license mix to suit their particular purposes. If you could just funnel all the queries through a single computer, and get away with a single-user license, then nobody would ever buy more than one user-license, and the cost of that license would have to increase substantially, which would lock out the true small users.

Bayberry

ukoda wrote: »

No I don't think this is true. I could collect eircodes directly from my customers and use ECAD to get the geocode and store it locally, that's only one transaction. It will work the same as the geo directory I assume and that's what's done at the moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_Directive

The acts restricted by copyright are similar to those for other types of work (Art. 5):

• temporary or permanent reproduction by any means and in any form, in whole or in part;
• translation, adaptation, arrangement and any other alteration;
• any form of distribution to the public of the database or of copies thereof, subject to the exhaustion of rights;
• any communication, display or performance to the public;
• any reproduction, distribution, communication, display or performance to the public of a translation, adaptation, etc.

ukoda

Bayberry wrote: »

Yes - that's the way "per-user" licenses always work, larger organizations pay more than smaller organizations, but they have the flexibility to chop and change within the license mix to suit their particular purposes. If you could just funnel all the queries through a single computer, and get away with a single-user license, then nobody would ever buy more than one user-license, and the cost of that license would have to increase substantially, which would lock out the true small users.

But you can have eircodes and geo's appended to your exisiting database and not need to query ECAD each time, eircode have no control or insight into how many times you then look up your own database.

one of the services offered to encoding of companies own internal database, it is highly unlikely that within the terms of that service that eircode then are allowed access to your database to tell how many times you query it

I think you are mistaken

ukoda

Bayberry wrote: »

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_Directive

That all refers to making a copy of the database? Nothin about what we are talking about. That's to stop people making a copy and selling it themselves or publishing it

Eircode are promoting 3rd parties to encode companies private databases with eircode. I think you're confused by what copyright means

Bayberry

ukoda wrote: »

Don't post things as fact if you aren't sure. Because no one actually knows at this moment in time so you can't claim exactly what is and isn't the case. Unless you've inside knowledge?

You don't need insider knowledge to know that per-user licenses are widely used in a particular way wherever intellectual property is being licensed, whether it's music, research publications, newspaper archives, scientific databases or, in this case address and geo inorfmation.

Don't go trying to impose rules on other people that you aren't prepared to follow to the letter yourself.

And if you EVER accuse me again of having "insider knowledge", I'll be asking the mods to ban your account. That's twice in the last couple of days that you've pulled that stunt.

Bayberry

ukoda wrote: »

That all refers to making a copy of the database? Nothin about what we are talking about. That's to stop people making a copy and selling it themselves or publishing it

Eircode are promoting 3rd parties to encode companies private databases with eircode. I think you're confused by what copyright means

Fine, go ahead. Make your own copy of eircodes copyrighted data and use it without paying a license to eircode.

The fact that eircode has a liberal license that they hope will encourage the widest possible use of their copyrighted data doesn't mean that the data, and the income stream that it will generate for eircode, isn't protected.

I'm not a lawyer.

But neither are you.

ukoda

Bayberry wrote: »

Fine, go ahead. Make your own copy of eircodes copyrighted data and use it without paying a license to eircode.

The fact that eircode has a liberal license that they hope will encourage the widest possible use of their copyrighted data doesn't mean that the data, and the income stream that it will generate for eircode, isn't protected.

I'm not a lawyer.

But neither are you.

I've no intention of making my own copy nor did I ever say anyone should or needed to:

Will you just please listen to what I said:

There are 3rd parties (auto address) who are authorised by eircode, to encode a private companies customer database with eircode and geocodes. There is a cost involved in this. All legal all fine.

My only query is, once that database is encoded, there would be no need to continuously query ECAD every single time you wanted an eircode or geocode. Eircode would have no way of monitoring your own internal database queries and it's unlikely they would try.

You're going off on a rant about lawyers and me making a copy of the database? Where did you get that from. I'm just trying to have a discussion

yuloni

This post has been deleted.

ukoda

yuloni wrote: »

But the pricing guide states that the resellers / service providers have to inform eircode of your usage levels... which I can only assume is so they can still charge you for usage even if you opt to use it within your own database

By the looks of it, unless you collect your eircodes one by one from your customers... you're going to be continuously paying for it... whether you got it encoded it into your own database or not

But think about, does that usage mean the number of encodings they did or the number of times you use each entry for a look up, is ericode going to send someone into your company every month to pull a report of your own internal database queries? The 3rd party will be long gone after the encoding is done, so is it down to each company to declare their own usage to ericode? Are we talking about installing some kind of monitoring tool on that companies database to monitor queries? Do you see what in getting at? It's not enforceable

There are companies out there smart enough to be able to encode their own database without the need for a reseller, if they buy the database directly from ericode who monitors their usage?

