Eircom's New Television Service

Elmo

http://www.rte.ie/news/2011/0728/eircom-business.html
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0728/breaking6.html

Dublin First? Anyone know anymore about this?

Mongarra

And they cannot supply me with Broadband on my existing line.

bk

Will only work in areas upgraded to FTTH or FTTC. It will probably be IPTV, so that means it will eat into your bandwidth, unlike with UPC.

That means for instance, on their 40Mb/s FTTC service, a single HD channel will use about 8 to 10Mb/s. Watch one channel while recording another, it will use 16 to 20Mb/s. That means you could be down to just 20Mb/s of internet bandwidth.

They are likely to roll this out only to areas that are already served by UPC *. This is basically a response to UPC stealing their customers at a horrendous pace.

* In general, we all know that there are black holes in areas generally served by UPC where UPC can't be gotten, these people might benefit from this.

Mountjoy Mugger

According to Morning Ireland today, roll out in Dublin will be restricted to the Sandyford area in the first instance.

I believe Wexford was mentioned as the other area - not 100% certain on this, however.

EDIT: It seems to be the case, alright.

Hibrasil

Irish Times Business News reports today that Eircom is to spend €100m+ in a fibre based network that will provide faster broadband speeds...plans also to offer TV services via a STB...competing directly with UPC and BSkyB.

Anyone who is unhappy with UPC....no real need to get mad (just yet).....lay your plans...to get even UPC. Hurt them where it really counts...in their pockets!

And who says competition is "not good"...

Carter P Fly

I wouldnt be holding my breath on this one, Eircom have been humming and hawing about this for longer then some board members have been alive.

Carter P Fly

bk wrote: »

Will only work in areas upgraded to FTTH or FTTC. It will probably be IPTV, so that means it will eat into your bandwidth, unlike with UPC.

That means for instance, on their 40Mb/s FTTC service, a single HD channel will use about 8 to 10Mb/s. Watch one channel while recording another, it will use 16 to 20Mb/s. That means you could be down to just 20Mb/s of internet bandwidth.

This is not true. Telecoms companies that deliver IPTV services elsewhere reserve bandwidth for their TV offerings as a constant data stream must be ensured. In essence you will have two connections running together to your house which come in on the one line and are split at house.

Minstrel27

Mongarra wrote: »

And they cannot supply me with Broadband on my existing line.

It is a joke. They wouldn't provide my mother with an unsplit line. She is on cable broadband now so she is very happy without relying on these numpties

Red Alert

IPTV was tried in Smithfield and Parkwest on new-builds with new wiring and it still failed.

Hibrasil

http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=466669
Irish telco to invest €100 million in fibre rollout; plans to launch IPTV services.

Irish operator Eircom this week announced it will invest €100 million to roll out fibre broadband to 100,000 homes and businesses by the summer of 2012.
"Our investment of over €100 million underlines the company's commitment to be the nation's network provider of choice, and to support economic growth in Ireland," Paul Donovan, CEO of Eircom, said in a statement Thursday.
Phase one of its plan involves replacing old copper wires with a mixture of Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) and Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) infrastructure. Customers connected via FTTC will see speeds of up to 40Mbps, while those hooked up to FTTH connections may reach speeds of up to 150Mbps, said Eircom.
An Eircom spokesman told Total Telecom that the telco has yet to determine what proportion of the 100,000 premises will be upgraded to FTTH, and how many will be connected FTTC, commenting that it depends on the exchange.
After phase one the telco hopes to continue its investment into fibre-optic technologies, and plans to extend its network to cover 1 million homes by the end of the three-to-four-year process.
It is still unclear how many phases there are to Eircom's next-generation network plan, either.
"We're not 100% sure," said Eircom's spokesman. "That is a question to be determined."
However, he insisted that the company is confident it will reach its target of connecting 1 million premises.
As well as broadband, Eircom plans to use its fibre network to offer a range of IPTV, video on demand (VoD), and catch-up TV services. It currently offers a music streaming service called MusicHub, and believes that the new services will compliment its current portfolio.

Freddie59

Hibrasil wrote: »

Irish Times Business News reports today that Eircom is to spend €100m+ in a fibre based network that will provide faster broadband speeds...plans also to offer TV services via a STB...competing directly with UPC and BSkyB.

