Any word on eircom upgrading?

mang87

a 512K connection, among the eyes of most internet users in europe nowadays, it really slow. It is in my eyes aswell. It's terrible that im being charged what I am being charged monthly, and that could get me 4 or 5 times the speed in another country...

Any word eircom upgrading their bandwidth?

Superman

I'm grumpy because I got banned from one board for being a smacktard and now I'm banned from broadband too :?

Moriarty

Superman banned until he changes his attitude. I suspect he'll be waiting a while.

yellabelly

In a country the size of Canada Bell offer a 3Mbps service (0.8Mbps upload) for equivalent of less than €30 a month.It does seem that we are once again stuck in the slow lane.

mang87

bump

mang87

Any word yet?

I know, a massive bump, but I didn't wanna bother starting a new thread, when this one has gone unnoticed and unused

CyberGhost

mang, it's going to be reeeeealy long time before we get 2meg and up, bb for less then 50euro

Sparky

it would be great if some of the english BB providers could come over here, or sky mabey offer BB through the digibox someday inc. in the subscription price, i dont mind the phoneline thing they can make the number a freephone no. or use data signals like they use at the moment to sence if the box is connected to the telephone line. Just a thought

Creamy Goodness

satilite BB will never be a contender for home marketed broadband due to the severe latancy issues

tuxy

how long did it take ireland to get affordable dsl after the u.k, 2 or 3 years?
i think the u.k only got reasonably priced 1 mbit dsl recently
so give it 2 or 3 years
we are that far behind the u.k who are a good bit behind alot of other countries

SkepticOne

People tend to assume that because other coutries have a better service then we should be able to get it here eventually. Sadly, this is not the case.

What is often forgotten when comparing Ireland with, say, Britain is that there is a far greater degree of competition in that country. In Britain, around half the country can avail of cable internet offering speeds of up to 3 Mbit/sec.

In Ireland, cable internet is only available to a tiny fraction of country and proportion is increasing only slowly. Other forms of competition such as wireless are only starting to take off here. Eircom pretty much still has the monopoly on the last mile and while they do, they will use that monopoly to maximise profits in the interest of their shareholders (as is their legal obligation).

The sad fact is that Eircom already provide 2 Mbit/sec DSL. However in the absence of widespread competition, it doesn't make much sense for them to charge less than 200 euros per month for it.

So in the immediate future, we can expect to see these other countries getting faster and faster internet access while Ireland remains static despite complaints here.

The situation is slowly improving. Over the next couple of years we should see wireless taking off in the larger towns and some rural areas. Some of the charges for LLU have come down recently and this may lead to improved services in cities although these new services may still be pricy - only services directly competing with Eircom's base level DSL in terms of price will have much of an effect.

Paradoxically, imo, it is the obsession with what Eircom does compared to other countries that is one of the factors holding back development. Eircom will only respond when they need to respond and they don't need to yet. From Eircom's point of view, why charge 40 euros for 2 meg/sec when they can charge 200? Why increase the speed of the 512k service at the same price when in a lot of areas they are the only supplier and people have no choice? However, it suits Eircom down to the ground to have people regarding Eircom as the sole potential provider of decent services.

So for the moment forget it. Look to services provided by other than Eircom first. By this, I don't mean bitstream resellers like UTV or Esat as these depend totally on moves by Eircom. I mean genuine last-mile competitors that in many cases will have nothing to do with Eircom's infrastructure.

When these start to appear (as they will, but slowly) then Eircom will respond. But, again paradoxically, Eircom's response will hopefully be irrelevant.

The challange for the government is how to promote this competition which is necessary for broadband development. There will be no quick fix or magic bullet.

Infini

CyberGhost wrote:

mang, it's going to be reeeeealy long time before we get 2meg and up, bb for less then 50euro

There is the possibility that NTL might upgrade the speeds to 3MB/s on their 50 yoyo package. Although that isn't a certanty its stull possible.

ando

SkepticOne wrote:

The sad fact is that Eircom already provide 2 Mbit/sec DSL.

Exactly, if they were to up home broadband speeds, they'd have to do the same for business broadband, putting more pressure on their networks, more investment for bandwidth etc. Anyway in my experience the business broadband clients (2meg users) don’t have any need for more speed, infact a 512 would suit most. I can’t see Eircom even considering uping speeds until there is a threat

monster_fighter

British BB compaines don't come in here (wireless, cable, local loop or otherwise) because the ENTIRE poplulation of Ireland is less than a medium sized British town.

SkepticOne

monster_fighter wrote:

British BB compaines don't come in here (wireless, cable, local loop or otherwise) because the ENTIRE poplulation of Ireland is less than a medium sized British town.

In part this is true, although NTL has been owned by a British parent company. The reason most of the cable is not (and may never be upgraded) is that it is of much lower specification due to being installed in the 70's to carry 5 or 6 analogue channels. Much smaller networks in Ireland such as Casey cable in Waterford are succesfully carrying broadband internet. Small population is only part of the story. Another example of a British company operating here would be BT, but they just resell whatever wholesale offerings Eircom deem worthy for the Irish public.

The US wireless company Clearwire recently purchased one of the 3.5 gig licence holders, so it would seem they deem the market of sufficient size to make money. Not British but the principle is the same.

