Maybe their model is a good one. I mean back in dialup days Esat gave the great service of unlimited time connections for whatever it was, ?25-?30.
It didn’t take them long to change their mind to firstly:
only after 6PM
only if you didn’t leech from the internet (and lets say it, most people still do something similar to this).

While it might be adventourous to try it, again, its definately needed to shake up the broadban market.

The point worth noting, like you said, are:

-they need the customers. period. if they don’t get them, then they are screwed.
- if they decide to change the package, for whatever reason (customers using too much bandwidth, etc) they will get flamed. I remember the rabid discussions on IOO about Esat.
- sell out to another telco before you run out of cash. Companies like Esat/BT can use their fiber network to reach more exchanges and replicate the model.
- they have to do business with Eircom. They would try the patience of a saint.

When I have to pay for bandwidth provided by a PSTN line, and if they are still around, then I would look at them.

Lets hope wireless becomes more popular.
rgrds,
bernard

1. Not enough bandwidth. There is only so much radio spectrum and therefor bandwidth available (there is no such physical constraint with fiber or copper).

2. Wasteful of bandwidth. Becuase of a technical phenomenon known as the hidden node problem, a lot of the bandwidth ends up being wasted with collisions and handshaking when you go above 30 or 40 users within a cell. You can get away with this with mobile phones because the bandwidth demand is quite low and most users only use their device very occasionally. You can’t get away with it so easily with high-bandwidth applications.

3. Unreliable. Some days wireless will work great. The next day it may not. This could well be because the salesman has been at work in your building or area, and your cell has become suddenly congested. Even a small increase in the number of users could cause this sudden outage. I certainly know of one user in Dublin who had wireless broadband for a few weeks, and then suddenly found out that it didn’t work anymore.

You don’t get this problem with a wired solution, particularly with DSL. (It may happen with cable, but the situation isn’t so volatile, and you’ll see a gradual reduction in service rather than a sudden and complete loss.)

Of course, it works well on a small scale, which makes it great for trials and for rural applications.

Look at mobile phones. The main reason for the success of mobile phones (network wise maybe at least) is there is a fixed distance for a urban, built up area, 1.5KM. Also the layout of the network that gurantees the distance between them.

I think if wireless was setup in the same way, there would be a more guaranteed reliability with it.

As the cost of these things becomes cheaper, there is no reason why they can’t be spread more on the ground.

True 802.11b does not have enough bandwidth available for a densly populated network.

The better configuration would be high bandwidth point-to-point links and then local coverage through 802.11b nodes.

Hmm, you get lots of other problems with DSL.

For remote coverage, yes of course, WiFi is an excellent model to use.

anyway, I have been interested in wireless since year 0, so I will always favour wireless over wired.

but thats just me.
b