Eircom to roll out 1Gb/s FTTH to 66 towns

ED E

swoofer wrote: »

out of interest, i know the access point for eircom cabling is along the back of a line of houses ie there is a small access point in each garden. The copper cable runs to the NTU on an outside wall , the box is neatly fitted into wall so that the existing cable comes down the cavity into box!! I have cable running up one cavity from a room used as an office, into and across attic and into cavity to NTU. Does this mean the fibre will be spliced at NTU and I will need to run it across attic??

The box outside is the ETU. They'll run it to there, drill a hole and terminate on the inside of the same wall. Thats where the ONT goes, after that its your deal.

Nickindublin wrote: »

It seems that Eircom have enabled E Fibre in the cabinet beside us. When i enter the numbers on the Eircom site for business's beside us and across the road they say it has been enabled But when i put in our number it says its not been enabled. Would that have anything to do with us having our business landline with Three? The business right beside us is an Eircom customer and they are fibre enabled.

Wrong thread bud. eFibre is FTTC, this is for FTTH.

Three DSL is eircom though, so your line may bypass the cab.

Praetorian

ED E wrote: »

They need to run it up into manholes outside premises first, then feed up to the houses from there. Id say they'll do areas or estates in one go, then come back to the appointments as a separate works order.

Grand, the Eircom manhole is at the bottom of my driveway

swoofer

Thanks for reply.

@ed e does that mean the customer runs the new fibre cable internally? Or will it be the old copper cable for the last few feet? I cant see eircom going into lofts etc

In my case if they drill a hole like you say it will be in a garage!! And router location elsewhere!! ie a long way away

I'd buy my own bit of fibre but may have to save up!

Nollog

swoofer wrote: »

Thanks for reply.

@ed e does that mean the customer runs the new fibre cable internally? Or will it be the old copper cable for the last few feet? I cant see eircom going into lofts etc

In my case if they drill a hole like you say it will be in a garage!! And router location elsewhere!! ie a long way away

I'd buy my own bit of fibre but may have to save up!

It'll be just a new wire coming into your house, and into a shiny new Huawei ONT, otherwise, it'll be a big Huawei ONT outside your house, mounted on a wall, with a wire likely coming into your house into a shiny Huawei router.

Depends how they go about it and if the pictures I found on google for Huawei's ONT's are really that small.

mass_debater

swoofer wrote: »

I'd buy my own bit of fibre but may have to save up!

Fibre is cheap, much cheaper than copper. Attaching it to poles and pushing it through ducts is the expensive bit

Its Only Ray Parlour

mass_debater wrote: »

Fibre is cheap, much cheaper than copper. Attaching it to poles and pushing it through ducts is the expensive bit

Digging up roads and footpaths is the expensive bit.

ED E

swoofer wrote: »

Thanks for reply.

@ed e does that mean the customer runs the new fibre cable internally? Or will it be the old copper cable for the last few feet? I cant see eircom going into lofts etc

In my case if they drill a hole like you say it will be in a garage!! And router location elsewhere!! ie a long way away

I'd buy my own bit of fibre but may have to save up!

The same fibre runs from splitter (at cab or manhole) all the way into the interior wall behind your ETU, wherever that happens to be. They drill a hole and shove in 3-4ft of fibre and fit that into an internal optical faceplate. The ONT is mounted beside this. They fit it there, it stays there. After that they don't care. You ISP gives you a modem and an ethernet cable to link to the ONT, if you want your network gear in the attic, run ethernet from the ONT to the attic, stick a router and switch there, done.

Important bit is dont go messing with the optical side of the setup, run your own CAT5e/6 from the demarcation point onwards.

murphaph

Its Only Ray Parlour wrote: »

Digging up roads and footpaths is the expensive bit.

They're both expensive. Depending on the condition of the pole infrastructure, the overhead variant may be more expensive as the poles may not be suitable without resetting them all.

Ducts under footpaths may already be present (in pretty much all the celtic tiger estates there will be ample ductwork present and even in many older states this will be the case).

Pushing fibre through existing ducts will be the cheapest option if available. It also means the fibre is well protected from the elements and unlikely to need any maintenance. Fibre strung along overhead wire will be subject to the same storms that knock out existing overhead networks from time to time, so from a long term prospective, underground will be cheaper if it's an option. Fibre is an ideal candidate for underground installation as it is not going to be affected by damp/water ingress as copper can be.

SpaceTime

Actually, the vast majority of eircom's network is underground (much more so than the ESB's).

