Eircom claim range of 2km for rural e-fibre.

clohamon

The Westmeath Examiner got a bit of scoop recently.

Paul Bradley, Eircom’s Director of Corporate Affairs was in Mullingar as part of his national tour with Chambers Ireland. Mr Bradley told reporter Rodney Farry that exchange based e-fibre "will provide high speed broadband [to] homes within a radius of 1.5 - 2km.”

This would be roughly twice the distance which eircom would normally claim for their e-fibre service.

Unfortunately this service will not be delivered until the end of 2016 - about six months later than eircom previously announced and outside the July 1st 2016 deadline for inclusion in the mapping of the National Broadband Plan.

bk

Eircoms eFibre already operates out to 2km, according to the Eircom wholesale site.

Though speeds at 2km are relatively low (less then 10mb/s)

watty

At 2km it's about the same as 2km on an ADSL2+ exchange.

I can't think many people are going to benefit from this marketing spin!

Well, the very few that are currently more than 2km from an ADSL2+ exchange AND get fibre to a cabinet 2km or less away. I can't believe that would be very many people.

What speed is High Speed Broadband anyway? Surely it ought to be more than 20Mbps which is nearly impossible at 1.5km to 2km in the real world.

This is of course the company that was still marketing 2 x 64k ISDN as "hi speed" when ADSL started to roll out. 128K of course was twice the phone bill of 64k. So if we had managed to get it when we had 19k Analogue in 2005 the bills would have been over €150 a month. Our exchange had ISDN but no ADSL. When we did order ISDN it took them 2 months to tell us there was no space for any more ISDN line cards! By Dec 2005 I was on Fixed Wireless. With ADSL price rises, no FTTH and 900m to exchange, even when there is Fibre (on the list) it will STILL be slower than my fixed Wireless for upload and barely faster for download as at 900m VDSL will only be a bit better than the ADSL2+ the exchange now has.

The street cabinet is only 10m away, which will would be 100Mbps easily if fibre to cabinet. But I'd bet only a couple of cabinets (1 far side of the village/town to exchange) will be fibre. Most people this area will only be on copper from exchange. At the far side about 1/2 the people will be more than 500m and many 1km+ from the cabinet. So really maybe 50% to 75% will get a speed increase and perhaps less than 25% a genuine High Speed Broadband service.

Even if your town or village is on the list to get Fibre it doesn't mean you will get Fast Broadband and in many cases only 30% to 50% improvement unless existing back haul is bad.

bk

watty wrote: »

At 2km it's about the same as 2km on an ADSL2+ exchange.

At 2km, it is faster then ADSL2+ but you are correct, only by a small amount.

However there are a few points to remember.

1) We are now seeing exchanges that currently only have ADSL1 gear getting VDSL. So VDSL2 at 2km is MUCH faster then ADSL at the same distance.

2) All VDSL cabs seem to be fibre connected. So these cabs maybe bypassing exchanges that currently don't have fibre, thus offering a much better speed.

3) A person might be 4km from their exchange, but might suddenly find that they are 2km from a VDSL cab. VDSL at 2km is going to be MUCH faster then ADSL2+ at 4km.

That won't be the case for everyone (exchange only lines), but very significant percentage of people are suddenly going to find they are at closer distances to VDSL cabs then their exchanges.

Sure, you are right, it isn't a silver bullet. But every little helps and it will certainly help significant numbers of people get onto "good enough" quality of broadband.