EIR contract and moving home - rural broadband

theguzman

I'm looking for some advice on what to do with my current remote house and trying to get a half way decent connection.

I am 3 months into a 12 month contract with EIR for landline and Broadband, I renewed the contract in early February and I was living at home with my parents both non internet users without even a smart phone. For me now this is understandably money wasted each month since it is not being used, only for the broadband requirement the landline would be dumped maybe 10 years ago.

I was traveling abroad when the Pandemic struck and got back to Ireland safely, me and my Girlfriend since moved into another property of mine which was idle at the time so my parents can cocoon at home properly. We are now however extremely remote.

Only EIR and GoMO are available here with EIR giving 3-5mb depending on time of day as we are very far from the two EIR mast's in the vicinity with a mountain in the way but the house is very high up also. I am 5KM and 13KM from both masts but I think I am served from the 13KM mast which has less obstacles in the way compared to the nearer mast.

Initially I used my own sim card in a spare phone with hotspot activated, however two weeks ago I got a GoMo sim and we are using this now for our internet (hotspot) which from my own monitoring is around 7-8GB per day. The house is an old stone walled house and we have no signal inside for phone service and instead need to either stand near a window upstairs, outside in the yard or use Wifi Calling as I am doing on my iPhone.

There was a landline installed here but the house was not lived in for 15 years until I decided to make use of it here. I am 8KM from the local exchange but have ADSL2+ available. I don't know if the landline would serve broadband this far if I got it reactivated.

Other than EIR GoMo there is nothing else available as there is no WISP and it is EIR or Satellite, I used Satellite 12-15 years ago and no way am I going back to that nonsense again. I have had people with Three and Vodafone call here and they have no signal on their phones here so EIR is definitely the only company to serve this remote house.

For now I am thinking if it is possible to get a booster to amplify my signal and repeat the GSM into the house also. Moving isn't an option for now but I have decided to fully renovate this house as it in a beautiful scenic location, once I get Fibre on the NBP I can start renovations, no fibre and there is no future for this place as far as I'm concerned.

The Cush

theguzman wrote: »

For now I am thinking if it is possible to get a booster to amplify my signal and repeat the GSM into the house also. Moving isn't an option for now but I have decided to fully renovate this house as it in a beautiful scenic location, once I get Fibre on the NBP I can start renovations, no fibre and there is no future for this place as far as I'm concerned.

I assume ADSL2+ at 8 kms will either be non-existent and near uesless at that distance from the exchange over a rural copper line.

Discussion here just recently on mobile repeaters - https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2058080245

babelfish1990

theguzman wrote: »

For now I am thinking if it is possible to get a booster to amplify my signal and repeat the GSM into the house also. Moving isn't an option for now but I have decided to fully renovate this house as it in a beautiful scenic location, once I get Fibre on the NBP I can start renovations, no fibre and there is no future for this place as far as I'm concerned.

Dont use a repeater. They are expensive and will likely not cover all of your house with thick stone walls. When you are renovating, make sure to wire each room with Ethernet back to a hub. In the meantime, get a Mesh WiFi system to relay WiFi between the rooms of your house. Some of them work over mains wiring like home-plugs - but no guarantees of this, so get one which works over either mains wiring or WiFi between access points. If you place your Mesh WiFi access points within wireless range of each other, they will bounce the signal around and create seamless WiFi coverage throughout your home. You csn add as many access points as you need to cover the entire home, but 2 or 3 will typically cover a large home with thick walls. Then use WiFi calling, as you are doing for voice calls on your mobiles. You should place your eir/gomo SIM in a 3G/4G/5G router and colocate this where the best mobile signal is and with the first mesh node in the chain. Use an external antenna if you want to boost your signal from the eir mast.

Your house sounds extremely remote. I would have no expectations that NBP will get you fibre. They have said that they will do the hardest cases with wireless/satellite. Not clear what percentage this will be, but your house looks like a candidate, as you already have reasonable coverage from the eir mast.

ED E

babelfish1990 wrote: »

Dont use a repeater. They are expensive and will likely not cover all of your house with thick stone walls. When you are renovating, make sure to wire each room with Ethernet back to a hub. In the meantime, get a Mesh WiFi system to relay WiFi between the rooms of your house. Some of them work over mains wiring like home-plugs - but no guarantees of this, so get one which works over either mains wiring or WiFi between access points. If you place your Mesh WiFi access points within wireless range of each other, they will bounce the signal around and create seamless WiFi coverage throughout your home. You csn add as many access points as you need to cover the entire home, but 2 or 3 will typically cover a large home with thick walls. Then use WiFi calling, as you are doing for voice calls on your mobiles. You should place your eir/gomo SIM in a 3G/4G/5G router and colocate this where the best mobile signal is and with the first mesh node in the chain. Use an external antenna if you want to boost your signal from the eir mast.