In most cases where you see poles, they're just legacy infrastructure that is only used for the last drop i.e. the wires come up the side of the pole (from an underground duct) and run from there to the houses overhead. This was done to avoid digging roads but, the network is pretty much entirely underground.

There's relatively little use of pole-to-pole stuff anymore. It's been progressively removed since the 1970s.

So in a lot of cases, it might just be a question of running the fibre up a pole and across a single drop overhead to a house. Other than that it would be underground and they've vaults (manholes) almost everywhere for putting splitters / aggregation gear and other equipment out of harm's way.

From what I know of the FTTC rollout, they ran 24 fibres (of which only 4 are used for FTTC) and there are 20 spare fibres, each of which would provide 32 homes with 1Gbit/s GPON service.

So they've actually got a huge lead over ESB if they want to get rolling.

They actually already have the necessary fibre rolled out to something like 4000+ locations where e-fibre cabinets are in place for FTTC.

All I know is the next few years could see Ireland's broadband being totally transformed as ESB, Eircom and UPC go head-to-head.

notahappycamper

ED E wrote: »

The same fibre runs from splitter (at cab or manhole) all the way into the interior wall behind your ETU, wherever that happens to be. They drill a hole and shove in 3-4ft of fibre and fit that into an internal optical faceplate. The ONT is mounted beside this. They fit it there, it stays there. After that they don't care. You ISP gives you a modem and an ethernet cable to link to the ONT, if you want your network gear in the attic, run ethernet from the ONT to the attic, stick a router and switch there, done.

Important bit is dont go messing with the optical side of the setup, run your own CAT5e/6 from the demarcation point onwards.

What happens the phone line once the FTTH is installed or will it use the fibre and become VOIP i.e. how would you make calls on the land line?

ED E

notahappycamper wrote: »

What happens the phone line once the FTTH is installed or will it use the fibre and become VOIP i.e. how would you make calls on the land line?

The pricing includes options for both. They have to offer a POTS line (USO, expect this will be relaxed), but I assume most operators will start using VOIP (vodafone already do a lot of VOIP for business, eircom used to sell it residentially) and pass the savings on to the consumer (somewhat).

Nollog

notahappycamper wrote: »

What happens the phone line once the FTTH is installed or will it use the fibre and become VOIP i.e. how would you make calls on the land line?

Fibre is completely separate from the phone line, if you use your home phone then it'll stay the same as long as you keep paying for it.

The Cush

ED E wrote: »

The same fibre runs from splitter (at cab or manhole) all the way into the interior wall behind your ETU, wherever that happens to be. They drill a hole and shove in 3-4ft of fibre and fit that into an internal optical faceplate. The ONT is mounted beside this. They fit it there, it stays there. After that they don't care. You ISP gives you a modem and an ethernet cable to link to the ONT, if you want your network gear in the attic, run ethernet from the ONT to the attic, stick a router and switch there, done.

Pics from the Belcarra pilot videos

Alun

ED E wrote: »

The same fibre runs from splitter (at cab or manhole) all the way into the interior wall behind your ETU, wherever that happens to be. They drill a hole and shove in 3-4ft of fibre and fit that into an internal optical faceplate. The ONT is mounted beside this. They fit it there, it stays there.

That's interesting. If they were to drill a hole through the back of the ETU in my house (a bungalow) they'd end up inside a built-in wardrobe with no power available:) Not very useful.

Do they have any other methods available to them, such as running the fibre outside in ducting for a short distance and enter at a more convenient place?

irishgeo

anywhere to register your interest for the eircom FTTH?

jca

irishgeo wrote: »

anywhere to register your interest for the eircom FTTH?

http://fibrerollout.ie/ In the very top right corner click on the "keep me in the loop" link, that will allow you to register.

PeadarB

jca wrote: »

http://fibrerollout.ie/ In the very top right corner click on the "keep me in the loop" link, that will allow you to register.

This relates to FTTC only, i.e. the current e-fibre rollout The only info given re FTTH on the current wholesale rollout map is to indicate whether or not a particular location is included in the FTTH plans.
I tried it and I've already got efibre, but I see the buggers still didn't re-profile me back to 100/20.

"Dear Peter
Thank you for visiting our fibrerollout site.

You requested an update on Letterkenny, specifically 074-91*****.

This number is served by a cabinet which has already been fibre enabled and qualifies for high speed broadband with speeds up to 90Mb/s.

For further information on price plans etc, you will need to contact your preferred retail provider.

Kind Regards"


So much for info re FTTH!!!

red bellied

ED E wrote: »

They need to run it up into manholes outside premises first, then feed up to the houses from there. Id say they'll do areas or estates in one go, then come back to the appointments as a separate works order.

