Eir rural FTTH thread

damienirel

murphaph wrote: »

Ireland will leapfrog Germany in every metric in a couple of years.

Yes - based on the promises of Eir and Siro at the moment that would be true.
But I wouldn't hold my breath. We just have to wait and see if we ever get on that graph.
But at the moment you're ignoring completely that ze Germans are already on it, contrary to your anecdotal evidence.

Johnboy1951

Allison Puny Appetite wrote: »

Germany only recently got on the ranking list from the FTTH Council Europe meaning that they have at least 1% household penetration. Ireland hasn't made the list. Yet!

http://wireandcablenews.crugroup.com/wireandcablenews/news/free/2016/02/4596272/

I would not be too concerned about that ranking for a couple of years yet.
We have a lot of households with cable connections which are part fibre and plenty fast, and a path to even higher speeds in future.

Fibre or cable or even copper tel line ....... speed, reliability and price are what concerns consumers, and not the tech used to deliver.

damienirel

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

Fibre or cable or even copper tel line ....... speed, reliability and price are what concerns consumers, and not the tech used to deliver.

That seems to be the approach Germany is taking by the looks of it.
But the problem is technical, Fibre is by far and away the superior technology, ignoring that now while speed demands are met via copper could prove to be very short sighted.

murphaph

damienirel wrote: »

Yes - based on the promises of Eir and Siro at the moment that would be true.
But I wouldn't hold my breath. We just have to wait and see if we ever get on that graph.
But at the moment you're ignoring completely that ze Germans are already on it, contrary to your anecdotal evidence.

The fact is that Germany should, by rights, have far superior broadband to Ireland given the population densities and settlement patterns in each country. Germany has no one off dispersed housing problem to worry about but the small villages generally have terrible internet here. These places in Ireland now all seem to have FTTC.

The cities here have mediocre broadband. Vectoring is just starting to make some inroads but as I said, our former home in central Berlin could only get 50/10, which is distinctly average for a developed capital city. Cable operators here offer up to 100/10, miles away from what Virgin offer in Irish cities and cable is much less widely available here anyway. our town of 12k has no cable whatsoever.

I personally consider that Germany is at the bottom of that list as a disgrace for a wealthy country like this, with excellent preconditions for broadband provision!

Johnboy1951

damienirel wrote: »

That seems to be the approach Germany is taking by the looks of it.
But the problem is technical, Fibre is by far and away the superior technology, ignoring that now while speed demands are met via copper could prove to be very short sighted.

As we know it is not being ignored in Ireland, but that does not mean that, for instance, there would be anything real to be gained by replacing cable with FTTH, at this time ...... and possibly for the medium term also.
So those households served by cable will not be included in the figures on that site, yet they have more than adequate service without FTTH.

damienirel

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

As we know it is not being ignored in Ireland, but that does not mean that, for instance, there would be anything real to be gained by replacing cable with FTTH, at this time ...... and possibly for the medium term also.
So those households served by cable will not be included in the figures on that site, yet they have more than adequate service without FTTH.

I don't disagree - but where we have the opportunity to go straight to fibre - i.e. areas that have inadequate or no broadband we should be doing that, or it should be already done - giving us a place on that league table.

damienirel

murphaph wrote: »

The fact is that Germany should, by rights, have far superior broadband to Ireland given the population densities and settlement patterns in each country. Germany has no one off dispersed housing problem to worry about but the small villages generally have terrible internet here. These places in Ireland now all seem to have FTTC.

The cities here have mediocre broadband. Vectoring is just starting to make some inroads but as I said, our former home in central Berlin could only get 50/10, which is distinctly average for a developed capital city. Cable operators here offer up to 100/10, miles away from what Virgin offer in Irish cities and cable is much less widely available here anyway. our town of 12k has no cable whatsoever.

I personally consider that Germany is at the bottom of that list as a disgrace for a wealthy country like this, with excellent preconditions for broadband provision!

Yes I'm very very surprised.

In South Roscommon we're getting closer to being connected as there was some cabling installed into ducting along the main road over the past couple of days.
No junction boxes so far.

