The DOBlog

Tag: Commuter Views

  • Managing MANs

    I live just outside Wexford town where I have a relatively expensive, relatively slow and occasionally downright awful fixed wireless/wifi broadband service. It struggles to top 1mb download and yesterday I clocked it at 16kbps upload. I’d have been faster training a pigeon to sing the email to the intended recipient and act out the powerpoint presentation through the medium of interprative dance. It (the broadband, not the pigeon) usually finds mist, fog, rain and leaves on trees to be a total embuggerance.

    Wexford is a hub town on the National Development Plan. Wexford has a grown up fiber-optic MAN that is, at present, woefully underutilised. What could be done to improve things to bring top notch fibre speeds to the door (or the last mile) and open up the use of the MAN to people who are just outside its loop?

    The map of the Wexford MAN can be found on the e-net.ie website. On the eastern side of the Slaney it terminates in an industrial estate (with lots of relatively tall buildings) in Knottown, Ardcavan (follow the blue line out). There are not that many houses out this part of the road as most of the land is agricultural or industrial uses.

    About a 3kms (approx 1.8 miles) north of Ardcavan is Castlebridge, which is a very rapidly growing village unserved by fixed line broadband and patchily served by FWA providers.

    Might the use of technology like this support the extension of that leg of the MAN out to Castlebridge and surrounding areas with a massive increase in available bandwidth for customers in those areas, with reduced attenuation due to distance etc. as instead of having to pick up anntenae in Rosslare or in Wexford town? The industrial estate where the MAN terminates is at the high point of a shallow hill (not that shallow on the bicycle though) and a reasonably tall mast on one of those buildings (such as the one that the Dept of the Environment are using and which Wexford VEC also use) would provide possible base for such a piece of infrastructure. ComReg recently approved the roll out of this type of technology.

    Would this not help convert the Wexford MAN from a virtual white elephant investment (which the Mayor of Wexford has previously complained about the cost of connection to) into something that actually could help make Wexford a ‘knowledge economy hub? Personally, if I could get even 5MB at a reasonable price I would be happy to reduce my commuting and work from home (hey, Minister Ryan… see how broadband can help reduce our carbon emissions? Have you joined those dots yet? Particularly as your colleague Micheal Martin is telling the world how much in demand our skills at hoiking bb into remote areas is.). If the marketing blurb is to be believed, this service would provide a 99.99% availability connecting Castlebridge to the MAN for backhaul. 99.99% availability for >1mb broadband on this platform versus 0% availability for >1mb broadband currently.

    Or have I (as usual) missed something obvious with either the technology or the politics.?

    Perhaps the solution to our broadband joke is the punchline to another joke…

    English archaeologists have dug down in Surrey and found long strands of copper bound together in pairs. This has lead them to deduce that the primitive Britons had an advanced copper based DSL network with speeds of up to 12mb. French archaeologists, not to be out done, have dug down and found long strands of glass laid in leather bindings. This has led them to deduce that the ancient Gauls had fiber to the hut and speeds in excess of 20mb.

    A team of archaeologists from UCD have also done excavations in the South East of Ireland and found absolutely nothing. The only conclusion they can draw from this is that the ancient Celts had a highly advanced totally wireless broadband network with speeds of up to 1GB to the hut.

  • Stuck on the train – go on line? WTF

    The Dublin Chamber of Commerce has called for the roll-out of wireless broadband access on public transport including Dart, buses and commuter trains to support the development of Dublin as a ‘knowledge city’.

    Frankly, speaking as a regular long haul commuter (Wexford to Dublin by train or bus, hail rain or shine), this is just nuts.

    The investment necessary to achieve this would be far better spent developing some form of ‘knowledge worker hubs’ in what are currently satellite dormer towns and villages within the East coast commuter belt (which stretches now to Wexford Town). This would reduce the need for people to commute, support development of local communities, support the nuturing of relationships and families etc.

    Sticking wifi on the Wexford to Dublin train would not work (and I suspect similar reasons would apply on other commuter routes).

