Ice Broadband steadily becoming even more terrible

wasim21k

well to do this all u need internet with some speed. as i said to open ice web site took me 2 hours and to test speed using speedtest.net was not possible as you need internet with some speed to open any web site which ice dont have :mad:

BigglesMcGee wrote: »

A good test to see if you have latency or packet loss problems with Ice is to use ping plotter.

Just google pingplotter and download the free version.

set it to take about 150 pings at intervals of 1 second.


You can then see the whole path to the address that you ping and can see that with ice there are frequent soikes up in the sveral hundreds. this mean that your connection is no good for remote apps, voip or games.

A real BB provider will give constant low pings with hardly any deviation from the average.

Ice will spike every few seconds with a lot of packet loss.

You can then send the results to them for them to just ignore.

bigpaddy2004

wasim21k wrote: »

well to do this all u need internet with some speed. as i said to open ice web site took me 2 hours and to test speed using speedtest.net was not possible as you need internet with some speed to open any web site which ice dont have :mad:

Looking at the update section on their site it says they have just completed an upgrade on the Portlaoise base station, and QUOTE "once these works are completed you will notice an immediate improvement." !!!

mrplop

bigpaddy2004 wrote: »

Looking at the update section on their site it says they have just completed an upgrade on the Portlaoise base station, and QUOTE "once these works are completed you will notice an immediate improvement." !!!

It will only take 45 minutes to load speedtest after the upgrade...

bigpaddy2004

....instead of the normal 2 hours! Really MrPlop, you must finish your sentences!

wasim21k

can i add something,
feel lucky if you able to open that site in 2 hours.

ooh yeh
one more thing speedtest.net is some third party web site hosted somewhere very very far, far beyond reach of ice bb, better try icebroadband.ie their own web site. if it open on my pc using ice bb i can say i m the most lucky person in the universe


bigpaddy2004
when this update was completed? i checked net in morning at 6:00AM.

bigpaddy2004 wrote: »

....instead of the normal 2 hours! Really MrPlop, you must finish your sentences!

pm.

What a shower of BASTARDS



and this is what i get after ringing customer support ( yeah but your pings are good ) wtf, i have 5 people in my local area that want bb, after my experience with ice i will direct them to last mile, as bad as they are.

mrplop

Weird that the pings in the speedtest results posted by pm are almost reasonable, shame about the speeds themselves.

All of you guys should cancel your direct debits until they do something.

I'm pretty convinced that most of the positive remarks about Ice were posted by Ice employees or friends of the people that work there.
Just before I left Ice I spoke to a support guy who had read this thread, he was amazed at some of the higher speeds posted by the folks defending Ice.
He told me some of the speeds were practically impossible to achieve.

Do you think it's possible that Ice would get employees to post 'doctored' speedtest results as some form of a damage limitation exercise?

kaiser sauze

mrplop wrote: »

Weird that the pings in the speedtest results posted by pm are almost reasonable, shame about the speeds themselves.

All of you guys should cancel your direct debits until they do something.

I'm pretty convinced that most of the positive remarks about Ice were posted by Ice employees or friends of the people that work there.
Just before I left Ice I spoke to a support guy who had read this thread, he was amazed at some of the higher speeds posted by the folks defending Ice.
He told me some of the speeds were practically impossible to achieve.

Do you think it's possible that Ice would get employees to post 'doctored' speedtest results as some form of a damage limitation exercise?

Seriously, you need to wake up.

I am not an ICE employee; I am not able to doctor speedtest results; I did get the speeds I posted, at the times I posted them (I am still getting good speeds).

You seem to, all of a sudden, be taking a tech support person seriously. These are the same people that you have called, "complete wastes of space", right?

Take your ludicrous suppositions and fúck off.


Everyone else, I am sad to see the way some of you have been treated. If I were in your positions, I would be making the strongest representations and threatening reporting to COMREG and cancelling the direct debit soon thereafter if an improvement is not swiftly forthcoming.