They were doing this for the past hour outside my house this morning, packed up and gone already.

swoofer

you could say location, ie roughly, the town, to give us an idea

red bellied

Sligo town, Caltragh area, they feed the fibre into a manhole beside the cabinet and it was then linked up to another two in the estate, a small cul de sac with 16 houses.

PeadarB

MCS/KN Networks working at my cabinet today (LKY1_005) in Letterkenny. They are currently clearing ducts and pushing fibre up the Long Lane, and into Errigal Road which is only across the road from me. Still no sign of how they plan to service the houses in my estate though.

SpaceTime

PeadarB wrote: »

MCS/KN Networks working at my cabinet today (LKY1_005) in Letterkenny. They are currently clearing ducts and pushing fibre up the Long Lane, and into Errigal Road which is only across the road from me. Still no sign of how they plan to service the houses in my estate though.

The whole thing's done in vaults and pushed through underground. There won't need to be any more cabinets if it's anything like similar installations I've seen in France.

They'll install an ODF (Optical Distribution Frame) at the local exchange and all the fibre ends up back there. Each fibre line back to the exchange carries fibre carries 32 FTTH customers AFAIK.

Effectively what you'll have is a small splitter / aggregation node sitting in a vault (manhole). These aren't 'active electronics', they're passive optical splitters, so they're far less complicated to install and maintain than the current Efibre cabinets which contain full DSLAMs and routers and stuff. They require power, cooling, battery back up etc etc. They're basically a cabinetised mini exchange.

The final drop to your house might go in via a duct if one exists, or could come up the side of a pole and overhead just like current older phone line installations. The majority of eircom's network is actually underground. The bits you see overhead are typically just a short drop from the pole to a house because there was no duct installed years ago. The wires actually run down the sides of the poles in a metal tube and into a vault and off to the nearest cabinet / exchange.

The rollout of this stuff could, in theory anyway, be very rapid.

ED E

SpaceTime wrote: »

The whole thing's done in vaults and pushed through underground. There won't need to be any more cabinets if it's anything like similar installations I've seen in France.

They'll install an ODF (Optical Distribution Frame) at the local exchange and all the fibre ends up back there. Each fibre line back to the exchange carries fibre carries 32 FTTH customers AFAIK.

Effectively what you'll have is a small splitter / aggregation node sitting in a vault. These aren't 'active electronics', they're passive optical splitters, so they're far less complicated to install and maintain than the current Efibre cabinets which contain full DSLAMs and routers and stuff. They're basically a cabinetised mini exchange.

The OLTs are are already in place to feed the NGA nodes, they'll just need to plug in a few extra GPON line cards.

SpaceTime

ED E wrote: »

The OLTs are are already in place to feed the NGA nodes, they'll just need to plug in a few extra GPON line cards.

Depends how they do it and what space they have.

Normally they'll avoid running multiple fibres from the same place if the end points aren't all equidistant from it. You'd just end up running a lot more fibres than you actually need.

You can for example run a long fibre from the cabinet to serve a cluster of houses .. There's no particular reason why everything needs to radiate from a single cabinet as the gear's much smaller and easier to deal with than VDSL.

In the French setup, you typically have a node sitting underground some where near 32 homes and they just plug in there. They haven't actually run a fibre from the cabinet to every house, yet they're still all at least 1Gbit/s capable.

In theory, this stuff should be able to get FTTH out to a lot more homes than could get FTTC... Could be quite interesting.

PeadarB

SpaceTime wrote: »

The whole thing's done in vaults and pushed through underground. There won't need to be any more cabinets if it's anything like similar installations I've seen in France.

They'll install an ODF (Optical Distribution Frame) at the local exchange and all the fibre ends up back there. Each fibre line back to the exchange carries fibre carries 32 FTTH customers AFAIK.

My concern is that in the older estates, which are serviced via drops from a central pole (to 10 or 12 houses) will be missed owing to the fact that we are not served by underground ducting. They seem to have brought a lot of contractors in from the North to do the work. There is a marked increase in KNN activity up our way over the past week or so. Looking good for some for a September 1st kick off all the same.

SpaceTime

PeadarB wrote: »

My concern is that in the older estates, which are serviced via drops from a central pole (to 10 or 12 houses) will be missed owing to the fact that we are not served by underground ducting. They seem to have brought a lot of contractors in from the North to do the work. There is a marked increase in KNN activity up our way over the past week or so. Looking good for some for a September 1st kick off all the same.