Anyone who is unhappy with UPC....no real need to get mad (just yet).....lay your plans...to get even UPC. Hurt them where it really counts...in their pockets!

And who says competition is "not good"...

If you look on the BB forum, the majority of complaining is not about UPC.....

UPC have spend €400m in the past four years. On a technology that sees them able to double speeds on a whim. That same technology is being used by Virgin in the UK, who are currently trialling 1.5GB Broadband in London at present. Interestingly, Eircom's CEO said on Matt Cooper the other day that FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet, which will be the commonest form used by Eircom) could offer speeds of UP TO 40 Mb - maybe 70. UPC's lowest tier is currently, I think, 25Mb.

Dardania

To be fair, fibre to the home is able to offer more throughput per customer than UPC's offering, if everyone wants to use the full capacity of their connection simultaneously...

Whether eircom will or won't provide this remains to be seen. It sounds like a massive capital cost and they are in the financial doldrums at the moment after being milked by many investments firms since privatisation...

Dardania

Red Alert wrote: »

IPTV was tried in Smithfield and Parkwest on new-builds with new wiring and it still failed.

WHy did it fail?

Red Alert

Look at the threads on Neighbours.ie and you'll see... both of these developments got communal Sky dishes in the end.

IP Unicast networks are not the right way to deliver broadcast TV in a scalable way. That's why you get stuff like pixellation, intermittent loss of picture, clips in the sound. Throw in a big download from a PC in the same house - like Windows Update and you're heading for trouble. You're also limited to usually a maximum of one multi room box because of bandwidth issues.

BT in the UK are trying a new TV service that uses multicast IP for some stations, but that needs a pretty big investment in routers and setup. It's still using encrypted DVB-T for the most popular channels.

Dardania

Thanks for that and I agree unicast is absolutely the wrong architecture to use if everyone is watching the same channels at the same time (i.e. as per our current setup)

BT's approach seems better with multicast.

Where unicast comes in is for on-demand services - I'd say the best solution would be a hybrid of multicast for conventional stuff when it's first broadcast, with unicast for on-demand stuff (basically like a network video recorder)

Tomtata

Another waste of time - just look at Magnet - They have a number of Fiber to the home estates (I live in one of them)

I have 50mb fiber to my house, the TV service which works over the same fiber is terrible, everyone I know in the estate uses Sky or NTL.

icdg

Merged

lucernarian

Red Alert wrote: »

Look at the threads on Neighbours.ie and you'll see... both of these developments got communal Sky dishes in the end.

I tried looking around on neighbours.ie for the threads in question but I wasn't able to find them. Sorry if I'm blind but could you drag up a link from some thread or other about this?!:cool:

NewHillel

Red Alert wrote: »

BT in the UK are trying a new TV service that uses multicast IP for some stations, but that needs a pretty big investment in routers and setup. It's still using encrypted DVB-T for the most popular channels.

eircom are also using Multicast for IPTV.

Freddie59

Tomtata wrote: »

Another waste of time - just look at Magnet - They have a number of Fiber to the home estates (I live in one of them)

I have 50mb fiber to my house, the TV service which works over the same fiber is terrible, everyone I know in the estate uses Sky or NTL.

I rest my case.

bk

Carter P Fly wrote: »

This is not true. Telecoms companies that deliver IPTV services elsewhere reserve bandwidth for their TV offerings as a constant data stream must be ensured. In essence you will have two connections running together to your house which come in on the one line and are split at house.

Actually it is true.

Unlike most people here, I've actually had two different IPTV services.

I live in an apartment with Smart Telecom Fibre To The Premises and IPTV.

I've experienced (and helped them test) first their MPEG 2 based IPTV platform, followed by their newer MPEG 4 based platform.

The MPEG2 platform was absolutely rubbish. The MPEG 4 was a lot better, but in the end it was still scrapped and replaced by Sky Communal dish service, which is WAY better.

Here is a few facts about IPTV:

- SD MPEG4 is about 3Mb/s per stream
- HD MPEG4 is about 8 - 10Mb/s per stream
- For each channel you watch or record, you use a stream.

