SIRO - ESB/Vodafone Fibre To The Home

The thing is that other countries don't do it. They provide good broadband in villages which is what they're on about when they talk about 'rural broadband' in those contexts.

I've a lot of connections to France and in rural areas there you get pretty good service in small villages (well ADSL2+ from a cabinet exchange same as in Ireland and you might get FTTC or even FTTH in some towns and definitely in bigger towns/cities) but once you get out into one off housing (and western France has a surprisingly high amount of it) you can really struggle to get decent broadband at all.

The scenario is almost exactly the same as Ireland to be perfectly honest. In some respects (e.g. mobile broadband and wireless) Ireland's actually quite a lot better!

The only thing I would say is that at this stage Orange/France Telecom does not have any ADSL (up to 8mbit/s) exchanges still in use and probably have better NGN access to even the smallest rural exchange as there was a lot of state aid put into achieving that. So, in villages you'd typically at least be able to get a 10-24mbit/s ADSL2+ service on NGN.

Although that being said, I've relatives who can only get voice service as their local exchange (a small Alcatel E10 cabinet pretty much identical gear to what eircom use) has no ADSL service at all! They're relying on ISDN and a 3G dongle!

They also have this setup where they will declare a low density area (especially with bad mobile coverage) a "zone blanche" (white zone) which means that one of the mobile operators will have coverage only and the rest of the operators' customers can use "F-Contact" a MVNO they're forced to host to provide universal coverage for voice and SMS at least.

The downside is that F-Contact doesn't have to provide 3G and may not necessarily work for all MVNOs and doesn't support international roaming customers.

There was also a huge shift in FTTH policy in France in the last few years.
The original idea was that the state was basically forcing Orange/France Telecom to rollout fibre to the home and it wasn't allowed to consider FTTC (like e-fibre).
However, the company basically couldn't justify doing it as a lot of French suburban / urban hinterland is very similar to Ireland and quite low density housing with big gardens.

So, eventually the French regulator's policy changed and allowed FTTC so, Orange is only starting that now really. They concluded that it was costing them 15X more to install Fibre to Home in low density areas than to use FTTC and that the installations were many many times more expensive than installing FTTH in dense urban zones.

Just all in all, I don't think Ireland's situation is *THAT* different. What's very different is that there's a large % of homes that are basically in scattered / ribbon development and most of the countries that are blazing ahead with broadband don't have anything like that. It's all dense populations.

France is kind of in-between the two scenarios. As is Britain.

Many parts of the United States and Canada have Irish-style issues. We tend to look at big cities, but when you start looking at suburban hinterlands and quasi-rural parts of the states, there's a lot of dependence on slow services and WiMax.

....

We need to fix the problem and deal with the situation that we have. But there's going to have to be a large dose of reality too that a significant % of homes in Ireland will need to consider wireless options and the Government needs to also consider state-aiding really decent fibre-backed wireless in quasi-rural and fully rural areas and for dealing with ribbon development.

We can't really just say OK, they have great broadband in Estonia or Singapore and apply that in Ireland. It won't work simply because of the way our housing is built. That being said, you probably wouldn't really want to live in a dense apartment building in Eastern European style, or in a very high density city like Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul etc.

Life's about trade offs. You get to live in a big house in a rural setting with great scenery, but it means having a septic tank and mediocre broadband and lots of driving.

There's no reason why urban areas (right down to quite small towns) however can't have FTTH and ultra fast HFC (and that is happening already). However, loose planning and the laws of physics tend to make reaching every rural home with similar services extremely expensive.

What we need is an appropriate mix of technologies to solve the problem.

I am worried that the Government still hasn't got a clue about broadband. The National Broadband Scheme used the wrong technology - UMTS (3G mobile) for example. Fixed wireless technologies like WiMax and even DOCSIS 3.0 over microwave or even UHF links would have possibly made more sense.
Likewise, they built out a lot of MAN networks in small towns and then couldn't find any customers for them.

There's a lot of jumping on band wagons going on and I am not really seeing a joined-up, logical, well thought out strategy to deliver decent speeds to everyone. Selection of the right technologies is absolutely fundamental to this and putting future-proof infrastructure in place (i.e. basic stuff like ducts in roads, fibre to transmission mast locations and open access to utility poles)

We also need a BIG block of spectrum allocated to rural broadband on a technology-neutral basis. It's not good enough to keep allocating measly bits of spectrum and charging huge prices for it for 4G mobile etc. Ireland has unique issues that require a LOT of radio spectrum for broadband and it needs to be made available cost effectively too.

The ESB Low Voltage wiring isn't particularly crappy. It's just often insulated quadruplex (four platted wires 3 phases + neutral). I doubt that would be suitable for wrapping as it's not really an even surface.

In towns, they're also likely to use their own duct network to push fibre through.

I've seen this kind of process done in France by EDF's subsidiary Axione on low voltage 230/400V distribution lines.

EDF don't seem to actually wrap the wires like the way they do with high tension lines. Instead, they basically install it like an extra wire run from pole to pole on its own brackets. So, all it really shares is the poles.

There are some housings added for splitters and splices and stuff, but all in all it was quite neat looking and you really wouldn't notice it at all unless you were specifically looking for it.

All you see is an extra black wire below the electricity cabling.

There's also an issue that ESB need to be able to access LV lines to make connections and for maintenance.

On medium voltage 20kV and 38kV lines, they'll probably wire wrap it similarly to the way they do it on high voltage.