How do you find UTV Clicksilver Broadband?

pushpop

I've started this thread in response to a lot of complaints about service outages with UTV Clicksilver over the past few days. I am on the 2meg /12GB package, and twice this weekend my internet connection has petered out, with my router complaining of being unable to find UTV's DNS servers. For those of you affected, use this following as a proxy for a temporary fix: 194.46.8.9 Port 3128.

In addition, I find that when my IP address is renewed, I have to manually reconnect my router to reactivate the connection. Couple this with bi-monthly service downages of a few hours, and I start to wonder whether the service is as good value as it claims to be, especially when you consider the 12GB cap given its price. Whenever I ring up asking what the problem is, they usually try and blame my firewall or virus scanner, software tools which are completely independent of the routing hardware, obviously enough. Not to mention the fact that the guy I was talking to in customer support said that there were only 3 people on call for the whole of Ireland that day, which is completely ridiculous.

On a positive note, when the service is actually up and running, connection speeds are excellent are completely consistent, always around 210-220k.

If you have any experiences you'd like to share, please stick them in here.

IgsTer

i think utv are very good provider now adays..you rarely hear of any trouble with them any more..they have good packages and offers..espcially the unlimited deal which is excellant and most providers dont have this and there also quite cheaper for the package your getting..although i have had some trouble with them at times..but i can only think of two times ive hard trouble with thjem in the past year and a half and on eis this weekend and the other to do with me reseting my modem back to factory settings by mistake..so all in all i think there pretty good..i dont know what has happened this weekend hoopefully its only a once or thingh while there installing new stuff or something..

im using these ips at the moment which i found in a post yesteerday..thanks for them...id be lost without em..

194.46.8.51
194.46.8.52
194.46.8.57
195.218.116.2

although im not sure how these work..is it alright to use these ips?? not against the terms or noting??

pushpop

Well you can always use OpenDNS. It's a free domain name service, you just plug the two IP's they give you into your router settings, save, reset etc and you have working internet again.

IP's are :

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Good luck

di11on

When I first signed up to Clicksilver around 3 years ago, they were absolute rubbish. No support - regular outages and bad latency. Made playing games very difficult.

So I tried switching to Esat BT. They lost my application twice. A crowd that I have to pursue and hassle in order to donate my custom is definitely not worthy of my business. So I stuck with UTV.

However, they improved dramatically since then. Untill this weekend, they've been brilliant.

Do they have a 24 hour support number? The only number I have for UTV support is 1890 926111 which only operates duing business hours. That in itself is ridiculous... no 24 hour support!!!

AMHRASACH

. . YES, having really awful service drops,especially yesterday Sunday 05 XI '06 & this morning.
Why would there be a service drop on a Sunday! !
Any one else in the Galway area having problems?
Advice welcome.

Stephen

I haven't had the service itself go down in a long time, but their DNS servers are flakey pieces of ****. They were down for most of the weekend, which would cause your connection to be pretty useless unless you had alternate DNS servers set up.
I ended up going online via my phone to get the OpenDNS.org nameserver IP's. Once I stuck them into my router everything worked fine.

cianr

Yep we've had problems this weekend - 01 area if that makes a difference (probably not if its the DNS servers). We've only recently joined UTV (escaped from the farce that was BT) but these recent outages don't look good to new customers. Though I have to say the phone service/tech support/customer care is excellent (which is a huge relief after BT, which is atrocious).

connection speeds are excellent are completely consistent, always around 210-220k.

Hmm Im on the 3mb option and dont get these speeds. Im getting maybe half that - any ideas?

DamoKen

just setup a new router last week and thought maybe it was borked yesterday so from that point glad to see it was a common problem. However wasn't particularly impressed with no connection for all of last night considering the weekend is the only time I can really use the service. Plus the fact there is no support on a Sunday, what's that about, surely it's one of their busiest days for users online, hence likelyhood of user calls is increased?

Hobbes

I've been with UTV for some time, maybe over a year.

Haven't had many if any serious problems. Think there has only been 3 times I've had a long outage.

AMHRASACH

. . .out again for hours this morning!

mike65

just got this off the support group from Carl (poor fella!)

First up, apologies about the lack of info and explanation about the
DNS problems last weekend. I know this does not excuse poor customer
service, but our contact centre has been utterly swamped and our
infrastructure team have been working to resolve the issue since its
discovery.


The outage was due to a recurring fault - not a planned
works/maintenance. On Saturday morning I was alerted by tech support
that RoI DSL customers were experiencing problems with DNS resolution
since Friday evening. After checking our forwarders, I discovered
that they'd both crashed after receiving malformed DNS requests. Both
were restarted successfully.

This was a repeat of fault that had happened on the 26-Oct, and which
we'd set up specific monitor alerts to catch a re-occurrence after
patching our DNS platform at the time. However, we received no
automated alerts of this problem. Investigation of this revealed that
at some point on Friday evening our alarm and monitoring platform had
also crashed. Unfortunately it was not possible to repair this quickly
(was brought back online yesterday). The same fault then re-occurred
several times over the weekend.

On Monday we attempted to install a new beta-level patch for our DNS
platform. This was not successful. In light of this, we have taken
the following steps:

• Upped the DNS platform logging - these malformed requests are being
generated by someone in our IP space (most likely a broken client
rather than a malicious attack).

• Re-instated the automated monitoring

• Tasked an infrastructure engineer with manually monitoring the two
effected forwarders

• Continue to work with our vendor to finally patch the server
software


Again, apologies for the lack of notification and information.

Mike.

NIBBS

thanks for that Mike,

sounds like a bit of a mess........

I've been with UTV for a long time, was going to switch to BT but as with others they've lost my Application and haven't gotten back to me at all, and I've no intention of changing to someone i've to chase up to give business to, was really annoyed that UTV didn't automatically apply the price reductions to existing customers without having to buy into a new contract period..........but I may aswell do it now as there aren't too many options around me at the moment.......

apart from this weekend I haven't really noticed major problems in recent times and the service has been pretty solid, just wish they'd up the cap to what the other vendors have, don't know why they didn't increase it in line with Eircom/BT.

tomsav

Anyone else finding some sites timing out tonight e.g. www.microsoft.com, konplett while amazon, google etc are ok. Is this part of the same problem with UTV?

DecTenToo

I've been with them since their DNA days and have been a clicksilver user since it came out. I've had very few issues with them and in the years I've been a customer have had to phone them approx 3 times, one of which was the DNS outtage last week. My only issue is more business related in having to sign up for another contract if I want to take advantage of the cheaper prices.

As I'm working from home a few days a week, the extra €5 for unlimited is worth it for me and the phone calls so few that at the moment it's not even worth me considering switching.