National Broadband Ireland : implementation and progress

Brilliant. I was chatting to a few around Aughrim, Liscappul, Urraghry, Glan areas and similar stories. Modems landed in most cases and/or install dates next week.

Yes, they are using two models of DPs or splice closures as NBI refer to them. They are both manufactured by 3M. The larger one would be used for its higher cable and/or fusion splice capacity.

No definition of "proper broadband" included but, assuming it's FTTP, then 10% would be c.240K premises.

Which means either

• that the recently announced Eircom 200K will not be deployed within the IFN timeframe (2024/5) or
• the NBP will run late by about 100K at the end of 2026, or
• some mixture of the two.

Plenty of work still happening in the Monard area outside of Tipperary Town, no sign of DPs yet though. Probably expect the Dec 21-Feb 22 to get pushed tbh despite the pretty much daily presence of various contractors, seems whatever they're doing along the N24 is taking them a while to do.

Update (in bold)...

Area: West Wicklow. Specifically the lane I live on.

Some people have asked for timeframes. So in my particular case (might apply overall)...

September 2020: One man and an Actavo/NBI van doing a survey.

December 2020: One man taking pictures of poles etc.

26th March 2021: Contractors cutting hedges and trees.

30th August 2021: A crew arrived and strung fiber between the poles.

During the week of 11th Oct 2021 to 15th Oct 2021, a crew arrived and installed a lot of DPs (much more than I expected).

Anticipated availability: October 2021 - December 2021.

Anticipated availability: January 2022 - April 2022.

Anticipated date for connection: April 2022 - June 2022

We're still 6-8 months away from connection even though DPs are now in place.

Does this sound right or is there room for optimism for earlier availability?

One comment I would have thought my pings would have been better!! I had Eir FTTH a couple of years ago and I used to get single digit pings....

Do me a favour and speedtest it between 8 and 10pm and see if you see below 10% of your rated speed, or your ping shooting up to 10x what it normally is.

Can someone explain how this would be the case? Surely the DAs are sized proportionately to exchange capacity? Is it a fibre technology issue (ports,etc.) or lack of physical space for equipment in the exchange that would cause something like this? I would have assumed fibre needed less physical space in the exchanges due to the multiplexing afforded by splitter between the premises and the exchange....

Roscommon Town neck o' the woods

Preorder:01/10/21 via Digiweb

Update: 01/11/21: "Thank you for your recent Fibre Broadband order from Digiweb. The service will be live in December and you will soon receive your install date via SMS."

As far as I can see you have never been part or the Carrigaline deployment area nor the Midelton area. Here is a section of map of the two areas, Carrigaline in blue and Midelton brown.

The red line is the backhaul cable from the Mahon PoH to Midelton. It passes through the Jack Lynch tunnel. It has always been part of the design, Midleton cannot go live without being connected to Mahon.

What you have been told makes little sense. A deployment area doesn't magically become full. They would be well planned in advance to accomodate a specific number of premises.

I have speculated to you before that there is an OLT in Mahon that would serve your area, I cannot be sure of this as I haven't seen maps confirming it but to say that you would be connect to the OLT in Midleton seems far-fetched. The cable distance to Mahon from the Midleton OLT is nearly 24km, for it to then travel down to Passage West and further would be pushing the limits of the technology. I just don't see it.

What may have happened and this is just my speculation, is that they had intended to launch your area with Carrigaline but have run into delays. They want to get paid for Carrigaline so have now pushed your area into Midleton.

I'd be interested to hear if you spoke yourself to the build manager and if so did you ask him if there is an OLT in Mahon?

Got an email update re connection in our area in Clare. Between Jan 25 and Dec 26. Why even bother with such a **** update, what's the point. You get a bit excited when the email comes and then you get the massive drop - 5 fn years more to wait.

I was hoping you'd jump in @NBAiii you big insider you!

Thanks for the detail, but I sincerely hope you're wrong about DA premises shuffling for the sake of getting paid. It makes sense from a commercial point of view, but you'd imagine the DECC would have information on the number of premises in each DA, and that if those numbers are going down in one DA, and rising correspondingly in a neighboring DA, questions will have to be asked?

I was more trying to fit the story told to Agent Avenger about being moved to Midelton. I assume if it were to happen it would be with the consent of DECC, but I have no evidence of it happening. I could well be way off with the theory.

Not that I expect them to catch up or accelerate anyways, but suppose that it means they aim to either finish by end of 2024 (5 years) or end of 2026 (full 7 years)

You are most likely not included in the NBI intervention area as you already have 35mb bandwidth. Check your eircode on the NBI website to see if you are included.

Fair play to them, I've thought they couldn't suprise me anymore.

ps.Stay away from them.

I wonder if this has been sanctioned by Imagine or just a solo by one of their sales people, I assume imagine they'll deny all knowledge in either case.

Easy for Imagine to trawl the NBI map to identify and target those premises far away from a fibre connection.

Basically depends on when the other 2 commercial fibre providers roll it out to your area, open-eir and SIRO.

This is the open-eir website, it has a link to their rollout map - https://www.openeir.ie/, they don't interact directly with the public as they are a wholesale provider only.

otherwise contact one of the retail providers, such as eir, Vodafone, etc., to see if they have any update for your location.