irish broadband questions

pxnubi

hello there,
im considering getting irish broadband but i wanted to check it out first as there is no free trial and its a 12 month contract. i think there are a few types but the one im after involves them coming out and putting an ariel on the roof. 2mb or 3mb .

for me the upload speed is as important as i use the internet mainly to email photos ... lots of em... for work. i have been using eircoms 1mb bb in my folks place and the upload speeds are ridiculous...47.8 kbps...in my last flat i was getting 2800 kbps upload speed with smart vision.

so heres my questions :

1. is it as fast as it says...they say their upload speeds are the same as the download ie 2mb or 3 mb.

2. does it go down much? reliabilty is important fro me.

3. when it does go down ... am i going to be on hold for 2 hours trying to get through to customer service? (like eircom and smart)

thanks in advance for your replies

fran

lucernarian

I'm not an IBB customer but I get the impression that their service has improved from the pits of depravity to a pretty decent service nowadays, particularly in Dublin.

Not an expert though, so you'll need to hear off other people who have it and do a search in the forum for recent experiences.

Btw, usually the speeds are symmetric no matter if the speed is 1 kBps or 200 kBps.

djr

i use ibb here at home, and regularly upload large (2.5 - 3mb) photos in large batches to the spectra website, and find it great. large uploads (50+ photos) typically take 10-15 minutes, so i'd say ibb is defo worth it for the symmetric "line" at the least. i'm on the 2mb package, and i consistently get at least my full speed, sometimes more.

have never uploaded a large batch of pictures over dsl before, but i imagine it couldn't be as quick.

TheDrunkenBrain

djr what are your download speeds like - does it do what it says on the tin because I'm seriously looking at their 3mb up/down breeze package?

pxnubi

thanks everyone ,
i ordered it today so fingers crossed i pass the signal tests...to me it seems like the best service (if it does what it says) . i tried eircom but they wanted €150 to connect my line, then they wanted to test the line to see if it was good enough, then they said it would be 28 days to connect to bb , and their upload speeds seem crap....what a bag of ****!
ill be devestated if i cant get the IBB !

thanks again for your replies
fran

djr

@brain

i'm on the baldoyle mast, so i can't speak for other users , but i'm consistently getting ~2mb.

right at this moment, performed a "speed test" and got the following results:

1.85 down, 1.93 up

TheDrunkenBrain

Sounds good, thanks.

ScouseMouse

I am in the shadow of the tallaght mast on 3 meg up and down. On a bad day, I get 180k but average is 280k and a good day 320k. I have had one outage in two years and that was only on sending email - not receiving, it lasted about 4 hours.

TheDrunkenBrain

Cheers Superscouse, I could live with that as long as it's uncapped and there's no packet shaping. Any input on the packet shaping?

humaxf1

Connected to 3Mb Breeze-Killiney mast here. On the whole, very good service.

It really depends on which mast you are connected to. Couple of years ago, IBB got a terrible slating on here and to the stage where I didn't bother reading the threads, but it seems to have improved greatly.

Try it and see. Only real way to find out.

kill4bite

ibb customer for last 2.5 years,

highsight: MerrionRow, area Rialto, Dolphins Barn, just beside the nissan car dealers.

2mb/2mb connection, premium user of rapidshare.com

constant download speed: 235kbps solid as a hard on, during night u can get 300-350 which is 3mb package! but i pay only 35.99

upload, 150-250 kpbs, in most cases upload is fast as flush in the toilet, all i do is upload 10mb jpeg from 12mega pixels canon camera, and it goes pretty fast around a minute or so. maybe cause ppl dont use their upload a lot and bandwitdth for upload always free.

now in those 2.5 years i had to rang only 3 times to tech support, 1 time was cause of outage in my area, got notifed on the phone, so in couple hours it was restored.

2nd time was packet loss... well very next day engineers was out in my house checking ariel and sh1t, and they found out that just between me and msat there was construction going on... a f*cking crane was blocking me :eek: so each time it was turning i was loosing few packets... well it was out of their power to fix, but anyway i stayed and in a week or so it was back online.

3rd time was yesterday... had to cancel it cause moving to a new place and they dont cover that area am just moving up to st.james hospital area and trey dont cover it

anyway me personally think ibb is great, maybe it had bad start but now they up and rolling...

p.s. my self working in eircom... as support guy and personally i wont go for eircom

p.s.s. thinking ibb dsl 3mb package.

p.s.s.s no packet shaping nothing like dat, at first year eMule + Shareaze were running 24/7 and theire were no problems at all.

Linoge

kill4bite wrote:

constant download speed: 235kbps solid as a hard on, during night u can get 300-350 which is 3mb package! but i pay only 35.99
.

I would have imagined 235kps on a 2mb connection is bad??!

And 300 - 350 is what I would expect from a 1/2 mb line

daffy_duc

Linoge wrote:

I would have imagined 235kps on a 2mb connection is bad??!

And 300 - 350 is what I would expect from a 1/2 mb line

Or maybe he means kBps ?

Liam Byrne

humaxf1 wrote:

Couple of years ago, IBB got a terrible slating on here and to the stage where I didn't bother reading the threads, but it seems to have improved greatly.

From personal experience, the slating was completely justified in the case of Ripwave, which was (is?) dire and is by no means a broadband product, despite the ads. It's since been referred to as an ISDN replacement, but if my ISDN was as unreliable and inconsistent as Ripwave was for me (and still is, for a friend of mine) I'd be grey and bald and still waiting for emails to be sent.

If you're on Breeze, then it's a different story, apparently.