So if you are recording one HD channel while watching another (like Sky+) then you would be using 16 to 20Mb/s of bandwidth. Wife watching a different HD channel in the bedroom, add another 8 to 10Mb/s to the above numbers, understand?

As for reserved bandwidth, that is a bad joke. Lets say the total bandwidth of your connection is 50Mb/s, sure they might reserve 30Mb/s for TV service, which means you'll only ever have 20Mb/s for you internet service.

With Smart, they, rightfully, didn't "reserve" any bandwidth. I use to get about 13Mb/s from my internet connection, when I switched on the TV box, that internet connection would drop to about 10Mb/s, start recording a channel, it would drop down to 7Mb/s.

Sure VDSL2+ has a lot more bandwidth then Smarts ADSL2+, but then people are increasingly expecting and using HD, which uses far more bandwidth then SD.

Of course if Eircom gives point to point fibre connections to every house, then they will have plenty of bandwidth capacity. But this would cost about 2 billion euro to do the whole country, so not a chance of that happening. More likely they will use VDSL2+ for individual homes and fibre to the building in apartment buildings which in turn would be distributed by either cat5e or VDSL2+ to each apartment.

BTW of course UPC also has theoretical bandwidth limits, but they are actually much higher. Coax cable is a much higher quality cable then telephone cable, a new UPC coax cable is capable of about 800Mhz to 1GHz of radio frequency, which equates to about 5Gb/s of bandwidth!!

Of course some of that bandwidth is used for TV services, etc. but this is the reason that UPC can deliver 100Mb/s so easily and will be able to deliver even faster speeds in the future.

In other words, don't expect much from this announcement. I wish I was wrong, I'd love to see Eircom offer some competition to UPC, but it is very unlikely. You are much more likely to see improvements in UPC's TV service, with the introduction of VoD, Catch UP TV services, etc.

who is this

Hibrasil wrote: »

And who says competition is "not good"...

Yes please do tell. I'd be fascinated to hear who says that

Make no mistake eircom are not the saviours here, UPC are. It is UPC's competition forcing eircom's hand to improve. UPC are in a much better position infrastructure-wise, so to dress it up that they will be forced into extreme competition by eircom is nonsense. The only positive eircom is providing is possibly providing some competition for UPC. Right now they're no match

Paxmanwithinfo

Eircom gave me a box (which I still have + remote incidentally) and then they gave me a number of months testing. (No Sky channels but they did give me Setanta). To be honest it wasn't bad at all - picture quality etc. though the GUI was painfully slow and glitchy when an update was due (sound like UPC I know..) and support was not local. Where it also fell short was not the channels available but the pay per view material available which I know was only for test purposes but "The Presidio" under new releases... but they did have "The Office - Season 2".

When asked to complete a lengthy questionnaire at the end I said that I would seriously contemplate signing-up for it but was not attracted to the particular bundles offered.

Subsequently, I've actually cancelled my Eircom BB and phone and gone with UPC but that doesn't mean I wouldn't contemplate a return to Ar*eCom.

Why not have more competition?

Carter P Fly

bk wrote: »

Actually it is true.

Unlike most people here, I've actually had two different IPTV services.

I live in an apartment with Smart Telecom Fibre To The Premises and IPTV.

I've experienced (and helped them test) first their MPEG 2 based IPTV platform, followed by their newer MPEG 4 based platform.

The MPEG2 platform was absolutely rubbish. The MPEG 4 was a lot better, but in the end it was still scrapped and replaced by Sky Communal dish service, which is WAY better.

Here is a few facts about IPTV:

- SD MPEG4 is about 3Mb/s per stream
- HD MPEG4 is about 8 - 10Mb/s per stream
- For each channel you watch or record, you use a stream.

So if you are recording one HD channel while watching another (like Sky+) then you would be using 16 to 20Mb/s of bandwidth. Wife watching a different HD channel in the bedroom, add another 8 to 10Mb/s to the above numbers, understand?

As for reserved bandwidth, that is a bad joke. Lets say the total bandwidth of your connection is 50Mb/s, sure they might reserve 30Mb/s for TV service, which means you'll only ever have 20Mb/s for you internet service.

With Smart, they, rightfully, didn't "reserve" any bandwidth. I use to get about 13Mb/s from my internet connection, when I switched on the TV box, that internet connection would drop to about 10Mb/s, start recording a channel, it would drop down to 7Mb/s.

