SIRO - ESB/Vodafone Fibre To The Home

People really need to stop assuming that everything's "reselling Eir." It's not!

Ireland has three fibre access networks: OpenEir, Siro and NBI.

All 3 of them essentially do the same thing, provide access to people's homes / business premises over fibre access networks.

Traffic is passed over to the ISP and they take it from there.

Each ISP (including Eir's retail division) has their own infrastructure that provides national connectivity, peering (interconnection) and international connectivity. They may also inject other services like IPTV and VoIP telephony into their own managed networks.

The individual ISPs use combinations of their own infrastructure and network capacity leased from various companies to provide that. There are major national and international fibre connectivity either as a managed wholesale services or as dark / unlit fibre. Some of those are names you'd recognise like Eir, Vodafone, Virgin Media, BT Ireland, ESB Telecoms, Ervia, Verizon, Telia, Orange etc etc, some you won't have ever heard of, particularly the ones that provide fibre capacity internationally.

ISPs assemble their services based on a whole combination of infrastructure, data centres and so on. Some own most of it (e.g. Eir and Virgin in particular) others lease most of it.

There can be significant differences in quality of services between ISPs because of how their backhaul and international connectivity works, how much capacity they have in place and so on.

Eir's retail division has a history of customer service issues, but from a technical point of view it's absolutely excellent as an ISP, just pray you never have to get support! Digiweb seems to be absolutely excellent, but it's nothing to do with Eir. You need to read reviews and so on before picking your ISP.

(And we've Virgin Media (and a few other tiny cable operators) providing cable (CATV) based services, which are becoming more and more like fibre and stepping towards FTTH. Virgin has opened its network, but only so far has one user : Vodafone.)

I've said this numerous times and gotten berated for saying it, I was told there was only one routing route used in Ireland, end of, which we know isn't true. Nice to see you got 2 thanks for your post and no abuse which is certainly a lot more than I got. I agree 100% that Eir's actual service is top class but badly let down by dreadful support, they've always had terrible support unfortunately. I've also been with Digiweb who, in my opinion are the best out there. In saying that the best company I ever had BB with were called Homevision, unfortunately they went bust as everyone was still on ADSL and they had a lovely TV package available but nobody could use it.

Are VM using siro? I haven't seen it as an option when checking known siro addresses, I think Eir were always a retailer on NBI.

It's a joint venture between Vodafone and ESB Networks.

It definitely is more sensible to go the standard ftth route, who knows what will happen in the future.

My Vodafone bill has an Account Number, a UAN and a Circuit Reference Number. It was the last of these that sky needed to change service...

Nope, they keep insisting that UAN: 600012345 is what I need to switch. They haven’t got it published on their bills. Missed out on an offer with virgin media because of them

This is Virgin media through SIRO fibre though. Im in Roscrea. Thurles and Clonmel are the only towns here that have the actual cable network.

I just checked my Vodafone SIRO bill and it is listed as UAN SIVFXXXXXX (6numbers) but my older digiweb invoice shows it as 60000XXXXX. Digiweb should be able to see a SIDW number and provide you with that. Sky do often make a hayms of porting too though so hard to know which is right. I've always found Digiweb support excellent but I never ported with SIRO, just two separate accounts and providers when I moved house.

Ring 1907 or message them on twitter and ask them to reach out to you directly.

Or just leave the broadband in your housemate's name until end of contract, and get them to cancel when it's up?

Anyone in the know able to help me with who to contact to clear a logjam somewhere in the FTTH bureaucracy?

Bought Sky Ultrafast FTTH beginning of October. Install date was 23rd Oct. Sky then email saying install delayed...

I get a call from Siro (actually Actavo on behalf of Siro) saying install delayed as ESB need to come and route the fibre from the pole to the house, could take weeks. Fair enough. In the end someone comes next day and installs the cable which is now attached to my fascia.

Sky customer service are hopeless and won't send out an engineer. Generic response is "we are waiting on a 3rd party, could take 6 more weeks". I've told them the cable is on my house ready to go...

Am I right to think the next step is Sky need to come and drill that cable through my wall? Confusingly Sky customer service gave me a number for OpenEir to call (no answer) even though it was Siro who called me about the FTTH?

I had a similiar experience about 2 months ago and I just rang Actavo back and asked them what the story was with the proper install and they scheduled someone. To be honest I don't know that that was the correct process but they did have the notes from the original call so knew it had progressed to the next stage (ready to be spliced and ONT fitted)

Does your Siro ACC number stay the same after changes? I got it 3 years ago and I've been assigned new customer numbers throughout the years but assume Siro ACC number will still be the orig? (Sky want that number)

Sky can use any of them, although they can only run on NBI as a new line, they don’t have the capability of moving to NBI from another provider.