I just think it's a bit of a grey area

recedite

ukoda wrote: »

I had an account with 3 mobile last year and they validated my address from the geo directory at sign up, they then had my phone number, date of birth, address with geo's, bank details for direct debit and other info)

Are they selling that database info, or are they keeping it confidential?

ukoda

recedite wrote: »

Are they selling that database info, or are they keeping it confidential?

Who knows! But ericode won't affect wether they do or they don't sell it.

Impetus

The area code map on the Comreg website for geographic phone numbering would make a simple understandable basis for a numeric postcode system. Just delete the initial “0”.
Eg 51000 is centred on Waterford city centre, 91000 is centred on Galway city centre. With local codes branched off the county town.

http://www.comreg.ie/licensing_and_services/area_code_maps.552.1040.html

There was this idiot on CNBC on Friday evening proposing to postcode the world – using three English language words to point to any lat long point on the planet. Eg CAT DOG MASON might be one’s “postcode”. Aside from the arrogant assumption that everybody speaks, reads and writes the English language across the world, it is just as easy to number roads in places like rural Africa, and use kilometric numbering to point to an address along each numbered road – eg 60015 route N99 – being just over 60 km from the start of route N99.
It seems to me that the proposed Eircode is trying to do a similar task to the random words guy – except it uses random gibberish to point to a lat/long point, instead of random words.

Sam Russell

This pricing list shows what a huge revenue generator the Eircode is destined to be.

Unless everyone ignores it.

Impetus

SpaceTime wrote: »

All La Poste sees is "Irlande" or "Irlande" or "Eire"

What causes serious confusion is the UK countries actually.

A tiny bit politically sensitive.

While one agrees with much of what you say, La Poste use the same system as most other EU postal administrations - aside from British PO. If you post a letter in Cannes for example, this goes to the centre de tri postale at Nice airport where the full Irish address is scanned and matched to a database of Irish addresses. They put a barcode serial number on the envelope and transmit the full address to An Post electronically, together with details such as the weight, package type, where it was posted in Cannes etc. So when the letter arrives at the Irish end the address does not have to be re-scanned/recognised - they just read the French barcode and look up the destination co-ordinates (lat/long) in the database.

Mail across Europe generally is based on a single barcode. However mail from GB invariably has two barcodes - the British one and the Irish one. Which is why mail from GB takes longer to be delivered in Ireland and other European countries than mail from France, Germany, etc. Britain's barcode is based on their postcode system. Most other postal administrations use a barcode which is just a package ID serial number which references to a full address scan and match job done in another state. Aside from GB, and a few tiny states that have no mail automation to speak of, the European postal system works as a single entity, using common standards, which eliminate duplication, and mis-readings of postcodes which can cause letters to go astray.

Impetus

Sam Russell wrote: »

This pricing list shows what a huge revenue generator the Eircode is destined to be.

Unless everyone ignores it.

The absence of proper postal addresses (ie street name, house number, town name) for 50% or more of Irish addresses is not solved by turning Eircode into a huge revenue generator. The addressing problem will still remain. Which is fraud on the householder and business mail user.

Impetus

ukoda wrote: »

Who knows! But ericode won't affect wether they do or they don't sell it.

This is not a simple issue for farm addresses, for example. Not many farms have farm names. The farm is often connected to the family name who own or operate the farm. An Eircode database will therefore contain the names and addresses and geo-coordinates of thousands of farms. All needlessly. They could instead give each farm a road address and number based on km scale and use a 4 or 5 digit postcode as a national postal district number, as is the norm in 99% of the world that has postcodes.

Ireland - they are all out of step except for my Jonnie.

dr.fuzzenstein

Impetus wrote: »

This is not a simple issue for farm addresses, for example. Not many farms have farm names. The farm is often connected to the family name who own or operate the farm. An Eircode database will therefore contain the names and addresses and geo-coordinates of thousands of farms. All needlessly. They could instead give each farm a road address and number based on km scale and use a 4 or 5 digit postcode as a national postal district number, as is the norm in 99% of the world that has postcodes.

Ireland - they are all out of step except for my Jonnie.

So design and use a completely separate postal code system for farms? And one that requires the user to say "OK, I am now at the junction of R415 and R612, I need to zero my mileage meter and drive another 4.5 km, then stop and see where I am", instead of putting an Eircode into a SatNav.
Yes, that makes sense...

Bayberry

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

And one that requires the user to say "OK, I am now at the junction of R415 and R612, I need to zero my mileage meter and drive another 4.5 km, then stop and see where I am", instead of putting an Eircode into a SatNav.

So you think that they can add in a whole eircode database into a GPS, but can't handle the distance from a junction? Even though that's how they calculate individual house locations now (estimated distance from the known end of the road).

Victor

ukoda wrote: »

Don't post things as fact if you aren't sure. Because no one actually knows at this moment in time so you can't claim exactly what is and isn't the case. Unless you've inside knowledge?

Bayberry wrote: »

And if you EVER accuse me again of having "insider knowledge", I'll be asking the mods to ban your account. That's twice in the last couple of days that you've pulled that stunt.

The two of you need to lose the attitude.

Moderator