It looks as though it's the same old problem from my very brief glance at the Irish forum. Three users overload outdated O2 infrastructure and a bit of vice-versa (O2 customer goes on three "OMG this works"). Depending on how it's done here we could have the same problem.

Not so sure about O2 IRL's infrastructure being outdated as such, arguably all the networks have put a lot of investment over the years, one of the main reasons being that the original 3G auction in the RoI didn't become a cash bonanza that it was in the UK so funds for rolling out a network was more readily available. The difference in 3G coverage between the Republic and NI was night and day until around a couple of years ago with the gap now much closer. If anything it was 3 IRL that had a network that struggled to cope, especially when they started selling mobile broadband which had such high demand it just couldn't cope with it. Many people still won't touch it because of their past experience.

At the moment there is a very forward looking pace of development in telecoms and communications infrastructure in the Republic right now both for landline & mobile - it's slowly dawning on them that FTTH is the way forward even in rural areas. Unfortunately there seems to be very little will in Westminster to develop a proper UK-wide broadband development plan like there is in several other countries. Everything here is too heavily bolted on to the decades old copper POTS infrastructure.

The issue with our telecoms network is that we have been developed for too long. Other countries have had telecoms for much less time, e.g. South Korea, Japan.

What they're trying to do with FTTC is to get fibre even closer so that in the future those who need faster can just pay for it: it will be much cheaper to run it 800m as opposed to 3 miles. However, giving all the contracts to BT wasn't the best idea.

There's a fair bit of FTTP deployed by BT in Cornwall, to the point where it constitutes some large percentage of the total nationwide number of BT FTTP premises. Something like 62000 out of 200,000 for Cornwall alone. (unfortunately I do not live in one of them)

They've even deployed it to very rural farmhouses at what must be enormous expense, and poles that have no copper customers and so are unlikely to have any fibre customers too. Dat return on investment.

Unfortunately, BT is not consistent in what it does - some very rural premises get told to go to satellite, others get FTTC, a few get FTTP. They cherry pick the odd street or section of street to give FTTP (seemingly with no pattern) while deciding that others can have FTTC.

Far away from Cornwall, up t'north where B4RN are, BT are scrambling to deploy their own FTTP. Strange how competition makes BT splash the cash (when I believe it was originally not planned to get anything at all)

The short-term view seems to otherwise prevail though, because profits today (with a slower rollout and higher overall cost) mean more than savings and futureproofing for tomorrow

That's not really a very good excuse, given that other countries have managed to go for full FTTP regardless of age - some of these telcos have already been doing "FTTC" for decades too.

Ultimately it's just excuses - BT could do it if they wanted to, but they generally won't, and there are a lot of people who will lap up the "it's too expensive, too hard" rubbish.

There is simply no reason why BT could not do far more FTTP than they currently do. 100% might be too much to ask, but it should be more than fractions of a percent in some cases.

As for "those who want to pay for it can have it", when you're looking at a couple of grand to install plus at least 100+ per month plus VAT wholesale cost (so you have to add on the ISP's charges and profits) and a 3 year contract, it isn't happening. FTTP on Demand already exists and is seemingly priced to prevent people actually wanting to purchase the service from doing so - probably because they want you on a much more expensive leased line

see below:

Sounds good ! I'd post in it.

I came across O2 4G today for the first time in Ballymena NI. While I was only on it briefly it didn't feel as fast as EE 4G.

Today i was in abergavenny wales had full 02 hsdpa 3g signal speed tests was giving 0.02mb, In Newport center later on getting o2 1mb 3g and then on o2 4g same place 24mb

I suspect a lot of users are still with 4g-unable phones (or contracts) and therefore can't make use of any 4g capacity that's available locally - or, like I was (before my 2g/3g Samsung S3 bit the dust), simply happy with what I got and was in fact noticing a performance increase as other users moved to 4g thus giving the 3g network some respite.

Perhaps if o2 can convince more users to transition to 4g this effect will be more evident there. Okay, there's the risk of their 4g network crumpling under the load as well, so.. well, hopefully they don't foul up again!

Well looking at O2's coverage map it looks like only the western part of Ballymena heading towards Ahoghill is adequately served with 4G there. Put in the more limited bandwidth O2 has and the potential amount of users on it compared to EE (many O2 customers here already have 4G enabled handsets who can use them once 4G becomes available) and the overall contention means that the user speed will likely not "...feel as fast as EE". Not making excuses, just dealing with real-world variables. If EE in NI had the user base O2 has, it would feel a lot slower than what it is at present too!