Your house sounds extremely remote. I would have no expectations that NBP will get you fibre. They have said that they will do the hardest cases with wireless/satellite. Not clear what percentage this will be, but your house looks like a candidate, as you already have reasonable coverage from the eir mast.

Barking up the wrong tree, he's talking a WCDMA/LTE repeater, not a Wifi. It IS a good solution for somebody like him.


A better solution would be to setup an LTE router and an external antenna (add a lightning rod if you're remote and up high!). That'll do much better than a phone hotspotting stuck in the corner of a room.

westyIrl

theguzman wrote: »

Only EIR and GoMO are available here with EIR giving 3-5mb depending on time of day as we are very far from the two EIR mast's in the vicinity with a mountain in the way but the house is very high up also. I am 5KM and 13KM from both masts but I think I am served from the 13KM mast which has less obstacles in the way compared to the nearer mast.

Initially I used my own sim card in a spare phone with hotspot activated, however two weeks ago I got a GoMo sim and we are using this now for our internet (hotspot) which from my own monitoring is around 7-8GB per day. The house is an old stone walled house and we have no signal inside for phone service and instead need to either stand near a window upstairs, outside in the yard or use Wifi Calling as I am doing on my iPhone.

There was a landline installed here but the house was not lived in for 15 years until I decided to make use of it here. I am 8KM from the local exchange but have ADSL2+ available. I don't know if the landline would serve broadband this far if I got it reactivated.

Other posts are pretty bang on. I've had DSL at 7km (copper length) and max Down/Up was 1.7/0.256Mbps and it was a SOB to get half stable. Mobile is your best/only option.

However, one of the advantages of being rural and relying on mobile broadband is that you may get a quiet sector on whichever mast you are using. I'm connecting to a co-located Three(3G) & Eir(4G) mast site that is is 4.5km away and have a very usable reliable 3G connection with Three that gives me steady 10-20/4 Down/Up with 30ms pings. I have tested Eir 4G with my gomo sim also but being honest Three on 3G does everything I need for €20 AYCE.

If I force 4G on the router I get a Three 4G site that is 16 km away. However, pings are higher and that is also a more contended mast but it shows what is possible.

I use a Huawei E5186 (same as B525, B593 etc) and couldn't recommend them more. However the key to giving the connection it's best chance was getting a Poynting 4G-XPOL-A0002 antenna and installing it on a 10 foot alum pole off the side of the house. So my advice, would be to first get a Huawei 4G router that can take an external antenna and test it out by placing it as high as possible in attic and test orientations for best signal. It may work absolutely perfect for you like that. However, if signal strength/quality is poor to fairish, pay up for the antenna and a lashing kit to mount it. These antennas are that good and I'm a rare positive reviewer.

Post back on how you progress. Eir have a 750GB plan for €30/month so if trialing it for a month or two work out, that could be the plan for you but stick to top up plans for a month or two at the very least. Also take a read of https://editorsean.com/articles/large-4g-plans-home-broadband-ireland/. He has some really useful information on his page that was a great help to me when I was getting set up. Keep in mind that all success is limited by how busy the mast you are connecting to will be at various times of day/night.

Best of luck

jim

The Cush

The OP mentioned GSM in their post, I wonder if they were referring to a 2G/3G voice requirement or mobile broadband or both.

theguzman

The Cush wrote: »

The OP mentioned GSM in their post, I wonder if they were referring to a 2G/3G voice requirement or mobile broadband or both.

Ideally I think I need two systems,

Firstly and most importantly,

For data I would have a system perhaps a stronger antenna which I could put the gomo sim into. I currently get 2-3 bars of H+ 3G on a Samsung Galaxy Core Prime positioned upstairs and acting as a wifi hotspot, this pulls 3-5mbs down with 0.3-0.8mbs upload. Perhaps a stronger antenna mounted outside and fed back into the house with Cat5 or Cat6 to a normal wifi router.

secondary concern.

