Wholesale Broadband

getsome

Does anyone know how wholesale broadband works, iv no knowledge of this area? heres a price list it makes no sense to me.

http://www.nextgenerationaccess.ie/resources/Proposed-Bitstream-Price-List-v2.pdf

Mr. G

That price list is the eircom wholesale price list mainly for providers.

Eircom own the traditional telecoms network in Ireland. The company is split into eircom retail and eircom wholesale. Eircom retail deal with consumers, businesses and so on, however eircom wholesale deal with providers and allow them to use Eircom's network to provide their service.

The way the telecom's network actually works is a lot different to what you might think. Broadband providers have their own connections to the eircom network and negociate bandwidth with others.

Providers (eg Vodafone) use wholesale carriers both in Ireland and abroad. So a call to Germany may go through a provider in the UK and then out to the German telecoms network. Vodafone and other providers use the Eircom UI to port numbers also.

It can be quite complicated. In my opinion when the government were selling Telecom Eireann, they should have split it in two and only sold the retail side. The wholesale side should have been kept under the governments control. Its makes more sense also as the government will allow for competition and that way we wouldn't have an near monopoly in the telecom's market.

installer

been looking around for price examples for wholesale broadband but cant find any online, does anyone have an upto date list or guides even.

ED E

Its all on eircoms website.

eg FTTH:
http://www.eircomwholesale.ie/news/FTTH_Pricing/

installer

That seems very cheap or am I missing something?

sparky63

That's because its the wholesale price, not what joe public will be paying.

ED E

Exactly. That's the price for ISPs, you can't buy wholesale unless you're a big player.

installer

Was contemplating starting a wisp and wanted to see what the bandwidth costs were, looking at that its obvious joe public as it were is getting reamed

ArthurG

installer wrote: »

Was contemplating starting a wisp and wanted to see what the bandwidth costs were, looking at that its obvious joe public as it were is getting reamed

Wholesale prices and what joe public gets charged are never the same. Any business that thinks it could just pass on the cost the manufacturer/provider charges them to the end customer with no mark up will go out of business very quickly....

Gmaximum

installer wrote:

Was contemplating starting a wisp and wanted to see what the bandwidth costs were, looking at that its obvious joe public as it were is getting reamed

FTTH and VDSL are not suitible services for wholesale back haul. In any event the access product price is only a small element of the actual costs when port bandwidth etc are included.

A better option if you're just starting may be to look at a smaller carrier such as Viatel or Magnet. They have access to their own Eircom and other wholesale networks. It would be simple to purchase back haul and IP transit from then and increase capacity as you grow

installer

Gmaximum, thank you for that it makes perfect sense, would you happen to have an idea of say 50mb/s would or should cost when taken from such providers. I do remember around 8 years ago maybe less a friend of mine worked in management at Irish broadband and a 2 meg uncontended service was astronomical (so I thought anyhow) but I just can't remember how much.

ED E

As a modern wisp you'll be talking more than 50Mb, cutomers will want minimum 10mb each.

Eircoms ethernet product or another small provider as above is what you want to look at, and you'll be required to get close to one of their POPs.

installer

ED E wrote: »

As a modern wisp you'll be talking more than 50Mb, cutomers will want minimum 10mb each.

Eircoms ethernet product or another small provider as above is what you want to look at, and you'll be required to get close to one of their POPs.

Thats the thing tho, the standard connection down here on fixed wireless is 2Mb down and 2 up for 1 company and 2 down 1 up for another for 35 euro per month, 10mb per sec down would be what I would be basing my proposal on for same price, assuming I was to go ahead with it.

Gmaximum

installer wrote:

Gmaximum, thank you for that it makes perfect sense, would you happen to have an idea of say 50mb/s would or should cost when taken from such providers. I do remember around 8 years ago maybe less a friend of mine worked in management at Irish broadband and a 2 meg uncontended service was astronomical (so I thought anyhow) but I just can't remember how much.

It depends on how close to a pop you are. Comparing historic prices isn't really relevant as technology has shifted from legacy networks to IP.

sparky63

ED E wrote: »

As a modern wisp you'll be talking more than 50Mb, cutomers will want minimum 10mb each.

Eircoms ethernet product or another small provider as above is what you want to look at, and you'll be required to get close to one of their POPs.

In that case i have 100mb, i should be able to get wholesale price. I think wholesale price in all fairness, again i'll say it doesn't include joe public. Dont think someone getting 50mb to distribute amongst 5 people is wholesale. Although i stand corrected.

ED E

The idea of wholesale products is it B2B. You run your own network, buy your own IP blocks, run your own AAA. Its not just buying a 100Mb connection and dishing it out.

sparky63

Yea but getting a feel that it needed to be spelt out on this thread.

tails_naf

ED E wrote: »

The idea of wholesale products is it B2B. You run your own network, buy your own IP blocks, run your own AAA. Its not just buying a 100Mb connection and dishing it out.

