Ice Broadband steadily becoming even more terrible

rightman

http://www.speedtest.net/result/246422819.png

Very fresh result.

Furkin_Bastage

mrplop wrote: »

Post as many fake results as you want - everyone knows they're 'special' Ice staff speeds anyway.
Your comments make about as much sense as your speed test results.
'You can even get me to Comreg'?
'Hate maniacs'?

Post away, rightman - you're doing more damage to Ice than good.:p

rightman wrote: »

http://www.speedtest.net/result/246391815.png


mrplop, "you're not denying or you're denying".
I don't think that I owe you any explanations! There are many much more valuable people for discussion in the topic.
That's an idea to close the topic for hate-maniacs...
Why do you read it still?? Don't you have your own life and things to do??
Do you realize that it costs your private time and energy even if you quit ice already.?

"bringing radio with yourself around" - LOL - read your words again
I don't care about your opinion - you can even get me to comreg because of that ;D and will post my speed results if I'd like to.

Regards,

We'll the two of you relax
This thread is about connection speeds not false this and that or who works where
Jebus lads come on ffs

wasim21k

rightman i think u r inside man now u r trying to convince all of us that you have extream speed which was 10mb (not near possible on ice) and now u r trying to show a above normal speed, :mad:
here is mine

Peanut

I think it would have been better if rightman stated that he was associated with the ISP in question at the beginning, although it was kinda obvious :-p

bartificer

Every time rightman posts his results trying to pretend that ICE are anything other can cowboys of the worst kind it back-fires because it pisses off yet another frustrated ICE customer enough to post.

ICE service in the Maynooth area SUCKS. I have been without service for a total of 5 weeks since mid-December. When I do have service I NEVER, and I do mean NEVER get to see my full speed. I'm supposedly on ICE's high-end package and I get about half of what I should late at night and about a quarter the rest of the time. I have never once actually seen my connection reach 4Mb/s, not even at 3, 4, 5, or 6 in the morning.

Then add to that the fact that ICE support is an even bigger joke than their service. They don't answer the phone, they don't reply to emails, they lie to you and god help you if you decide you've had enough and want to get on to a manager. I came to that conclusion months ago, still trying!

They are such a joke that they don't even have a call tracking system! Sure explains why they can't manage to follow up on anything they promise.

Like so many others in this thread I will be leaving ICE as soon as I can and I make it my business to bad-mouth ICE to anyone who'll listen. When someone delivers a service that exceeds expectations they get immense positive word of mouth advertising. When someone delivers an service that spectacularly underperforms then they get loads of bad word of mouth. Every single person who I have ever met who is or was an ICE customers HATES them and badmouths them as soon as they come up in conversation. Some day I'm going to hear someone praise them. But it hasn't happened yet.

Share your experiences with ICE with your friends and family so they never have to suffer like you!

Bart.

bartificer

Peanut wrote: »

I think it would have been better if rightman stated that he was associated with the ISP in question at the beginning, although it was kinda obvious :-p

Indeed ... some basic integrity would be nice. Though, apparently too much to ask for

mrplop

Furkin_Bastage wrote: »

We'll the two of you relax
This thread is about connection speeds not false this and that or who works where
Jebus lads come on ffs

The point is this guy works for Ice broadband.

Tonight is the first time he's admitted to working for Ice, before then he posed as a regular joe in an attempt to dupe people into thinking Ice provide a decent service.
The speed test results he's posting are the result of him or one of his buddies reducing his contention and increasing his bandwidth.

This is bait and switch - making people believe they can obtain the unobtainable.
The worst aspect is that Ice can obviously supply decent broadband to their staff - why can't they do this with the bulk of their paying customers?

dclifford

I'm ringing up eircom on Tuesday to get broadband. It will kill me to have to pay for line rental just to get broadband. I have had enough of not being able to play games online. Over the last few weeks even sending emails was difficult.

Anyone know what I need to do cancel ICE subscription?

bartificer

I'm having real trouble getting mail out. It almost seems like ICE are doing something to slow down SMTP connections or something. Takes me about three attempts to send an email on average.

