eircom Announces fibre roll out

watty

Because you can have Billions of Debt as long as you have a revenue stream to service it.

But the revenue is dropping fast due to competition from Mobile and Cable, as the Line Rental cash cow is x3 or x4 what it should be (to pay of the Debt interest).

pat13wx

D'Peoples Voice wrote: »

you should have left it at that

I was tempted - but only for a few seconds:D

TechnoKid

Does anyone want to answer my question on "What do you mean by connecting to the exchange?" :P

bealtine

TechnoKid wrote: »

Does anyone want to answer my question on "What do you mean by connecting to the exchange?" :P

The question is a bit out of context...care to elaborate?

Solair

TechnoKid wrote: »

Does anyone want to answer my question on "What do you mean by connecting to the exchange?" :P

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to ask.

In Irish and British telecommunications terminology, 'the exchange' refers to any node on the public telecommunications network where end users' lines are concentrated and connected to a switching system or data node.

The 'local exchange' contains:

• a digital voice & ISDN switching system. In eircom's network these would be either Ericsson AXE or Alcatel-Lucent E10 switches. This provides your dial tone, call management services like call waiting/voicemail/caller ID etc, billing and of course connects all of your calls. It also provides ISDN services. These are a big deal for connecting companies' internal office phone systems, providing direct inward dial etc etc.
• Broadband data service equipment - for DSL, Metro ethernet and other technologies.
• Equipment for leased lines and major data users with direct fibre connections.
• Power supplies, battery back up and diesel generators.
• Backhaul equipment for connecting all of these systems to a core fibre optic network, which is increasingly entirely IP based. Typically an exchange will have multiple fibre routes to other near-by exchanges.
• Bigger exchanges also have space for co-location i.e. other companies e.g. Smart, BT Ireland, Magnet etc can install their own voice and data equipment and connect their customers directly to it. They also often house / host equipment for mobile operators and may have a mobile mast on site.

The physical size of your local exchange building would depend on how many people it is serving, if it is a major network node and also when the building was constructed. Older equipment often required very large amounts of floor space, much of which is now just empty.

There are also some large exchanges which have no end users i.e. they are only for transit traffic providing connections between other exchanges and managing / routing data through the core network and onto other providers' networks.

eircom and other providers also have international gateway exchanges which handle traffic in and out of their networks to overseas operators.

So, typically it's either:

A small air-conditioned/cooled cabinet on the street with various cards and switching equipment packed in.
A pre-fabricated unit that is installed in what looks like an air-conditioned shipping container. (these are often located behind Garda stations or post offices)
A small building, the size of a large garage or shed.
A building about the size of a primary school
Or, if it's a major switching node somewhere like Dublin or Cork it could be a whole office block. Chuchfield, the main node in Cork for example is huge. It's about the size of a typical corporate office campus.

With fibre-to-kerb technology i.e. the fibre rollout. The whole idea is that 'the local exchange' gets moved much closer to your house. It means that instead of having miles of copper cable running back to a traditional exchange, your line terminates in a box outside on the street somewhere and goes by fibre from there into the network. It also can mean providing fibre connections directly to your home instead of a pair of twisted copper wires, which is what most of us still have today.

So, basically instead of having one big exchange, you scatter the exchange's local equipment around placing it in cabinets on every street.

UPC are already doing this in many areas, with fibre to a local node and then coaxial cable to your house which is what's allowing them to offer customers with 100mbit/s broadband instead of the measly up to 24mbit/s (and a lot less in reality) that is possible over a traditional telephone network.

So, hopefully that might answer your question...

johnmcdnl

so yeah I'm just going to assume I'm not getting it out in rural Cavan for another couple years by which time I'll have left home and be living in an area which will have had UPC for 10 years time so I won't even be able to brag to the neighbours about my super fast broadband as they'll have all got it years beforehand life sucks balls sometimes


saying that I suppose it's still at least something to see eircom making some sort of an effort

Murtinho

eldwaro wrote: »

itll still be a loada ****e! ireland is light years behind other countries, i lived in holland for 6 months and its mortifying how fast it is over there

I lived in a large city in sweden for 11 yrs and find it much better here, in wexford. Ireland is far from light yrs behind other countries.

Murtinho

I think they were installing this in my estate this week,the lads doing it said it would be ready in a month or so,tv, broadband etc.

anyone got any details when its ready and howmuch it will cost?

lucernarian

If you look at some of the links at the beginning of this thread on www.nextgenerationnetwork.ie there's some documents discussing the timetable for all this. I think I remember reading that all lines in the two areas will be "enabled" by late november or early December. The 50% point is mentioned as being in the latter half of September.

Solair

Murtinho wrote: »

I lived in a large city in sweden for 11 yrs and find it much better here, in wexford. Ireland is far from light yrs behind other countries.

I agree. There's quite a lot of not comparing like with like going on when we talk about broadband.

Urban Ireland has services which are quite comparable to, and sometimes a lot better than, urban areas in other countries. I lived in a reasonable sized city in Spain and the DSL was diabolically bad and you could only get 20mbit/s absolute max on cable and it was very pricey compared to UPC.

