SIRO - ESB/Vodafone Fibre To The Home

hallo dare · 23-01-2014 8:30am #1

Esb to provide areas with broadband, limited info to start with, but i for one am looking forward to higher speeds!!!

http://www.rte.ie/news/2014/0122/499525-esb-broadband/

long_b · 23-01-2014 8:34am

"Finally" makes.it sound like it's here already.

AFAIK they're doing trials in the wilds of Cavan

White Heart Loon · 23-01-2014 8:43am

long_b wrote: »

"Finally" makes.it sound like it's here already.

AFAIK they're doing trials in the wilds of Cavan

Finally

hallo dare · 23-01-2014 9:04am

can't wait to hear the capabilities of what a home can expect to get.

Next thing you'll see is UPC selling electricity with a broadband package in the middle of nowhere :-)

gazzer · 23-01-2014 9:39am

long_b wrote: »

"Finally" makes.it sound like it's here already.

AFAIK they're doing trials in the wilds of Cavan

I live in the wilds of Cavan

Sir Arthur Daley · 23-01-2014 9:41am

Will it be by satellite like Tooway broadband does anyone know?

ironclaw · 23-01-2014 9:42am

You know ESB own most of the fibre optic in the country? Which carries a large percentage of the existing broadband carriers? So it will be on par if not the very same to existing offers.

SpaceTime · 23-01-2014 9:43am

I think ESB are planning on wholesale fibre and not being the ISP, so there is every possibility that UPC could use it.

White Heart Loon · 23-01-2014 9:50am

SpaceTime wrote: »

I think ESB are planning on wholesale fibre and not being the ISP, so there is every possibility that UPC could use it.

And Eircom, and the resellers. Even the local wireless providers could use it for their core network to deliver faster speeds to the very remote areas, where at the moment their core networks are wireless links

godskitchen · 23-01-2014 10:21am

This is very light on details.....

Are the suggesting they are going to connect rural homes to their fibre network? I find it hard to see how it would be cost effective without massive state funding.

SpaceTime · 23-01-2014 10:29am

ESB connect rural homes to heavy gauge overhead copper power lines anyway. So for them, fibre overlaid on that is possibly quite simple.

Eircom only have relatively tiny copper cables and their routes are all along roads. Although they've an extensive duct network in urban areas and good fibre routes between all but the tiniest exchanges.

ESB have very robust poles with heavy power lines capable of physically supporting fibre running cross country.

In terms of universal access and rural infrastructure for stringing wires, ESB has a big advantage.

In most areas eircom is not dependent on microwave links. Only really a very small % of tiny rural exchanges have that setup.

Bear in mind some exchanges are basically just like what you'd find in a small office phone system. Maybe serving fewer than 100 lines from a single cabinet.

Mr. G · 23-01-2014 10:32am

godskitchen wrote: »

This is very light on details.....

Are the suggesting they are going to connect rural homes to their fibre network? I find it hard to see how it would be cost effective without massive state funding.

I thought the idea was to implement it where UPC weren't there, since they would be direct competitors, with same speeds, and could beat the 100Mb service ESB are talking about

I was thinking this also.

It isn't anything new. ESB announces this last year, and it isn't definite either. Unfortunately.

SpaceTime · 23-01-2014 10:34am

In reality they'll probably get up and running in towns and cities too.

There are plenty of parts of Dublin and Cork without UPC coverage. Including large areas of the centre of Dublin!

bk · 23-01-2014 10:41am

Rumour has is that the ESB are going to roll out a Fibre To The Home (FTTH) network.

But initially this won't be targeted at really rural places, unlike what the article implies.

Instead ESB plan on targeting 500,000 homes in urban and semi-urban areas not served by UPC (but yes served by Eircom VDSL).

However when that is complete, I do hope that they will then have future phases where they start doing more rural homes.

I think ESB are planning on wholesale fibre and not being the ISP, so there is every possibility that UPC could use it.

Yes, rumour has it they are going to be partnering with Vodafone, who will actually sell it.

Yes it is strange that UPC didn't jump at partnering with the ESB on this. With the plan to target non UPC areas and with UPC unlikely to ever expand outside their own areas, then you would think it is a match made in heaven for UPC.

It would allow UPC to almost double the number of customers they can target and they have the advantage of a well known brand and lots of existing experience in the TV market.

They could even do what Verizon does in the US with it's FTTH network and transmit the TV channels as cable TV over the fibre rather then IPTV, so UPC could then even use their existing cable TV and Horizon box with the exact same lineup of channels.