Sure VDSL2+ has a lot more bandwidth then Smarts ADSL2+, but then people are increasingly expecting and using HD, which uses far more bandwidth then SD.

Of course if Eircom gives point to point fibre connections to every house, then they will have plenty of bandwidth capacity. But this would cost about 2 billion euro to do the whole country, so not a chance of that happening. More likely they will use VDSL2+ for individual homes and fibre to the building in apartment buildings which in turn would be distributed by either cat5e or VDSL2+ to each apartment.

BTW of course UPC also has theoretical bandwidth limits, but they are actually much higher. Coax cable is a much higher quality cable then telephone cable, a new UPC coax cable is capable of about 800Mhz to 1GHz of radio frequency, which equates to about 5Gb/s of bandwidth!!

Of course some of that bandwidth is used for TV services, etc. but this is the reason that UPC can deliver 100Mb/s so easily and will be able to deliver even faster speeds in the future.

In other words, don't expect much from this announcement. I wish I was wrong, I'd love to see Eircom offer some competition to UPC, but it is very unlikely. You are much more likely to see improvements in UPC's TV service, with the introduction of VoD, Catch UP TV services, etc.

None of the Irish operators have IPTV implemented in a workable way, which is pretty much why they dont work.

I was referring to telcos in other countries and how it is implemented there which I have first hand knowledge of as I was involved in the design and rollout of these systems.

bk

Carter P Fly wrote: »

None of the Irish operators have IPTV implemented in a workable way, which is pretty much why they dont work.

I was referring to telcos in other countries and how it is implemented there which I have first hand knowledge of as I was involved in the design and rollout of these systems.

Please tell how you magically get more bandwidth out of a VDSL2+ connection?

You don't, it is physics, a copper cable has certain physical limitations which depending on distance from the exchange and quality of the cable, means the cable has a certain maximum bandwidth it can carry.

Any bandwidth "reserved" for IPTV services on this copper cable simply means less bandwidth available for regular internet services on the last mile.

Everything I said in my post is 100% factually correct. Don't just wave about that you worked on previous IPTV rollouts abroad, for all we know you could have just been making the coffee. Please point out anything in my post that was actually wrong?

lucernarian

who is this wrote: »

Yes please do tell. I'd be fascinated to hear who says that

Make no mistake eircom are not the saviours here, UPC are. It is UPC's competition forcing eircom's hand to improve. UPC are in a much better position infrastructure-wise, so to dress it up that they will be forced into extreme competition by eircom is nonsense. The only positive eircom is providing is possibly providing some competition for UPC. Right now they're no match

The only positive? For someone looking for basic broadband as opposed to mobile ****e, nearly 85% of locations can sign up with eircom. Compared to nearly 50% with UPC. And for TV service, Sky will always beat UPC's 60% or so and less than that for HD TV. We won't even mention MMDS:D UPC are not completely dominant just yet. Even if UPC beat eircom in most ways they are still "competing with" UPC for the incumbency factor and customer loyalty or else having a phoneline that can work with eircom phonewatch etc. In any case, future plans aren't going to bother UPC when eircom have yet to convince their bondholders they can pay for it so that isn't even an advantage for eircom currently!

And arguably it was Sky who forced UPC to improve, which led to UPC competing properly against eircom:cool:

I'm not disagreeing with what you said at all, just offering an alternative way of looking at it.

NewHillel

The total bandwidth is determined by physics, as bk states in a follow-on post. (The figure of 40Mb/s may prove a little conservative for FTTC, in Ireland.)

Why partition (scarce) digital bandwidth over an xDSL connection? Surely the better option is to use Class of Service Marking, to prioritise TV over general Internet Traffic. This means that additional bandwidth is available for Internet use, when not required for TV.

Carter P Fly wrote: »

This is not true. Telecoms companies that deliver IPTV services elsewhere reserve bandwidth for their TV offerings as a constant data stream must be ensured. In essence you will have two connections running together to your house which come in on the one line and are split at house.

bk wrote: »

Will only work in areas upgraded to FTTH or FTTC. It will probably be IPTV, so that means it will eat into your bandwidth, unlike with UPC.
That means for instance, on their 40Mb/s FTTC service, a single HD channel will use about 8 to 10Mb/s. Watch one channel while recording another, it will use 16 to 20Mb/s. That means you could be down to just 20Mb/s of internet bandwidth.

