Pace picks up to bring high-speed broadband

Ireland's slow journey to faster broadband has been boosted by UPC announcing a 100Mbits/sec product and by mobile operators upgrading their infrastructure. IAN CAMPBELLreports

WITH UPC unveiling plans for 100Mbits/sec broadband and 3 about to increase the speed of its mobile broadband service, famine is slowly turning to feast for Irish consumers and small businesses starved of high-speed connectivity.

The cable company and mobile operator are two of the more recent entrants into the Irish communications market, but both are investing in new infrastructure technology to enable faster speeds and put them in a better position to steal a lead over their competitors.

In August, UPC will launch a 100Mbits/sec broadband product expected to be priced at around €80-90 per month, in line with its other European offerings.

Consumers who want the triple-play service of TV, broadband and telephony may pay closer to €100.

The new service will be available to 500,000 homes at launch, with a further 200,000 to be connected over the next two years.

A business offering based around the 100Mbits/sec service will also be launched at just under €100 for the most basic package.

Following the acquisition of Chorus and NTL, UPC became Ireland’s biggest cable provider in 2005 and embarked on a process of gradual transformation.

In addition to its cable TV services, it now claims to be the fastest growing fixed broadband provider in Ireland.

“Nationally we have added more subscribers in the last four quarters than any other, and around 50 per cent of growth in fixed broadband has been on our platform,” said Mark Coan, sales and marketing director, UPC.

As part of Liberty Global, an international company selling cable and communication services in 10 European countries, funds were made available to support UPC’s upgrade at a time when other service providers felt the full force of the recession and adopted a more cautious approach.

UPC has invested around €330 million in upgrading a footprint that covers Ireland’s five main cities and 12 largest towns.

“If you include the €700 million acquisition costs of NTL and Chorus it comes to around €1 billion,” said Coan. “There is a clear difference between what we can do compared to our competitors. No one else has been able to invest at this level through the current economic cycle.”

Eircom has rolled out a next-generation network that has raised its entry-level broadband speeds to 8Mbits/sec, but going faster than its top-end 24Mbits/sec product would require significant investment in its DSL-based infrastructure that it is not in a position to undertake.

The company has been carrying out technical trials of VDSL, which has the capacity to deliver speeds of 50Mbits/sec, but head of communications Paul Bradley said a commercial roll-out would be prohibitively expensive.

“There isn’t a country in the world where there hasn’t been a change in the regulatory framework or an injection of assistance to get the faster speeds,” he said. “It can’t be just a private company on its own.”

He discounted UPC because it does not provide national coverage. “UPC is hitting 500,000 customers. We are looking at fibre as the future for Ireland, not just urban centres.”

Like cable, mobile broadband is enjoying a boom despite difficult times.

The most recent ComReg survey of businesses, published in March, said that nearly two in 10 small firms believe that mobile broadband is a substitute for fixed broadband, a view that is likely to gain more credence as speeds increase.

All the Irish mobile operators have been upgrading their networks to deliver 3.5G speeds of 14.4Mbits/sec and even 21Mbits/sec, though the absence of supporting hardware – compatible dongles and smartphones – will hamper how quickly these speeds are realised.

Mobile broadband has evolved at a blistering pace.

“Since 2007, speeds have doubled year-on-year, and that could even be surpassed in 2010,” said David Hennessy, chief technical officer at 3.

“We are in the process of going up to 14.4Mbits/sec from 7.2Mbits/sec and later in the year we will have the capacity to go up to 42Mbits/sec. Whether we roll it out will depend on the modems being there to support it.”

Further down the track is 4G, also known as LTE (Long Term Evolution), which will accelerate download speeds even further. Infrastructure manufacturers and operators are conducting trials of the new technology and claiming download speeds of 100Mbits/sec, but commercial services are not expected to arrive in Ireland before 2012.

Meanwhile, UPC may also enter the Irish mobile market as an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator), piggy-backing an existing provider to offer services under its own brand. It is already delivering so-called “quad play” in Belgium and the Netherlands.

“Ireland is not a mature market for UPC, and we’re still upgrading our triple-play offering,” said Coan, “but if we can strike the right deal we could be an MVNO within three years.”