A bid to buy Eircom for 95 million has been launched. One of the reasons cited is that the government cant afford the main Telco to default along with the banks. Time to nationalise this company also?
http://www.independent.ie/breaking-n...m-1711893.html
Same problem most companies have, a mamoth and unsustainable debt load when the deflation kicks in
eircom's local access infrastructure i.e. the local exchange buildings, switches, ducts, manholes, cabinets, and the copper cables running to homes need to be nationalised.
The rest of the company i.e. eircom's retail division, their national trunk network, their international network and Meteor Mobile can really do whatever they like.
The lack of proper investment and lack of opening-up to competition of the local access infrastructure is putting a serious dampner on our ability to keep up with other countries on broadband.
We absolutely do not need to nationalise eircom as a whole, the company by all accounts is a debt ridden mess. We do however need to ensure that this train wreck of an organisation doesn't take our local network access infrastructure with it.
Billions of €/£ tax payers' money was poured into what was Telecom Eireann in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s. It's utterly disgraceful that this is being flushed down the toilet.
The Government needs to admit that it made an utter mess of the privatisation of eircom and the opening of the fixed line telecommunications market to competition. It needs to be completely reviewed and fixed as a matter of extreme urgency.
There won't be a smart economy or many of those green collar jobs won't be possible without not only good, but world-beating, broadband access.
eircom's local access infrastructure is crumbling and it's fallen into a state where it's becoming rather mediocre and outdated by international standards.
Who was the minister for finance that sold off this key piece of infrastructure?
The move to broadband, in a mostly rural (topography wise) country means a move more and more towards radio/wireless and wi-fi technologies, which will get better and better over time. Friends on 02 have a better service than my eircom at times.
The national backhaul is a bigger issue/barrier
Charlie McCreevy was in the hot seat at the time.Originally Posted by Digout
The minister with responsibility for public enterprise at the time was Mary O'Rourke.
Wasnt McCreevys afault. O'Rourke sold it, good, without splitting it, bad, against advice of her staff.
O'Rourke.
Regards...jmcc
Yes indeed, I'm all for free low speed municipal wifi, extending over the whole country as time goes on, with an option to either pay for higher speed access or to possibly install a program so your computer could act as a node for peer to peer media streaming (which opens the door for true live internet TV) or high processor requirement jobs, sort of an ad-hoc super-super computer.
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There are at least four different issues.
1) Rural broadband, this is an issue of planning. Ireland has a huge number of houses that are almost 'off grid'. It's quite unlike other European countries which tend to have rural population concentrated into villages which are quite easy to serve from a local exchange. This is going to have to be dealt with through wireless technologies. There needs to be some decent planning of this though to ensure that the best technologies are made available and that people aren't just relying on 3G mobile services, which aren't really intended to be a replacement for DSL or Cable at this stage. Backhaul access isn't actually that big a deal, there's a lot of fibre optic capacity in Ireland, however it's mostly unused!
2) eircom's physical infrastructural deficit. This is a huge issue in all areas, including big urban centres like Cork and Dublin.
a) Basic maintenance of copper lines is failing to be done. This is really basic stuff. It's quite clear that the maintenance of the copper wire system that connects up homes and businesses is not what it used to be. The number of lines that cannot carry DSL at all due to faults, or due to lack of capacity where multiple subscribers are connected to a single line using pair-gain technology (i.e. multiplexing) is simply unacceptable.
b) Repair time is unacceptable in a lot of instances.
c) Installation lead time is totally unacceptable in a lot of instances, this may be due to lack of capacity.
d) Simple lack of capacity in urban areas, where lines or DSL ports simply run out.
e) Poor quality lines (for whatever reason) that fail to carry DSL at a reasonable speed or with any reliability. These need to be investigated and repaired. It's unacceptable to simply turn around and say that the line 'fails'. To me that means eircom is just a big failure incapable of fixing its own network.
3) New technology, or lack there of.
a) eircom's still largely stuck on ADSL 1.0 technology which maxes out at 7.6MBit/s. Upgrading to ADSL 2+ (used by Smart Telecom already) instantly brings speeds up to a possible 24MBit/s and improves stability and means access can be delivered over longer lines.
b) Next Generation Network technology. Eircom have basically given up on this due to lack of funds. This is at its most basic a migration towards an all-IP network, which they have made some progress towards. The existing DSL and 'class 5' (Voice/ISDN) switches can be (and some have been) adapted to use this instead of the older ATM backhaul technology. This makes much more efficient use of existing fibre optic backhaul infrastructure, i.e. you can get a lot more traffic down the same optic fibre pipes.
The next step however, is where it gets expensive. It involves reorganising the entire local access network. The existing digital exchanges are replaced with a distributed network. Cabinets are installed all around the network housing small multi-sevice access nodes (MSANs). These provide end users with basic dial-tone telephone service, and data services up to 150mbit/s using VDSL technology over copper wires, or ultimately fibre-to-home. Basically, rather than your line running all the way back to a large local exchange, it runs to a tiny local exchange located in a secure green box on the street. Because the distance to your home/office is so short, the system can deliver much faster speeds.
In urban areas, UPC, the company that purchased NTL Ireland and Chorus, is already rolling out a cable version of this technology and will start offering very high speeds rather soon in a lot of areas of Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway etc.
However, without competition from eircom (and other companies using eircom's network) we will not progress as there's nothing driving serious competition. Also, eircom's access network reaches a MUCH wider area than UPC's cable network.
Take a look at this wiki article if you want to have a read through the technicalities :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTTH
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