Broadband in Northern Ireland?

blorg

I'm advising a client of my father's who needs to get broadband for a system we are putting in, to connect three sites (one in the Republic, and two in Northern Ireland).

Now the overwhelming priority here is reliability, in the sense of always on connection. Bad pings don't matter; neither does speed as long as it is reasonable (all that is being transmitted is text). What does matter is disconnects and I've been hearing a lot of bad things with UTV ROI in this regard.

UTV is also the provider they were considering for NI, where they can get DSL (they can't get it in the Republic, but there is someone near them in Dunleer that does wireless). Does anyone have any experience of the service there, or have recommendations for alternatives?

tribble

blorg wrote:

Now the overwhelming priority here is reliability, in the sense of always on connection. Bad pings don't matter; neither does speed as long as it is reasonable (all that is being transmitted is text). What does matter is disconnects and I've been hearing a lot of bad things with UTV ROI in this regard.

I have Netsource and while they are expensive (€200 per quater incl VAT) I almost never have issues with the reliability (maybe once for 2 minutes a few months ago).

Apparently Eircom also offer a rock solid (if underspec'ed and overpriced) service.

tribble

blorg

Thanks for that Tribble, I have Netsource myself and would recommend it to them if they could get DSL in the Republic (they can't, will have to do wireless), and I'm aware that Eircom is reliable from all the threads here. It's information about Northern Irish providers that I'm interested in. In particular, UTV have such a bad reputation down here quality-wise, I was wondering if it was the same in NI?

rash

Worked for a company before that had a client with 5 sites in NI, these were connected via VPN back to Dublin using BT DSL at the NI sites. Had no problems with the sites after the setup & test phase.

I presume that the 3 sites will interconnect via VPN. If so you need to look at your weakest link, if the site in Dunleer is acting as the Head Office Site, then if the wireless link is unreliable then it impacts the quality of service of the other sites regardless of how good their local DSL link is.

blorg

I think I'll suggest that they go with BT; I've just heard too many bad things about UTV. We probably won't be using a VPN, the sites in NI will probably communicate back to Dunleer using FTP or HTTP. They just need to send stuff back and forth periodically. Wireless in Dunleer wouldn't be my choice either, but DSL is not available - if anyone knows of other solutions I'd be interested to hear them.