So surprising that they don't.

On the other hand, maybe better that they don't from a consumers perspective as it might make it more likely that the ESB will expand into UPC areas at a future date.

Actually I'm also a little surprised that UPC don't also launch their own VDSL bitstream product on Eircoms network, along with UPC IPTV. It would allow them to target areas that can't currently get UPC services and UPC has a very extensive fibre network of their own that they could use to offload too.

SpaceTime · 23-01-2014 10:57am

Maybe UPC simply don't want to have a lower profit margin. Their business model may be all about owning their own access networks.

It would not be hard to come up with a version of their Horizon gateway that runs on fibre rather tham coax though.

They're still very much a traditional cable company. They need to fill in a lot of network gaps though in urban areas and upgrade some legacy networks in certain cabled towns.

They're bizarrely missing in some towns too like Tralee and Killarney and many of Cork's satellite towns like Carrigaline.

Maybe UPC will prioritise that kind of thing first and closing gaps in its urban networks.

swoofer · 23-01-2014 11:08am

here in the indo they mention running fibre on electricity poles to the home! now that would be innovative but is 400m enough to cover cost! It does not add up, put fibre on poles and then expect consumers to take it, what about distance, fibre is no good after a certain range. If it happens it would mean rural would have faster speeds than urban.

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/esb-will-roll-out-broadband-to-500000-homes-29942493.html

bk · 23-01-2014 11:46am

GBCULLEN wrote: »

here in the indo they mention running fibre on electricity poles to the home! now that would be innovative but is 400m enough to cover cost! It does not add up, put fibre on poles and then expect consumers to take it, what about distance, fibre is no good after a certain range. If it happens it would mean rural would have faster speeds than urban.

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/esb-will-roll-out-broadband-to-500000-homes-29942493.html

It isn't that innovative, Verizon in the US, the largest FTTH provider runs fibre along their telephone poles:

http://www.bricklin.com/fiosinstall.htm

So it was obvious that the ESB would do the same, much cheaper to use poles then to dig fields and need to get permission from farmers, etc.

Fibre isn't range limited, quiet the opposite, it is the best option for long distance. GPON Fibre range is 20km from the exchange/cabinet and that can be increased to 60km with range extenders:

http://www.telnet-ri.es/fileadmin/user_upload/preventa/presentaciones/GPON%20Extender_EN.pdf

This is why Fibre is ideal for rural Broadband.

500,000 buildings at 400million is €800 per building. That is a little on the low side, I always estimated a figure of €1000, but maybe by using overhead poles, they can do it cheaper, so the figures are certainly in the right, doable ball park.

Very exciting times ahead

SpaceTime · 23-01-2014 11:55am

GBCULLEN wrote: »

here in the indo they mention running fibre on electricity poles to the home! now that would be innovative but is 400m enough to cover cost! It does not add up, put fibre on poles and then expect consumers to take it, what about distance, fibre is no good after a certain range. If it happens it would mean rural would have faster speeds than urban.

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/esb-will-roll-out-broadband-to-500000-homes-29942493.html

Thanks to eircom and other providers (including BT in the UK etc) that brand service that are actually 'fibre to node' or 'fibre to cabinet' as 'fibre', there is a lot of confusion about this technology.

With 'e fibre' your local street cabinet is where the fibre optic portion of the service ends and it's delivered to your home on a phone line which can be up to 1000m long. The longer that line, the slower your data service and the drop off rate's quite dramatic. So far, eircom hasn't commercially deployed any fibre-to-home services other than tests.

UPC's 'fibre power' service is also a hybrid of fibre with legacy coaxial networks. It performs better as copper coaxial cable is actually designed to be high bandwidth from the outset and it's heavily shielded so suffers little signal loss. Where as eircom's copper twisted pairs were only ever designed to carry phone call audio signals and are extremely lossy for data.

Neither service delivers fibre to your house, although UPC might be able to deliver nearly fibre-to-home speeds over their coax network. They're getting fibre nodes extremely close to end users at this stage in many areas.

Fibre optic services do not suffer from any thing like the attenuation (signal loss) experienced by copper services (particularly phone lines carry data). So, over the kinds of distances involved in distributing service to homes (even in rural areas) there would effectively be no signal loss at all and no repeaters required on routes.

So, basically the distance to your house from the node shouldn't make any difference.

