Irish Broadband?

Big P

I'm able to get Irish Broadband in my area. The following is the pricing for home users;
http://www.irishbroadband.ie/htmdocs/bb_at_home/pricing.htm

This seems to be the best Broadband available for such a price. The only disadvantage seems to be the 2m pole on your house, but of that doesnt matter then should I avail of this broadband service?

Moriarty

Moved to broadband.

spongebob

Oh Dear

I do SOOOOOOO hope that IBB are not back pimping in here (excepting Chaz , Chaz is grand)

M

Big P

Took me a long time to reply, but I'm now thinking of getting their Ripwave service. Seems very cheap (too cheap).
Anyone have this? I know its available in my area anyway (just about the only area its available). I just want to know if anyone here has it and what do they think of it? I'm very tempted to get either ripwave or the grid antenna...

Mutant_Fruit

go for the grid one if you can, its a bit more expensive, but you get lower pings (supposedly) and yuo get more upload (4 times more). Also, its completely unmetered then.

Ripwave has huigher pings and has a limit, which means if you download 24x7 you will be asked to lessen up on the usage. i.e. no charge, just a warning. If you ignore that, dire consequences i presume.

Creamy Goodness

for their 512/512 is that okay for gaming like cs?

Mutant_Fruit

it can be good or bad, but it will definatley be better than ripwave.

At the moment it really depends per house, as to what kinda pings you'll get. It all depends on interference, los etc. BUT, if you order it, you have a 1 week testing period. If you aren;t happy, you get your install fee back, and they remove the equipment.

Creamy Goodness

can u take a photo of your equipment if you have IBB just want to see what it's like

Serbian

Steer clear of Irish Broadband at all costs.

Their "Breeze Home Plus" product is more akin to dial-up than broadband.

luckat

I've switched from dialup to Irish Broadband in the last month and find it great. Breeze Home. There are times it slows down, but most of the time it's fast; the difference in getting large images by email is startling, and ftp is really fast too.

Originally posted by Serbian
Steer clear of Irish Broadband at all costs.

Their "Breeze Home Plus" product is more akin to dial-up than broadband.

agreed. away with ye filty ibb.

/me chases them away with trusty pitchfork.

Flashman

Steer clear of Irish Broadband at all costs.

On the contrary, IBB is the bees knees in my experience.
Good dl speeds, and quick pings.

Seems to depend on your location relative to the transmitter however.

Reesy

Guys, I was thinking of dumping eircom and going for Ripwave. Can youse tell me what REAL speeds you're getting (up and down) and where you are?

My current speed from errorcom is 14.4kb/s (dreadful... I complained to EVERYONE, did no good... for that reason alone I'm keen to try someone else). How slow is slow, and what time of day is it worst?

Big thanks

Mutant_Fruit

IBB is more of a personal experience, the kind of connection you'll get depends on a lot of personal factors. Firstly, how close you acre to the tower, the closer you are, the stronger teh return signal you'll send.

Secondly, the coser you are the sronger the signal you'll get off them, the stronger the better.

Thirdly, the amount of interference you get. The more the worse.

You can't really compare between people as to what kind you will definately get. You might get no interference, meaning you'll get uber low pings....

Ping statistics for 82.195.131.128:
Packets: Sent = 33, Received = 33, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 12ms, Maximum = 137ms, Average = 37ms
Control-Break

Or you might get pings in the 1000's if you have really strong interference.

basically, once you get it installed you get a 1 week test period, if you aren't completely happy, then you can get a free uninstall, and they don;t charge ya for the installation.

Big P

There are three things I have against the €35 a month deal:

1) Satellite is an eye sore
2) Drilling through walls to bring through my house
3) That I'll most likely have to buy a POE since my PC in bottom floor of house. (2 stories)

Hence why I wouldn't mind the idea of ripwave. No wires and still a fairly damn good connection (512/128).

My friend got it today, I have to find out later what kind of speeds he's getting because that's what matters. I need to know the throughput (actual kbs per second downloading).

I shouldn't be bad for a connection as I'm less than a mile from the Irish Broadband HQ in the Sandyford Industrial Estate..... Thanks for the infos so far

Originally posted by Big P
I'm less than a mile from the Irish Broadband HQ in the Sandyford Industrial Estate...

So am I. Worst. connection. ever....ever

APM

my friend had to get rid of IBB also because of dire pings, ping was perfect for the first week but then couldnt get under 600, websites failing to load and downloads no faster than 10k/s for the rest of his connection time, which has been the last 3 months.

tech support ignored his emails and phone calls also, promised to return calls/emails etc, in the end he had to get rid of it and get IOLBB......they have taken the 'gaming' part off their advertisement though so I assume wireless just isn't suitable for gaming in general

Moriarty

Originally posted by APM
they have taken the 'gaming' part off their advertisement though so I assume wireless just isn't suitable for gaming in general

Wireless is perfectly suitable for gaming. It can provide pings similar to ethernet (<1ms <-> 2ms) if its configured correctly and a good connection is established.