I think cable broadband will probably spread to parts of Waterford and Galway eventually. Chorus may upgrade a few more areas (currently they only have Clonmel, Thurles and Kilkenny done). LLU is likely to remain screwed for regulatory reasons for the next couple of years, so we are probably looking at wireless as the source of competition for Eircom in the near future.

So, the problem is that to date is that cable was not a competitor to Eircom for historical reasons (people willing to pay for a few UK channels in the 70's meant that what was installed initially can't carry broadband), LLU failed (see ComReg), wireless only now becoming a viable technology.

Blaster99

When I did a bit of analysis for IrelandOffline on offerings in other countries (and I will do more when I'm through a large pile of urgent work), I noticed that in other countries they never specify the contention ratio and the pricing of the products is not proportional to the speed like it is here. 512kbps might cost €30, 8Mbps might cost €60. When you look at the Irish market, all offerings are priced in proportion to the cost of uncontended bandwidth and they're all more or less the same, whether Eircom is involved or not. I suppose NTL in Ireland are the only ones that don't do the proportional pricing model. Does NTL state the contention ratio on the products? I don't recall having seen it.

So is Ireland fundamentally different or does the contention ratio in other countries go up significantly on the higher speed packages to keep the cost down?

I would have thought an uncontended megabit has a particular unit price in every country so I don't understand how you could sell a 20:1 512/128 service for €30 and 20:1 8192/1024 for €60 when the ISP needs to buy 16 times the amount of uncontended bandwith to support the latter but only gets twice the money in retail.

dub45

Blaster99 wrote:

When I did a bit of analysis for IrelandOffline on offerings ...................... Does NTL state the contention ratio on the products? I don't recall having seen it.

17/1

rymus

Quick solution.. Move to Dungarvan... Something like 9mbps for €40 a month? Can't go wrong with those numbers. Makes me feel a little bit sick every time Im passing through there.

Blaster99

Without mucking around with this too much, NTL's figures show that it costs about €18 euro to provide a broadband service of any description and the bandwidth costs about €23 per megabit on top of that. So the price isn't proportional to the bandwidth. The rest of the providers are ripping us off (in case that was news).

ro2

SkepticOne wrote:

The sad fact is that Eircom already provide 2 Mbit/sec DSL. However in the absence of widespread competition, it doesn't make much sense for them to charge less than 200 euros per month for it.

For the average home user connecting to the internet that's correct. However there is one reason why it would make sense to offer faster connections - VPNs. In our company we've converted most of our offsite users from dialup to DSL. The VPN server, on a 2Mb leased line, could support about 30 users downloading at full speed. Now four users at 512k/s will fill the link so we've had to increase the bandwidth on the leased line.

The profit margins on a leased line are a lot greater than on DSL so the more bandwidth eircom are pumping into the DSL the more bandwidth I need in my office to keep up. You also need to factor in the costs to Eircom - assuming most of the VPN users are in Ireland that means the VPN server will more than likely be on an eircom.net leased line or another Irish provider. If it's eircom.net there are no transit costs and if it's another ISP and it goes through the INEX it'll cost them about €1 per Mb.

Then there's the fact that there isn't a whole lot of difference between a 5Mb connection and 512k to the average home user - Hotmail loads just as fast on 512k. So if eircom changed everyones DSL from 512k to 5Mb tomorrow morning they wouldn't need to go off and buy ten times more transit as only a small proportion of their customers would actually use it.

yellabelly wrote:

In a country the size of Canada Bell offer a 3Mbps service (0.8Mbps upload) for equivalent of less than €30 a month.It does seem that we are once again stuck in the slow lane.

That's not a fair comparison. Most of the popular Internet sites are hosted in the US so for you to look up a site on eircom dsl they need to pay for a transatlantic connection, a provider in Canada only has to connect over the border.

Mutant_Fruit

ro2 wrote:

That's not a fair comparison. Most of the popular Internet sites are hosted in the US so for you to look up a site on eircom dsl they need to pay for a transatlantic connection, a provider in Canada only has to connect over the border.

I think theres a hellofalot of internet not based in america I think we could safely assume that america also has to buy transatlantic bandwidth, and theres plenty of traffic going each way.

More competition is the only thing that will drive prices down and speeds up. We'll just have to wait and see.

OfflerCrocGod

I'm sick of my 512kbps connection I've finally given up on ESAT and have decided to go the wireless route with Brezee, without more speed and less caps you lose my cash. Bye Bye €ircon.

SkepticOne

Blaster99 wrote:

Without mucking around with this too much, NTL's figures show that it costs about €18 euro to provide a broadband service of any description and the bandwidth costs about €23 per megabit on top of that. So the price isn't proportional to the bandwidth. The rest of the providers are ripping us off (in case that was news).

Price doesn't seem to be proportional to bandwidth for some of the other providers either. I took a look at IBB and Leaps wireless offerings. Leap have a 48:1 512k service at 40 euros and a 20:1 1 meg service at 80 euros. Not particularly great value, imo, but the higher end service is four times the bandwidth at twice the price. IBB's business level services start at €40 for 20:1 1 mbit/sec up to €250 for 6:1 3 mbit/sec. You get slightly under twice uncontended bandwidth per euro at the higher end. Amocom in Cork don't seem to publish contention ratios.

I don't consider either of these particularly great, but Eircom's linear pricing is certainly non-competitive. Again, competing services need to become more widespread before you see Eircom responding.