There has also been a massive improvement in the robustness of fibre optic cables to the point that they can be strung along ESB poles without any major problem. The cost has also dropped quite significantly (and the cost of copper has gone way up oddly enough).

So, all in all this technology's prime to be used and could be rolled out on ESB's network with basically no disruption and wouldn't even really be noticed by anyone who didn't know what it looked like.

If ESB drive this, it's likely that you'll see eircom scrambling to rollout FTTH too. They're more than capable of doing it if the market conditions force them to.

UPC can also squeeze a lot more speed out of their network if they need to. They can also potentially rollout FTTH too.

bk · 23-01-2014 11:59am

SpaceTime wrote: »

Maybe UPC simply don't want to have a lower profit margin. Their business model may be all about owning their own access networks.

True, though they do this in other UPC markets such as Austria where they offer VDSL outside areas they normally cover:

http://www.telecompaper.com/news/upc-austria-to-offer-vdsl-outside-footprint--843904

They are also preparing to enter the mobile market as a MVNO here, which would be equally low margin.

That is why I think UPC aren't afraid to do this. Better to get some profit from these costumers then non at all and it helps strengthen your profile in the market and as you have more customers it also helps strengthen your hand with TV companies at negotiation time.

They don't have to run the infrastructure, but they can of course make use of their existing sales and marketing staff and billing and customer support systems. And they can also make use of their extensive fibre network.

I'd think that partnering with the ESB in particular would be a no brainer.

SpaceTime · 23-01-2014 12:05pm

For all we know, they may be considering it.

UPC could basically rollout their Horizon product on whatever platform was available without much difficulty at all and use all the same back office stuff to support it that they use to support cable customers.

The big issue for UPC in the next few months / years is that they're going to have to find an alternative to MMDS or else just abandon a lot of customers when that license runs out.

It's a horribly outdated piece of infrastructure that really needs an urgent alternative. ESB's fibre platform might be one way they could move their existing MMDS portfolio over to a far better platform.

They urgently need to cable-out the areas that are in big towns / cities that are only served by MMDS too. That's not likely to use ESB's infrastructure though.

That being said, I'm surprised they haven't built out cable networks in towns like Carrigaline, Tralee, Killarney, etc on the MAN fibre networks that were laid on in all of those places. So I'm not holding my breath waiting for UPC to do something in rural areas when they can't even get big towns and suburban areas cabled up in a lot of cases.

shane7218 · 23-01-2014 12:12pm

This is great news. I might finally get out of this satellite hell.

bk · 23-01-2014 12:19pm

Just to add to what SpaceTime said above, while UPC isn't a FTTH network, you can pretty much consider it equivalent to one.

UPC has been replacing all it's cable with very high quality coax cable, capable of tremendous bandwidth. A UPC cable theoretically could carry 10Gb/s shared. Which is actually five times as high as GPON fibre, the mostly likely type of Fibre to be used by the ESB.

UPC's current modems are already capable of doing 400mb/s, maybe even 500mb/s and the new DOCSIS 3.1 standard was recently ratified. UPC was one of the major developers of the DOCSIS 3.1 standard and it should allow them to do 1 Gb/s over their existing cable network (but with new modems).

This is why the ESB aren't going to target UPC areas (of course there will be some overlap), the ESB can't really offer anything better then what UPC themselves can offer.

BTW I agree that UPC have to do a lot more to infill the gaps in their own network.

bk · 23-01-2014 12:27pm

SpaceTime wrote: »

The big issue for UPC in the next few months / years is that they're going to have to find an alternative to MMDS or else just abandon a lot of customers when that license runs out.

I don't think it is a big issue, I think they just plan on letting it die out.

The numbers of MMDS customers has been going down very quickly every year, I think they were down to just 42,000 customers in mid 2013 (down from 60,000 in 2011).

If the trend continues they will be down to just 20,000 by 2016 and will likely jsut let them go then. Probably they will recommend people switch to Saorview/Freesat or Sky.

SpaceTime wrote: »

They urgently need to cable-out the areas that are in big towns / cities that are only served by MMDS too. That's not likely to use ESB's infrastructure though.

That being said, I'm surprised they haven't built out cable networks in towns like Carrigaline, Tralee, Killarney, etc on the MAN fibre networks that were laid on in all of those places. So I'm not holding my breath waiting for UPC to do something in rural areas when they can't even get big towns and suburban areas cabled up in a lot of cases.

