Eir FTTH Real speeds ?

_John C

Is it really the norm to get only 55%-65% of profile speed ? Surely not! I ordered the 500Mbps plan today.

KildareP

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058304004/eir-ftth-real-speeds

Norm, no. Most will easily get the maximum speed at any time.

However because the service is ultimately contended, if a few of your neighbours join up and are very heavy users then there won't be enough bandwidth to go around for everyone to get their maximum speed.

This is Eir covering themselves for that possibility and once you get at least 55-65% at any time, tough, essentially.

You can get actual guaranteed bandwidth lines where you will get the advertised speed 24/7 but monthly costs are typically more than your Eir connection would cost for the entire year.

limnam

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058304004/eir-ftth-real-speeds

Assuming your gear is capabale of the speeds. (e.g. your laptops/phones/etc) You will get the "full" speed I'd say 99.9% of the time.

But you also need to keep in mind the vast majority of public facing severs cannot provide you with 500Mbps. You'll be lucky if some of them can provide you with 100Mbps.

So unless you have a huge amount of endpoints all hammering the line at the same time even if you were getting 55-65% most of the time you wouldn't notice the difference.

long_b

Right now (10 AM on a weekday), sitting beside the router on my phone I'm getting 560 down, 95 up on 1 Gb plan

I find you'll always get the full upload speed - download speed can vary

limnam

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120816933#Comment_120816933

What do you get with a cable into the router?

Most wifi is not capable of gigabit speeds.

long_b

I'm going to sidestep that question the grounds of

(a) laziness and

(b) although I've run ethernet cable to most rooms in the house the devices we use most often are all wireless. So wired speed, although interesting, is pretty irrelevant for me day to day. If say most people would be similar these days.

I went 1 Gb for the upload speed (which I'm happy with).

limnam

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120817655#Comment_120817655

Understand.

But in this case using a technology that can't utlize a 1gig link to prove the speed of a link as you'll appreciate doesn't make much sense.

brio09

EIR door-to-door sales person came to my house near Dundrum today. He said FTTH is rolling out starting 8th August to my area. I tried virgin media 1gbps fiber and Vodafone 100mbps DSL at my address.

Do you know how does EIR fiber differ from Virgin Media fiber? As per the salesperson, EIR is FTTH whereas VM had fiber to the cabinet, so it was shared with others. Is that correct? Should I expect much better speed with EIR?

babelfish1990

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120880631#Comment_120880631

In most areas, Virgin Media is not true fibre (FTTH). It is copper coax to the nearest street cabinet (aside from a small number of mainly new-build areas). The Advertising Standards Authority took them to task a few years ago for misleading customers into believing it is fibre. While coax can support 1Gbps, the latency is much higher than even DSL FTTC, and there is much more contention, particularly on the upstream. Eir's urban FTTH supports up to 10Gbps, but even at 1Gbps that is typically delivered currently you will never see congestion, and latency is very consistently low. It is a mistake to pay too much attention to download speed when comparing Broadband services. Most applications do not need much download speed - but obsessing on this ignores all the other factors that are important - Latency, contention, upload speed, reliability/downtime, dependence on mains power, etc. There are other advantages of real fibre - unlike copper coax, it is not susceptible to electrical faults due to dampness or weak mechanical connections as all the joints are fused glass. In general, door-to-door salespeople are to be treated with a degree of skepticism - but it sounds like your Eir rep is probably correct.

brio09

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120881579#Comment_120881579

Thank you! that is helpful. I have texted the salesperson to come by and I'll place the order with them.

bk

“ but it sounds like your Eir rep is probably correct.”

No he wasn’t and he lied!

He claimed Eir FTTH isn’t shared, but that is a lie, the FTTH technology Eir use GPON is a shared technology. It depends on the split, but your connection is typically shared with 32 of your neighbours.

Having said that, I don’t see this sharing as a problem and for the reasons you state around latency etc. and lower price, I’d still take Eir FTTH over Virgin Media 1gig coax service.

It just pisses me off seeing sales people lie like this. What the sales person did is against Eir’s rules and if you reported him to management, he would be in big trouble. Never trust something a sales person says.

BTW Virgin are upgrading their network to FTTH too, so once available it would be more competitive with Eir.

limnam

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120889760#Comment_120889760

Apologies in advance if it wasn't Eir.

But I was pretty sure I saw an advert on RTE recently which has an Eir Engineer installing FTTH in someones house and telling the kid in the advert he won't need to share the connection with the neighbor anymore

If Eir are advetising it on the TV I can't imagine a Sales rep getting thier knuckles wrapped for doing/saying the same thing.

micks_address

question on Eir FTTH - does anyone know if will work in during a powercut if you have a home backup supply? Virgin media doesn't... (at least it didnt for me during powercut)

The Real B-man

Yes it will if the ONT and modem has power a small ups will do, your local exchange will have battery failover for x amount of hours or generator in the event of a powercut.

bk

“But I was pretty sure I saw an advert on RTE recently which has an Eir Engineer installing FTTH in someones house and telling the kid in the advert he won't need to share the connection with the neighbor anymore”

I found the ad you are talking about, Christ that is mad! A complete lie. I’d certainly be complaint to both Comreg and the competition authority if I had seen that.

