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Eir urban FTTH

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Comments

  • #122
    lotas
    Registered Users Posts: 925 ✭✭✭lotas


    Airwire: MartinL wrote: »
    On the other hand, the pricing is a lot more affordable than our NGN based layer2 products.

    Ohh, i fully agree... unfortunitly, its just out of my budget...


  • #123
    lotas
    Registered Users Posts: 925 ✭✭✭lotas


    Just got off the phone with Eir Business after ordering... Will be installed next Wednesday. Area is showing with AirWire as available from the 22nd, so new build out. Will see if i get the new XSGPON device or the old stuff... will keep you updates. Fun part? Eir Sales still dont know what they are selling... Agent told me im getting 1000 GIGABYTE Broadband... 8Tbit/s would be nice, but would need a LOT of new hardware to run that...


  • #124
    Xertz
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,069 ✭✭✭Xertz


    Has Open Eir actually started this rollout in any of the cities e.g. Dublin and Cork? So far it seems to be just the smaller urban areas / outer hinterlands and low hanging fruit like modern estates that already have ducting.

    Where I am in Cork City we can't get CATV and are on VDSL2 from a cabinet which maxes out at about 52mbit/s and I know people both in Cork and Dublin (very close to the city centre) in worse situations where they can only get exchange launched VDSL and it's less than 20mbit/s. Quite large areas of Dublin 1 and 2 for example have fairly significant issues with slow internet connectivity as does the central island of Cork City.

    Because those urban areas had telephone networks long before most of the rest of the country - automatic switching as far back as the 1920s and 30s, they were typically all wired underground to exchanges and didn't use junction cabinets. As a result, VDSL services are often poor as they need street cabinets. Some of those exchanges in the city centres have very few VDSL cabinets installed both due to the topology and due to lack of space to mount them on tight pavements etc.

    Then because the business districts of cities had few houses, they tended not to have been cabled as the early cable networks were TV only. So, why bother?

    You also get the odd housing estate that was never cabled and sometimes streets with older, non-developer led housing, especially in Cork.

    You also get a lot of older estates that were underground-fed for phone service and have no breakout cabinets, so have no FTTC type VDSL.

    To cut a long story short, I'm just surprised that Open Eir isn't more aggressively going after the areas that are poorly cabled and poorly served by VDSL in the cities. They'd make an absolute killing, as there are definitely islands of cities that have no access to Virgin Media and plenty of places that have very mediocre DSL services due to the network topology. You get huge uptake of gigabit internet / FTTH services in the city centres for example and in those skipped over houses and estates.

    I'm absolutely amazed that Eir hasn't got full GPON coverage in central Cork and Dublin.


  • #125
    ED E
    Registered Users Posts: 36,163 ✭✭✭✭ED E


    Xertz wrote: »
    Has Open Eir actually started this rollout in any of the cities e.g. Dublin and Cork? So far it seems to be just the smaller urban areas / outer hinterlands and low hanging fruit like modern estates that already have ducting.

    Where I am in Cork City we can't get CATV and are on VDSL2 from a cabinet which maxes out at about 52mbit/s and I know people both in Cork and Dublin (very close to the city centre) in worse situations where they can only get exchange launched VDSL and it's less than 20mbit/s. Quite large areas of Dublin 1 and 2 for example have fairly significant issues with slow internet connectivity as does the central island of Cork City.

    Because those urban areas had telephone networks long before most of the rest of the country - automatic switching as far back as the 1920s and 30s, they were typically all wired underground to exchanges and didn't use junction cabinets. As a result, VDSL services are often poor as they need street cabinets. Some of those exchanges in the city centres have very few VDSL cabinets installed both due to the topology and due to lack of space to mount them on tight pavements etc.

    Then because the business districts of cities had few houses, they tended not to have been cabled as the early cable networks were TV only. So, why bother?

    You also get the odd housing estate that was never cabled and sometimes streets with older, non-developer led housing, especially in Cork.

    You also get a lot of older estates that were underground-fed for phone service and have no breakout cabinets, so have no FTTC type VDSL.

    To cut a long story short, I'm just surprised that Open Eir isn't more aggressively going after the areas that are poorly cabled and poorly served by VDSL in the cities. They'd make an absolute killing, as there are definitely islands of cities that have no access to Virgin Media and plenty of places that have very mediocre DSL services due to the network topology. You get huge uptake of gigabit internet / FTTH services in the city centres for example and in those skipped over houses and estates.

    I'm absolutely amazed that Eir hasn't got full GPON coverage in central Cork and Dublin.

    Think about it.

    PON in the countryside gets you new customers. PON in urban areas just converts existing customers - cost for little extra profit. The semi rural was always the low hanging fruit.


  • #126
    Xertz
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,069 ✭✭✭Xertz


    Well, it's actually been a dire strategy in the sense that in cable areas, Eir is no longer even the main access provider anymore. So, effectively they'll have a huge uphill battle to get back lucrative high-spend customers because they failed to invest.


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  • #127
    KOR101
    Registered Users Posts: 1,898 ✭✭✭KOR101


    ED E wrote: »
    Think about it.

