James Galvin

Situated halfway between Blarney and Mallow, on the back road, the little Cork village of Bweeng doesn’t have much to offer. Its still a few years off meriting a Wikipedia entry, and currently its claim to fame is a comical name, and the close proximity to Stuake (pronounced Stwick). If you haven’t heard of Bweeng (pronounced Bwing, as in “stwick bwing”) its because theres nothing there to attract your attention. Unless, like me, you live in Donoughmore.

Damien has raised the curtain on Eircom’s Schrödinger’s Cat - their elusive fixed wireless service which names Bweeng as one of its alleged high sites. I spent the past two years in Donoughmore (north of Blarney) up on top of my roof, plotting line of sight to every mast in the greater Cork area. 18 minutes outside of Cork City, at a height of 180m, a 15 foot pole gave me clear line of sight to just about everywhere. I defied physics by associating with access points as far west as Bandon, and south at Farmer’s Cross, but I was just too far out for any ISP to cover me. My plight led to encounters with other technology refugees seeking any form of terrestrial broadband in Donoughmore, willing to pay whatever it took. And now we are told that somewhere just a few miles away, on a hill in Bweeng, Eircom looked down upon us, silently sniggering as we scurried about with ladders and binoculars and ordinance survey maps and 20 foot poles and 30 foot poles, meeting with ISPs, and group broadband schemes, and amateur initiatives to no avail.

Eircom FWA is, of course, a scam. I see several locations on their list of wireless base stations that are known as black spots, with no broadband available which isn’t backhauled via satellite. But it must be a valid product, it is listed on broadband.gov.ie… although when searching by location it does not appear to be on offer anywhere. The installation cost of €605 must put it up among the most expensive in the world. Just to compare it with a few other fixed wireless providers who operate in the Cork area:

The Insanely High Installation Fee
How can Eircom justify charging 500% of the average installation cost? The customer premise equipment for fixed wireless broadband is often very expensive, and each unit could be worth a few hundred euro. Combined with the manual installation costs, fixed wireless installation is not trivial. So what does every other wireless ISP in the world do? They claw back any loss on the install by specifying a minimum contract period (6 or 12 months in Ireland), and they reclaim their gear off your chimney when you quit the service. There is NO justification for the astronomical install fee that Eircom proposes, especially when coupled with the high monthly rental.

The Ridiculously Low Upload Rate
64k - on par with ISDN, and in practice not so much better than dial-up. There are 340 different Irish broadband products listed on broadband.gov.ie, with costs ranging as low as.. er.. free. Out of these 340 products, excluding a couple of low-end satellite services, Eircom FWA is the only one that insults us with an upload speed as low as 64k. I remember a few years ago there was a Croatian ISP which offered 64k upload on their broadband. These days, the very idea is a joke. Even your local group broadband schemes and small local operators can muster more bandwidth than that, at a far lower monthly cost.

The Scam
In general, fixed wireless has some major advantages over satellite. For starters, is far cheaper to install, and the low latency facilitates VOIP and gaming. But the tiny upload in Eircom FWA is a bottleneck which prevents both VOIP and gaming, and the crazy installation fee speaks for itself. Eircom only want this product to exist on paper. They have deliberately made it so unreasonable that nobody would be mad enough to apply, even if it was on offer. Milo Minderbinder would be proud. Damien says they are squatting the spectrum - this makes sense to me, although I would love to know more about this - what frequencies they’re sitting on, who (aside from the customer) is losing out, what Eircom hope to gain in the long run. Whatever the case, it is very wrong if they use this phantom product to gain kudos off the government for extended rural coverage. My guess is that Bweeng national school is sitting on an expensive, bulky, slow, limiting satellite connection, just like every other school in the area, while the locals continue to spend a fortune on slow ISDN.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this… with all the pressure that has been put on the government lately, this is a great opportunity to highlight dodgy dealings and a rip-off of the highest order. The funny thing is, believe it or not, I would consider signing up for it… anything is better than ISDN