Eleusis

@bk "What the sales person did is against Eir’s rules and if you reported him to management, he would be in big trouble."

This person would not get into trouble. This is what is inherently wrong with Eir IMO. During my various traumas with Eir over the years, I have reported many Eir people to their superiors and the problem is they don't give a fck. You end up having to report the superiors too because they don't care either.

Noone has to answer to anyone for anything they say or do= customer service disaster. Which they are.

RobiePAX

@bk sales rep won't get in any trouble as he's repeating literally what is on their website. This is not something they are hiding, but rather something they are actively promoting.

I don't have technical expertise to tell if their statement is incorrect and warrants ComReg investigation. My understanding what they mean is that you don't share maximum speed of connection with your neighbours. That if all kids in the area start updating Call of Duty, you'd still get your 1 GB speed. At least that's my understanding.

babelfish1990

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120915114#Comment_120915114

The text in the advert is technically correct. Eir's FTTH network is your own exclusive fibre into your home (Star network) vs cable network which has a shared bus topology. Of course, all Internet connections are contended at some point, so the connection gets shared further upstream. The lack of any sharing on the final leg is not really what makes FTTH faster than cable, but it does help to make FTTH a better and more reliable solution. If Mrs. Murphy decides to decorate her living room or repaint her fascia boards, she could potentially damage the shared cable, impacting on all her neighbours. If Mrs Murphy happens to be the house that powers the cable amplifier, she could cause a power failure for all her neighbours. The simple message that sharing is bad is not inaccurate, if a bit simplistic. The other disadvantages of cable vs FTTH are way more important, such as the lower contention ratio on FTTH, lower latency etc. Also, FTTH is way less susceptible to failure due to water ingress or mechanical joint failure. These more important attributes are difficult to convey in the text of a short advert, so it is easy to see why the simple sharing message was chosen.

bk

So, the FTTH technology Eir use is more then just contented, it is actually shared!

Yes, it is a star topology (actually it is a tree topology) which as mentioned above, means each home has an individual fibre going to the home from the splitter. However from the splitter to the ONT there is only one fibre cable shared with 32 neighbours and even more then that on the downstream all 32 fibers are shared.

The technology Eir (and SIRO/VM) use for FTTH is called GPON, with this technology, a single fibre cable from the OLT in the exchange travels to your local area, where a splitter then splits it out to 32 of your neighbours.

When the OLT in the exchange needs to send you data, it does so by using a laser to fire a beam of light down the single fibre cable, which actually gets sent to not only you, but all of your 32 neighbours! The ONU/ONT decides if you can "see" the data or not, to avoid you seeing your neighbours data and vice versa.

On the upstream, the splitter combines your data with all your 32 neighbours to send back to the OLT. It does this using timeslots.

It is very much a shared medium.

This might help visualise it:

This is even a better explanation:

From here: https://blog.router-switch.com/2022/01/how-does-gpon-work/

NOTE, the above is for GPON, strictly speaking Eir is using XGS-PON for new installs, which basically works the same way as above, just more bandwidth, 10Gb/s shared, rather then 2.4Gb/s indicated above.

EDIT: Double checking Openeir's docs, part of their network is GPON at a 32 split and newer parts XGS-PON at a 64 split.

Gonzo

Eir's rural network is GPON and the IFN (Urban) is XGS-PON. I wonder will OpenEir ever upgrade the rural network to XGS-PON, i'm sure they'll have to at some point but that's probably years away.

bk

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120932182#Comment_120932182

I'm sure they will eventually. The path to upgrading to XGS-PON is relatively straight forward and relatively (for Telecoms) cheap.

Basically they can just swap out the GPON OLT's for XGS-PON OLT's in the exchange to enable it (or a WDM). XGS-PON is backwards compatible with GPON and both can operate side by side on the same fibre. No need to upgrade any fibre or splitters out in the wild. Customers can stay on their GPON ONT's until they upgrade to a product greater then 1Gb/s (like 2Gb/s) and then they just need to swap out the just that customers ONT for one that supports XSG-PON, while their neighbours can stay on GPON.

Vastly cheaper and easier then the original VDSL or the initial FTTH rollout. Not having to touch anything in the outside network (ODN) and backwards compatible makes it easy.

BTW The same should be true for the future NG PON (25, 50, 100 Gb) standards under development. It looks like PON will have a nice future proof upgrade path.

brio09

I went ahead with EIR "FTTH" and I am seeing good speeds. 670mbps as per speed test via cat6 cable and laptop. connected directly to the EIR modem/router. I had to upgrade other parts of my home networking from Usb 2.0 to 3.0 and to cat5e or cat6. But I'm seeing these good speeds now. I took screenshots and have a network diagram, in case it helps anyone.

Thanks to @babelfish1990 - your response helped me make the move.

I'm next trying to bypass the EIR modem/router and use my Asus router directly with the ONT device and see if that increases my reliability and speed further.

KeRbDoG

On 1Gbps down, 100Mbps up - FTTH with Vodafone via OpenEir. Running a Speedtest Tracker docker, testing over a number of months a few times a day

Download
887.9Mbit/s (average)
932.8Mbit/s (maximum)

Upload
97.2Mbit/s (average)
101.4Mbit/s (maximum)

Ping
4.6ms (average)
9.7ms (maximum)