Eircom & wikileaks

croo

It seems wikileaks & the Indo are doing an expose on the leaked US cables that have some relevance to Ireland.

the full story
Eircom was 'Luddite' in attitude to technology
By Shane Phelan
Thursday June 02 2011

According to a cable written by then US Ambassador James Kenny, Mr Doherty and Eamon Malloy, an assistant secretary at the Department of Communications, both claimed that Eircom was resisting competition and advances in technology for its own benefit.

The two officials said that Eircom, facing little competition in the late 1990s, had charged prices that were five times the EU average and had slowed broadband roll-out to favour its own dial-up system.

I guess for any regular reader of this forum, at least, there is nothing "news" in all this. If nothing else it does clear up the question of just how two faced comreg are. Of course the Indo didn't mention how one of its key share holders was also behind Eircom for a substantial period! Pots, kettles & black come to mind.

Solair

Well that's what you get for selling-off a monopoly.

They really did very little to ensure that eircom was operating in a competitive environment before they rushed to sell it off.

The local exchange / access infrastructure should have been kept in state hands, possibly put out to tender every X years.

What was worse was that when this was going on Fianna Failure did very little other than sit on their hands, giving Comreg/ODTR very limited powers, while Ireland rapidly slipped down the technology rankings.

Meanwhile, the cable industry provided no competition either due to the fact that it was stuck in a model of thinking that its only unique-selling-point was that it had BBC/ITV/C4 !!

watty

Comreg/ODTR didn't even enforce Digital rollouts mandated in Chorus and NTL licences.

They did deprive Chorus of a Wireless phone licence. But would not act against lack of MMDS and Cable upgrade process.

lucernarian

watty wrote: »

Comreg/ODTR didn't even enforce Digital rollouts mandated in Chorus and NTL licences.

They did deprive Chorus of a Wireless phone licence. But would not act against lack of MMDS and Cable upgrade process.

Reading back on newspaper reports and the like about this, I wonder why there was such a push for digital TV from regulators and government. Internet and telephony is far more important to the functioning of business and government and perhaps society as a whole and than having a larger channel lineup with unreliable set top boxes.

It's an interesting article, I just wish Phil Nolan was still in charge to see the massive boom in DSL from 2006 onwards. He'd look very silly by then if he claimed there was no demand.

watty

Cable Broadband downlink *IS* DVB-C, same transport stream and modulation as Digital TV on cable. I believed that Broadband and phone was supposed to be part of the Digital TV. Chorus even had a Wireless Broadband called Powernet using MMDS style dishes but they ran out of money to roll it out.

The Upstream part of Cable Broadband is 15MHz to 45MHz or 5MHz to 65MHz. You replace all your Analogue service Cable trunk amps that work from 40MHz to 560MHz with amps that do 5MHz to 65MHz *UPSTREAM* and 88MHz (or 110MHz) to 870MHz (or 1200MHz) downstream.

There was no demand because (a) Not available, (b) Madly overpriced when it was.

You lose so much Analogue bandwidth doing Cable Broadband that you really need Digital for the TV.

Also UPC *could* (and wanted too) roll out DOCSIS broadband to MMDS customers. But Comreg actually reduced MMDS band and would not kick eircom of the spectrum they squatted on doing nothing with at 2.3GHz and 3.5GHz. Nor allow ANYONE a real national 3.6GHz license other than Eircom. Off the shelf combo MMDS/DOCSIS broadband gear exists for 700 MHz, 800 MHz, 2.3GHz, 2.5GHz, 2.6GHz, 5.8GHz, 10.5GHz and DOCSIS is easily adapted for ANY radio band unlike LTE/Wimax by a cheap roof top adaptor (basically 2 way MMDS technology) and then coax to indoors with regular cable modem (5MHz to 65MHz TX, and 110MHz to 862MHZ RX, converted with roof top box/aerial). The coax can be tee to a DVB-c TV box. MMDS is cheap 2.6Ghz to 400MHz adaptor for regular DVB-T or DVB-C on coax cable.

