As Finland plans universal 100Mbps by 2015, is Ireland’s broadband plan just another

kippy

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Me thinks you're trolling now. The NBS gifted €250 million to Three to build a fourth mobile phone network, it didn't bring a single person broadband, in fact some people disconnected perfectly working broadband because the flyer came through their door with the Minister saying this was the answer to their needs. Some of them even ended up with satellite dishes on their gables and a contract they couldn't break.



I don't, I expect a long term plan with that being the end game, say 10 years



Good luck in getting any of them to invest outside of the cities where they can be provided for. How does a large town attract investment without the infrastructure. We have already seen the start of a digital divide: http://www.siliconrepublic.com/digital-21/item/27614-first-signs-of-irelands-di



Agreed, but this is another band aid fix, the end aim has to be fibre.

Fair enough.

funnyname

I'd give my right nipple for a fibre connection, it would make my life a lot easier with working from home 3 days a week, something a lot more people will be doing in the future.

Think back 20 years ago when mobile phones were introduced here, not many people thought they had any use for them now there are more mobile phones in the country than people, over 5m.

Look at these people in rural north west England getting out their spades and digging trenches to provide their community with not just 100mb but a future proofed 1gb connection, now that's forward thinking and not a Luddite in sight.

http://b4rn.org.uk/

And all at the crazy high price of £150 connection fee and £30pm, actually I'd give me left nut for that. €100 connection fee and €147pm only got me a 3mb "business" connection.

Within a generation every household with kids in Ireland will be crying out for a fibre connection, that's not a guess that's just a plain and simple fact.

funnyname

kippy wrote: »

What mess are you talking about?
Really, it is crazy to expect fibre to every house in the country especially considering the situation the country is in.
I don't see broadband speeds having an impact on the investment decisions of Google, Ebay, Facebook, Paypal, Intel - whatever tech companies you want to mention and you know why?
Because ultimately these organisations can be provided with the connectivity they require.

Get fibre to all the towns in the country and provide and infrastructure there, break it out to some form of wireless to get to those further out, by all means, but running fibre everywhere just doesnt make sense on a lot of levels.

You might have missed this

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/digital-21/item/27614-first-signs-of-irelands-di

oscarBravo

It's been said, but forget about power lines as a data transmission medium. Long parallel runs of wire are the worst possible scenario for data transmission (although they make pretty good antennas at certain frequencies, which is precisely the opposite of what's required) - there's a very good reason that twisted pair cables are twisted.

cgarvey

kippy wrote: »

4 billion is not a small few billion.

In this context, it is.

kippy wrote: »

So FDI will be determined whether a house in the remotest part of the country has 100Meg broadband?

Pedantic.

kippy wrote: »

Again, the type of operations will rely on 100meg broadband going to every house in the country?

General availability will be a distinct advantage, yes. Why do you think most western countries are working towards this (with Finland well on the way)? Don't forget consumer demand as well.

kippy wrote: »

I've no idea what the NBS costs to be honest and I don't believe it's a great option but as a stop gap........was it not better to get some level of connectivity to those that didnt have it

"some level of connectivity" would have been much better provided had the money gone to WISPs instead of Three. Anyway, NBS is adequately covered in the above posts.

The ESB analogy is still an adequate one here, I think. Ireland could have waited until it was commercially viable to deliver to rural areas. It could have adopted the line of "nobody needs it badly, just yet". Electricity is more important a utility, sure, but broadband is right up there (and certainly will be very soon). So, I argue we should look to our neighbours (as we did in the case of electricity) and plan for the future. Fibre to every home (certainly well above 95%) looks to be easily achieved with some joined up thinking. There will be demand for it, and if we don't ease the digital divide very soon, we'll have much bigger economic problems in rural areas (including most small towns, etc.).

That's my final say. If you can't see the bigger picture problem, or think the commercial market will handle it, I've done my best to point it out. You should probably read up some more (especially if it's an area of interest for you).

bealtine

kippy wrote: »

I don't see broadband speeds having an impact on the investment decisions of Google, Ebay, Facebook, Paypal, Intel - whatever tech companies you want to mention and you know why?
Because ultimately these organisations can be provided with the connectivity they require.

.

eBay have throughout the years been very active with IoffL as they see a more general roll-out of decent broadband as good for their business and by inference good for the economy in general. Other corporations see ubiquitous broadband as good for their businesses too for many reasons that have been outlined in previous posts like hot-desking and home-working. Recent decisions by Apple and Amazon have made the necessity for good broadband for workers an investment decision.

Sure Intel can get whatever connectivity they need in-house and delivered to their door, but what about smaller corporations/businesses?

Take for instance one company that was on to IoffL recently that got a new order from Japan. The situation for that small company was that the people from Japan had to ring them to let them know there were orders pending...once the company knew the orders were available they drove around their area looking for a mobile signal so they could download orders via 3G. They simply could not get any form of broadband in their premises...now they have a satellite solution and it's ok but they really want proper broadband. This is in 2010 not 1990.

Broadband is the lifeblood of businesses in the 21st century and will increasingly become more and more necessary for ordinary consumers too.
Manufacturing models are being transferred via the internet now, schematics and plans and all manner of other electronic models are being transferred electronically like CNC models. These are not used by "hi-tech" companies.

This does not take into account banking or insurance companies who are now looking for sub-millisecond timing on trades

UPC have demonstrated that high speed broadband is quickly becoming a necessity to deliver our new services like TV and broadband.


Do we need fibre to every home? Probably not but did every house require electricity, after all they had paraffin lamps? Lighting was the only original use for electricity. Probably fibre is not needed in the short-term but as the benefits of electricity became clear and new "machines" were invented and electricity was rolled out to every house and became a necessity of modern life.