I think this is the bigger issue, they definitely, need to fill in the gaps in their cable network, in particular MMDS feed cable (yuck!) and built out to some more towns as yo say. I think they maybe leaving money on the table there.

But the thing is, until now they have been focused on rebuilding the existing network. It is much easier to target an existing UPC TV customer and upsell them to broadband and phone, then it is to move into a completely new area and target people who were never your customers before.

lucernarian · 23-01-2014 12:37pm

This is certainly good news overall. It's important that it can be made a success through promotion in the areas it's available and through good introductory offers and low install fees.

If or when this finally happens, I hope the good people of Cavan will tell eircom to stick it and sign up to the ESB/Vodafone service in their droves. If the trials work out, it will encourage a more national rollout to other rural and urban areas too.

Mr. G · 23-01-2014 12:49pm

SpaceTime wrote: »

Maybe UPC simply don't want to have a lower profit margin. Their business model may be all about owning their own access networks.

It would not be hard to come up with a version of their Horizon gateway that runs on fibre rather tham coax though.

They're still very much a traditional cable company. They need to fill in a lot of network gaps though in urban areas and upgrade some legacy networks in certain cabled towns.

They're bizarrely missing in some towns too like Tralee and Killarney and many of Cork's satellite towns like Carrigaline.

Maybe UPC will prioritise that kind of thing first and closing gaps in its urban networks.

What's even more bizarre is that UPC cannot be gotten anywhere in Ennis, but can be gotten in Shannon. Ennis has VDSL (eFibre) and no doubt it would be serviced by ESB if they came into the market. It is bigger than Clonmel, yet you can get it there.

ED E · 23-01-2014 1:00pm

Mr. G wrote: »

What's even more bizarre is that UPC cannot be gotten anywhere in Ennis, but can be gotten in Shannon. Ennis has VDSL (eFibre) and no doubt it would be serviced by ESB if they came into the market. It is bigger than Clonmel, yet you can get it there.

In bizzare cases like that its probably the civils/politics in the way, not UPC themselves.

bk · 23-01-2014 1:12pm

Mr. G wrote: »

What's even more bizarre is that UPC cannot be gotten anywhere in Ennis, but can be gotten in Shannon. Ennis has VDSL (eFibre) and no doubt it would be serviced by ESB if they came into the market. It is bigger than Clonmel, yet you can get it there.

It is down to historical reasons.

First there were dozens of cable TV companies, in different towns across the Country. Over time Chorus in Cork and NTL in Dublin bought them all up.

Then UPC entered the market, first buying Chorus and then NTL.

UPC didn't really enter any new markets after that, instead they rebuilt the existing network and filled in gaps.

So that is why you have this crazy situation, because some small towns had a local business build a network that eventually got bought up by UPC.

iPhone. · 23-01-2014 1:15pm

Living in a rural area myself but definitely not holding my breath.

The article seems to indicate that it is only a change in regulations to allow the ESB to provide Telecoms Services.

No guarantee it will ever come to anything, just allows the ESB to enter the market If they choose

SpaceTime · 23-01-2014 1:21pm

What I don't understand in Cork is that Cork Multichannel (Chorus) began cabling places like Carrigaline in the 1980s and the cable there is seemingly unused or was never upgraded.

There are also still some housing estates in Cork City well within heavily cabled areas that have no cable. You can see MMDS antennae.

So overall, I think UPC is still concentrating on refurbishing existing infrastructure rather than adding more of a footprint.

I know there are lots of historical reasons but some are bordering on prehistoric at this stage.

There was a lot of shortsighted decision making in the 1990s and early 2000s that saw places go without cable or ducts going in.

I just hope we have learnt some lessons about how not to do infrastructure!

irishfeen · 23-01-2014 1:28pm

I think this is our (country folk) last big hope of a proper broadband connection because the normal fibre network is probably on its way to being complete - I won't get excited about it as of yet but it would nice to upgrade dial up to the speeds they are talking about

bk · 23-01-2014 2:47pm

Interesting comment in the Silicon Republic article on the legislation:

http://siliconrepublic.com/comms/item/35494-esb-aims-to-provide-fibre-b/

“It should be noted that the legislation is not, however, project specific and will allow ESB’s considerable distribution infrastructure to become available to the telecommunications market even if the current JV proposals do not come to fruition,” Rabbitte said.

So if the Joint Venture with Vodafone falls through, Eircom, UPC or someone similar could work with the ESB to make use of their poles to roll out FTTH.

SIRO - ESB/Vodafone Fibre To The Home

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