Moving to IFSC this week - need broadband advice!

Selik

I'm currently living in Dublin 8 and I've got a great broadband deal with NTL on a 6mb connection.

Does anyone know what the deal is with broadband availability in the Dublin 1 and more specifically IFSC area? I don't know if NTL are servicing the area yet (unfortunately) but I presume the Eircom and Esat BT are? Are they quick with the installation or can it take some time as I really don't wanna be without broadband for too long!

I have a desktop and a notebook so I ideally I would be looking to have a the main broadband connection running into my desktop and then have a wireless router so I can connect with my notebook, along with anyone else in the apartment who wants to use the connection. Does any provider supply a wireless router for free and if not can anyone recommend a decent not-too-expensive one?

Thanks in advance for any replies and tips!

dub45

Giles wrote:

I'm currently living in Dublin 8 and I've got a great broadband deal with NTL on a 6mb connection.

Does anyone know what the deal is with broadband availability in the Dublin 1 and more specifically IFSC area? I don't know if NTL are servicing the area yet (unfortunately) but I presume the Eircom and Esat BT are? Are they quick with the installation or can it take some time as I really don't wanna be without broadband for too long!

I have a desktop and a notebook so I ideally I would be looking to have a the main broadband connection running into my desktop and then have a wireless router so I can connect with my notebook, along with anyone else in the apartment who wants to use the connection. Does any provider supply a wireless router for free and if not can anyone recommend a decent not-too-expensive one?

Thanks in advance for any replies and tips!

Why not ask NTL if they are available in the IFSC seems the logical thing to do?

Eircom provide a wireless router for free however you might want to offset the cost of any router they provide against the lower charges of most other isps - however it may take you so long to get through to BT that their products may have changed by the time you actually get to order one! But at the moment afaik they do not provide a wireless router.

Laslo

I had NTL Broadband Max installed in my place in the IFSC on Monday and it's running okay.

However, I've been testing my connection on Blacknight's Irish ISP Test and I've only been getting downspeeds of around 1.7mbps. I decided to ring NTL about this today and the phone conversation with their technical guy went something like this:

Me: "Yes, well the problem is that my connection doesn't really seem to be going anywhere near 6mbps."
NTL Guy: "Well my reading here is telling me that you are connecting at 6mbps."
Me: "Well I've tested it and..."
NTL Guy: "Was it Blacknight's test you used?"
Me: "Yes it was."
NTL Guy: "That test won't work on any connection above 4mbps. It can't handle connections any faster than that, it gives an inaccurate reading"
Me: "Er, right. I see. But the test is telling me that I'm only connecting at around 1.7mbps"
NTL Guy: "Well that test is not accurate and I'm getting a reading here that you're connected at 6mbps"
Me: "Hmmm. Right, well I'll have to run a few more tests and call you back if I'm not satisfied with that because I've been on a 2 meg connection for a few years now with Eircom and this one doesn't seem much faster to be honest."
NTL Guy: "Well you'd only really notice if you were downloading video or..."
Me: "...or podcasts or whatever, yeah I know. Okay, well I'm going to take your word for it that Blacknight's ISP Test applet is flawed and do a little more investigation. Hopefully you're right and I won't need to call back"

Now... what I'd like to know is this:

1) Is Blacknight's applet broken or was this bloke fobbing me off (slightly rhetorical but I wouldn't mind a serious answer)?

2) Is there an infallable test to check my connection speed?

silverlining

Laslo wrote:

I had NTL Broadband Max installed in my place in the IFSC on Monday and it's running okay.

However, I've been testing my connection on Blacknight's Irish ISP Test and I've only been getting downspeeds of around 1.7mbps.

I'm down in IFSC, just got NTL today and I've been getting 4-5Mbps down and 520Kbps up on blacknight's speedtest.

However, if I try downloading from Heanet.ie I get 6Mbps (~600KBps) so maybe you should try to download a file from their software mirroring service and see what speed it comes down at. Example: http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/ftp.mandrake.com/pub/mandrake/Mandrakelinux/official/10.0/iso/i586/
You dont have to download the whole 650MB file just use it it test the speed.

jimmycrackcorm

Blacknight shows 6 meg for me while speedtest.ie shows 3.7meg.

mneylon

1 - the applet is not broken. It can test above 4 meg quite happily.

watty

However I often can get heanet.ie downloads 4 times faster than a speedtest, if speed test is showing very low speed. I suspect sometimes the bandwidth elsewhere than my own connection is getting used up. Nobody has infinite bandwidth.

Laslo

Well there's obviously something strange going on. I just ran a test on Irish ISP Test and it came in at 2.12mbps and then when I tried HEANET it came in at 3.94kbps.

Who's to know what to think?