SIRO - ESB/Vodafone Fibre To The Home

Strawberry HillBilly

ukoda wrote: »

They actually already do this, for the last few years, every new electricity connection they've laid has had fibre laid along side it

Any idea when this started ? I built 6 years ago and don't believe fibre installed with electrical connection.

ukoda

Strawberry HillBilly wrote: »

Any idea when this started ? I built 6 years ago and don't believe fibre installed with electrical connection.

I'm not exactly sure but i would think 3/4 years, they have been laying fibre in their main ducts for longer than that, The main work they have been doing is laying fibre to their mini pillars when they connect a new housing estate, so i don't actually means they have been laying fibre cable up to peoples meter cabinets. I mean that if a new estate was built, the estate would have fibre laid throughout it up as far as the mini pillars but not to each individual house

Nollog

Shane_ef wrote: »

FTTH - Eircom & VF (Owned by Eircom) (Trialled on staff for both companies)
Entirely based on Existing Eircom infrastructure

FTTB - VF (Owned by ESB)
Entirely based on running fibre cable alongside Esb power lines

Why are you calling the esb's FTTB ?
They both go directly into the home.
Does B mean something relevant only to the ESB network?

Sterling Archer

/\/ollog wrote: »

Why are you calling the esb's FTTB ?
They both go directly into the home.
Does B mean something relevant only to the ESB network?

No just vodafones way of separating from eircom I believe, means fibre to the building

I think it's also to help with any confusing with people who are aware of FTTC and FTTH.

bk

Shane_ef wrote: »

No just vodafones way of separating from eircom I believe, means fibre to the building

I think it's also to help with any confusing with people who are aware of FTTC and FTTH.

No that isn't correct, the new ESB/Vodafone network is definitely FTTH.

Actually more accurately, both Eircoms and ESB/Vodafone networks are FTTB, of which FTTH is the subset, but majority of premises.

FTTB means Fibre To The Building.

- In the case of a house, then that means it is in fact FTTH
- In the case of an apartment building or office building, it would mean Fibre to the basement/utility closet of the building and then the last few meters to each office/apartment using either ethernet/copper(VDSL/G.Fast)/coax.

Eircom and ESB are both using exactly the same FTTH technology, GPON, though obviously their network toptologies will differ, Eircom following their existing FTTC/copper network, while the ESB will follow their power network, subsations, etc.

But they are both fundamentally FTTH. FTTB just muddies the water unnecessarily, it is mainly a technical term use be specialists in the area.

SpaceTime

Considering that 96% of Irish people live in houses, fibre to the building would be fibre to the home.

This is absolutely definitely FTTH though.

UPC's system is close enough to Fibre to the Building in a lot of cases, certainly fibre to the terrace / fibre to the block. They've a lot of very small nodes hence the >250Mbit/s

bk

SpaceTime wrote: »

Considering that 96% of Irish people live in houses, fibre to the building would be fibre to the home.

This is absolutely definitely FTTH though.

Yup, exactly

SpaceTime wrote: »

UPC's system is close enough to Fibre to the Building in a lot of cases, certainly fibre to the terrace / fibre to the block. They've a lot of very small nodes hence the >250Mbit/s

Yup, it certainly is in my case, the UPC cabinet is right on the side wall of the apartment building, it is fiber feed and it only serves the building, that is definitely FTTB there.

Mc Love

Does anyone have any idea what locations will be selected for phase one of fttb?

http://www.iiea.com/blogosphere/fibre-to-the-building-fttb---power-to-the-people

red_bairn

Gonzo wrote: »

VDSL can work up to 2km away but only if the lines within those 2km are all connected back to the cabinet. This certainly is not the case where I live, The nearest cabinet to me is 2km away and none of the houses after 200 meters from the cabinet can receive anything other than bog standard ADSL as the cabinet I am on about only serves the cluster of houses in the housing estate. There are probably 100s if not 1000s of homes across the country who are within 2km of a cabinet and can't get fibre.

murphaph wrote: »

Eircom are working on that as well. Direct fed lines are being moved over to cabinets but this is very labour intensive so takes time.

Mc Love wrote: »

Does anyone have any idea what locations will be selected for phase one of fttb?

http://www.iiea.com/blogosphere/fibre-to-the-building-fttb---power-to-the-people

Is this what you are looking for?

PaddyTheNth

I have to admit I question the FTTH/FTTB endeavour.

On the one hand I'm excited about it happening - I'm particularly amazed that VF are going ahead as I think they have to be hugely forward-looking to see how to monetize it.