There seems to be little obvious pattern to Cornerstone's 4G roll out in NI outside of Belfast & Derry, though I have noticed that they now have most of the A32 between Omagh and Enniskillen covered, stopping a few miles outside of Enniskillen by Ballinamallard. I'd assume once Enniskillen is eventually covered that should take road coverage then down towards the Fermanagh part of the lands of the Quinn clan.

O2's smartphone penetration is still low compared to other networks but considering at the moment their limited spectrum it's going to get worse not better unless they drastically increase their mast density.

There's been a lot of development in the roll out of FTTC here in Northern Ireland itself over the past four to five years. My parents have had it for almost four years now themselves and have a full 76/20 meg service though the cab is only about 20 metres away from them. Interestingly the first places in the first stage of the roll out mostly concentrated on places which only had up to 8 Mbps download speeds available (either the local exchange was ADSL only or premises were too far away to take advantage of ADSL2+ speeds e.g. outskirts of towns) and Virgin Media wasn't available. So lots of rural places got done up first, followed by more urban locations like town centres and Virgin Media areas. The current stage of the roll out is now concentrating on some very small cabinets, some of which are serving communities as low as 150 people, which is planned to be completed by the end of this year.

However there are some significant hurdles to overcome. I'd would assume the general geography of Cornwall and much of Northern Ireland in comparison is fairly similar, I wonder what the comparison of the spread of population is like. Northern Ireland has a disproportionate amount of its population that is deemed to live in a rural area (35%, compared to an average of 12% in the UK as a whole), lots of people, myself included, tend to live in small towns, villages and hamlets as well as their own one-off housing which puts problems on the planning and running of certain infrastructure compared to places where nearly everyone lives closer together in larger communities and settlements. As an example, only 74% of premises in NI have a telephone line that has a line length of 5km or less from the exchange. In some cases the enablement of some green cabinets for VDSL2+ where ADSL wasn't available or was very poor before has eased this problem for broadband in some places, but for those that might live only a mile or two outside some villages, even VDSL might not be available and ADSL might not be great.

So what does this have to do with mobile? In fairness the above does belong more in the Broadband Internet forum, but I'd did give a paradox that back in 2011 and the first half of 2012 that I was able to use 40Mbps download FTTC internet at home whilst there were no 3G operators available(!) and also that with a rather dispersed population that rolling out 3G on 2100MHz would see in many cases serving quite low population levels per cell (not to mention topology itself) hitting that 'return on investment' especially when so much was paid out for the 3G licences in the first places, so the likes of O2 rolling out 3G on 900MHz was at least in local terms more cost effective for them at least, not to mention that having a large captive market meant the return of investment of doing such upgrades was likely to come in a shorter amount of time.

In the Republic of Ireland, ESB (the rough Irish equivalent of the National Grid in Britain) and Vodafone are planning to deliver FTTH, which has prompted Eircom (yes, analogue to BT!) to declare a FTTH roll out themselves, not just in major cities like Dublin, Cork and Galway but also many provincial towns as well. Eircom already have a fairly extensive FTTC network themselves where you can get the service without having to take a POTS telephone service with it, meaning line rental doesn't be separate and its part of the monthly service cost instead. And they also implemented vectoring as well quite early on. Meanwhile naked DSL still isn't available in the UK. For the likes of Eircom, their management realise that their future lies in their network being geared towards data rather than as a bolt-on to phone calls over copper, and that while a FTTH roll out to even isolated farm yard homes that can give 100Mbps or even 1Gbps is a nice side addition, the real reason for such is to overcome the distance problems xDSL technologies have in disperse populations. Since ESB are the owners of NIE, who are responsible for the running and maintenance of the electric grid in Northern Ireland, I wonder if they could be encourage to do something similar to their southern wing and team up with a partner to roll out FTTH up north? It would certainly make BT start panicking!

In the last Ofcom Communications Report in August 2014, it noted that smart phone penetration risen in Northern Ireland from 45% in 2013 to 55%.

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/mar...ireland/ni-4.2

This is still lower than the general trend in Britain, but it is catching up especially in Rural NI which went from 35% to 52% - an area where O2 has a 69% share of the mobile network market (up from 67% in 2013). While I can't get a more detailed breakdown of these figures, putting two plus two together would seem to indicate that at least locally here many O2 subscribers are already upgrading to smart phones, with many latest models including 4G.

Also from my observations with Cornerstone's roll out here, areas which previously were 2G only on O2 or where 3G was on 900MHz only which have now been upgraded to 4G, they now also have 3G on 900MHz and 2100MHz from the same cell site if it was not available before, which assuming enough data backhaul is in place should help ease data congestion in those places upgraded. For example, my local O2 cell went from having 3G on 900MHz with a single 5MHz paired slot only to having 5MHz paired 3G on 900MHz, two 3G paired slots on 2100MHz and a 10MHz paired slot for LTE on 800MHz, overall giving a significant capacity upgrade. Of course local variances will dictate how well this plans out.