ICE did give me problems in the past, I fought my corner and I have a service that I am now happy with.

BigglesMcGee

mrplop wrote: »

Weird that the pings in the speedtest results posted by pm are almost reasonable, shame about the speeds themselves./quote]

The ping speed quoted on speedtest.net is only the speed of the first ping.

If you want to see what pings you really have then download pingplotter and ping a reliable site at 1 sec intervals. I think you'll find that there is major packet loss and major regular, ping spiking in the hundreds. All in all making any ping sensitive actions (Games, VOIP, Remote work) impossible with ICE.

All you have to do, if you cant get BB anywhere else is (as was said in a post above somewhere) ring Ice sales, ask to speak to the superisor and reduce your package with ICE to their lowest one. Tell them if you get the speed and reliability quoted on that package you will move back up to a more expensive one.

But give it a few months to make sure they are seriously back up (if ever) and the minute your service goes to pot ring sales again and reduce it or the minute BB is availabe from another provoder to you switch.

But people are idiots if they pay them more than the base rate, if ice dont provide the service they pay for.

This will hit them in the pocket where they will feel it. Constant emailing and calling Ice suport does no good whatsoever. You might as well ring Bertie Ahern and ask him about his bank accounts.

mrplop

kaiser sauze wrote: »

Take your ludicrous suppositions and fúck off.

Real mature. :rolleyes:
I didn't even mention your name.
So who do you know in Ice then?
You did say you were on a 3mb connection didn't you?
As far as I remember your speed tests show you were on something more like an 8mb - same time as everyone else is sub 1mb.

Strange.

The other guy with awesome speeds is definitely dodgy.

The tech I spoke to said the managers regularly checked subscribers connections to see if their contention was set too high and they were at the correct speed - seems like they missed you, eh?
Thou dost protest too much, methinks.

thebman

You can also get the ping results by pressing windows key + R (or click start and click run) and typing cmd into the run dialog box.

Then type ping insertWebsiteHere /t

and it will continually ping the website/server/ip address until you close the window or press ctrl + c. To exit type exit and hit enter or close the window.

Cabaal

kaiser sauze wrote: »

Seriously, you need to wake up.

I am not an ICE employee; I am not able to doctor speedtest results; I did get the speeds I posted, at the times I posted them (I am still getting good speeds).

You seem to, all of a sudden, be taking a tech support person seriously. These are the same people that you have called, "complete wastes of space", right?

Take your ludicrous suppositions and fúck off.


Everyone else, I am sad to see the way some of you have been treated. If I were in your positions, I would be making the strongest representations and threatening reporting to COMREG and cancelling the direct debit soon thereafter if an improvement is not swiftly forthcoming.

ICE did give me problems in the past, I fought my corner and I have a service that I am now happy with.

kaiser sauze, no need for personal abuse, this also goes for everyone else,
anymore and I'll be handing out bans

mrplop

Here's the Ice 'code of conduct'.

http://www.icebroadband.com/dev/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=62&Itemid=64

There are some useful contacts at the end of the page.
Especially this one;

Office of the Director of Consumer Affairs (ODCA)
4 Harcourt Road , Dublin 2, Ireland , Dublin 1
Tel: 01 402 5500 or Fax: 01 402 5501
Website: www.odca.ie
Helpline:1890 432 432 open from 8am to 6pm

I suggest anyone that's having major issues with Ice to give the ODCA a call tomorrow morning before 10.30 - a lot of you have been sold a seriously defective product after all.

The section below is absolutely hilarious but at the same time it may help those trying to get out of their contract without paying the disconnection fee.

3. Service Degradation
Ice Broadband constantly monitors the quality of our network and the quality of all customer connections. Ice Broadband aims to resolve all customer service degradation issues within 5 working days.


