Esat to announce new deal to compete with smart

bullpost

Esat are rumoured to be announcing a new deal in the next week.
They say it competes with the current Smart Telecom free line rental offer, so
my guess is the offer will include free line rental.
A friend who rang them recently to tell them he was switching over to SmartTelecom was told about it.

diarmo

How can EsatBT possible compete with Smart without enabling LLU on the exchanges???

CyberGhost

God Bless SmartTelecom!

Tusky

CyberGhost wrote:

God Bless SmartTelecom!

here here!

Infini

CyberGhost wrote:

God Bless SmartTelecom!

You can say that again! :cool:

Willymuncher

diarmo wrote:

How can EsatBT possible compete with Smart without enabling LLU on the exchanges???

I was gonna ask the very same question

Praetorian

EsatBT have more exchanges unbundled than any other company, and they must have long term plans to do more.

Smart only have a handful, and their rollout isn't very impressive looking on paper.

Leap only have 2 or 3 exchanges unbundled. All of these are in Dublin city centre. Again their long term plans are not impressive.

EsatBT can only offer the same speeds as the other bitstream companies on Eircoms exchanges. Although they can play around with caps / free hardware and they can reduce the price if they wish to do so.

Lex_Diamonds

I bet he's talking about the 2meg upgrade. :rolleyes:

diarmo

Praetorian wrote:

EsatBT have more exchanges unbundled than any other company, and they must have long term plans to do more.

Smart only have a handful, and their rollout isn't very impressive looking on paper.

Leap only have 2 or 3 exchanges unbundled. All of these are in Dublin city centre. Again their long term plans are not impressive.

EsatBT can only offer the same speeds as the other bitstream companies on Eircoms exchanges. Although they can play around with caps / free hardware and they can reduce the price if they wish to do so.

As far as I know EsatBt have less than 3,000lines unbundled out of a possible 1.7million or so!!!

In other words....how are esatBT going to compete with Smart without LLU???

halenger

LLU = unbundled. Esat already have exchanges unbundled. As has been said, more than SMART or anyone else have. They just haven't done anything about it lately. SMART may be the shove they needed to get off of their lorels. Their LLU packages used to be terribly over priced. They've dropped in price sometime in the recent past, apparently.

kasintahan

halenger wrote:

LLU = unbundled. Esat already have exchanges unbundled. As has been said, more than SMART or anyone else have. They just haven't done anything about it lately.

Lately?!!

Try three years!

diarmo

halenger wrote:

LLU = unbundled. Esat already have exchanges unbundled. As has been said, more than SMART or anyone else have. They just haven't done anything about it lately. SMART may be the shove they needed to get off of their lorels. Their LLU packages used to be terribly over priced. They've dropped in price sometime in the recent past, apparently.

I know that:
unbundling = LLU = local Loop UNBUNDLING

What I was trying to say is that a couple of thousand lines in Dublin city centre will not be able to compete with smarts ALL Ireland offering.

Blaster99

CyberGhost wrote:

God Bless SmartTelecom!

Indeed. The rest of the competitors are pretty worthless in terms of coming up with innovative products with EsatBT probably being the worst of the lot.

Blaster99

diarmo wrote:

I know that:
unbundling = LLU = local Loop UNBUNDLING

What I was trying to say is that a couple of thousand lines in Dublin city centre will not be able to compete with smarts ALL Ireland offering.

The fact still remains that EsatBT have unbundled more exchanges and can unbundle more lines than Smart. EsatBT has unbundled exchanges across the country, not just in Dublin. The list is available in a sticky possibly in this forum.

bk

diarmo wrote:

I know that:
unbundling = LLU = local Loop UNBUNDLING

What I was trying to say is that a couple of thousand lines in Dublin city centre will not be able to compete with smarts ALL Ireland offering.

Smart don't have an all Ireland offering.

Smart currently have 3 exchanges unbundled, but plan to do more, but they have never said they plan to do all ireland.

EsatBT have 40 exchanges unbundled.

EsatBT could easily offer a better product (then bitstream) on these 40 exchanges and there is nothing stopping them from rolling out LLU to more exchanges.

Anyway, I'd say it was just the sales person lying, he was probably just talking about the 2mb upgrade and they might have some sort of nice deal with BB + line rental + free calls.

diarmo

bk wrote:

EsatBT could easily offer a better product (then bitstream) on these 40 exchanges and there is nothing stopping them from rolling out LLU to more exchanges.