Shouldn't necessarily make much difference if they're using overhead drops of fibre from that pole.

In France it's even clipped along the front of buildings strung between houses much like UPC do things here.

Aerial fibre isn't all that unusual these days and if it's only being done for individual end users, it's not a big deal. You obviously want to avoid having major trunks running overhead as you'd take out a whole town if someone crashes into a pole or a very particularly heavy group of seagulls sit on it

lucernarian

SpaceTime wrote: »

Depends how they do it and what space they have.

Normally they'll avoid running multiple fibres from the same place if the end points aren't all equidistant from it. You'd just end up running a lot more fibres than you actually need.

You can for example run a long fibre from the cabinet to serve a cluster of houses .. There's no particular reason why everything needs to radiate from a single cabinet as the gear's much smaller and easier to deal with than VDSL.

In the French setup, you typically have a node sitting underground some where near 32 homes and they just plug in there. They haven't actually run a fibre from the cabinet to every house, yet they're still all at least 1Gbit/s capable.

It might be easier to match infrastructural records with existing cable records if they follow the same setup from cabinets to different distribution points. Eircom seem to be exactly planning to run long (not that long in the targeted urban areas) fibres to specific distribution points near each other, like a 30-pair cable would do currently.

SpaceTime

lucernarian wrote: »

It might be easier to match infrastructural records with existing cable records if they follow the same setup from cabinets to different distribution points. Eircom seem to be exactly planning to run long (not that long in the targeted urban areas) fibres to specific distribution points near each other, like a 30-pair cable would do currently.

That's pretty much what l'Orange (France Télécom) have been doing. There's actually tons and tons of information available on their rollout as they've been quite open about what they're doing, much like eircom have been with FTTC.

It basically follows the old copper plan most of the time with the local exchange buildings and those giant green cabinet things they housed some of them in proving to be extremely reusable as mini-data centres / ODF nodes.

ED E

Long term it'd make sense for them to move away from aerial spans, the chance of damage, environmental or incidental, is just way higher. They wont sell the product though if garden trenching is required. House mounted DPs the way UPC run are nice, but permission is a big issue, our road was delayed by 2yrs for DOCSIS capable cable due to a fussy neighbour.

SpaceTime

ED E wrote: »

Long term it'd make sense for them to move away from aerial spans, the chance of damage, environmental or incidental, is just way higher. They wont sell the product though if garden trenching is required. House mounted DPs the way UPC run are nice, but permission is a big issue, our road was delayed by 2yrs for DOCSIS capable cable due to a fussy neighbour.

They have been moving away from them for decades now. Their specs for all new builds are underground and even where a person orders a new phone line, they're supposed to provide a duct to the nearest pole.

Same with ESB for power. You won't see any overhead lines in new build and that's going back quite a long time at this stage.

Eircom don't actually have very much in the way of overhead spans anymore in most areas. It's literally only last drops. The multicore stuff is all underground where possible. There are some rural areas that probably still have long overhead multicore runs, but to a degree that's unavoidable as the costs of undergrounding all of it would put the line rental fees through the roof.

In low density population areas like Ireland, you have to strike a cost:benefit balance on these things. Undergrounding all of the phone or power network would be totally uneconomic.

Laying ducts into all new road builds / major resurfacing projects would be quite sensible though and I think to a degree that has happened.

In a lot of cases though, it's not really possible as resurfacing might only be a surface dressing, digging holes and trenches for ducts isn't cheap.

In a lot of cases you're talking about network rollout that was done quick and dirty in the 30s/40s/50s/60s too. Same all over the world, they needed to get lines (power or phone) into pre-existing buildings. Physically digging up roads in those days was hugely labour intensive - no JCBs, no mini diggers, no automatic road surfacing machines... It was all done by hand... You're talking a bunch of lads with pick axes, shovels and maybe if they were lucky a pneumatic drill or two.

Lots of legacy in these networks that people forget about and we also tend to forget just how much construction technologies and materials have changed over that period too. You can even 'mole' ducts in now without even disrupting anything that was way beyond the kind of tech available to people in the not so distant past.

Also don't forget that P&T was a Government department, so the ducts were dug by civil servants ... (not even semi-state employees). So you can imagine how that went Sir Humphrey isn't fond of breaking a sweat!

The biggest issue that may come up is broken / blocked ducts where they've collapsed or been infiltrated by roots of trees. Although from what I gather, during the FTTC rollout the ducts were shown to be in surprisingly good shape compared to a lot of other countries, so fingers crossed!