Good to see O2 is finally catching up. As much as MBNL is good for most of us, the ability to have a solid alternative and to create more competition in the market won't be a bad thing for prices or mobile investment

I often sound like I'm against O2 like it has personally offended me but it has the potential to catch up.

It's like what I've said here in this thread and also in the past, that the market and development of mobile networks in Northern Ireland has developed differently compared to Britain. I'm sure people must be tired with me on this and want me to STFU about it but it does try and highlight the different results across the UK in local areas and regions, for example while O2 has a disproportionate market share in NI, Orange seems to have a much higher share of the Welsh market (some of which has siphoned off to EE recently) itself compared to the UK as a whole. Performance isn't uniform across the land.

One of the simplest examples I can give is from the latest Ofcom 3G & 4G mobile broadband speed performance on the link below (PDF). On the last page is a small map of the UK showing each network's 3G & 4G coverage as a snapshot from last month. Focusing on NI, EE wins on 4G & 3G coverage, with 3 slightly behind on 3G. O2's 3G coverage in NI is not very far behind that of 3, in comparison to O2 in Britain where it is noticeably behind that of EE & 3 (look at Wales for example), hence why I find its 3G coverage quite decent (and unlike 3 I have 2G fallback). But bringing up the rear is Vodafone whose coverage is nothing short of shocking in NI let alone anywhere else. The funny thing is that the Voda 3G & 4G coverage in that map is roughly the same as that of EE & 3's 3G coverage just over 2-2.5 years ago.

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/bin...April_2015.pdf
Last edited by Redcoat : 07-04-2015 at 22:25

You make a fair point. I often think of how things are in the closely packed urban North west where I am.

In more 'packed' population areas, the likes of EE and 3 can have advantages in placing 1800MHz cells to cover small geographic areas whilst still serving a significant number of people, at a distance where at even these frequencies they are strong enough to penetrate indoors as well as bounce of buildings, though windows (some windows depending on how they're framed can let >1GHz signals in better than <1GHz) etc. OTOH, O2 have to be quite careful to plan their 800MHz network in densely packed areas to minimise co-channel interference between cells close together due to its propagation properties. In some of these areas, O2 could perhaps re-frame their small 1800MHz allocation for a 5MHz pair FDD-LTE to ease their burden at 800MHz, but this would mean losing 2G on it, forcing those users to use 900MHz only (of course they could still use 1800MHz for 2G where it hasn't been used for LTE). Of course a paired 5MHz slot for LTE won't have the data rate capability that say EE has with paired 20MHz in the same band, but every little would help in easing up data bottlenecks.

Going back to NI (groan!), the urban breakdown figures for each network indicate that EE (EE, Orange & T-Mobile combined) and Vodafone are neck & neck, 14% vs. 13%. On an anecdotal basis, I would say that EE would be the number 2 network in Belfast and its surrounding satellite towns (Bangor, Lisburn, Newtownabbey etc.) as there has been a long, steady, loyal customer base for Orange there over the years and the frequency operating differences are not as big. But in urban areas outside of the Greater Belfast area, like Derry city and many market towns big enough to come under the 'urban' tag Vodafone would edge it over EE, particularly so in places like Derry, Strabane & Newry that are close to the border and therefore can easily roam inadvertently - O2 and Vodafone offer deals for using their phones in the Republic at free or very cheap roaming rates that can use their allowances. That's just my experience.

It might be seen that I'm sticking up for O2 at whatever cost, or that I'm the ghost of wavejockglw - I'm not! I'm happy enough to recommend different networks according to different circumstances, that's why I advised some people to go to EE when Vodafone was letting them down. In fact I think EE through MBNL have done a very good job with their 3G & 4G roll out in Northern Ireland over the past couple of years with its 4G coverage now around 80% of Northern Ireland - albeit in outdoor coverage terms, not sure how that translates to indoor coverage. But covering the population of NI is a challenge for all operators, hopefully explained by the droning I've typed into words.

J'accuse!

:P Nah your arguments actually seem to be logical and well reasoned. Plus you've gone an awfully long while without mentioning Glasgow.

I would like to categorically state that unlike what appears to be at least half of the population of Northern Ireland, I have never been to Glasgow and I have no plans to visit there any time soon.**




BTW if O2 ever did one thing that they deserved to get a right kicking for, it was when they were BT Cellnet and they did this advert.