The HUGE cost is what is currently stopping them.

That HUGE cost wont disappear until the courts can get eircom over a barrel and force then to do automatic LLU movement at a much lower cost.

Praetorian

A lot of walls that were blocking LLU have been brought down; some still remain but are being tackled now. EsatBT should be announcing a plan for the near future when LLU is economically viable. Maybe they won't, maybe they aren't going to invest any more in LLU. It's sad either way; EsatBT are supposed to be Eircoms main competitor!

damien

LLU in Ireland is broken. It's not an automated system. Paper and pens are used to process an LLU request for christ's sake. It relies on the number of staff in an organisation for processing instead of an automated system. Until everything is automated I cannot forsee more than a few 100 customers getting enabled every month. Smart and EsatBT are fcked unless ComReg wins in court on April 13th.

Blaster99

Isn't there a physical element of the unbundling that requires an engineer? I bet that's going to be the bottleneck no matter how efficient the other parts of the unbundling get.

diarmo

The paperwork is a far more time consuming thing than reconnecting your Telephone cable to another ISP's netwoek on the other side of the room.

paperwork takes forever with eircom.
If you want to upgrade your broadband from basic to plus (just change your cap) with eircom you are advised that a wait of 10 will be needed before your will have the change implemented!!!

Paper is a bitch!!!

WizZard

10 what, minutes/months/days/years/eircom-time frames??

jesus_thats_gre

Actual paper work or manual data entry into a database form?

Having had experience with FMNP where the process was virtually automated, there was still a fair amount of human intervention required on a regular basis. Mind you, the memory is a bit sketchy.

diarmo

WizZard wrote:

10 what, minutes/months/days/years/eircom-time frames??

10 DAYS you tool!!!
If it took 10 seconds/minutes/hours...do you think I would have bothered making a point of it???
And if it took 10 weeks then eircom would fall to pieces with such incompetence.

Sponge Bob

The actual unbundle will take about 1 minute if there is a tea break coming up in the exchange and 3 minutes if not

dahamsta

damien.m wrote:

Until everything is automated I cannot forsee more than a few 100 customers getting enabled every month. Smart and EsatBT are fcked unless ComReg wins in court on April 13th.

I was thinking about this the other day, I doubt many understand just how fscked EsatBT and Smart are. Even if you're generous with the numbers and peg it at 1000 activations a month, that would see Smart's target of 100,000 customers take 100 months or just under two years to activate. And of course that's just Smart, EsatBT and any other companies that want to unbundle aren't included.

All of which makes the fact that the process is almost entirely manual several years after unbundling began, all the more ridiculous. ComReg has some serious questions to answer here, unless EsatBT are so incompetent that they didn't request automation all that time ago. And by rights this should have been something ComReg should have been working on without prompting by OLOs. The words "reactive" and "proactive" are rearing their ugly heads again...

adam

diarmo

What really makes me laugh is that esatBT's parent company...BT....tried out all of eircoms tricks a couple of years ago!!!

Why..O...why didnt esatBT take steps years ago to work around all the arguments that they knew eircom would throw against LLU...as they were the very same arguments BT had make not so long ago.

Im not sure for how long LLU has operated in the UK or even if its automated like in Italy...but the huge strides that are being made by British ISP's must be testament that its the right way to do things.

Look at it this way....
We know have access to 2Mbit DSL....you better get to like it because for the next couple of years without the advent of LLU....its all were doing to get with DSL I'm afraid!!!

Why..O...why are Comwreck so InCoMpEtAnT!!!!???

halenger

dahamsta wrote:

Even if you're generous with the numbers and peg it at 1000 activations a month, that would see Smart's target of 100,000 customers take 100 months or just under two years to activate.

Um... months or weeks? 100 months is over 8 years (8 and 1/3 to be exact).

What is a realistic figure? (I don't know whether months or weeks is more appropriate, thus the question.) 1000 activations a month or a week?

Maybe we're to expect an exponential rise. The more exchanges that are activated/unbundled, the more people who'll sign up, on average. Though I think dropping prices at the same time would also round up a lot of people who're on the verge of getting BB but now quite sure, and on an active exchange. Not that I want to turn this into a price debate. I just mean things like SMARTs offer.

