Apirl BB packages - any thoughts?

Richard Dower

The new round of packages come out in April, does anyone have any inside info as to what is planned?, i doubt speeds will increase further...probably more packages to cater for the lower end market.

Probably 1MB/128 for €24.99 or something, maybe a cap increase...personally what i'd like to see on the higher end is a drop in contention ratio.

At 3MB/384 and a 24.1 ratio you're playing with fire, i'd like to see it dropped to 20.1, maybe Eircom will go mad and go 16.1

Thoughts?

kaizersoze

All the providers announced new packages in February after the speed increase so I'd say thats it until next year. Can't really see anything changing before then.

DemonOfTheFall

What do you care what the contention ratios are? I've never seen contention issues on any of the BB provider's networks anyway, even when they were 48:1

Snaga

Well youve been lucky then. Plenty of people on here report lower speeds and higher latency in the evenings on several different broadband packages.

Richard Dower

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

What do you care what the contention ratios are? I've never seen contention issues on any of the BB provider's networks anyway, even when they were 48:1

I care, because the fewer people sharing your port the better.

Blaster99

In the beautiful world of ADSL, the port is all yours.

bk

Richard Dower wrote:

I care, because the fewer people sharing your port the better.

That is a misunderstanding that many have from the bad old days of dial-up, with DSL everyone has a port. What the contention of 48:1 means that 48 users share a 1 meg backhaul. However that is also not as bad as it sounds.

At first you might only have 1 user on the exchange, so he has a full 1 meg, then you might get another 4, meaning the 5 share the 1 meg. As you approach 48 (well before that actually) the ISP will order a second 1 meg segment, so now you would have 48 sharing 2 meg, later 60 sharing 2 meg and soon on.

Actually the more people you have on an exchange the less likely that the contention will cause a problem, as you have more people spread out over more bandwidth.

Gonzo

I think your theory is correct because when eircom upgraded everyone on January 24th last, my connection went from a 2mb flawless heaven to a 3mb hell that was more unstable than a 28k modem connection with satellite latency. Not everyone on the exhchange had the problems I had but a few did. This persisted for 8 weeks with alot of phonecalls to eircom and eventually they came out to my exchange a week ago and did something to totally fix it, now im back on a wonderfully stable low pinging 3mb connection. perhaps they put in another pipe in my exchange.

halenger

As for upgrades - something I wouldn't even be considering - did I not read at some point that Eircom were supposed to start transitioning to ADSL2(of some sort) during the summer? That's just something random I'm plucking from my memory.

Freddie59

Blaster99 wrote:

In the beautiful world of ADSL, the port is all yours.

Yes - that's why there are so many people on here bitching about the quality of it.:rolleyes: