National 100 Mb Fibre Rollout inc rural areas

Spotted this earlier from a friends Facebook post

Click here

Interesting read!

Del

In reply to a post by delone:

Spotted this earlier from a friends Facebook post

Click here

Interesting read!

Del

If you live in Ireland it would be, unless you live in Northern Ireland or Belfast which are not down for it.

But yeah nice read.

Paul

And relevance to the UK is ... ?

It's either of interest to you or it's not. Relevance will be entirely subjective to the reader.

Some things I found interesting were, FTTC with vectoring so 100Mb possible, large rural coverage and perhaps most interesting of all the roll out is being done in just over a year.

Perhaps a relevant question could be how does this compare, if it can be, to the BT roll out if scaled up to UK proportions?

Del

Confusing story since talks of fibre to the home in the headlines but you are talking about FTTC with vectoring

The Irish national plan is at http://www.dcenr.gov.ie/Communications/National+Broa...

So real question for anyone in Ireland is the where and when and how long to hit 100% coverage with FTTH which the site in the original post suggests, but the Irish Government plans suggest some way to go.

In reply to a post by delone:

Some things I found interesting were, FTTC with vectoring so 100Mb possible, large rural coverage and perhaps most interesting of all the roll out is being done in just over a year.

Perhaps a relevant question could be how does this compare, if it can be, to the BT roll out if scaled up to UK proportions?

Last year, when the Irish government was performing consultation on their NBP plans, Eircom responded - and the response included a graph of the distance -vs-speed they were seeing in the vectoring rollout.

I reported what I found on this thread, where I also made a graph to show how it might map to UK lines.

Those distances become key to the decision whether you follow an FTTC rollout, or whether you switch to FTTH.

However, I haven't followed this Irish story much since, so I don't know what plans Eircom have been making with regard to FTTH instead of FTTC - there are more competitors there willing to try FTTH, so Eircom seemed to be edging in that direction instead. I'm not sure what direction the Irish government are leaning, in awarding contract(s).

Meanwhile, in this country, the recent BT announcements have all focussed towards G.fast instead of FTTH. The two countries might have been similar 6 months ago, but they might now be going in radically different directions.

Well, things have indeed moved on a bit in Ireland. Siro came on the scene and announced that it would run FTTH using the ESB (equivalent of UK national grid I suppose) ducting and overhead suplply lines to 500k premises (Ireland has just 2.3m premises in total). This roll out has not yet commenced beyond trial areas but looks set to commence imminently.

Eircom (legacy telco, BT equivalent), in response announced it would roll out FTTH in 66 towns over the next 3 years. This roll out has commenced. Eircom were quite clever. They blew lots of extra dark fibre from their exchanges to their VDSL street cabinets and will use these to carry on beyond the cabinets with FTTH. The cabinets themselves are easily up-gradable to host the GPON gear to split the fibre feeds out. Eircom always planned to go FTTC->FTTH. All that changed is that they have been pushed into the upgrade earlier than they might have liked.

Last year the government completed a map based on what commercial operators said was viable to serve with fast broadband commercially (requiring no subsidy). The government then announced the remaining 760k premises that would not be served commercially would get at least 30Mbps subsidised by the state.

Eircom then just this Monday suddenly announced that they would serve 300k of those 760k premises with FTTH, which is a real game changer. These are, amazingly, often extremely small/remote exchange, with a few dozen lines. Eircom believes that FTTH is the solution to Ireland's rural broadband problems.

Story here.. I look on with envy at my home country from my adopted Germany. We here are being left in the broadband dust by smaller countries like Ireland and the baltic states. Deutsche Telekom has rolled out barely any vectoring and FTTH in maybe 10 towns on a limited basis and only up to a piddly (for fibre) 150Mbps.

Probably time to stop teasing my Irish friends over their tin can broadband.......

Del

In reply to a post by murphaph:

Siro came on the scene and announced that it would run FTTH using the ESB

Ah. I'd heard of the Vodafone announcement, but hadn't realised the JV had morphed into Siro.

In reply to a post by murphaph:

Eircom then just this Monday suddenly announced that they would serve 300k of those 760k premises with FTTH, which is a real game changer.

Isn't it just! Impressive...

It might also indicate that they're not confident they can win the tenders, and have chosen this step to lock out a subsidised competitor.

In reply to a post by murphaph:

These are, amazingly, often extremely small/remote exchange, with a few dozen lines. Eircom believes that FTTH is the solution to Ireland's rural broadband problems.

Does Eircom have the right to remove copper entirely from these properties, to shut the small exchanges? Or are they required to keep supporting it for unbundled competitors?

Honestly I'm not sure, but many of these exchanges have no DSL whatsoever, Eircom or competitors gear. Some are on wireless links with insufficient backhaul to even allow ADSL1 equipment to be installed.