Elmo

Upc should use satellite broadband/telephone in mmds areas coupled with its pay mmds service, how many hd services could the put on mmds alone?

druss

Paxmanwithinfo wrote: »

Eircom gave me a box (which I still have + remote incidentally) and then they gave me a number of months testing. (No Sky channels but they did give me Setanta). To be honest it wasn't bad at all - picture quality etc. though the GUI was painfully slow and glitchy when an update was due (sound like UPC I know..) and support was not local. Where it also fell short was not the channels available but the pay per view material available which I know was only for test purposes but "The Presidio" under new releases... but they did have "The Office - Season 2".

When asked to complete a lengthy questionnaire at the end I said that I would seriously contemplate signing-up for it but was not attracted to the particular bundles offered.

What channels did you get with it, out of interest? I'm in Wexford and UPC and Sky aren't options anyway. If it added anything to my saorview offerings, i'd be happy enough to consider moving phone providers. :P

bk

Elmo wrote: »

Upc should use satellite broadband/telephone in mmds areas coupled with its pay mmds service, how many hd services could the put on mmds alone?

Ideally UPC should use satellite to deliver TV services including HD in rural areas, perhaps using the new k-sat RTE are using for Saorsat and then use the MMDS frequencies to deliver phone and broadband to those people in rural areas.

Great idea, but very unlikely to happen.

Elmo

bk wrote: »

Ideally UPC should use satellite to deliver TV services including HD in rural areas, perhaps using the new k-sat RTE are using for Saorsat and then use the MMDS frequencies to deliver phone and broadband to those people in rural areas.

Great idea, but very unlikely to happen.

I did mean to finish if QSat can do it then UPC are in a better position to do it, and hopefully with realistic prices.

galtee boy

I see Eircom have large ads in today's newspapers promoting the forthcoming TV service, which they say will launch in September this year, as part of a quad play - phone, broadband, mobile and tv. I assume this new tv service will only be available if you live in one of the areas where Eircom have installed fibre ?

Sponge Bob

eircom have been promising some form of TV on a Telephone Wire since the late 1990s ....just after eircom SOLD THEIR CABLE NETWORK TO NTL!!!

They have conducted myriad IPTV or TVoCopper trials since. Today, 15 years later, they are telling they Sindo that they can launch this IPTV or TVoCopper as soon as September 2013.

"quad play" offer due in September.

The forurth bit of the Quad is TV, they already offer data/voice/mobile packabges. How very organised seeing as they announced their pilot scheme ( INCLUDING TV) in mid 2010. Does it take 3 years to configure a head end????

channelsurfer2

wouldnt hold your breath waiting for it if its anything to go by the survey I did last month. It had 30 channels in it with 50mb broadband and offpeak calls and line rental for 60euro. all the channels were free to air except sky1 and sky 2 with the option of 5 extra hd channels for 3 euro

ftakeith

will it will be called eircom vision like bt vision in the uk

then in 2020 eircom will go head to toe with sky tv for the irish eng premier football rights
eircom had over 10 years before saorview was set up
timing is too late

ftakeith

http://www.rte.ie/news/business/2013/0228/370067-eircom-television-quad/

more eircom news

MadsL

Hysterically funny. I first saw eircom's trial on demand TV service in 1989 I think it was. Closed user trial group.

I then toured their state of the art studio and production company "docomo" I think it was called in 1998, all with grand plans to broadcast IP TV. They sank millions into it.

So after quarter of a decade, here it is.

Oh eircom, you funny.

Solair

Isn't DoCoMo a major Japanese mobile phone operator. - http://www.nttdocomo.com/

So's eMobile http://emobile.jp/

eireannBEAR

This thread was started in 2011 and we still dont know what channels they are offering!!! :mad:

icdg

eireannBEAR wrote: »

This thread was started in 2011 and we still dont know what channels they are offering!!! :mad:

Indeed. Given that we don't drag up old threads, it might be best to see if they ever launch a service.