4. Repair
Ice Broadband aims to repair all customer connectivity faults within 5 working days.


5. Other
all other complaints will be resolved within 10 working days.


5. Notification of resolution of the complaint

Once a complaint is rectified, you will be contacted by a customer care representative to ensure that the fault has been resolved to the satisfaction of the customer. Faults will only be closed with agreement of you, the customer. A record of the complaint and of the resolution will be maintained on Ice Broadband's customer database for a minimum period of 12 months.

I think that you can easily catch them out by informing them they completely violate their own code of conduct.
Did anyone ever get a notification of resolution of the complaint?
Come to think of it did anyone ever get any kind of resolution?

Peanut

mrplop wrote: »

..
I think that you can easily catch them out by informing them they completely violate their own code of conduct.

I don't think that's quite true ..

IceBroadband wrote:

Ice Broadband aims to resolve all customer service degradation issues within 5 working days.

:cool:

And if the complaint wasn't resolved, then they're not obliged to notify you..

mrplop

Peanut wrote: »

And if the complaint wasn't resolved, then they're not obliged to notify you..

That's true!

No fix - No notification!

They should call this their 'code of misconduct'.

Moriarty

kaiser sauze banned for two weeks for personal abuse.

pm.

ok, i got onto ice today and demanded to speak to a supervisor,to put a long story short they fixed it again and assured me that i will get my full speed all the time. so i got my wife to run a speed test at home the results are, dl 2875 ul 965 and ping 35, i will post up a speedtest when i get home, i will also post up my speedtests every 3 days to see if ice are telling the truth.

BigglesMcGee

pm. wrote: »

ok, i got onto ice today and demanded to speak to a supervisor,to put a long story short they fixed it again and assured me that i will get my full speed all the time. so i got my wife to run a speed test at home the results are, dl 2875 ul 965 and ping 35, i will post up a speedtest when i get home, i will also post up my speedtests every 3 days to see if ice are telling the truth.

They promised me the same thing last Friday.

Can hardly load a web page today and check out these pings.
2nd Column (the one to the right of the green one) is % packet loss.

This has to be a world record for packet loss

I hate Ice Broadband so much.

mrplop

This is what I can't understand.

PM, they obviously know what is going on with your connection because they've got it working again - why are they letting it revert?
It really looks like a case of Ice not really giving a toss.

You guys may have seen Bart Busschots blog - he is also a long suffering Ice subscriber, he's documented his entire history with them.

http://www.bartbusschots.ie/blog/

I thought this particular section sums up Ice perfectly - it's very, very true especially in my case;

The Sales/Support Test

If it takes orders of magnitude longer to get through to support than sales then you're probably dealing with cowboys. As an example I offer ICE broadband, I gave up waiting on hold to support after 20 minutes. I got through to sales in less than 10 seconds, about two rings. Certainly shows where their priorities lie. Their sales is superb. The staff are fantastic and you feel really happy signing up for a year's contract with them. Then you're stuck and you are forever frustrated by the fact that support don't reply to emails, seldom return calls when you leave a massage, and almost never answer the phone after 6pm even though they are officially open till 9pm.

Another interesting contrast is that support refused to put me through to a manager but Sales were happy to. I had to ask a sales manager to find out exactly what was going on from a technical point of view in my area. How insane is that! Mind you, the sales manager did fail to call me back with the answers to my questions like he promised so they are flawed too.

It's very easy for people to tell you to cancel your subscription and find an alternative - Ice tends to 'supply' broadband to areas where there are no alternatives, it looks as though they're aware of this fact and consequently they really don't try to provide a decent service.
The dial up route is also a major problem as it can take Eircom many months to connect a phone line.