You'd think Comreg doesn't want good national Broadband. To this day only eircom has national Fixed Wireless licences, and hardly utilise them.

Because of roof top aerials, the two way version of MMDS (Cable Broadband DOCSIS over Wireless) is 8x more efficent than 3G/HSPA, LTE or Mobile WiMax, because those *ARE* mobile with small omnidirectional indoor aerials. Additionally the standard channel is 8MHz which is thus about 50% more capacity than an 5MHz channel on 3G or LTE. Not only that, but a DOCSIS base can in theory have 110 active 8MHz channels simultaneously in any mix of TV and data. A DOCSIS 3.0 modem has channel bonding built in to aggregate 5 or more shared or exclusive 8MHz channels.

Also LTE, 3G, WiMax have limited variation of channel size (3G is 5MHz, LTE is 5, 10 or 20 and WiMax 10). DOCSIS/DVB-C can use ANY channel width from 2MHz to 8MHz, though Set-boxes and Modems for other than 6MHz and 8MHz are not standard order.

lucernarian

What has all that stuff about LTE and how MMDS can supply got to do with why regulators specifically wanted digital TV rollouts on cable? It's only speculation to think broadband and phone would go hand in hand with this regulatory condition.

For the record, Casey Cablevision and the outfit in Longford run a perfectly successful cable network with analogue TV only and use their DVB-C EuroDOCSIS for broadband. It's only a commercial matter of whether they want more bandwidth used for DOCSIS or for plain PAL TV. The last time I read about it, they had 30-odd analogue TV channels.

There was even an ISP who have investigated using a coax cable network in a housing estate in Drogheda purely for broadband delivery but the residents were too concerned for their fascia boards looking unsightly.

Stinicker

Solair wrote: »

What was worse was that when this was going on Fianna Failure did very little other than sit on their hands, giving Comreg/ODTR very limited powers, while Ireland rapidly slipped down the technology rankings.

One of Fianna Fail's main buddys Tony O'Reilly was benefiting nicely out of the screwing of the consumer so maintaining the status quo was most importance to them. Beyond that there was no other benefit to the party members, relations, cronies and connected people to do anything about Eircom. They were all too busy granting planning permission to build 500 hundred houses in a village in ballygobackwards and ensuring that maximum state funds were diverted into their friends and cronies.

If broadband was some kind of industry that could line the pockets of the Fianna Failure traitors then I could guarantee they'd be a Terabit Fibre connection rolled out to the top of Carrantouhill. Fianna Fail <.cg snip> and I refuse to even read that link because it links to a Media outlet owned by Tony O'Reilly, you think FoxNews is bad take a look at the garbage that spouts out.

lucernarian

I highly doubt Tony O'Reilly is a friend of every FFer considering his newspapers was the most pro FG-paper until about 1996 or so when they had a falling out with the then-govt.

You don't really know much about the tripe Fox news spouts out when you think the Indo is on the same level! The politics or news and media forums aren't here anyway.

croo

Stinicker wrote: »

One of Fianna Fail's main buddys Tony O'Reilly was benefiting nicely out of the screwing of the consumer so maintaining the status quo was most importance to them. Beyond that there was no other benefit to the party members, relations, cronies and connected people to do anything about Eircom.

Hmmm ... I seem to remember some link between Eircom & FF funding.
Was it this ? Political "funding" often seems to me (in Ireland at least) to have many similarities with icebergs... what you see on the surface is a tiny proportion of what exists hidden from sight.

EDIT:
I think I might have misread your post Stinicker and we are actually making the same point!

watty

To_be_confirmed wrote: »

What has all that stuff about LTE and how MMDS can supply got to do with why regulators specifically wanted digital TV rollouts on cable? It's only speculation to think broadband and phone would go hand in hand with this regulatory condition.

If OTDR / Comreg didn't have broadband in mind then someone in charge then should be charged with criminal negligence.