Thinking of switching to Chorus. What are the pitfalls?

RangeR

Hi All,

I am thinking of dumping my existing ISP and switching to Chorus, considering this. I was thinking of it for a while but if thi is rea, it's pretty much clinched it.

However, Chorus or cable in general is an unknown to me. I've been through the mill with a good few providers so want to be sure before I go with Chorus so I'm hoping to get a few questions answered.

1. What's VoIP like?
2. Do they block or throttle ports ala Clearwire [regardsless what CW say I KNOW they intentionally block ports, not just throttle]
3. Average latency to Irish, Euro and USA sites?
4. What's their downtime like? Are they close to 99% uptime?
5. How easy is it to get through to Tech Support and how knowledgable are they? Please keep this factual and un-biased.
6. What is their modem like? Is it just a device to plug into my firewall or does it have it's own NAT / Firewall / DHCP built in. If built in, can they be disabled and bridged?
7. Do they charge for going over the cap. I'm not talking about going over by 100's GB per month. But if the odd time I go over by 5 or 10 GB... Do they come a knocking? If I consistently go over by a small amount, say 5GB, will they come a knocking? 40GB is a horribly small cap these days. [assuming the NTL 40GB on the 6Mb connection]

I'll probably have more questions later but this is all I can think of. If anyone can add any info that I haven't asked for yet, that would be great.

On a side note and a little OT, What's their digital TV package like if I get it with broadband. I know what channels they have, but what's the quality and reception like these days. I have heard reports in the past that Chorus reception could be patchy. Also what connectors are on the back of the set top box for connecting to my equipment?

Sponge Bob

Chorus BB has always had a good reputation ...I KNOW that sounds strange

RangeR

Cheers Sponge. Coming from you, that has pretty much made my mind up. However, I always act on impulse. I think I'll hold off a week and let it settle in and see if any other items come up. In my past, I always hear the bad aspect of things the day after I commit

Sponge Bob

IrishTLR wrote:

However, I always act on impulse.

I'll stick my neck out further so and say that it works very very well with relatively few outages and that the only problem with it was that their download speeds were a bit crap until this week.

Now they offer 6mbit/512k for €40 a month I am positively salivating at the thought.

Remember eircom offer 2mbit/128k for €40 a month but only if you pay them €24 line rental too.

Historically Chorus sold BB on its own, they may change that and require that you take a telly package too. Thats my ONLY caveat about them. Its a great deal , almost up there with Dungarvan and Longford they are . I would ring them and get the full T&Cs before you do the impulse thing.

RangeR

Sponge Bob wrote:

Now they offer 6mbit/512k for €40 a month I am positively salivating at the thought.

Salivate some more, my little Spongey friend. I just rang them up and they confirmed that these new speeds will go live next week, 3rd July.

Sweet, the cap could be bigger in my opinion, but hey, sweet anyway.

*Waves bye bye to Clearwire*
EDIT * Waves bye bye to Sky as well *

First 3 months are free, so that will get me comfortably past my Clearwire contract.

I was also thinking of dumping Sky for the past few weeks. I think I'll do that too and get Chorus digi TV and keep the free Sky channels.

Happy days indeed. I know there has to be a catch somewhere but I don't care. There's my acting on impulse for ye again

I'll read over the T's & C's thourouly tonight. All on their web.

BendiBus

But will the forthcoming upgrades bring the whole thing crashing down in a great big puddle of saliva? :eek:

RangeR

BendiBus wrote:

But will the forthcoming upgrades bring the whole thing crashing down in a great big puddle of saliva? :eek:

That's the chance you take with ANY isp when they upgrade their speeds. I know it's no real comparison but NTL let slip a 10Mb upgrade for a day or two, not so long ago. I didn't hear any complaints.

paulm17781

IrishTLR wrote:

That's the chance you take with ANY isp when they upgrade their speeds. I know it's no real comparison but NTL let slip a 10Mb upgrade for a day or two, not so long ago. I didn't hear any complaints.

Clearly you weren't paying attention.

There were quite a few complaints but it settled down. My connection is pretty solid these days. I would think it would be worth trying the Chorus BB out if NTL is anything to go by.

RangeR

paulm17781 wrote:

Clearly you weren't paying attention.

It would appear, my dear chum, that you may just be correct. I wasn't paying too much attention as I don't stand a hope in hell of getting NTL in Naas anytime soon.

However, I have just signed up to Chorus Digital TV multi room [bye bye Sky] and their 6Mb broadband [bye bye Clearwire and BT] bundle. Will [should] be installed tomorrow [now that is quick]. All it costs me for installation is the €50 for the multiroom point.

I'll let ye know how the 6Mb is going, fr those that are interested. Before my 7 day grace period is up, I want to test at least...

* simple pings to a few Irish, UK, international sites [Boooooo Clearwire]
* Speed tests at different times of the day for a few days [Boooooo Clearwire]
* extensive VoIP testing, as I hope to drop the landline soon [bye bye Eircom / Smart / other landline provider]
* specific ports for browsing, as there a number of ports I cannot browse to using Clearwire but can with BT [a friends asterisk / endian servers etc] [Boooooo Clearwire]
* Latency in Steam based games [Boooooo Clearwire]
* a few traceroutes to see how many hops I have to go to for some sites
* Simple port tests [FTP / SSH / Telnet / SSL / VNC / RDP]

Anyone want me to run any other tests while I'm at it, for your own morbid curiosity?

* EDIT * It is also true that their CAP is 40GB on the 6Mb line. Scandalous considering it's a 30GB cap on 3Mb. Anyway, what ye gonna do.... I did complain but it fell on deaf ears. Quote "We have one of the highest caps in the business". I told him that was irrelevant, even if it was true.

RangeR

Ok, for those that are interested, I got Chorus TV and Broadband in yesterday. I was very late home yesterday so only gota few minutes to do some simple tests this morning.

* FTP download from esat.net ::: Started downloading fedora and maxed out at about 650KB/s, leveled off at about 580KB/s. Bloody marvelous

* Pings to boards.ie ::: simple ping test done shows averages of 30ms to 40ms. Not excellent but by no means shoddy.


I'll run some other tests over the next few days when I get a chance.

I have to say, though. I do have one gripe with the installer. I organised for someone to be there for the install. He came, installed, tested, put live and left. When he put it live, it didn't work. He claimed that it would take 5 or 10 minutes to activate and left.

I would have known he was talking cr@p, but the person there had to take him at face value.

The testing he did was to plug the cable modem into my machine, which would have worked fine. When he put it live, he pluged the cable modem into my WRT54GP2 router. However, I have this setup to PPPoE to my bridged Zyxel. For this reason only, it wouldn't have worked.

He should have put the BT Cat5 back into the router as I had an employee without internet access from lunch time onwards.

Totally unprofessional, but what ye gonna do. I've come to realise that professionalism isn't a big facter in many ISP's.