[ILUG] Bandwidth/Internet use in Ireland

[Niall]

On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Owen J Connolly wrote:
 
> 1.  There are other infrastructure providers in this country now,
> besides TE, all of whom are using fibre to their street cabinets.

None of whom provide "last mile" connection to domestic users at the
moment - it's just too expensive to dig up the road for one domestic
connection.

> 2.  My email included a chart giving details of the BW expectations at
> different distances from the exchange or end of Fibre loop, i.e. Street
> cabinet.

I don't know how much Eircom uses fibre to local distribution cabinets. In
my days in T.E. fibre was only used inter-exchange but that's a while ago
now :-). However, the provision of xDSL type services I would imagine is
even more problematic with this arrangement. I don't know how that's
provisioned, but presumably there's more than the classic 3100Hz of
bandwidth allowed per voice line - let's be extremely generous and assume
they allow for every line to be used for ISDN so there is enough fibre
bandwidth for 64K x number of lines. If ONE of those lines is to be
supplied with 45M, it uses up capacity allocated for 720 lines. Things
have undoubtedly changed since I worked in telecoms, but I'm fairly sure
that Eircom doesn't overprovision by 72000%

Like many others, I hate to rain on Owen's parade, but it smells like
snake-oil to me. What's ILUG's policy on online gambling ? I've a couple
of pictures of Douglas Hyde here which I'm very willing to bet that nobody
makes a genuinely available offer of 45M internet connectivity for less
than 20 quid a month - let's say to at least 1% of the population. 


Kindest regards,


Niall  O Broin

P.S. I just got a quote today for a 128K connection - app. 10K a year via
Worldcom and UUnet, not to mention the few grand installation fee.
A little simple arithmetic shows that Genesis will provide bandwidth at
1/25000 of this rate (@ 45 Mbits for 12 punts/month). Sorry, Owen, but
you'll have to excuse the collective scepticism.