Would it be possible to buy 100mbit and dish it out as you say - I mean just get a 100mbit domestic connection and connect to a router and then a base station / access point. Is it really necessary to buy ip blocks?

ED E

tails_naf wrote: »

Would it be possible to buy 100mbit and dish it out as you say - I mean just get a 100mbit domestic connection and connect to a router and then a base station / access point. Is it really necessary to buy ip blocks?

Your "customers" would be limited by your NAT, you'd be responsible for any child porn etc they downloaded AND it would be against the terms of service and you could be shut down at any point.

Share your 100Mb with the mother in law 2km down the road? Yes. Sell your retail connection on? Nooo

tails_naf

ED E wrote: »

Your "customers" would be limited by your NAT, you'd be responsible for any child porn etc they downloaded AND it would be against the terms of service and you could be shut down at any point.

Share your 100Mb with the mother in law 2km down the road? Yes. Sell your retail connection on? Nooo

Interesting. Those are very good reasons to go the wholesale route. From the first post, it looks like buying a chunk of bandwidth is cheaper than a regular person can purchase it - but I guess this is if you are buying huge quantities. If, say I wanted to buy a small amount of bandwidth which I COULD distribute, do you know how much you'd be expected to pay for something like that.

Long story short - I've a few neighbours interested in setting up a community WISP. It would be non-commercial, and 50-100Mbit speed would be more than enough, assuming no data caps. We have some initial scoping on the comms side done - but the 'connection to the internet' side is a bit of a mystery in terms what the options and costs are there - so any help or info would be really appreciated.

ED E

You want to talk to BigLar http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=74983299&postcount=1

installer

ED E wrote: »

You want to talk to BigLar http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=74983299&postcount=1

I guess that didn't go so well!

ED E

installer wrote: »

I guess that didn't go so well!

Oh it did, I just linked the first post.

Big Lar

Still going strong 5yr anniversary coming up soon

tsue921i8wljb3

Big Lar wrote: »

Still going strong 5yr anniversary coming up soon

Looking at your site it says 6/1Mb is the premium residential package. Do you get many requests for increased speeds from your users and have you investigated upgrading your equipment?

Big Lar

Upgraded all our AP'S last sept/Oct with newer radios (faster processors) , installed a few ups's for less down time. All of the clients are the same mostly ubiquiti 5ghz and small few 2.4ghz to go through trees and such.

Most folks are happy on 2mb and we have very few on 6mb

tails_naf

ED E wrote: »

Your "customers" would be limited by your NAT, you'd be responsible for any child porn etc they downloaded

I wanted to come back on this point - from looking at the wholesale providers, they only offer a few 'static' IPs also per connection - so it looks like we would still be using NAT to distribute it for each end-customer.

Given this - how do we 'protect' ourselves from mis-use of the network? Are we required to log DNS requests / IP information ?

tails_naf

Big Lar wrote: »

Upgraded all our AP'S last sept/Oct with newer radios (faster processors) , installed a few ups's for less down time. All of the clients are the same mostly ubiquiti 5ghz and small few 2.4ghz to go through trees and such.

Most folks are happy on 2mb and we have very few on 6mb

Hi Big Lar - I've followed your thread with great interest - inspiring stuff!

2mb can just about handle netflix on medium quality - but that does mean you need a pretty constant ~2mb. Do you see much netflix use, and how has that impact how you determine your contention ratio (I imagine many providers have had to look at this given the peak demand due to streaming).

ED E

tails_naf wrote: »

I wanted to come back on this point - from looking at the wholesale providers, they only offer a few 'static' IPs also per connection - so it looks like we would still be using NAT to distribute it for each end-customer.

Given this - how do we 'protect' ourselves from mis-use of the network? Are we required to log DNS requests / IP information ?

They'd expect you to buy/lease your own block. So they give you 86.8.8.2 say and their border router is 86.8.8.1 then you advertise a route to 90.0.0.0/22 say that you've purchased. Depending on provider routes may be advertised with BGP etc or may just be manually listed by their NOC.

The Gardai/Courts can request "who was using IP X at timestamp Y" and you're expected to be able to answer this. Normally that would be done via a RADIUS server that stores a few years of logs or similar.

DNS wise the High Court order RE Piracy probably means you should blacklist a small cohort of sites within your own DNS but you dont have to intercept those requests of others DNS servers. Not sure if smaller WISPs comply with this though as they're probably under the radar, consult a solicitor for actual advice here.

Big Lar

tails_naf wrote: »

Hi Big Lar - I've followed your thread with great interest - inspiring stuff!

2mb can just about handle netflix on medium quality - but that does mean you need a pretty constant ~2mb. Do you see much netflix use, and how has that impact how you determine your contention ratio (I imagine many providers have had to look at this given the peak demand due to streaming).

We have a contention ratio of around 6:1 at the moment so Netflix does not seem to be an issue for us even at 2Mb, I don't use it myself but anyone I speak to has had no issue.