Johnboy1951

damienirel wrote: »

I don't disagree - but where we have the opportunity to go straight to fibre - i.e. areas that have inadequate or no broadband we should be doing that, or it should be already done - giving us a place on that league table.

I guess the point I was trying to make is that with the numbers already on cable and FTTC, it will be a while before we get on that table, and not being on it is not a bad thing, if we all have adequate service.

Over time more will be moved from FTTC to FTTH, as the eir service is updated in built up areas.
It will be a long time I'd guess before there will be a need to change the cable to fibre, so none of those will be counted for that table.

murphaph

damienirel wrote: »

I don't disagree - but where we have the opportunity to go straight to fibre - i.e. areas that have inadequate or no broadband we should be doing that, or it should be already done - giving us a place on that league table.

We are doing exactly that. Eir is rolling out FTTH to 300k of the 700k premises that can't currently get fast broadband. The NBP will take care of the remainder, also through FTTH in all likelihood.

legocrazy505

murphaph wrote: »

We are doing exactly that. Eir is rolling out FTTH to 300k of the 700k premises that can't currently get fast broadband. The NBP will take care of the remainder, also through FTTH in all likelihood.

Correction 900k+ according to latest estimates for the NBP.

That's excluding the places where Eir hasn't even started their "planned" FTTC rollouts though they probably don't account for much.

The pace at which Eir are going at to get just 300k done makes it look like it could be 2025-2030 before it's finished. By which point a future government could screw over the remaining 700k households not on the blue lines.

damienirel

legocrazy505 wrote: »

The pace at which Eir are going at to get just 300k done makes it look like it could be 2025-2030 before it's finished. By which point a future government could screw over the remaining 700k households not on the blue lines.

Yeah the 2018 blue line completion date is pie in the sky alright. For now anyways we're not on any league table for fibre. And like lego said it could be years before anything happens. I wouldn't count any chickens just yet.

murphaph

damienirel wrote: »

Yeah the 2018 blue line completion date is pie in the sky alright. For now anyways we're not on any league table for fibre. And like lego said it could be years before anything happens. I wouldn't count any chickens just yet.

What do you mean though? Stuff is happening. It's also not going to be a linear roll out because as crews gain experience they get faster. More crews are being hired. Existing techs are being retrained for fibre from copper. As more rural customers move to IP based telephony over fibre there will be fewer maintenance call outs, freeing up even more crews to do fibre installs.

Even if it's 2019 or 2020 it will be an incredible achievement.

legocrazy505

murphaph wrote: »

What do you mean though? Stuff is happening. It's also not going to be a linear roll out because as crews gain experience they get faster. More crews are being hired. Existing techs are being retrained for fibre from copper. As more rural customers move to IP based telephony over fibre there will be fewer maintenance call outs, freeing up even more crews to do fibre installs.

Even if it's 2019 or 2020 it will be an incredible achievement.

The only way we'll know is once we get over the winter months I think. Once we are into next year we'll either see the slow progress continuing or a nice increase in the number of houses that get passed every month. Even then the winter so far hasn't been dreadful.

Gonzo

theres already very much an increased momentum over the past 6 weeks, not just in Dunshaughlin, but in other areas too, reports of progress in Galway, Louth, Cork and other counties recently.

When Dunshaughlin goes live I'd be really interested to see the number of premises passed, could it be 100%, if so it's a first and a sign that Eir will do entire exchanges in one go and move on, certainly the whole of this exchange is almost ready.

I would say end of March will be a good indication to how things are progressing. Up to mid November most of us barely saw anything with most of the action over past 4 weeks, hopefully with the increased manpower and the lads working on weekends now too, that there will be a serious pickup in progress and if so then this project could meet it's deadline of end of December 2018.

Johnboy1951

legocrazy505 wrote: »

The only way we'll know is once we get over the winter months I think. Once we are into next year we'll either see the slow progress continuing or a nice increase in the number of houses that get passed every month. Even then the winter so far hasn't been dreadful.

I don't consider the progress slow at all.
There is a lot of work to be done prior to the fibre being strung out.
Most of the manpower is concentrated on that work.

We should have a better idea of progress by mid-February I think.

