Iol broadband slower than Gbush at a mensa meeting

PaulMagrath

I have only had IOL Broadband a few days but I have had no major problems so far although I have noticed something. For web pages, e-mails, etc this is unnoticeable but for downloads from freeware (and not so freeware!) sites it is:

I have achieved speeds of over 500kilobits per second, however there seems to be a problem with sustaining these speeds - every second second there it seems to slow right down and then go back to where it was less 60 or so until it gets to around 200 or so and then jumps back up. Very strange. (I am getting these readings from Hagel Technologies's DU Meter by the way)
Hopefully it is something minor that IOL will sort soon.

Anyone who is using IOL Broadband should check out http://broadband.iol.ie/cgi-bin/sec/dsl. If you enter your IOL broadband username and password (without the @iolbb bit), you can check your usage statistics.

PiE

Could the problem be that the DSL contention is at exchange level, which means IOL BB users are taking bandwidth from UTV users who are taking from Netsource etc? That's the only explanation I can think of 'cos there's no way UTV could have enough users to make speeds this bad so soon after launching ClickSilver.

-ADREN-

sounds like there is something really fu(ky upy about it all.. hope fully it will alll get sorted.. i doubt its something that will be continuous.

bizmark

cool in 22 days i only used 1.28 gig downloaded and 0.32 uploaded

seem,s surfing and games really dont do anything to your cap

Fabre

At 10 in the morning



much better

M03

Let's hope it has nothing to do with the time of day and that everything is sorted.

I won't be able to check mine until 6pm tonight. Can anyone else who was having speed problems do a test?

M03

butts

Every morning this week my download speed has been 50 - 54 kB/sec. By 6 pm its down to 25 - 30 kB/sec. By 9 pm its down to 5 - 10 kB/sec. Same pattern through out the week.

M03

:mad: :eek: :mad: :eek:

That's very worrying butts. For everybody.

Fabre

at 15:32



Starting to degrade

PiE

Every morning this week my download speed has been 50 - 54 kB/sec. By 6 pm its down to 25 - 30 kB/sec. By 9 pm its down to 5 - 10 kB/sec. Same pattern through out the week.

Same is happening to me on UTV.

Töpher

at least you can connect to it!

Fabre

Those slow speed won't change anytime soon.

I got the following info from BT tech support.

- The contention ratio for IOL Broadband is 48:1
- The bandwidth is 512kbps

So I asked if that meant that if the 10 first users on the line are Downloading files the 38 other are getting a speed close to nothing?

And got an affirmative answer...

Whats the email of murphy?

Think we should send him a nice email will all of us in cc:

bizmark

well ill tell you this now

I am not takeing a service thats 10 euro + more expensive than 56K and around 2 time,s slower .I singed up for broadband not 28k

Fix it or im off simple as that

-ADREN-

yea thats not right... broad band in every other country with residential ratios of 50 : 1 never have trouble like this... Friend in england has 50 : 1 ratio.. no proplems.. friend in Spain has same .. no problems..

M03

I mailed Bill Murphy today and he was very polite and did his best to help but there's no way I'm staying around for speeds like this.

Stopwatch timer: 1min59.9s
Downloaded: 106.7KB
Avg Speed: 0.9KB/sec

2 minutes is where I gave up trying to download this file from an FTP server that I always get stable, fast downloads.

M03

Tazzle

Bet you all wish you had gone with netsource now Doubters! and you lot have caps too, shucks.

bizmark

Shut up taz or ill tract you down and kill you with your adsl line

Tazzle

steviem

948592 bytes transferred in 17.625 secs

420 kbit

bizmark

enjoy it while it last newbe

i had the same speed not 1 week ago

Balfa

It wouldn't suprise me if this was just contention on the exchanges. eircom seem to have put 2 meg lines to the DSLAMs but throttled them to 512k so you get a "true" 48:1 contention ratio.

In the UK, BT have a "contention ratio" of 50:1 on the ADSL cards on their DSLAMs, but in all urban exchanges at least, regardless of how many DSL cards are in the DSLAM, they provide a 155Mbit fibre out the back of the DSLAM.

So it seems like this isn't going to change until eircom get up and throw more bandwidth at the exchanges. it's not like it'd cost them anything more to put a 8meg line to the DSLAMs than the pathetic 512 they currently have. This would let the individual ISPs provide their own contention, so other users wouldn't be slowed down by netsource's lack of cap, for example.

I can't back up the eircom statement, but the BT statement can be backed up in a FAQ at www.zenzupport.co.uk

SuprSi

Well mine's bad again tonight. Taking like 30 seconds to open a Teamtalk webpage, and don't even talk to me about trying to open Komplett!!

Guess I'll be going to complaing route :mad:

Si.

-ADREN-

yea every just mail then .. the head complaints officers email is John.Markey@esat.com I suggest an e-mail from every1, giving pics and graphs of the dreadfull service..

M03

Balfa's reply makes some sense of what I'm seeing. If my exchange only has a 512K or 1MBit line then the speed of 20Kbit/sec would be accurate if the contention is at maximum.

But if this was the case, would my ping be affected? My pings have been fast and stable the whole time. I can play online games for hours on end with rock solid pings of 45-50ms to UK servers.

M03

PiE

Downloading at 1.8k/s right now.

Yummy.

-ADREN-

strange how u can get pings very low to servers.. i mean ingame u 'dload' stuff and if u bring up net_graph 3 in CS u can see ure transfer rate.. now surely if they are high (3.0kbs) is high.. if they are high then they dont seem to be getting affected by this problem is having.. cus some report getting .9ks etc.. meaning that even online gaming would be impossible

UbahOne

My IOL broadband is perfect. Not a single problem. Slows a little bit in the evenings however that would be from like 60-70kbps down to 40-50kbps. Quite nice as you can see.

The only thing I am trying to understand is the download limit on http://broadband.iol.ie/usage . Does the limit last for one month from the time you sign on or just the particular month your in. For example, i joined the 23'rd July, so does that mean I have 5GB's until August 1'st or is it until 23'rd August.

Any light on this please?

-ADREN-

1st of august.

Gummy Panda

Are you sure its the 1st of August??

How do you know this??

Because if it is, let the downloads begin. I'm not paying for 50 euro a month and only using 2 gigs of my cap

MrPinK

If they reset caps from the date they were connected then ppl would ring up and argue about what the date actually was because they mightn't have gotten their modem or username for a week later, etc. It's also a lot less hassle if they can reset all the caps at the same time rather than doing it every day for certain ppl. That's why every capped service that I've ever heard of does it at the end of the month. IOL will be no different.