On the other hand, I'm sceptical about the capacity of the core infrastructure of not just the Tier 2/3 carriers, but the Tier 1 carriers also.

Obviously multiplexing plays a large role, but when you're rolling out Gigabit connections to end-users at this sort of scale I don't think that the end-user experience is going to be as amazing as people seem to be expecting. That being said this would be fairly standard for VF who have quite a history of over-promising under-delivering.

dbit

I was passing through clonmel over the weekend and spotted the fiber hanging from the LV MV poles, I also saw one of the Catherine wheel looking tension device . Looks like ball is rolling in Clonmel . Move there ???? possibly .

Praetorian

PaddyTheNth wrote: »

I have to admit I question the FTTH/FTTB endeavour.

On the one hand I'm excited about it happening - I'm particularly amazed that VF are going ahead as I think they have to be hugely forward-looking to see how to monetize it.

On the other hand, I'm sceptical about the capacity of the core infrastructure of not just the Tier 2/3 carriers, but the Tier 1 carriers also.

Obviously multiplexing plays a large role, but when you're rolling out Gigabit connections to end-users at this sort of scale I don't think that the end-user experience is going to be as amazing as people seem to be expecting. That being said this would be fairly standard for VF who have quite a history of over-promising under-delivering.

The vast majority of connections are idle or comparatively idle compared to max capacity, most of the time. My own VDSL connection is capable of nearly downloading a terabyte in a day. A gigabit FTTH connection could probably do 8-10 terabytes a day. Even the most hardcore linux iso downloaders are going to have a hard time keeping that kind of connection busy.

I think the end user experience will be superb (it already is in fairness). Even on FTTH connections I've already used in Ireland that are held back massively to around 150 m/bit the experience is astonishing. Ping times are amazing and their is no "feeling" quite like it. Even page loads are just faster than vdsl / cable.

Regarding the rollout under delivering. I think you could be right but let's see what happens.

For those that get it, I think it will be superb.

Yes it's a very long term investment, but they will only have to do it once per house for the very long term. The amount of data that can be sent down a piece of glass is pretty astonishing and progress is being made constantly on that front.

dbit

I see great potential for silly home users with ill configured systems and spam, dark net, bots and all things internet of things ...........
They wont take long to stomp on ones ass on connections like these im guessing.

bk

PaddyTheNth wrote: »

I have to admit I question the FTTH/FTTB endeavour.

On the one hand I'm excited about it happening - I'm particularly amazed that VF are going ahead as I think they have to be hugely forward-looking to see how to monetize it.

If you look at the overall industry worldwide, it is very clear why Vodafone is doing this. Vodafone are doing this all over Europe and not just here in Ireland.

It is very clear to any observer that the days of separate mobicos, telcos, cablecos etc. is going away, that they are all merging to create quad play dataco's.

Revenue and profit margins are down significantly in the mobile market and they are only going to drop further. Vodafone has just made 100 billion+ on it's sale of its 49% share in Verizon in the US and is now using that money to become a fixed line operator all over Europe.

It is quiet clear that the "data industry" is moving from a fast moving high profit startup type tech industry to a more lower profit utility type industry, more similar to electricity companies, gas companies, etc.

Not necessarily a bad thing, while less profitable, it can represent a much more long term stability and profitability, with much less ups and downs and changes.

Vodafone are at the forefront of this evolution in the industry, investing in fixed broadband all over Europe. It really is a very good strategy for them.

It is obviously also a no brainer for the ESB. With broadband becoming more utility like, it is right up their alley. Long term infrastructural capital investments is exactly the type of thing that the ESB excels at.

PaddyTheNth wrote: »

On the other hand, I'm sceptical about the capacity of the core infrastructure of not just the Tier 2/3 carriers, but the Tier 1 carriers also.

Obviously multiplexing plays a large role, but when you're rolling out Gigabit connections to end-users at this sort of scale I don't think that the end-user experience is going to be as amazing as people seem to be expecting. That being said this would be fairly standard for VF who have quite a history of over-promising under-delivering.

While it is a concern, I wouldn't be overally concerned. Even with gigabit links, few people would be using all that capacity at the same time.

It is more about having the capacity when you need it. Downloading a movie in 30 seconds and then spending the next 2 hours watching the movie while your gigabit connection sits idle.

Of course the ISP's do need to manage it and put in new backhaul as needed, but they are always doing this anyway, new international backhaul is constantly being built and old backhaul upgraded.

Of course the highest bandwdith users (Netflix, RTE Player, Sky, Youtube) etc. should be caching as much as possible locally here in Ireland to reduce the strain on international connections.

