your opinions on The whole broadband situation in ireland ?

someone suggested that we change the business model for internet access from speed to usage.

i.e. if we paid for what we used instead of how fast we can use it then ISP's would want to give us as much internet as possible to get more money.... at the moment we pay a flat rate of say 40euro per month and it doesn't matter how slow or much we download, the isp still gets 40euro per month.. so there's no incentive to give us more data...

what if we paid 50cent per gig of data instead? that way they would WANT us to download more and more, they would want to give it to us faster and faster... netflix? oh yes please...

thoughts?

because?

if we can't download something because it's too slow... then the ISP is loosing out of making money! think about it....

Ireland's problem is that some cities are getting 120meg BB while many others have to make do with with either 2meg landline or, even worse, a midband dongle that often gives dial-up speeds.

I am currently on 2.5meg landline BB. Its good enough for my purposes at present, but I think it will be quite a few years before I will ever see 120meg BB where I live.

Well this is the purpose of IrelandOffine...

www.irelanoffline.org

or
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?forumid=60

revver wrote: »

How on earth can you download that much??

If you look at almost all non "unlimited" data pakages they are around 30gb per month at 35-40euro. This works out at 1eu/mb!!

You my frie

Surely that should be €1 per gb?

Anyone who downloaded 350gig in a month should be popping up as someone who is doing illegal downloading. How else could you download so much?

NIMAN wrote: »

Surely that should be €1 per gb?

Anyone who downloaded 350gig in a month should be popping up as someone who is doing illegal downloading. How else could you download so much?

Netflix streaming in two separate rooms and two children both with xbox 360 and ps4. It adds up pretty quickly.

There are two sides to the broadband situation in Ireland, urban/ suburban vs rural. I think the broadband situation in urban and suburban Ireland has improved significantly in recent times and is continuing to improve with Eircom rolling out VSDL to more and more towns.

There are valid complaints about the services people are being offered and what they are getting, e.g. 8 Mbs but only getting 5/6 Mbs. This is simply down to the technology being used by Eircom in delivering their services. Eircom predominately uses whats called fibre to the cabinet (FTTC), which means fibre optic cables only go as far as various cabinets dotted around towns throughout the country. The old copper telephone lines are then used to carry the signal from the cabinet to peoples homes. The problem with this is that copper is not great in terms of signal strength vs distance. This image below gives an idea of how throughput drops vs distance from the cabinet.



It is important to remember that this distance is not as the crow flies from the cabinet to the home either, it is the path the telephone line will take which normally follows roads increasing the distance. As a result unless you are within a couple hundred meters from the exchange it is unlikely you will get your advertised speed. This is something anyone using Eircom will just have to live with until the technology being used changes.

This is then what makes things so bad for rural areas. Rural Ireland is rather dispersed with a lot of road, and therefore long telephone lines connecting homes to towns where the cabinets are typically placed. This results is pretty crappy speeds for rural houses but its simply the physics of the technology being used. As bk says fibre to the home (FTTH) is probably the best option to get high speed wired internet to rural houses but this simply is not economically viable for any company to do. You have to keep mind in how much it would cost to role out such an extensive fibre network vs the potential revenue and it just simply wouldn't make sense. So I have sympathy for both the ISPs and the customers in this case. It is a difficult problem to solve.

One potential would be through the use of wireless broadband using for example LTE/LTE-A. With enough spectrum being available and through the use of carrier aggregation this can offer extremely high speeds, even over a decent enough distance (although a similar principle in throughput vs distance from the base stations applies, it is in fact worse than that with FTTC). The problem again is it is not going to be cost effective for mobile operators to roll this out to the areas that need it most, i.e. low density rural areas. Data caps and the price for data on mobile networks in Ireland is already ludicrous in my opinion and if things stayed as they are in this regard broadband for a home through something like LTE would also be ridiculously expensive. The other problem is the amount of spectrum that operators have been allocated is going to limit to potential of LTE. We are unlikely to see extremely fast speeds on LTE (> 100 Mbs) in this country for a long time.

Edit:
Just to say that someone getting an 8 Mbs service from Eircom wouldn't be using an EFibre service, therefore wouldn't be using FTTC. In fact an older technology is being used for that. This is what limits its top speed to around 8 Mbs, but the same principle in terms of drop off of throughput vs distance from the exchange/cabinet applies.

This is why we need fibre to the home, every home.

Interesting fact... there's a wire going to every home in the country, it's an ESB wire. If there was only some way we could wrap a fiber cable around this and back to a local exchange or something?

It's amazing that I see "hundreds" of workmen around my area installing water meters... it goes to show, if there's money to be made they will do it... why can't we just pay and get fiber installed next? If we did, I actually would be happy to pay for it too....

It's very obviously a 2 tier system. It's generally decent in urban and suburban areas. Rurally it's poor.

How much does it actually cost to provide fiber to an exchange over the esb network in the country?
the main ESB fiber cable runs around 300 meters from my local exchange, but yet the exchange itself is wireless backhaul and can only support "up to 3mb" broadband AT THE EXCHANGE... so unless every exchange in the country is fiber enabled we're never going to get the last mile sorted either...

hfallada wrote: »

If you choose to live in the middle of no where in a one off housing unit. Why should consumers or the tax payer pay for your choice to live there? You can't expect to have excellent bb when the nearest village is 5 miles away. It would cost a fortune to give everyone bb.

Yeah as a once off thing it would but it'd pay for itself in time!