Irish Broadband problem

STaN

I'm having a bit of a problem with Irish Broadband. Based in D15 area.

We did ping and throughput tests and are getting 0.8Mb down and 0.1Mb up with a ping fluctuating between 150 and 300.

We rang up and they claimed that this was due to contention and is quite normal.

I've DSL at another address at the same contention and never had a problem?

Does this sound right or acceptable??

jor el

What should the speeds be and what's the contention ratio for that package? If the speed you're getting is within the minimum when you take contention into account then there's not much you can do. If it's below that then IBB are in breach of the contract and you can stop paying them. It probably won't make them do anything about your speeds though, unfortunately.

IBB have a history of such speed problems too.

watty

Ripwave or Breeze or the other one they do?

STaN

watty wrote:

Ripwave or Breeze or the other one they do?

Its 2Mb Breeze

gerryo

STaN wrote:

I'm having a bit of a problem with Irish Broadband. Based in D15 area.

We did ping and throughput tests and are getting 0.8Mb down and 0.1Mb up with a ping fluctuating between 150 and 300.

Does this sound right or acceptable??

If that's ping times from your connection to the next hop (the IBB mast) then it's really poor, those times are similar to dialup. I'm fairly sure the worst case contention for 2Mb Breeze is nearly twice as good as dialup, or meant to be.

Try again at different times throughout the day, if it never fluctuates, maybe there is something else affecting your connection.

STaN

Yes thats just to the mast itself, never mind anywhere else. It is really poor.

Even if the connection speed wasn't 100% we require low pings for VoIP

Nevyn

STaN wrote:

I'm having a bit of a problem with Irish Broadband. Based in D15 area.

We did ping and throughput tests and are getting 0.8Mb down and 0.1Mb up with a ping fluctuating between 150 and 300.

We rang up and they claimed that this was due to contention and is quite normal.

I've DSL at another address at the same contention and never had a problem?

Does this sound right or acceptable??

It is not right and it is not acceptable but it has been the state of thier network in the dublin 15 area for the last year.

We have never been able to use VOIP with ibb so call broad band.

It is not just contentions I know people on the southside that have ibb breeze and have never had these issues.

It got to the extent that IBB don't know how to fix it and we got told it is not going to be fixed in the dublin 15 area and if we wanted what we contracted for with them we would be better of uninstaling thier mast and looking at a different ISP by an IBB support tech on a susport call to them.

JanneG

The contention rate on the 2Mbit Breeze is 24:1 as far as I can remember.

This would leave you with, at a worst case scenario, 24 ppl sharing the same 2MBit bandwidth.

As 2MBit is 256Kbs then with 24 ppl sharing this it leaves you with 10.667Kbs per user which equals 80Kbits per sec which is about 24Kbits above an extremely ideal dial-up connection.

Not great when you look at it in that way but to be honest, during the 1½ years I've had my IBB Breeze connection I have never reached such low speeds.

gerryo

STaN wrote:

Yes thats just to the mast itself, never mind anywhere else. It is really poor.

Even if the connection speed wasn't 100% we require low pings for VoIP

I get pings of around 60mS (to the mast), which is not great, but Voip (the small amount I tried) seems OK. Overall, the connection is reasonably stable & speed does not drop to the lower limits, I usually get ~ 1Mb/S down.

I'm wondering if the pings really tell the full story, is it possible IBB ICMP responses are deliberately throttled to reduce susceptability to some types of DOS attacks (e.g. a smurf attack).