Even with our 200mb/s UPC and 100mb/s Eircom connections today, the issue is the same and for the most part it is handled well. To be honest I don't really think people will use much more data on FTTH then they currently do on cable and VDSL, there really isn't anything you can do with FTTH that you can't do with VDSL and cable today. I honestly don't see it making much of a difference.

PaddyTheNth

Like I said, multiplexing (not the perfectly accurate term but it'll serve as a concept) works in the ISP's favour re backhaul.

Praetorian wrote: »

I think the end user experience will be superb (it already is in fairness). Even on FTTH connections I've already used in Ireland that are held back massively to around 150 m/bit the experience is astonishing. Ping times are amazing and their is no "feeling" quite like it. Even page loads are just faster than vdsl / cable.

Agreed. The quality and consistency of latency on the fibre connections is a different world.

bk wrote: »

It is very clear to any observer that the days of separate mobicos, telcos, cablecos etc. is going away, that they are all merging to create quad play dataco's...It is quiet clear that the "data industry" is moving from a fast moving high profit startup type tech industry to a more lower profit utility type industry, more similar to electricity companies, gas companies, etc.

Totally agree. I'm just surprised to see VF taking a position on something that won't be profitable in even the medium term. I know they're struggling to find ways to spend the Verizon share money - I just hope their execution in this case is better than their execution in so many other areas.

bk wrote: »

To be honest I don't really think people will use much more data on FTTH then they currently do on cable and VDSL, there really isn't anything you can do with FTTH that you can't do with VDSL and cable today. I honestly don't see it making much of a difference.

I don't agree with this at all in the medium to long term. In my limited experience data traffic obeys Parkinson's law. As a personal example we recently moved from a 100/10Mbps connection to a 100/100Mbps connection in the office. We hadn't been receiving any complaints about the connection, nor had we seen any issues in terms of services (video calls etc). In the first few days after switching to the new connection our average max upload was 40Mbps. Our sustained average has been over 25Mbps when the office is busy.

Hopefully the fibre infrastructure will prove to be an enabler of future tech in the same way as copper supports VDSL etc.

Johnboy1951

bk wrote:

To be honest I don't really think people will use much more data on FTTH then they currently do on cable and VDSL, there really isn't anything you can do with FTTH that you can't do with VDSL and cable today. I honestly don't see it making much of a difference.

There are quite a lot of us for whom the idea of getting our video/TV entertainment over our 'broadband' connections is quite out of the question .... even for one user.

So yes I see a huge increase in usage from all those on very limited connections who get the chance to use FTTH.

dbit wrote:

I see great potential for silly home users with ill configured systems and spam, dark net, bots and all things internet of things ...........
They wont take long to stomp on ones ass on connections like these im guessing.

I hope in the future that providers will actually cut back the connections of those with such ill-configured set ups and virus ridden devices.

But will they be able to do what Microsoft have failed to do in the last decade?

SpaceTime

This stuff changes very quickly.
In 2000 you could have connected a medium town to a 100mbit/s line and it have spare capacity.

Backhaul catches up very quickly. There has actually been enormous rollout of backhaul and international connectivity in Ireland over the years, it's just mostly unnoticed by end users.

The congestion issues that occur here are normally from local node to the backbone network and usually on non upgraded first generation small Eircom exchange sites that are providing ADSL hanging on ATM networks that are squeezed beyond their design capacity.

I've never really seen congestion on efibre other than where there's been a network fault.

ESB isn't relying on retrofitting services into old 1980s/90/00s rural telephone exchange infrastructure and backhaul. This is brand new access and backhaul.

The remaining Eircom congestion issues are all resolvable by just plugging those remaining small exchanges into the high capacity IP backbone with appropriately fast fibre links.

The issue for Eircom has been lack of money (the company had to cut a deal and write off massive debts) and very low density infrastructure.

You've hundreds of "exchanges" (probably incorrect term as they're really just remote cabinets) that aren't really much bigger than an efibre cabinet in terms of how many end users they connect.

This ESB/Vodafone stuff is a 2014+ piece of infrastructure using high capacity connectivity from the outset. Eircom still has some small exchanges using ADSL 1.0 gear planned for 512-2mbit/s per user in the late 90s and early 00s. When you push that to 8 or 24 mbits on the same backhaul and where uptake is high... It inevitably chokes.

Hank Scorpio

SpaceTime wrote: »

Backhaul catches up very quickly. There has actually been enormous rollout of backhaul and international connectivity in Ireland over the years, it's just mostly unnoticed by end users.