Once a company starts using broadband their requirements for more bandwidth almost immediately start to grow, again I am not talking about technology companies. Here I am referring to bakeries,foodstuff companies and smaller manufacturing companies. I know of one manufacturing company (that makes perfumes) where there is virtually nobody in the factory except a few maintenance guys and the processes are started by "operators" from their home PCs. Sometimes the operators go to "work" but most of the time not.

Cheerful Spring

Finland isn't in a bail out program. People forget there is less money been generated from taxes now than before. We should have been thinking about fibre rollout countrywide in 2002. Its too late now.

The government hasn't got billions in spare change anymore to invest in broadband. The good thing about the spectrum auctions the Irish government got 600 million more than expected. This is a great time to invest in rural Ireland not covered by 70 per cent population standard.

Irish Steve

I have done work in the past for 2 people that are within 10Km of Dublin, one of them is less than 5 Km from the 100 Mb fibre ring round dublin, the other is equidistant from Swords, Ashbourne and Dublin Airport, and the only broadband service they can get that is in any way respectable is a wireless broadband service, as there are no cable broadband suppliers that can offer a sensible speed and reliability, even PSTN FAx lines are unreliable if used to send data abroad.

High speed broadband is needed for things like customer support, so that diagrams, tech support manuals and the like can be downloaded from suppliers in places like Japan, or Europe, or where ever. The other aspect that has totally been neglected in this almost purile discussion about Netflix and the like is that business users have to be able to UPLOAD as well as download, and for the vast majority of broadband suppliers their upload speed is archaic and primitive, and SLOW.

Home working, regardless of it being Google, or Amazon, or Intel, or a small one man business require a good reliable and timely 2 way connection in order to be able to work. Being able to download a picture in 3 seconds is not a lot of help if it then takes nearly a minute (sometimes longer) to then upload that picture to another person. A regular on line backup of less than 5 Mb of critical data at one site takes several minutes (again sometimes longer) to send from the machine. If I want to remotely access that machine in order to reduce travel costs, (which the Govt should be encouraging to reduce the carbon footprint), its no use to me if it takes 15 minutes to transfer a file from one machine to another because the upload speed is 128 or 256 Kb,

Yes, the suppliers of broadband could improve on that if they wanted to, but they don't, partly because it will impact download speeds, and partly because they've all spent huge sums on server farms in order to provide service to people, that can't live with dire upload speeds. I know many business owners that would be much happier if their critical and sensitive data was in house on their servers, but they can't get a fast enough upload speed to make the response that users get a respectable one. 8 Mbs download speed is pretty common now, but if I have 8 down, and the server providing the data I am going to download is only 128 up, my one second download will take 32 seconds to upload from the server. Most users will click elsewhere long before that time has elapsed. These speeds make things like a web shop impractical for the small business unless they use hosting, which is an additional expense.

That's why faster broadband is needed. Maybe not to the ends of the country, but it was needed several years ago in the urban areas and their surrounds, and the longer it's delayed, the more at risk is the ongoing foreign direct investment into Ireland from abroad. If that dries up, then the one area of the economy that has not died a thousand deaths will start to wither and die through the direct neglect of the relevant planners.

Yes, it really is that simple and direct. Nothing to do with Netflix, or porn, or Youtube, and everything to do with restoring a competitive and vibrant economy, to all parts of the country. Huge numbers of commuters could work from home if the speed of broadband was reliable and fast, with massive benefits to the economy and the local infrastructure of many towns and villages.

Cheerful Spring

I want to know what the government is doing with the 800 million there getting from the spectrum auction results. Whats the plan?

The Irish government promised 200 million plus to rural areas who were unlikely to be upgraded to a better service and to those areas that have no internet at all.

200 million promised when they taught they be lucky if they got 200 million from the auctions.


This the time to to do something about it. The people must not allow the Irish government to squander this money. I being a citizen demand a better internet service there should be a petition with this in mind.

40% of the population still lives in rural areas, should we be ignored because they don't live in urban area.

I have a dreadful feeling Pat Rabbite will let the broadband providers alone and let them invest were they want and not get involved. I have a feeling urban areas and towns will have lighting fast internet in five years, were the rest of us will be scraping by on 8meg or less.

cgarvey

Cheerful Spring wrote: »

I want to know what the government is doing with the 800 million there getting from the spectrum auction results. Whats the plan?

If you read back on this forum around the time, Rabitte said it was just going in to the general exchequer/coffers.

PogMoThoin

cgarvey wrote: »

If you read back on this forum around the time, Rabitte said it was just going in to the general exchequer/coffers.

That means giving it to the Germans

watty

The Spectrum auction does nothing for Rural Ireland or for Broadband.

Nor is our financial situation an excuse. State spending (possibly on Private / Public Partnership basis or even just borrowing ALL the money for it) on Universal Fibre Broadband would pay for itself as the private Retailers resell it to the Public. UPC would have to reduce their BB prices which are artificially high to almost match Eircom DSL.

Also if the MASSIVE cross subsidy of Data packages by Voice was forbidden by EU & our Government you would see Mobile Data prices at least double or triple and private investment in Fixed Broadband including fibre and wireless really take off. The Mobile voice prices to would at least be half as much and SMS a 1/10th. These are at rip off prices. Also there should be NO premium at all for roaming in EU as the extra costs are negligible compared to ANY traffic off their own network.

A bit of pro-active regulation and investment following the Spirit of EU intentions instead of wheeling out our Debts and EU rules as excuses to do nothing again.