Reesy

Greetings all,

I asked about the facts. Well, thanks to the talented Mr. Ripwave I understand these things a bit now, & I agree, it's not truly broadband, but I'm getting 14.4kbit/sec (yes, less than 2kByte/sec) from those chocolate-teapots eircom (as in 'as useless as a ch...').

Therefore, even if I only get 10kByte/sec on it, IBB's Ripwave service might even save me money. Anyway, errorcom won't sell me DSL cos I am on a split carrier (line shared with a neighbour, high vs low frequencies - see www.eircomtribunal.com for details but not they overestimate the users's bitrate). So IBB is my only option. Or move house. Or 3G, when it arrives.

Anyway, IBB tell me the 3.5GHz kit may be here in '2 or 3 months'. Sod it, I won't wait. All I need do is decide between ethernet option (easier for putting the antenna in the attic) & the USB (no fannying about) & I'm ready to rumble.

Adios

Reesy

Calman

Originally posted by Reesy
Or 3G, when it arrives.

3G is already here. It's too expensive though, I think it's about €3 a megabyte at a speed of 144Kb.

mag

I would definatley not recommend IBB.

Like many others my service was fine at the start except for falling over every second weekend, when theres no-one in IBB to resolve. That was for about 4-6 weeks, for the last 3 months its been very unstable - crappy speeds, problems with the high site, totally down, etc...

Basically they're a very small organisation which *imho* are cutting corners - no support out-of-hours, no backup on their backbone, etc...

Im on the Breezehome 512/512 service. I had to ring them again today for about the 25th time since i got it in cause my download speed was at dial-up rates - less than 5KB/Sec, for the past 3 days.

The guy i spoke to said that this was above the minimum level of service that they were required to provide to me. I dont have a copy of my contract with them but i asked him to send me an e-mail stating that & this is what he sent (a lot of its yada but ive highlighted the important part) -

==========================================================

We set a minimum amount of bandwidth (CIR) and maximum amount of bandwidth
(MIR) for each customer on the system. The system will balance the load across the high site sector based on the capacity and the CIR settings.

As the business customers have lower contention rates than residential customers, they will have ‘priority’ in that sense over residential customers during the day as they will have more minimum bandwidth assigned to them.

The sector you are connected to has a high level of business users on it. Hence it is probable that during the day, if all the business users are online, that you may receive slower download speeds.

The system operates as follows in balancing the load:

If a customer is online and using bandwidth, and another customer comes online and requires bandwidth, the system algorithm will ‘gracefully degrade’ the connection of the first user. This means it will slowly, after an initial waiting period, reduce the bandwidth to the first customer. The system will therefore always connect a customer at the lowest speed. If the customer requires more bandwidth, it will wait a period of time to determine whether this is simply a short burst of consistent requirement.
If it determines that it is a consistent requirement, it will then gracefully degrade the existing customers and assign more bandwidth to the new requirement. We have a number of high bandwidth residential customers on this sector who regularly use large amounts of bandwidth. You would therefore need to run a download for a few minutes before you would see the system ‘gracefully degrade’ their connections and increase you above your minimum speed.

If you were therefore to connect to servers at your minimum bandwidth of 25kbps, your initial download speed would be only 3.2KBps, until more bandwidth is made available to you. Dependant on settings and load, this can take a few minutes.

Research show that 80% of residential users use their connections after
18h00, when business users are largely offline.

We try to balance the connections on each high site with an equal load of residential and business customers as generally speaking business users require bandwidth during the day and residential users require it at night. If we were able to structure an optimal high site, business users would be happy during the day and residential users would be happy at night and week-ends. It does mean that during the day you would more often than not see a lower connection speed, with more bandwidth being available at night.

In general our business users seldom burst up to their maximum speeds, allowing more than enough capacity available during the day. However, there may be times when it will not be. In your case we also have other residential users who use their connection during the day, hence tending to ‘flat line’ the bandwidth available at times with huge downloads.

As a Breeze Home customer the current amount of bandwidth assigned to you is 512kbps(MIR) with 25kbps(CIR). You will notice your service fluctuate between these two parameters again this will depend on the time of day and the amount of users sharing your 512kbps connection.

==========================================================

Any other BreezeHome subscribers got a copy of their contract to check this ?