The congestion issues that occur here are normally from local node to the backbone network and usually on non upgraded first generation small Eircom exchange sites that are providing ADSL hanging on ATM networks that are squeezed beyond their design capacity.

I've never really seen congestion on efibre other than where there's been a network fault.

Eircoms had massive congestion problems on NGB adsl2+ and even efibre over the last year

http://www.boards.ie/ttfthread/2057315815

http://community.eircom.net/t5/Broadband/Slow-speeds-at-peak-times/td-p/60996

Which makes it even more annoying you can't get ESB bb where I live!

godskitchen

Most of you are looking at this from the point of view of the comsumer/public.

The big change here is for businesses and especially businesses with multiple sites.

It will make a massive difference.

jca

dbit wrote: »

I see great potential for silly home users with ill configured systems and spam, dark net, bots and all things internet of things ...........
They wont take long to stomp on ones ass on connections like these im guessing.

They said all that when we went from dial up to adsl too.....

dalta5billion

godskitchen wrote: »

Most of you are looking at this from the point of view of the comsumer/public.

The big change here is for businesses and especially businesses with multiple sites.

It will make a massive difference.

Exactly. Now anyone can run a business from a nearby town rather than having to move into the city. This is actually going to improve the SME sector the most (presuming the pricing is relatively fair).

SpaceTime

nuxxx wrote: »

Eircoms had massive congestion problems on NGB adsl2+ and even efibre over the last year

http://www.boards.ie/ttfthread/2057315815

http://community.eircom.net/t5/Broadband/Slow-speeds-at-peak-times/td-p/60996

Which makes it even more annoying you can't get ESB bb where I live!

Mostly due to localised faults though not due to just plain lack of capacity as is the case in non-NGN areas.

There are also probably a few choke points in the NGN connections to certain exchanges.

dalta5billion

SpaceTime wrote: »

Mostly due to localised faults though not due to just plain lack of capacity as is the case in non-NGN areas.

There are also probably a few choke points in the NGN connections to certain exchanges.

Eircom's peering with Level3 is for the past month totally congested at peak times (60KB/s or worse). Their port at (or route to) INEX has also become more and more congested in the last week, although it's tolerable. I don't know how eircom connect to LINX but downloads are sometimes multiples faster from Cachefly via LINX than from HEAnet via INEX.

It's just so frustrating.

SpaceTime

That's probably down to them selling a lot more efibre than they initially predicted and the links catching up.

They can scale those things up pretty easily.

Hank Scorpio

SpaceTime wrote: »

That's probably down to them selling a lot more efibre than they initially predicted and the links catching up.

They can scale those things up pretty easily.

Been going on 3 months now..

bk

dalta5billion wrote: »

Eircom's peering with Level3 is for the past month totally congested at peak times (60KB/s or worse). Their port at (or route to) INEX has also become more and more congested in the last week, although it's tolerable. I don't know how eircom connect to LINX but downloads are sometimes multiples faster from Cachefly via LINX than from HEAnet via INEX.

It's just so frustrating.

nuxxx wrote: »

Been going on 3 months now..

What I've heard is that they are currently suffering from two faults, that they are currently working on and will be fixed.

Yes, I know it sucks and is frustrating, but it happens from time to time.

UPC had similar growing problems a few years ago, when they first introduced 100+ speeds, but those issues were all fixed within a few months and it has been very stable ever since.

The overall point is that their isn't an overall backhaul problem, that the links etc. will be upgraded to handle all these faster connections. This is a constant and ongoing process that for the most part the public isn't aware of.

Villain

bk wrote: »

What I've heard is that they are currently suffering from two faults, that they are currently working on and will be fixed.

Yes, I know it sucks and is frustrating, but it happens from time to time.

UPC had similar growing problems a few years ago, when they first introduced 100+ speeds, but those issues were all fixed within a few months and it has been very stable ever since.

The overall point is that their isn't an overall backhaul problem, that the links etc. will be upgraded to handle all these faster connections. This is a constant and ongoing process that for the most part the public isn't aware of.

Related to the sea fibre cuts or congestion within their network?

SpaceTime

Relating to issues in London from the trace routes I've seen.

Villain

I doubt very much if they are congested at INEX, they may well be on some backup links if either of the cuts in the Irish Sea affected them

red_bairn

Villain wrote:

I doubt very much if they are congested at INEX, they may well be on some backup links if either of the cuts in the Irish Sea affected them

Are they still having problems with this since the beginning of the year?