[ILUG] [Completely OT] ISP service

[Fergal Daly]

At 19:59 30/01/01, John McCormac wrote:
>Given that the local loop should have been deregulated on January 1 and
>it now may happen by April, Eircom may be running scared about investing
>in upgrading the network only to have to play with all the other
>operators. The only thing that is clear about Eircom is that it is a two
>bit operation run by third rate people.

Local loop unbundling and bitstream access are two different things, LLU is 
proceeding, Eircom's reference offer was published on schedule at the start 
of the year. The fact that they were looking for astronomical amounts for 
co-lo etc was to be expected, there's plenty of haggling to go on but as 
far as I know this is chugging away and OLOs will be able to do 
line-sharing possibly within the first half of this year.

The bitstream offering is what could take a hit from this. As far as I can 
tell Eircom were only providing bitstream because they had to allow OLOs 
access to whatever services their own retail arm had. Now that their retail 
arm aren't doing it, they may try to withdraw the offer - I can't find any 
ODTR docs that actually mandate bitstream access by a certain date. If they 
do withdraw, then we'll have to wait until line sharing is implemented to 
see any DSL services, one advantage to this is that it should be cheaper 
than bitstream and OLOs should be able to offer greater speeds than the 2Mb 
limit imposed on bitstream,

Fergal