Cable broadband always drives the speed in any market as the technology is just vastly superior to DSL. In Ireland, we didn't really have a competent cable company that was taking broadband seriously until UPC arrived on the scene. Within a few short years, that has had a really big impact on the market.

Outside of urban Ireland (and I include even small villages in that) there is a huge problem with planning more than with broadband. There's a lot of one-off housing and isolated developments that are very difficult to connect to anything.

If you don't live in an actual urban area or town or village, you really are almost 'off grid'.

We have the same problems with services like sewage.

Ireland's population spread is actually very unusual by European or even North American standards. We have vast amounts of one-off housing scattered in the countryside.

Those kinds of developments' only hope is wireless technologies. Fibre, cable, DSL etc are really just not appropriate in those kinds of situations.

We need a two prong approach :

Fibre-roll outs and cable TV access in urban areas.
High-tech wireless in rural / near urban scatter hinterland areas.

Sponge Bob

Solair wrote: »

In Ireland, we didn't really have a competent cable company that was taking broadband seriously until UPC arrived on the scene.

Yes we did. Let me fix that outrageous assertion.:cool:

Casey Cablevision in Dungarvan County Waterford continue to be the leading residential ISP in Ireland since they first launched in 1998, currently providing an AVERAGE 35mbits which is nearly 10 times faster than eircom

However IN DUBLIN we didn't really have a competent cable company that was taking broadband seriously until UPC arrived on the scene.

Solair

Sponge Bob wrote: »

Solair wrote: »

In Ireland, we didn't really have a competent cable company that was taking broadband seriously until UPC arrived on the scene.

Yes we did. Let me fix that outrageous assertion.:cool:

Casey Cablevision in Dungarvan County Waterford continue to be the leading residential ISP in Ireland since they first launched in 1998, currently providing an AVERAGE 35mbits which is nearly 10 times faster than eircom

However IN DUBLIN we didn't really have a competent cable company that was taking broadband seriously until UPC arrived on the scene.

Yeah, they were pioneering and deserve credit. It's a shame that NTL and Chorus were so content providing bog standard cable in Cork, Dublin etc etc for way way too long?

johnmcdnl

To_be_confirmed wrote: »

If you look at some of the links at the beginning of this thread on www.nextgenerationnetwork.ie there's some documents discussing the timetable for all this. I think I remember reading that all lines in the two areas will be "enabled" by late november or early December. The 50% point is mentioned as being in the latter half of September.

I'm after looking at the maps on that site and by the luck of it one of those cables connecting the towns are going to be passing right by my house which is about 3 miles away from one of the towns...

does this mean that I'll be able to get the higher speed internet now or will I still have to live in one of the towns to be able to get it...

I don't exactly understand where exactly I connect to and all of that.....

basically if the cable is going past my house will I be able to get the fibre powered internet....


also - when is all of this due to be completed...

bealtine

johnmcdnl wrote: »

basically if the cable is going past my house will I be able to get the fibre powered internet....

No, as it currently stands the fibre is to feed the exchange and your phone wires come from the exchange. So there will be no change for you.

johnmcdnl

bealtine wrote: »

No, as it currently stands the fibre is to feed the exchange and your phone wires come from the exchange. So there will be no change for you.

was waiting to be told this oh well what can ya do

yuloni

This post has been deleted.

DingDong

Solair wrote: »

Yeah, they were pioneering and deserve credit. It's a shame that NTL and Chorus were so content providing bog standard cable in Cork, Dublin etc etc for way way too long?

It wasn't that NTL was content providing bog standard cable they where flat broke. They invested a huge amount into cablelink network over 2 years (something like 80-100 million) before going bust. They also put a lot of duct into the ground which has only ended being use in the last couple of years.

Devalued and struggling with debts of around $18bn, NTL had to seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy-protection in May 2002 in order to organise a refinancing deal. The company did not emerge from protection until January 2003, having converted around $11bn of debt into shares — technically, this amounted to the largest debt default in US corporate history. The company reduced its debt to $6.4bn. A re-organisation split NTL itself into NTL Inc. (covering the UK and Irish markets) and NTL Europe Inc. (for the French, Swiss and German parts of the corporation). New executives replaced the NTL president, CEO and co-founder Barclay Knapp, as well as Stephen Carter, the MD and COO.

Solair

DingDong wrote: »

It wasn't that NTL was content providing bog standard cable they where flat broke. They invested a huge amount into cablelink network over 2 years (something like 80-100 million) before going bust. They also put a lot of duct into the ground which has only ended being use in the last couple of years.

It doesn't really matter what the reason was. There was absolutely no reason for NTL Ireland or Chorus to be bankrupt. They'd access to wealthy, young, internet-savvy market with a huge cable TV penetration rate.

If they were unable to tap that market, there was something severely wrong with how they were being run!

The Irish cable market should be EXTREMELY profitable and should have been even more so during the celtic tigre.