Gonzo

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

I don't consider the progress slow at all.
There is a lot of work to be done prior to the fibre being strung out.
Most of the manpower is concentrated on that work.

We should have a better idea of progress by mid-February I think.

The fibre being stung out is the quick bit! The preparation, especially the ducting is the slow bit where manholes have to be created, old manholes reopened and ditches, fields and even parts of road side gardens and drives dug if the pre existing ducting is there.

From what I've seen the ducting is about 60% of the work. Once they get past the ducting and onto the poles it's really fast.

Gonzo

Gonzo wrote: »

The fibre being stung out is the quick bit! The preparation, especially the ducting is the slow bit where manholes have to be created, old manholes reopened and ditches, fields and even parts of road side gardens and drives dug if the pre existing ducting is there.

From what I've seen the ducting is about 60% of the work. Once they get past the ducting and onto the poles it's really fast.

Yes, this is a clear example of where a huge amount of unseen work needs to be done before there are any real visible signs of actually anything being achieved.
Around here, it appears that they put up the overhead fibres long before the underground uplink fibres. It seems to be a logistics lottery as to what is required in each area, and which crew is available tol work there.

murphaph

Yep. Anyone who observed the Luas construction works will be familiar with the preparatory works taking the longest. By the way.... Telekom tech did a lot of head scratching before telling me he couldn't explain the huge bandwidth loss on our line and it has to be escalated. Early adopter syndrome I reckon.

Gonzo

lads are outside my front gate wiring up:)

They must have started really early as they are almost finished!

Pulsating Star

Gonzo wrote: »

lads are outside my front gate wiring up:)

They must have started really early as they are almost finished!

Yeah, get the breakfast on mate, we'll be in in a minute!

damienirel

Gonzo wrote: »

lads are outside my front gate wiring up:)

They must have started really early as they are almost finished!

Gonna be jelly!

ED E

Gonzo's early christmas.

Shyboy

Eir are still telling me that I cannot get FTTH as yet, although the Eir phone line /Eir Code checker is now telling me I can. I know everything is done in our village but I would say the whole exchange area is not fully done yet.

Surely the Eir website should not be giving me the option of ordering it until the exchange is launched?

I can place the order, but then they ring me back and say it is not available to me as yet...

Frustrating...:mad:

rob808

Shyboy wrote: »

Eir are still telling me that I cannot get FTTH as yet, although the Eir phone line /Eir Code checker is now telling me I can. I know everything is done in our village but I would say the whole exchange area is not fully done yet.

Surely the Eir website should not be giving me the option of ordering it until the exchange is launched?

I can place the order, but then they ring me back and say it is not available to me as yet...

Frustrating...:mad:

It only can be order when it come up on the sales system it annoying but you have FTTH soon.I had same problem with UPC when my estate got done I had wait like 2 month before it went live even doh it was done.I don't think it be like that with Eir probably January when you be able to order it.

long_b

Gonzo, we demand photos.
Tomorrow will do

Tommy Lagahan

Reading about Gonzo getting hooked up and im like....



At least the local mast finally upgraded to 4G so I can bask in 90ms to EU MM servers on CSGO

frozenfrozen

drop avp noob

Gonzo

long_b wrote: »

Gonzo, we demand photos.
Tomorrow will do

sorry guys was away with the family all weekend, left while the guys were finishing up on Saturday morning. Photos will have to wait till tomorrow, lads were back on the road this morning while I was away. The coil of cable on the pole beside my gate is no longer visible, the splice box was fitted so the cable must be inside that?

I've yet to take a walk down the road to look at what was done since saturday morning!.

damienirel

Gonzo wrote: »

sorry guys was away with the family all weekend, left while the guys were finishing up on Saturday morning. Photos will have to wait till tomorrow, lads were back on the road this morning while I was away. The coil of cable on the pole beside my gate is no longer visible, the splice box was fitted so the cable must be inside that?

I've yet to take a walk down the road to look at what was done since saturday morning!.

Could you have it before the NY? That would almost make the original dates they gave correct would it, I've forgotten what they were for your exchange? Or have they missed it?