ibb - Breeze 1 Mbps Lite for home use (advice)

monkey24

Hey

Quick question. We are currently getting bb into our house in Fairview. At first I was going to get eircom and try the free trial out. But changed to ibb the breeze package for business. The reason being, we do not have a phone line so considering the cost to install a line and overall cost of eircom, ibb looked a better prospect, with no cap, better contention rate and overall speed.

But I have read a couple of messages on this board where people were not v.happy with ibb in general. Could anyone give me some feedback on this package. Seeing its near 24 quid a month cheaper than eircom (with phone rental included), i was just wondering why more people dont take advantage of it.

Details of business package below

Thanks
monks

Description Breeze 1 Mbps Lite
Installation €149
Monthly Charge €40
Symmetric Yes
Downstream 1 Mbps
Upstream 1 Mbps
Contention 20:1

Mutant_Fruit

AS you have read, support can be abysmal. Personally, i tihnk everyones support is like that, so its up to you as to whether thats a deciding factor or not.

The Ripwave product is very location dependant. You might be within range of it, but you might not be able to get the signal anyway, or just a very poor one. Theres nothing IBB can do about that, so if you try Ripwave and it doesn't work, tough ****. Just send it back, nothing can be done really.

The Breeze home product used to be run on 2.4ghz equipment, and was prone to interference and crappy speeds/packet loss. Once again, if you had interference there was nothing that could be done about it.

The 1mb product runs on 5.8ghz equipment, and is rock solid from all reports. I've never heard anyone complain about the 5.8ghz equipment once they got it installed. This is what i have, and i havn't had any problems in the last 8 months or so since i got it, besides a little downtime here and there (less than 6 hours in last 8 months. I don't know exactly).

EDIT: its EUR48.40 inc vat per month

Blaster99

You must have ignored all my posts then.

Radio-wise the service works fine, but certainly in my case the contention hurts badly. I'm now on the 8:1 service (at €70) because the 20:1 gave me speeds around 10Kb/s most of the time, i.e. useless. I can't say I'm generally jumping up and down in joy with the 8:1 service either. Performance dives pretty badly in the evenings/nights which is when I'm using it the most. The performance seems to depend quite a bit on where the traffic is coming from. Pings are generally very good, though, if that's an issue for you.

I certainly couldn't recommend the 20:1 service as experienced by me. I'm in Bray. You may experience a better service in your location. At €70 you're getting into the 1Mb/s ADSL services and given the performance of my 512K Eircom ADSL line, I would guess Eircom's 1Mb/s is a lot better/consistent performing than IBB's effort. My experience with Eircom's 2Mb/s service has certainly been favourable. I have never had a reason to call Eircom's support which perhaps says something in its own right. IBB's support is pretty good once you get hold of the right person, but I tend to prefer services that don't require me to spend hours on the phone with support which is what I've had to do with IBB.

Mutant_Fruit

Blaster99 wrote:

You must have ignored all my posts then.

Did a quick backcheck on your posts, and i remember reading it now. All i can say is, you're the only one to have problems with the VL regularly. I assume you aren't one of them "warez monkeys" as IBB do run a throttling policy afaik.

If i remember correctly, you had problems regardless of the protocol used, but i assume you used non-default ports for P2P apps where possible. I have the 20:1 off the Tallaght highsite, and all i can say is, it might as well be 1:1. I never get contention problems. I'm a lucky ******

ballooba

What do you mean by throttling policy?

Over what limit?

monkey24

Hey thanks for the info guys. Just another follow on from that, Blaster99 Is it possible to cancel the contract if my service turns out to be 10kbs. I certainly wouldnt want to sit there for a year with that speed, when its advertised as a 1mpbs. Also did it take you long to get the Breeze service installed.

Plus there was no mention of VAT in the original price. I asked the sales rep is it 40 quid a month no more and he said yeah. I think they should make that more clear.

Also as another poster asked what is the "throttling policy".

Thanks again, very helpful
monks

gline

ballooba wrote:

What do you mean by throttling policy?

Over what limit?

Afaik it is where the isp puts a cap on the use of certain ports e.g. if you are downloading loads on a p2p program, they cap it so u can only get a certain speed using those ports. I think that is what it mean, not 100% sure though. But i kno IBB do cap certain ports

Blaster99

In their words, IBB sells a contended product. Even though it's advertised as 1Mbps, you're only guaranteed a twentieth of that (or whatever the contention ratio is on a particular product). And in my case, that's pretty much the speed I got. I would expect serious hassle to get out of the contract and you would most likely be financially penalised.

I can't comment on how broadband performs for other people, but I have both Eircom 512/128 ADSL and IBB 1024/1024 so I have a pretty good benchmark to compare against and I ran a lot of speed tests to build up stats. Primarily to hand over to my solicitor if needed.

I haven't gotten legal opinion on this, but my own opinion is if you advertise something as 1024Kbps and deliver speeds around 50-200Kbps then you're probably falsely advertising the product.