Ice have a captive audience and they know it.

wasim21k

here is min result after 1 hour and about 35 minuts thousand time try, :mad:

now i m not really very expert, but i can say i broke record of having slowest ever recorded on human history bb, i think i should upload it on wikipedia, or some other world record web site.:mad:

thebman

wasim21k wrote: »

here is min result after 1 hour and about 35 minuts thousand time try, :mad:

now i m not really very expert, but i can say i broke record of having slowest ever recorded on human history bb, i think i should upload it on wikipedia, or some other world record web site.:mad:

Got 20kbps a few days ago on my IBB connection

wasim21k

well this was i can record when i have some speed how about when i have 1bit/hours speed when it takes only 3 hours to just open ice web page :mad:
you can not win here m8,

brim4brim wrote: »

Got 20kbps a few days ago on my IBB connection

roadruner

God lads I was thinking of getting ice BB, I have a vodafone 3G mobile (Supposed to be 3.6Mbps) internet modem which jumps from
1297kps down 315kps up
to
319kps down 112kps up

But judging by what has been said here, me thinks i'll stick with what I have.
I tried this site for various BB offers around my area eircom & digiweb offer 512k downloads but ice offers 3GB!! (ya sure)

I think they cover thier asses by advertising with the words UP TO 3 Gigs download.

Short of forking out a fortune for a satellite i'll stick with what I have
well at least it's better than dial up !!

Sky hurry the F up and put BB through yer dish!!

redelephant

Hi guys. I've been reading this thread with interest for months(only understand about 50% of it). My relationship with ICE is a long sorry saga. Until Eircom get their act together and upgrade the local telephone exchange ICE are the only BB available to me (and I live in the middle of a big town but that's a whole other rant. For the first 6 months I had signal only approx 50% of the time, eventually after 5/6 call outs by ICE engineers(well that's who they said they were but I have serious doubts, feeding me crap about trees blocking the signal from the base unit which u can see from the upstairs of my house and zero trees in the way) and me nearly losing my mind (think the network manager was scared of me by the end of it) I've had functioning BB for 6 months. But since christmas it has gotten progressively slower after 6pm.






I rang to complain (they didn't answer my voice mail as usual so 20mins on hold). The guy who answers tells me to unplug the radio unit and plug it in again after 15mins. Foolishly I did this and of course it made zero difference. So he says i need a visit from and engineer to tune the radio unit or something. Basically what I want to know is, is that total crap and what i need to say when i ring up again to complain ? Speeds fine during the day.


Hope u don't mind a non techy crashing your thread

Peanut

I guess people have become used to DSL contention ratios not really meaning much. However with wireless contention ratios, you really have to read the speeds advertised as "up to x mb", instead of "usually x mb".

This should be stated more clearly by the providers, though.

mrplop

The problem with Ice is that the poor speeds are beyond contention.
I had speeds lower than dial up on a good few occasions.

wasim21k

i think if you download/upload to much they just block ur traffic, and when ring them they amend traffic quota in background and tell u some child story do this and do that there is no problem on our end check ur pc switch off this switch on that....:mad: i m 100% sure on this. ice don't want to say anything about quota coz they are advertising unlimited bb.

BigglesMcGee

I think they just really dont have a clue what they are doing. They should post someone from digiweb or another wireless provider to teach them.

You know if anyone came to me with ICE written on their CV they would never get a job in my company.

They must all be incompetent if not one of them can show the others how to fix stuff.

roadruner

wasim21k wrote: »

i think if you download/upload to much they just block ur traffic, and when ring them they amend traffic quota in background and tell u some child story do this and do that there is no problem on our end check ur pc switch off this switch on that....:mad: i m 100% sure on this. ice don't want to say anything about quota coz they are advertising unlimited bb.

BigglesMcGee wrote: »

I think they just really dont have a clue what they are doing. They should post someone from digiweb or another wireless provider to teach them.

You know if anyone came to me with ICE written on their CV they would never get a job in my company.

They must all be incompetent if not one of them can show the others how to fix stuff.

I think ye hit the nail on the head!

pm.

i said i would post my speed up every 3 days,,

im happy enough atm, bu it is getting that bit slower.