    PON in the countryside gets you new customers. PON in urban areas just converts existing customers - cost for little extra profit. The semi rural was always the low hanging fruit.
    The focus seems to be on areas where SIRO and VM have expanded into. Balbriggan which is one of the places they have started is a case in point. It's defensive in nature.

    There is a market in the cities where VM currently has no realistic competition but maybe apartments are just too difficult.


  • #128
    ED E
    Registered Users Posts: 36,163 ✭✭✭✭ED E


    Xertz wrote: »
    Well, it's actually been a dire strategy in the sense that in cable areas, Eir is no longer even the main access provider anymore. So, effectively they'll have a huge uphill battle to get back lucrative high-spend customers because they failed to invest.

    Sorry but you don't know what you're talking about. If my memory serves me OE have over 2Mil active lines. VM around 0.8Mil. They're still dominating.
    KOR101 wrote: »
    The focus seems to be on areas where SIRO and VM have expanded into. Balbriggan which is one of the places they have started is a case in point. It's defensive in nature.

    There is a market in the cities where VM currently has no realistic competition but maybe apartments are just too difficult.

    Precisely, they've been firefighting while grabbing the low hanging rural fruit. Now that they've finished they'll be able to go to town on the urban rollout.


    NB: On my way home last week passed 20 KNN vans working in South Dub. All over the place. Only one OE van but assume it was for them. Thats a big team, not for regular repairs. Gonna watch eircodes from that area on the APQs.


  • #129
    Xertz
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,069 ✭✭✭Xertz


    I'm not sure what's with the tone of the response, but in dense urban areas with cable penetration, eir is no longer the dominant access provider. Failing to dominate areas with much higher spending power is generally not a great strategy for any business.

    I was reading media references to statistics quite recently about the penetration of Virgin Media in Dublin in particular, where Virgin Media currently (late 2019) referencing that Virgin Media has approximately 60% of the broadband market in urban Dublin.

    https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/eir-s-market-share-in-dublin-underscores-disaster-that-was-privatisation-1.3790164

    It's also been a stated objective that Eir is planning to win back market share in the cities.

    The facts are that in most urban areas VDSL from a technical point of view, is a far inferior product to Virgin's Hybrid fiber-coaxial DOCSIS setup, and is extremely poor on longer lines, which are a frequent issue in older urban areas.

    There are currently 373,362 HFC cable broadband subs (none of which are outside urban areas due to nature of those networks) 630,529 VDSL subs (could be anywhere), 252,942 ADSL subs and 144,611 GPON/FTTP subs (predominantly rural and urban hinterlands)

    Virgin have 26.2% of broadband subs and 24.3% of all fixed telephony.
    Eir retail: 31.4% (obviously Open eir has a lot of indirect revenue beyond that)
    Eir have about 45.3% of wholesale revenues.

    For any company, ignoring what should be potentially your most high spend markets is not a very good strategy. The cities have a lot more spending power and there's serious revenue to be made by selling in services, particularly TV packages but also full triple play opportunities which Eir, Virgin and Vodafone are all geared up towards.

    It just seems previous incarnations of Eir sat on their hands and let urban markets drift away from them.


  • #130
    Gonzo
    Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators Posts: 16,699 Mod ✭✭✭✭Gonzo


    Xertz wrote: »

    It just seems previous incarnations of Eir sat on their hands and let urban markets drift away from them.

    NTL/UPC/Virgin Media started building their Dublin network rapidly in the early 2000's when Eircom was still trying to peddle dial up and ISDN. By the time Eir had rolled out ADSL availability to most homes around 2004 or 2005, cable broadband was already available throughout most of Dublin and from 2007 onwards the speeds really started to jump regularly across the cable network. It wasn't till 2012 that Eir started offering speeds of more than 24megs, with many not getting VDSL till 2014 or 2015. By then cable was already offering speeds of over 100. Eir have their work cut out for them to try and undo and bring back a bigger audience from the cabled city areas.


  • #131
    Xertz
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,069 ✭✭✭Xertz


    It looks like Eir's current management has genuinely changed the focus of the company. The vibe is very similar to when the cable companies suddenly realised they were actually broadband providers and not primarily selling cable tv anymore.

    I guess being owned by a successful, non-incumbent telco might be causing a major cultural shift.
    It took previous incarnations of Eir a very long time to fully wake up to the notion that the industry was opening up both because of major changes in how it was regulated and also due to complete transformation of the technologies involved.

    It will be very interesting to see if they, in their current incarnation, are able to really transform their business into something far more modern and successful than it has been to-date. A lot of those former monopolies failed to recognise that times were a changing.

    Just driving around Cork City, it's fairly obvious that Siro's also about to take a significant slice of the urban broadband pie and far more quickly than some might have imagined. There's loads of of fibre appearing on ESB poles in Cork and probably plenty more underground that's not visible.


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  • #132
    greyhill
    Registered Users Posts: 12 ✭greyhill


    KN are here and I'm getting the IFN connection and kit.


  • #133
    joe_99
    Closed Accounts Posts: 763 ✭✭✭joe_99


    greyhill wrote: »
    KN are here and I'm getting the IFN connection and kit.