MicraBoy

I have the Breeze Lite package for the last few weeks and am very happy. I had some initial trouble with IBB figuring out if I was covered (e.g. applied for RIpwave and then was told I wasn't actually covered). Once I applied for the Breeze package everything went smoothly and I had it installed in 3 weeks. No problems with contention and the pings seem pretty good.

The reason you see the price ex VAT is because you are looking at the business package. If you look at the Breeze Home Lite you will see the price inc VAT (€48.40). I guess as a business you can claim the VAT back. They are the same thing package though.

gline

MicraBoy wrote:

I have the Breeze Lite package for the last few weeks and am very happy. I had some initial trouble with IBB figuring out if I was covered (e.g. applied for RIpwave and then was told I wasn't actually covered). Once I applied for the Breeze package everything went smoothly and I had it installed in 3 weeks. No problems with contention and the pings seem pretty good.

The reason you see the price ex VAT is because you are looking at the business package. If you look at the Breeze Home Lite you will see the price inc VAT (€48.40). I guess as a business you can claim the VAT back. They are the same thing package though.

Thats the type of service im hoping for, though i have been waiting more than 3 weeks already. fingers crossed

monkey24

MicraBoy wrote:

I have the Breeze Lite package for the last few weeks and am very happy. I had some initial trouble with IBB figuring out if I was covered (e.g. applied for RIpwave and then was told I wasn't actually covered). Once I applied for the Breeze package everything went smoothly and I had it installed in 3 weeks. No problems with contention and the pings seem pretty good.

The reason you see the price ex VAT is because you are looking at the business package. If you look at the Breeze Home Lite you will see the price inc VAT (€48.40). I guess as a business you can claim the VAT back. They are the same thing package though.

Cheers thats real helpful. And thanks Basser99 as well. I would certainly agree that its false advertisement if I don't get at least 1/2 of the speed advertised.

I may ring them up and just enquire about this point but really their sales should be more informative.

Mutant_Fruit

Throttling policy: They may limit traffic to residential users during the day to supply business users with the needed bandwidth.

Thats what i was referring to. But there is no download limit or cap or anything of that nature on the service itself. (But if they throttled you 24x7, you'd have perfect rights to complain... as long as it wasn't contention).

neokenzo

The weather in Dublin today is really bad. Has this effected the broadband?

LegacyUser

I've had Breeze 1 MB lite for the last 2 months and even tonight with all the gale force winds. I'm delighted with it altogether. I'm not checking pings .. all I know is that its reliable.

Mutant_Fruit

neokenzo wrote:

The weather in Dublin today is really bad. Has this effected the broadband?

Ping statistics for (www.ireland.com) 195.7.33.37:
Packets: Sent = 35, Received = 35, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 8ms, Maximum = 131ms, Average = 12ms

One spike to 131 there....

Ping statistics for (clarity.jolt.co.uk)195.149.21.11:
Packets: Sent = 36, Received = 36, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 15ms, Maximum = 24ms, Average = 17ms
Control-Break

Download speed is still 120kb/sec. The weather has had no affect on my connection at all. **pats his VL gear** That'll do boy, that'll do.

neokenzo

Nice one Mutant. Although the ping for www.ireland.com does spike a bit but the one for clarity looks sweet. Cant wait to get my connection.

neokenzo

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

Throttling policy: They may limit traffic to residential users during the day to supply business users with the needed bandwidth.

Thats what i was referring to. But there is no download limit or cap or anything of that nature on the service itself. (But if they throttled you 24x7, you'd have perfect rights to complain... as long as it wasn't contention).

Does that mean they only limit the ports during the day or do they limit it 24/7?
What does throttled means?

Mutant_Fruit

I'm pretty sure they still have the throttling policy, but it basically means that during business hours only (supposedly) they might limit your upload/download speed.

This has happened to me a handful of times over the last 3-4 months. Once i was accidently left throttled for over 24 hours, but then it suddenly fixed itself again and all was well.

WHen i was throttled, i was limited to 128kbps/128kbps (1/10th of my connection). Browsing was still very fast though, so it wasn't a major problem. The speeds always picked up (except for once) to max speed by nighttime though.

lazygit

I also have the below package

Description Breeze 1 Mbps Lite
Installation €149
Monthly Charge €40
Symmetric Yes
Downstream 1 Mbps
Upstream 1 Mbps
Contention 20:1

Am in smithfield connected to the Guiness tower... happy as a pig in ****e with the service, it was installed in about 3 weeks. no downtime, fast pings and cheap!

I know the odd TV Ep has found its way onto my PC over IRC and i have never noticed any Throttling

Omen

My experience with initial set-up was dreadful (delay after delay and finally I had to contact IBB management). When it was finally installed I had to go for the 1MB link due to problems with the 512K link and a line of site issue...

Once it was installed the speed was great but it got worse and worse within days until finally the connection died (with 10 days of installation). I logged the call on a Friday I think and it wasn't fixed until the following Thursday and all my broadband equipment had to be replaced.

Recently I emailed IBB asking if they have plans to extend their helpdesk to weekends and no reply. I sent another reminder today and it wouldn't surprise me if that goes unanswered.

Damian