Digiweb standing still on speed?

Watty
The question is whether Digiweb is likely to match the speed increases currently being spoken about by Eircom, or being delivered by Smart or BT.
I know Digiweb have faster products but they are prohibitively expensive.
Is the metro system capable of delivering faster speeds at a reasonable cost?

Only eircom makes any money out of DSL. Upto 3Mbps on DSL there is no difference in exhange to User cost, it's the backhaul only that costs eircom more.

For ALL wireless sytems the last link of the chain does cost more directly according to the speed as well as the backhaul cost.

On Wireless there is no line rental overhead.

If the wholesale DSL price is cut Digiweb DSL customers will benefit as much as anyone elses DSL customers. The bulk of wireless serves those whose lines fail on enabled exchanges (up to 40%) or those who have no line (31%) or who are not on DSL enabled exchange (10% according to eircom).

Many 512k to 2Mbps wireless products cost less than the eircom line rental, so they are hardly going to upgrade speed for free. You'll have to pay a different price for different packages.

Many DSL resellers make little or no profit. Some major Wireless operations have never really been profitable (not Digiweb , but YOU know who you are. Little money is made on LLU DSL, the major LLU player still needs to dramatically increase price to be profitable in a normal sense. They have lost a lot in the past.

Perlico lost 17m last year.

The fact is that given the high cost of dual channel ISDN and lack of any true flat rate dialup there is a substantial market for a cheap product even at 200Kbps.

While some people want more speed, many "ordinary" people only want fixed low cost and enough speed for daily email and odd web page look up / pay road tax etc..

I know lots of "occasional" users who regard DSL as too expensive. So four markets:

1. Casual user ( 200Kbps, needs cheap & fixed price)
2. Regular user (cap is not an issue, 1 to 3Mbps, wants more speed at same price)
3. Mad Downloader (Cap size is an issue)
4. Business Use (Leased Line replacement, self hosting, > 20 users etc)

Most of the population is (1) or (2).
Boards posters tend to be (2) or (3).
(4) is very badly served in Ireland. The basic Wireless or home Cable/ DSL packages are useless for major Business operations such as ebay, Intel, Dell, Sage, Microsoft, large schools or Colleges.


The strange fact is that there are about 10 times as many ISPs in Ireland as makes any commercial sense, and yet while we have generally the highest prices at lowest speeds, only about 20% of ISPs here are actually profitable.

Obviously eircom's Wholesale shouldn't be among the loss making operators.

Let's say that in somewhere in the future (5? 10? or even more years), people everywhere in Ireland can avail of 20Mbps. Fibre or so.

Is there any room in wireless technology to go faster than 10Mb?

Wcool wrote: »

Let's say that in somewhere in the future (5? 10? or even more years), people everywhere in Ireland can avail of 20Mbps. Fibre or so.

Is there any room in wireless technology to go faster than 10Mb?

Yes.
You can get 1Gbps wireless. (not for home users today).

Today 10Mbps Home package and 20Mbs to 1000Mbps business packages.

If you pay for two home packages it's possible to aggregate with a Linux Gateway to a total of 20Mbps to serve say 40 PCs in a School or business. There is little need for a single user to have more than 2Mbps. IPTV does of course need 4Mbps peak standard Definition and 20Mbps peak HDTV, to give equivalent to Sky BBC quality. But IPTV is going to be on a separate QOS (Quality of Service) managed port that has priority over your download, so on a 8Mps connection your speed will vary dropping to less than 4Mbps when TV peaks at 4Mbps. Also the IPTV part would be 1:1 contention and the "ordinary" connection at usual 10:1 to 48:1 contention depending on how much you pay.

In the UK higher advertised speeds have resulted in higher contention such that the majority of people only see 1/3rd to 1/2 of their advertised "up to" speed. Ofcom is looking into it

watty wrote: »

...
There is little need for a single user to have more than 2Mbps.
...

Maybe at the moment, but you can't rely on that being the case for very long, sites like YouTube would not have been possible in the dial-up era, you can guess that there will be more appetite for higher-bandwidth applications (not necessarily provisioned over a separate IPTV channel) in the not so distant future.

Blaster99 wrote: »

Is it? I'm sure if I pay enough to own the sector or a peer-to-peer link it's viable but I don't see any signs in the home market of this being viable. But I guess we'll have to wait and see as Digiweb is clearly a follower, not a leader, and will have to match whatever eircom comes up with. This has always been the trend with wireless providers, which would lead one to make the not entirely far fetched conclusion that it's expensive or difficult for WISPs to increase speeds.

How is Digiweb a follower when it has fibre, High speed Wireless (Metro) at faster speeds than eircom 3 months before eircom announces it, the fastest and most advanced Mobile Wireless product in Ireland and the fastest professional 2 way satellite products?

As well as the DSL and Wireless that everyone else sells? If the LLU was not so skewed in favour of eircom profit you would see a lot of that from Digiweb too.

Admittedly today eircom has more infrastructure and more customers, but their cut of the market has shrunk to 46% even though they have grown Broadband to add their 500,000 customer. eircom's Bitstream is still behind all the LLU offerings and top Cable and Metro offerings. eircom's national wireless is nearly invisible and 1/5th to 1/10th the speed of Digiweb. How is that Digiweb following eircom? People change from eircom leased line to Digiweb dedicated wireless because it is cheaper and faster.

It's absolutely true that all the other WISPs apart from Digiweb are basically limited to around the 200kps to 2Mbps depending on system.

Blaster99 wrote: »

That page has looked the same for the last couple of years and if it is to change, then that has to do with eircom forcing Digiweb to do so.
.

The last couple of years?

The 2mb and 5mb package were introduced late 2007....:rolleyes:

Digiweb still offer a phone and BB package for cheaper than eircoms line rental alone...

Metro came to Limerick in Nov/Dec 2005. Then there was only 1M and 3M packages.

There has been various versions of that page since then.
http://www.digiweb.ie/broadband_metro_index.asp?i=80&i2=81&i6=90&zzz=hm

The problem is eircom's strangle hold on infrastructure. People either use it and make no money or like Digiweb invest in their own Infrastructure. In the long term those that have invested will be able to reduce prices and will stay in business. Those only renting and reselling eircom have their prices set by eircom and are not likely to stay in business.

Almost two full pages of Watty (Digiweb employee and apologist of the year, nay, decade) writing FUD and just generally talking crap. Fair enough that some of Boards.ie owners work for Digiweb, that Boards.ie is hosted by them, that some of the supermods are employed by Digiweb and some of the moderators too but christ almighty are Digiweb employees allowed so much free reign when it comes to pimping their services while also trying to spin a genuine request away?

Given Watty's grandstanding it appears Digiweb ain't going to do speed bumps. Suffer on peasants.

Damien has said it all really. Do they pay you by the post Watty?