10 weeks with IBB, its ups and downs.

gothakane

I hope this helps someone decide whether or not Irish Broadband is right for them by presenting the good and bad side of using their service.

When I moved to Dublin last July I saw that IBB wasn't available yet to my area yet (Clontarf) and since I wanted Broadband ASAP I hunted down every DSL company I could find using the helpful Stickys on this Broadband forum (in the meantime I ordered Breeze Home Plus from IBB just in case)
After being led on a wild goose chase by Eircom (see THIS thread) I gave up and began to pester Irish Broadband for dates on when the transmitter serving my area would be active.
After several phonecalls and 6 weeks waiting they finally got back to me with a date and eventually at the end of August I was online!

For the first day I was getting solid simultaneous 100/100 k/s... things went downhill from there. After a few days I started getting huge periods of packet loss and blackouts, pings dropped to 300-400 (to the IBB email server) I played the waiting game believing they'd know about it and fix it up.. got sick of that and phoned tech support. To cut a long story short, the packet loss problem continued for 8 weeks, during which time I was on the phone to tech support almost every day sending them statistics, screenshots, graphs and asking for updates on work being done on the high-site (which was the cause we finally pinned down) Let me tell you a bit about the IBB tech support which I learned in that time:

- They are a small team of 5-6 members, around half are really cool, helpful and knowledgable people.
- They are overall very obliging, and usually went out of their way to find out things for me.
- Usually if they say they will return your call... they don't :rolleyes: (they're busy I guess)
- They are sick to death of ripwave users calling up asking if they could use tinfoil to boost their signal, and taking abuse from people pissed off with the speeds (you get what you pay for!)
- If you call up tech support and the person seems cool get their name, and ask for them in future, I found that was the best way to get anywhere rather than explain the situation over and over.
-The engineers tell the tech support team nothing it seems, like if work is being done on your highsite at the minute etc

Now, 2 extremely useful programs (1 of which IBB themselves use) which I used to monitor my connection and use as evidence of its unstability are DUMeter and Multiping neither of which are free unfortunately. The most reliable route to monitor is the route between your computer and the IBB DNS server which is ns1.irishbroadband.ie, I still monitor it and would phone tech support if the connection crapped out for a whole day straight.

Now, I must inform you guys of some shady goings on while I was on the phone to tech support during those 8 weeks. After work one day I examined DUMeter which showed that my max download speed had been reduced to 60k/s (by examining the average download speed over a few days). Every time I my download speed went to 40k/s my pings would jump to 400-500ms!!
This of course isn't normal as Breeze Home Plus runs at 120/120 and it should show those pings until 110/110 or so. I phoned IBB tech and asked for a guy I knew was knowledgable, he examined my radio settings and found that an engineer had throttled my connection down to Breeze Home!!! :mad: He changed it back for me, so far that hasn't happened again, but I am now very wary of my connection speed as a result.

I've had NTL for 6 years (since it arrived) in Northern Ireland, and let me tell you, now that my IBB connection is (finally) how it should be I can play games with a 40-70 ping while downloading and uploading at 100k/s, its a dream come true, even after being with NTL. When I hear of NTL upgrading to 3mbs I am not bothered since their upload will still be forever at 30k/s due to the limitations in asymmetrical technology. I used to have to stop downloading altogether to get a decent ping with NTL. Even though I am a heavy user neither NTL nor IBB have pestered me about exceeding caps, both are truely uncapped unlike DSL. :rolleyes:

If you can't get IBB at the minute NTL is a worthy 2nd option. I will miss IBB when I have to move back to Belfast, the only company to offer affordable symmetrical connections to home users... its a pity you may have to put up a struggle to get things sorted if your connection starts off dodgy
If I remember anything else useful to people I will post it here.
Good luck!

Regards,
GothAkane

Ciaran500

Thanks for all the info, I'm currently waiting for a date for them to install breeze and I have a feeling I'll be on to tech support once its up.

gline

Me too my friend