For voice on our phones we have 2-bars of EDGE and GSM outside in the yard but this cannot penetrate the 1 metre+ thick stone walls. We would need a repeater to capture this and repeat it inside the house, even better if you could do it for 3G also as it would allow us to each use our mobile data allocation of our phones instead of hogging the GoMo data from the hotspot wifi always.

Lastly I know I am averse to satellite but what sort of satellite options are out there today? Our net needs currently are Netflix and alot of Skype calls by my partner for her work and study. We are not into gaming so if I could get 20mbs down on satellite it would be better than 3G but the ping for her video calls would be a concern.

babelfish1990

theguzman wrote: »

Ideally I think I need two systems,

Firstly and most importantly,

For data I would have a system perhaps a stronger antenna which I could put the gomo sim into. I currently get 2-3 bars of H+ 3G on a Samsung Galaxy Core Prime positioned upstairs and acting as a wifi hotspot, this pulls 3-5mbs down with 0.3-0.8mbs upload. Perhaps a stronger antenna mounted outside and fed back into the house with Cat5 or Cat6 to a normal wifi router.

secondary concern.

For voice on our phones we have 2-bars of EDGE and GSM outside in the yard but this cannot penetrate the 1 metre+ thick stone walls. We would need a repeater to capture this and repeat it inside the house, even better if you could do it for 3G also as it would allow us to each use our mobile data allocation of our phones instead of hogging the GoMo data from the hotspot wifi always.

Lastly I know I am averse to satellite but what sort of satellite options are out there today? Our net needs currently are Netflix and alot of Skype calls by my partner for her work and study. We are not into gaming so if I could get 20mbs down on satellite it would be better than 3G but the ping for her video calls would be a concern.

You don't need separate solutions for voice and data. Just put in a mesh WiFi system throughout the house, and you will have good WiFi everywhere for both Voice(WiFi Calling) & Data. Then follow the advice re using a WiFi router with external Poynting antenna and position that where you get the best signal from the eir mast. The signal you are getting is a good start, if it is indoors with just a handset. You will likely do much better on a router with external antenna - you may even get 4G from eir on your existing mast or a different one.

You are right to be skeptical of existing satellites. The latency is horrible, and unsuited to home-working. The next gen satellites - eg Elon Musk's Starlink will be much more interesting - promising 1Gbps speeds with very low latencies because they will be in low-earth-orbit. However they aren't due to launch commercial services until later this year, and will probably ramp up over the next couple of years. Likely to be sooner than NBP for most - but who knows what the price will be.

The Cush

babelfish1990 wrote: »

You are right to be skeptical of existing satellites. The latency is horrible, and unsuited to home-working. The next gen satellites - eg Elon Musk's Starlink will be much more interesting - promising 1Gbps speeds with very low latencies because they will be in low-earth-orbit.

From a recent FCC document on the funding of rural broadband and the use of satellite delivery. In their submissions SpaceX were claiming <50ms roundtrip latency for their LEO satellites but SpaceX did not prove it to the FCC's satisfaction.

In the absence of a real world example of a non-geostationary orbit satellite network offering mass market fixed service to residential consumers that is able to meet our 100 ms round trip latency requirements, Commission staff could not conclude that such an applicant is reasonably capable of meeting the Commission’s low latency requirements, and so we foreclose such applications.

Our eligibility decisions would not “mandate that SpaceX affirmatively mischaracterize the capabilities of its network in any bid.” SpaceX Comments at 7. Instead, our eligibility decisions mean that at this time we conclude that it is not in the public interest to permit low earth orbit satellite providers to bid for the Gigabit performance tier or low latency given their lack of a proven track record in offering the services that will be supported by Auction 904. Because we have weighed a number of principles to make these decisions, it is not arbitrary and capricious.
See, e.g., Telesat Comments at 2 (“Adopting a per se prohibition against low earth orbit satellites selecting low latency in combination with any service tier would be arbitrary and capricious”).

https://wccftech.com/spacex-starlink-fcc-low-latency/
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/elon-musks-promise-of-low-latency-broadband-meets-skepticism-at-fcc/

The Cush

theguzman wrote: »

Lastly I know I am averse to satellite but what sort of satellite options are out there today? Our net needs currently are Netflix and alot of Skype calls by my partner for her work and study. We are not into gaming so if I could get 20mbs down on satellite it would be better than 3G but the ping for her video calls would be a concern.

A family member in in the process of ordering this as there no better option for WFH for the rest of the year - https://bigblu.ie/for-business/business-satellite-broadband/

Skype and Zoom calls to Europe/Asia are part of the job, we'll see how that works out in due course.