    Firstly, there are quite large stretches of the line where there is no mobile access (and I’m not talking spanky 3g here, I’m talking ‘hello, I’m on the train’ phone call territory). So that creates a technical challenge to create a network that will actually work and let people do things on the train. Secondly the train in the morning is pretty much full from Gorey up (people were standing from Wicklow this past Monday).

    So the social impact of fishing out a laptop is not to be underestimated as you would inevitably have to smack the person next to you in the head with it (I’ve taken to using my pda to make notes on the train using my spanky bluetooth keyboard to avoid such faux pas). Also, the tables on current commuter trains are tiny and are actually too small to use a laptop on without taking up ALL of the table (again, PDA and small foldy keyboard work OK). For those times when I absolutely have to use my laptop to send/receive email or such like I have a mobile broadband dongley thing from vodafone which meets my needs (until I hit ‘dark territory’ on the route when all bets are off and I just read a book).

    There is of course some spanky technology about that, to an extent, solves the problems of maintaining connectivity when on/in a moving target (actually, the mobile broadband stuff does this reasonably well in my experience using it on the 002 bus to/from Dublin or the aforementioned train). But the issues of network black spots, managing contention, and the physical challenges of actually working on a overcrowded train would take a lot of investment in infrastructure to overcome.

    What is the cost/benefit analysis for this? Is there a better mix that would deliver greater benefit overall?

    As a commuter, I’d much rather have the investment that this would require spent on developing and promoting knowledge economy industries in areas such as the South East, promoting broadband availability to regions (through telcos or local providers), developing integrated ticketing for public transport, increasing capacity, frequency and comfort on commuter rail and generally raising public transport to a point where it is actually possible to work on the train. Reducing the cost of public transport to the passengers would also be a good investment. I already have the level of wireless broadband connectivity I need for working as I travel to Dublin.

    And let’s not forget the terrorist risks, as highlighted by the Steven Seagal movie Under Seige 2, where a terrorist uses a train as a mobile platform to wreak havoc and destruction – using a wireless network connection (where did I put that mobile broadband dongle?).
    Come to think of it, there was a network blackspot as a major plot point in that movie as well.

  • Support your local train service…

    As I write this I’m travelling on the new evening rail service from Wexford to Dublin. It is really good. Cleverly Irish Rail have figured out that if they run a commuter service between Wexford and Waterford (using the lines previously hogged by Sugar beet trains that are no more) then they can run a service to Dublin via a connection at Enniscorthy.

    For anyone travelling to or from Wexford this is a very much needed service. Indeed as a total package the new timetables provides a much needed piece of strategic connectivity between the South East and Dublin.

    Passenger numbers on this, the first evening service to run, are OK for an evening train. However I think that with a bit of publicity the numbers travelling on the revised routes will easily justify them. Personally it makes my life a shit load easier as I can actually get some work done and then spend and hour or two with my wife (who was on the morning bus to Dublin today).

    I will be trying out the morning service next week and will blog about my experiences live from the train… I really hope I can blog about overcrowding.

    The only drawback is that the speed of the train is slightly less than that of the bus… but with a bit of investment in the lines we could actually get a viable eco-friendly transport system out of the south-east and reduce the reliance people have on the overstretched bus services.

    Well done to who ever thought of this new schedule… and Santa, if you are listening, I’ve been really good all year and would really like to have faster trains that could get me to Dublin in less than 2hrs from Wexford.

  • Public Transport

    Iarnrod Eireann/CIE have announced a massive overhaul of the DART network in Dublin to integrate public transport around the capital. Details of their proposal can be found in the Irish Times today.

    What struck me was the similarity between the diagram of what they are proposing and the plan put forward previously by transport lobby group ‘Platform 11’. Platform 11’s proposal can be found here.

    The only difference I can see is that the Platform 11 plan makes use of the well documented tunnel that runs under the Phoenix park between Heuston Station and Docklands to complete the ‘orbital’ transport route.

    Of course I could be wrong – the diagrams presented are both artistic representations of (what I hope) are more detailed technical plans. But surely the consultation process that is now commencing should consider the options of converting the tunnel – which given that CIE are proposing to put some of the DART network underground as part of their plan surely makes sense? – it’s the one part where they wouldn’t need to dig the tunnel first.