National Broadband Ireland : implementation and progress

Once again. We had the biggest ever pandemic globally in the world's history surpassing Spanish flu. Whilst operations were ongoing the notion they were as normal is absolutely untrue. Various contractors were not working. There was travel bans so external contractors couldn't come. Many workers returned to their home countries and have stayed. These are all major setbacks.

People seem to continually and conveniently gloss over this as if it's nothing and tbh it's incredibly frustrating reading the pure ignorance on display. Once again we are back to nonsense posts like above this one claiming satellite and wireless is the solution. We are not traipsing over old ground again combating this misinformation.

Messer indeed ......

Elaine Byrne, in her column yesterday, was alluding to this too, dragging up Robert Watt and the Dept of Public Expenditure's reservations about spending €3bn on the NBP and the potential of emerging technologies.

How people like Elaine with zero information on technology gets to parade around nonsense like that is beyond me . Maybe if she bothered doing an ounce of research you might get a decent article.

Do we think ISPs will be able to resell starlink or partner with them to facilitate local installs of it?

That's objectively false information. Go read the starlink threads already out. It has really high pings continuosly and always. Latency can be up and down. Yes the overal speeds are good but also suffers from outages. And it suffers from contention so if it gets super popular you are back to a full mast situation like you would with imagine.

It is quite simply no match to the current NBP and is a decent solution for some. It should never be promoted as equivalent or any such replacement for nationwide fibre. Just no. There is a huge gap in quality and capacity with fibre. It's acres of a gap .

Probably a decent place to post here as NBI vs Starlink discussion has been on going for a while. I have starlink for a week now. Still not installed where I want it but its without obstruction.

My early impression is

- God send for likes of me who need fast download and upload speeds. Avg 160 - 210Mb down or so and 35 up.

- Amazing to be able to work away while download/uploads/other users are on the network with zero issues. My old vdsl connection of 14Mb would grind to a halt if a download or upload was taking place. I literally smiled as I watched a 5 gig work update downloaded in minutes and still be able to work as normal.

- latency is still very high - averaging 35- 60ms with some spikes and packet loss. rare but it happens.

- very rare occasional outages that last 5-10 seconds but these are literally down to maybe 1-3 times a day.

- the latency issue can be felt when loading some websites and especially Facebook services such as Instagram and Facebook itself. It can be very very poor on those sites at times esp. where pages, videos just don't load. Not even fully sure why they suffer so much.

- online gaming, again great for fast downloads but the ping sets it back as you average 50ms and the spikes in also hurt it. Outages again could result in a complete disconnect but I haven't ran into this yet.

- starlink router is poor but will buy my own soon.

-4k streaming isn't an issue at all on starlink now. Other streaming ‐ Outages were frustrating the first day knocking me off sky go on the xbox but again that was down to where I had the dish placed at the time.

- The 100 euro month sub is crazy expensive.

TLDR - Starlink is a great solution while I wait for NBI but would be even better coming in at around 60 euro.

It still doesn't come anywhere near to touching Fibre to the home and as soon as NBI come around, il be saying good bye to Starlink.

In same boat as yourself, stop gap to summer 2023 till NBI arrives. For now its progress going from 2Mb to 300.

BTW, keep us posed on the router upgrade.

what model are you thinking of?

Are you still getting free service from Starlink?

Your doc says "Brian... has no commercial links to any business interests discussed in this document"

Surely, getting free service is at least a benefit-in-kind?

It offers no net benefit to me as I also continue to pay for a parallel service. I think you are scrapping the bottom of a (very) empty barrel.

How can I avail of this free starlink service and still keep paying for my up to 5 Mbps wisp?