Best Broadband in Cork

Bacchus

Hey, sorry if this has been posted thousands of times before but the sticky on broadband has way too much info for me to digest and seems to be aimed at Dublin. The lack of a search function also makes finding a thread for broadband in Cork difficult.

Anyway, thinking of getting broadband in the house. I'm a student, living just off College road by UCC. Landlady shouldn't have a problem with it either.

First off, who's the best provider in Cork? I see from the poll that NTL and EIRCOM are people's fav but just cos their service is good in Dublin doesn't mean it's good in Cork.
Also, is it difficult to install? How long does it take to get up and running?
Security then, I assume it will be a wireless connection (can't have wires running all over the house) so how do I protect from people stealing my bandwidth?

Thanks in advance,
Bacchus

Freddie59

Bacchus wrote:

Hey, sorry if this has been posted thousands of times before but the sticky on broadband has way too much info for me to digest and seems to be aimed at Dublin. The lack of a search function also makes finding a thread for broadband in Cork difficult.

Anyway, thinking of getting broadband in the house. I'm a student, living just off College road by UCC. Landlady shouldn't have a problem with it either.

First off, who's the best provider in Cork? I see from the poll that NTL and EIRCOM are people's fav but just cos their service is good in Dublin doesn't mean it's good in Cork.
Also, is it difficult to install? How long does it take to get up and running?
Security then, I assume it will be a wireless connection (can't have wires running all over the house) so how do I protect from people stealing my bandwidth?

Thanks in advance,
Bacchus

NTL aren't in Cork.:)

hefty_langer

recommend metro (if you have LOS to Collins Barracks)
Support is good, Speed and d/l cap are well better than anything else available for a reasonable price (about 42p.m including line rental) no need for €ircon

galactus

Am interested in what people would recommend for Cork as well.

One other thing I'd like to know is do any ISPs offer upload spped greater than 256K in the Cork area?

Illkillya

For > 256k upload, wireless is the way to go. Namely, as hefty_langer mentioned: Digiweb Metro - 3mb/512k. If you live in the city and can see Collins Barracks then you're sorted. If you can't see Collins Barracks, then Nova Networks is another option which does 1mb/1mb and 2mb/2mb services - pings would be higher so its not as good for gaming. The main advantages of wireless broadband are the greater upload speeds, and also the fact that you don't need a phoneline - save yourself the line rental and hassle of installation.

As far as DSL goes... they're all fairly similar really but the 128k upload on all of the residential packages is a killer. Smart telecom can give you a 256k upload at an extra cost, as do a lot of business packages from other ISPs, but its possible that the ping on these could be higher, if you care about that. Depends where you live in the Cork area really.

If you're sharing your connection wirelessly through you're house, you can easily make that sufficiently secure if you want to - you can encrypt it with a password, which is crackable, but only in the very unlikely event that you have a l33t haxor determined to get onto your network. You can do MAC address filtering to allow only devices that are registered in your access control policy onto the network, but for a home connection theres really no need to go that far.

I don't know what the story is with Magnet - but they sound very interesting if they're in Cork.