There is a short answer to that Question: “No, it won’t!“
Present Situation
Digital Subscriber Line or land-based (good ol’) broadband
At the moment the Achill Sound and the Bunacurry exchange are enabled for land-based DSL. Giving a theoretic download speed of up to 3Meg and an upload speed of 384K. In reality here in Achill Sound the speed is not far off. Using Irish ISP Speed Test I just now measured 2.58 Meg down and 327K up. I rang Eircom a few weeks ago asking for the 7Meg DSL and got the answer that it is not rolled out yet, but is due to come to Achill in 2009. The Eircom 7Meg broadband will also only allow an upload speed of 384K.
3G / HSDPA
The rest of Achill Island is broadband wasteland. The only company offering 3G broadband is 3. O2 and Vodafone have not set up there Network to serve 3G/UMTS/HSDPA. You can use the Three 3G Modem from whereever you have line of sight with the mast on Minaun, so there are really only a few spots, where you cant get it, e.g. Doogort East. The modem costs about 20,-€ per month and is available from Kilkellys on Main Street, Castlebar. The main drawback is that it gets really slow at weekends and at night and is nearly unusable at Bank Holiday Weekends, as all logged-in useres share the same bandwidth.
Satellite
The third (kind of) broadband solution is through satellite, but it is kind of unreliable, due to it’s sensitiveness to some weather conditions. It is also a bit difficult to set up, as the satellite beam is very narrow compared to satellite television. Using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) through satellite is only possible with very few providers.
Two different kinds of satellite connections are available:
- Sending and reviewing the signal from the satellite, which requires a big dish and is very expensive. Here the speeds vary.
- “SkyDSL” – Sending the data through a telephone line and receiving through the satellite, which is less expensive. It still requires a telephone line, which is -unlike DSL- blocked by the signal. Here the upload speed is a maximum of 128K, which would require a double ISDN line, but usually it is about 56K using a simple telephone line and an analogue modem
The National Broadband Scheme (NBS)
The National Broadband Scheme (NBS) is supposed to provide 100 per cent broadband coverage to all of Ireland. BUT many rural areas of the county currently without a reliable broadband connection have been omitted from the scheme. AND the technology that will be used is inadequate and WILL NOT BRING broadband-speed.
Regions in Mayo omitted from the NBS
- Louisburgh
- Foxford
- Kiltimagh
- Kilmovee
- ‘Lower Achill’ (all of Achill except the anyway already broadband-enabled exchanges)
For these regions only the above mentioned satellite connections will work (if they work).
The NBS
The Government has entered a scheme with communications company ‘3’, with a view to provide 100 per cent broadband coverage in Ireland by September 2010. With a €223 million investment ‘3’ is to extend its network to provide mobile wireless broadband services into the NBS areas. The download speed is supposed to be a minimum of 1.2Meg.
Unfortunately I believe that this speed will never be achieved in reality and will remain a theoretical figure. Furthermore at the present stage it is not possible to hook up a small company network to one of these plug-in-devices, so using it will be a one-man-show. Companies will not be able to use this technology to safely connect to the Internet using a central firewall or gateway. I also believe that the use of VPN will not be possible. The Company Commsoft sells the Dovado USB Mobile Broadband Router (UMR), which supports a wide range of USB (3G/HSPA, CDMA, iBurst) modems, particularly those used by Irish providers: O2, Vodafone and Three.
Definitions (by Wikipedia)
DSL or xDSL, is a family of technologies that provides digital data transmission over the wires of a local telephone network. DSL can be used at the same time and on the same telephone line with regular telephone, as it uses high frequency, while regular telephone uses low frequency.Typically, the download speed of consumer DSL services ranges from 256 kilobits per second (kbit/s) to 24,000 kbit/s, depending on DSL technology, line conditions and service level implemented. Typically, upload speed is lower than download speed for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line.
High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is a 3G (third generation) mobile telephony communications protocol in the High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) family, which allows networks based on Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity. Current HSDPA deployments support down-link speeds of 1.8, 3.6, 7.2 and 14.4 Mbit/s.
A virtual private network (VPN) is a computer network in which some of the links between nodes are carried by open connections or virtual circuits in some larger network (e.g., the Internet) as opposed to their conduction across a single private network. The link-layer protocols of the virtual network are said to be tunneled through the larger network when this is the case. One common application is secure communications through the public Internet, but a VPN need not have explicit security features, such as authentication or content encryption. VPNs, for example, can be used to separate the traffic of different user communities over an underlying network with strong security features.
Cool that you live and work on Achill, been there many times. Surprised that you have any broadband at all to be honest – you’ve got more than we have here in Leitrim so I wouldn’t be too unhappy!