Anyway, im totally pissed off but afaics ive no comeback.

pete

Breeze Home has a contention of 20:1 so a CIR of 25kbps would seem about right, but BreezeHome Plus is 8:1 contention, so a CIR of 64kbps would seem more like it... or am i missing something?

mag

fvck................sorry..............im on breeze home

Got confused there with the package terms for a moment, i thought breeze home was 40:1 contention & breeze home + 20:1.

Im on the 20:1 contention package - breeze home.

Ive edited my post to correct.

mag

Originally posted by pete
Breeze Home has a contention of 20:1 so a CIR of 25kbps would seem about right

Yes but a constant download rate of around 5KBps. I dont think thats acceptable.

Their t&c's above state that "your initial download speed would be only 3.2KBps, until more bandwidth is made available to you. Dependant on settings and load, this can take a few minutes"

So if this last longer than a few minutes, i.e - A FEW DAYS. Then theyre not providing an adequate service. Right ??

bandwithnoname

I'm thinnking of getting the Breeze Home Plus Package.

Can anyone explain the concept of this contention to me?

And roughly what download speeds can I expect with the 8:1 contention of the breeze home plus system?

How do these compare to asdl broadband?

Thanks,
Robert

pete

Originally posted by mag
Yes but a constant download rate of around 5KBps. I dont think thats acceptable.

If you're contending with 19 people that are hammering their connections then I think this is as good as it's going to get.... IBB's t&c's say something along the lines of that while they've no download or upload limits they will take action if people take liberties. Or something.

Their t&c's above state that "your initial download speed would be only 3.2KBps, until more bandwidth is made available to you. Dependant on settings and load, this can take a few minutes"

So if this last longer than a few minutes, i.e - A FEW DAYS. Then theyre not providing an adequate service. Right ??

Well one would think so, yes - but if they're providing you with an equal 20:1 split on a 512k line they're within the agreed parameters.

12thMonkey

I too bought Breeze Home 512/512 wanting to
a) not contribute to Eircom and b) thought 35 euro for something "nearly" as good as 48euro ASDL from Eircom was a good deal. Now I am not at all sure.

I rarely get sustained download speeds in the evening ( or daytime for that matter) above 250kbit/31kByte, and often I see speeds down to 30-40kbit/4-5kByte between 7-9pm. I am on the Leeson St High site which I supposed would feature business users.

When I signed up in November I bought a 512 symetrical link with a 20:1 contention ratio (which their website states "shows that they are aiming for a premium product compared to the 48:1 ASDL offerings". BYW no where did I see the magic words CIR (minimum comitted rate). I did phone and chat to a nice guy in their tech support who said that people seemed happy and experienced 400-450kbits speeds.

I work in the telecoms area and I have done a fair bit of research on this issue of CONTENTION and IBB are muddying the waters here.

All telecoms works on the statsistics of large numbers. It is highly unlikely that everyone will be online and comsuming max bandwidth simultaneously. So less actual capacity can be in place than is actually sold - by a factor of 20, 50 or even 100. The key is that the actual bandwidth be spread over a large number of independent users. And here I believe lies the problem with IBB. Between your computer and the internet there are several capacity bottleknecks, which one might describe the conention ratio on. There is one between your house and the local exchange or high site, another between the exchange or high site and the internet backbone. ASDL's critical bottleneck is between the EXCHANGE and the internet, IBBs is between your home and the high site (the wireless link). This makes a big difference since there are possibly thousands of users connected to one ASDL exchange but only, possibly 200-400 to an IBB high site. So the law of averages does not work as well for IBB customers. Reading the note from IBB above the way the Alverion wireless equipement share the capacity is also a cause of dissatisfaction with the system taking "several minutes" to react to changed patterns of use whereas the router between the ASDL exchange and the internet backbone shares the available bandwidth fairly and instantly among all users.

The proof of the pudding is that if one looks at UK ASDL statistics the top 10 carriers achieve MONTHLY AVERAGE DOWNLOAD speeds of 420-450kbits/sec http://www.adslguide.org.uk/newsarchive.asp?item=1545 whereas my experience on IB is more like 230kbits/sec.

IBB like to divide the max rate by the contention ratio and say that you should be happy to see anything above 25kbits/sec, but the UK ASDL carriers (and from the number posted on this board Eircom) achive consistant speeds of 400-450kbits/sec. And that I believe is the current commercial benchmark they have to hit.

The commerical reality for IBB is consumers comparing ISDN flatrate anytime at 29 euro per month (guaranteed 128kbit/sec) or ASDL for 48 euro 420kbit average to their offering 250kbit or less for 35 euro.

My main hope is that IBB, being a fully commerical company, will up their ante and apportion their high site capacity fairly among their customers/ and or add capacity. Otherwise I will be attempting to terminate their contract.