It'll be very interesting to see what they announce, if anything. Lets hope they don't make a pack of fools of us, given the day that's in it.

Fibre for all! Wheeeeeeee.... :rolleyes:

dahamsta

Sorry, confused myself there, I was working in weeks when I should have been working in months. The number that's been bandied about is somewhere between the one suggested in damien.m's post and the one in mine. Damien's is probably a worse-case scenario, I'm trying to give a best-case scenario. A realistic figure would probably be closer to Damien's than mine.

To come at it from another angle: To make the system viable, it should be able to handle 10,000 connections a month at an absolute minimum. That's simply not possible without close to 100% automation.

Sorry about the misunderstanding. If I've made any other mistakes please feel free to point them out.

adam

dub45

Blaster99 wrote:

Isn't there a physical element of the unbundling that requires an engineer? I bet that's going to be the bottleneck no matter how efficient the other parts of the unbundling get.

Would it be possible for someone to explain what an automated system would invovle? - would it overcome the physical element mentioned above? And how would the contractual element be overcome in any automated system (i.e. the requirement to give a months notice or in a minority of cases someone buying out their 12 month contract).

Sponge Bob

Every part of the process BAR that physical element lasting about 3 minutes.

twould be an oul computher Dub45

iano

dub45 wrote:

Would it be possible for someone to explain what an automated system would invovle? - would it overcome the physical element mentioned above? And how would the contractual element be overcome in any automated system (i.e. the requirement to give a months notice or in a minority of cases someone buying out their 12 month contract).

LLU will always require physical jumpering of the line from the Eircom line to the "Access Seekers" equipment in the exchange.

The three identified deficiencies in existing LLU offering (over which Eircom and ComReg are in legal dispute) are essentially:
1. Single Product with LLU and number ported. Number to automatically port to new provider within minutes of hardware changeover. i.e. keep your telephone number
2. Automatic cancellation of equivalent existing products, including Bitstream etc. (zero notice cancellation). i.e. your order for Smart etc. cancels whatever else is on the line without you having to contact your existing supplier.
3. Automated system to efficiently manage large numbers of LLU migrations without unnecessary delays.

If Eircom can be forced to address these points, then LLU will be a realistic prospect. Customers choosing Smart etc. will fill in the order/authorisations and suffer a maximum of 15-30 minutes of service disruption in both telephone and broadband service during the switchover.

Reference is ComReg document: Directions to eircom: Local Loop Unbundling

Blaster99

So if it takes three minutes to unbundle how come it takes two weeks to get ADSL enabled by Eircom themselves? You're not seriously suggesting it takes two weeks even for Biddy to enter an order into a computer?

The thing I don't get is why the likes of Esat or Smart don't go for high-end products with higher margin instead of piddling around with €30-40pm crap. Smart are using ADSL2+, why not offer a 8Mbps service for €100 or 24Mbps or something like that. That would blow the socks off anything available in the Irish market, they would make plenty money per installation, and it wouldn't be a volume game. Going after volume in the current environment is insane. Leap are doing the right thing by offering leased line alternatives for several hundred euro a month.

Anarchist

I too have heard about a "very" special offer from Esat after phoning up yesterday
2mb/512 but of course it was just a person at the other end of the phone, she said ESAT will be doing a massive advertising campaign promoting this, if she is correct I guess they wanted the other isp's to show their hand and then go for the jugular?
Can you imagine 512 up lol I would never have trouble with my BT ratio again lol

Would also like to point out would get much better game speeds as when I use to be with ESAT business on 512/256 I had pings of 30 and when I went to Eircoms 512/128 they went to 50.

Rancid

Though... I believe that the cap for the 2MB package is only going to be 16.

Low, I thought.

JackieChan

Surely Esat could do the following:

Draw a list of the exchanges ordered by the number of Esat users on each exchange.
Starting with the exchanges at the top(the exchanges with the highest number of esat customers) offer the users on that exchange a 'special deal'. If its anything like Smart people will jump at it.They then install the equipment and make the transfer.
Not as simple in real life....but may be the best way to go about LLU

-Al-

friend of mine in italy, order broadband, a day later his line was activated, (he already had a modem so he didnt have to wait for theres to come)