To be quite honest, NTL/Chorus failure and eircom's massive debt problem is just mind-boggling and totally inexplicable based purely on the market conditions anyway.

UPC have definitely improved things no end!

Incidentally, NTL weren't THAT bad. Chorus were just a complete joke.

Sponge Bob

Solair wrote: »

Incidentally, NTL weren't THAT bad. Chorus were just a complete joke.

NTL, formerly Cablelink and owned by eircom and RTE were tolerable.

Chorus, largely assembled by Tony O Reilly in the 1990s from misc cowboy cable operators and eventually a single competent operator in the Kilkenny/Tipperary area was an unmitigated disaster.

Tonys earlier foray into MMDS in the late 1980's and early 1990's was another disaster but he made loads of money on eircom between 2001 and 2005.

lucernarian

I believe the CMI parts of Chorus' network were also reasonably well-ran and were undergoing trials of DOCSIS in Malahide I think when they were merged. The rest of their network in Swords for example was also more up to date than other cable networks particularly Cablelink's cobbled-together network in Dublin.

Sponge Bob

There is some info on how Chorus was cobbled together in this short thread, particularly a piece by ICDG from 2000

Only three towns, Cavan, Dungarvan and Longford, are outside the UPC network. Significant towns with no cable are Letterkenny Dundalk and Drogheda and Wexford....too near the border as was Wexford to Wales.

Freddie59

Sponge Bob wrote: »

There is some info on how Chorus was cobbled together in this short thread, particularly a piece by ICDG from 2000

Only three towns, Cavan, Dungarvan and Longford, are outside the UPC network. Significant towns with no cable are Letterkenny Dundalk and Drogheda and Wexford....too near the border as was Wexford to Wales.

+Tramore, County Waterford and Youghal, Co. Cork.

TechnoKid

Sponge Bob wrote: »

There is some info on how Chorus was cobbled together in this short thread, particularly a piece by ICDG from 2000

Only three towns, Cavan, Dungarvan and Longford, are outside the UPC network. Significant towns with no cable are Letterkenny Dundalk and Drogheda and Wexford....too near the border as was Wexford to Wales.

Are you saying anything one of the services from UPC or triple-play?

lucernarian

I thought Wexford had a basic cable TV service... There was an announcement made by UPC a few years ago and it was discussed here (http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2054963756) but new posts are no longer allowed...

Is there anyone in Wexford who can tell us what's going on there with UPC or indeed with the eircom fibre to the home network?! The one address I tried from wexford which showed up in UPC's checker only listed Digital TV and not Digital+, meaning MMDS or a cable system distributing MMDS is what's being used.

TheMilkyPirate

To_be_confirmed wrote: »

I thought Wexford had a basic cable TV service... There was an announcement made by UPC a few years ago and it was discussed here (http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2054963756) but new posts are no longer allowed...

Is there anyone in Wexford who can tell us what's going on there with UPC or indeed with the eircom fibre to the home network?! The one address I tried from wexford which showed up in UPC's checker only listed Digital TV and not Digital+, meaning MMDS or a cable system distributing MMDS is what's being used.

We can get UPC TV alright but i wouldn't know what type, And Eircom have been out all over the town the last few weeks installing new cabinets and laying cable, See at least two van a day. Including right at the entrance to my street last tuesday

lucernarian

Is it UPC through "piped cable" or using MMDS aerials?

Sponge Bob

There are towns where UPC delivers to an estate by MMDS and pipes to the premises thereafter ...eg Monasterevin. ie there is no pipe 'to' the estate itself.

lucernarian

Indeed that's right. Balbriggan is another example. But the reason why I ask if cable is used is that if there's a distribution system, it's not so challenging for UPC to broadband enable the area than when there's no existing cable network.

The hard part is laying the proper cable around a town in the first place.

Solair

To_be_confirmed wrote: »

I believe the CMI parts of Chorus' network were also reasonably well-ran and were undergoing trials of DOCSIS in Malahide I think when they were merged. The rest of their network in Swords for example was also more up to date than other cable networks particularly Cablelink's cobbled-together network in Dublin.

The ex Cork Multichannel network had some, albeit quite limited, rollout of broadband and phone as early as 2000 / 2001. They certainly had big plans to roll it out widely.
There was significant duct laying done in areas of Cork City under the Irish Multichannel brand.
By the time the Chorus re-brand happened, they seemed to be more interested in whacking up MMDS antennae in cable-franchise areas and also seemed to stop their network build out. I'm not even sure that much of the ducting was used until UPC came along and started to rollout "fibre power".
In some cases people were even "upgraded" to MMDS in areas with faulty cable!
When the Chorus&NTL merger happened, there was a massive improvement to the Cork City cable line up almost overnight. It went from a very limited mirror of Chorus MMDS line up to a full, >100 channel cable line up that mirrored NTL Digital in Dublin and the phase-out of analogue in Cork began with a box swap programme.

Sponge Bob

I hear eircom , in their negotiations with bondholders, are indicating that the new network in Sandyford and Wexford will not launch in September as promised.

Seems they want to prove to their bondholders that Comreg are oppressing them.