    Thanks. Be interested to see the set up. Especially what the ONT looks like on the wall as it is quite large compared to the old one they used.


  • #134
    lotas
    Registered Users Posts: 925 ✭✭✭lotas


    greyhill wrote: »
    KN are here and I'm getting the IFN connection and kit.

    what provider are you using?


  • #135
    greyhill
    Registered Users Posts: 12 ✭greyhill


    lotas wrote: »
    what provider are you using?

    Eir


  • #136
    lotas
    Registered Users Posts: 925 ✭✭✭lotas


    greyhill wrote: »
    Eir

    Is that the f2000 router they are putting in? Thats what they say im getting on business class on Wednesday... and do you have a choice of where you can get it installed?


  • #137
    The Cush
    Registered Users Posts: 15,476 ✭✭✭✭The Cush


    greyhill wrote: »
    KN are here and I'm getting the IFN connection and kit.

    Where approx are you?

    Last week I saw KN installing ducting in the Castletroy area of Limerick city, the area is already served by SIRO.


  • #138
    greyhill
    Registered Users Posts: 12 ✭greyhill


    The Cush wrote: »
    Where approx are you?

    Last week I saw KN installing ducting in the Castletroy area of Limerick city, the area is already served by SIRO.

    Mayo, installer said I am the first to get this in Connacht.


  • #139
    greyhill
    Registered Users Posts: 12 ✭greyhill


    lotas wrote: »
    Is that the f2000 router they are putting in? Thats what they say im getting on business class on Wednesday... and do you have a choice of where you can get it installed?

    I haven't seen the kit yet. Getting the fibre through the duct is proving difficult, so we're not there yet. I'll post pictures as soon as its in. It'll be terminated where the phone connection came in to the house - I'm not looking for a new route or termination point.


  • #140
    greyhill
    Registered Users Posts: 12 ✭greyhill


    Installation is completed

    501153.jpg


  • #141
    lotas
    Registered Users Posts: 925 ✭✭✭lotas


    How long in all did it take?


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  • #142
    greyhill
    Registered Users Posts: 12 ✭greyhill


    lotas wrote: »
    How long in all did it take?
    A couple of hours. The main hold-up was getting the fibre through the duct, everything else was fast. I'd say it could be done in an hour in an ideal setting.


  • #143
    Xertz
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,069 ✭✭✭Xertz


    The one thing I've never understood is why they can't just use a the existing phone line as a draw-line and use a fibre cable that carries a copper pair to replace it, if they've some regulatory obligation to preserve the copper path.


  • #144
    tuxy
    Closed Accounts Posts: 14,983 ✭✭✭✭tuxy


    Xertz wrote: »
    The one thing I've never understood is why they can't just use a the existing phone line as a draw-line and use a fibre cable that carries a copper pair to replace it, if they've some regulatory obligation to preserve the copper path.

    There is, legally they can't remove the copper phone line


  • #145
    tuxy
    Closed Accounts Posts: 14,983 ✭✭✭✭tuxy


    I admit that xgs pon ont is gigantic, there must have been a better choice than that.
    Why did they go for one with so many ports?


  • #146
    lotas
    Registered Users Posts: 925 ✭✭✭lotas


    tuxy wrote: »
    I admit that xgs pon ont is gigantic, there must have been a better choice than that.
    Why did they go for one with so many ports?

    probably the only one Huawei make at the moment without wifi (looks like there is a Wifi version of it too). Given that Eir's perfered partner for all this gear is Huawei, they probably wont be going to Nokia or any other provider for some gear, and Huawei for others... Plus, probably as easy to configure on their end, since its very simular to the existing GPON ONTs they have...


  • #147
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 3,621 ✭✭✭[Deleted User]


    lotas wrote: »
    probably the only one Huawei make at the moment without wifi (looks like there is a Wifi version of it too). Given that Eir's perfered partner for all this gear is Huawei, they probably wont be going to Nokia or any other provider for some gear, and Huawei for others... Plus, probably as easy to configure on their end, since its very simular to the existing GPON ONTs they have...

    This is the one I got from Vodafone/OpenEir:
    501257.jpg
    It's an ONT that slots into the fiber termination wall box. Very neat.


  • #148
    BarryM
    Registered Users Posts: 837 ✭✭✭BarryM


    MOD: Comments removed.


  • #149
    tuxy
    Closed Accounts Posts: 14,983 ✭✭✭✭tuxy


    ronoc wrote: »
    This is the one I got from Vodafone/OpenEir:

    It's an ONT that slots into the fiber termination wall box. Very neat.

    That's not from their urban deployment though is it?
    That ONT supports 1 Gbps not 10


  • #150
    lotas
    Registered Users Posts: 925 ✭✭✭lotas


    BarryM wrote: »
    MOD: Comments removed.

    Looks like they just green lit their use in the 5G network... url]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/28/boris-johnson-gives-green-light-for-huawei-5g-infrastructure-role[/url


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  • #151
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 3,621 ✭✭✭[Deleted User]


    tuxy wrote: »
    That's not from their urban deployment though is it?
    That ONT supports 1 Gbps not 10

    Yes it would be. Didn't realize they were doing 10gig ONTs?


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