Also, I just discovered a hidden cost of being an ICE customer, I spent about 25 Euro last month on calls to ICE support

Bart.

maninaskirt

Here's mine, although the speed looks ok it feels like dial-up, it's like they up your speed for this speedtest? As mine hovers around the 120k mark for a few secs then jumps to over 1Mb.......if you know what I mean? After all ICE did block the speedtest site....




Look at the ping!!

Thankfully I have DSL from UTV for my gaming, with a stable connecion for gaming.....makes some difference to online gaming experience, much less lag and not getting thrown from servers often due to a long ping.

DCLIFFORD your going to have to try and speak to someone at ICE to cancel, so expect to get unreturned messages, unanswered emails and no answer to voicemails, I'm sure you know the deal by now.........going by hear-say the best way to get them to contact you is cancel the Direct Debit with your bank. Also you'll be glad to get DSL for gaming, one day using DSL for your gaming and you will forget the expense and cheated feeling that dealing with Eircon leave's you with.

dclifford

Thanks maninaskirt, That could be the way to go. Guess we will see what way it goes on Tuesday.
Trying to play Call of Duty is impossible, it leaves me feeling like somebody has just stolen something on me and there is nothing I can do about it.

maninaskirt

I was also drove insane by the lag on COD caused by ICE, supposed to be gaming broadband?!?!?! When I played it using DSL I was amazed with the difference in lag, I was no longer really, really, really bad on TDM, I was just really bad and enjoyed it much more......no more red bars for my connection status, no longer stuck in the lobby and getting thrown out of games due to " connection " issues. I forgot my son's xbox was using ICE for online until I seen he was stuck searching for games on COD4, swapped him over to the DSL connection and he got into a game straight away.

BigglesMcGee

I have recently aquired some inside knowledge on Ice. (i actually met someone who works for them through a friend at a wedding - Sad the way we have to get to ice).

They could have call tracking, but dont because it would be a record of their rubbish service.

The person i was talking to said that email all of your comments to ice support but also CC comreg. Give all your calls your own reference number. If its about the same issue keep the same ref number.
Also when mailing them agian about he issues, highlight the fact that they havent answered, replied or fixed the issue and put the number of days since the issue was first raised too.

This way comreg will have a record of complaints even if Ice dont record them. Eventually comreg will have to act.

k99_64

BigglesMcGee wrote: »

I have recently aquired some inside knowledge on Ice. (i actually met someone who works for them through a friend at a wedding - Sad the way we have to get to ice).

They could have call tracking, but dont because it would be a record of their rubbish service.

The person i was talking to said that email all of your comments to ice support but also CC comreg. Give all your calls your own reference number. If its about the same issue keep the same ref number.
Also when mailing them agian about he issues, highlight the fact that they havent answered, replied or fixed the issue and put the number of days since the issue was first raised too.

This way comreg will have a record of complaints even if Ice dont record them. Eventually comreg will have to act.

Great, so the staff that ice screws you.

Irish Steve

Ok, this is my work connection, and I have no other alternatives at the moment. Been live over 18 months, and so that there's no questions, I do NOT have any link with ICE other than as a user, and as far as I'm aware, the link to here has not been specially modified or tweaked to make it work



From results I'm seeing from another test I run, the problem is not ICE, it's Hosting365, their servers are all over the place with response times. Some of ICE's services are hosted there, so if 365 is slow, for whatever reason, then guess what, so will ICE be slow.

What would make things so much simpler would be for Eircom to get off their fat backsides and start providing a decent 2 way speed so that small companies can host in house on their own hardware, and not be held to ransom by useless upload speeds that make it all but worthless to host at the end of a 'standard' ADSL link.

bartificer

Irish Steve wrote: »

Ok, this is my work connection, and I have no other alternatives at the moment. Been live over 18 months, and so that there's no questions, I do NOT have any link with ICE other than as a user, and as far as I'm aware, the link to here has not been specially modified or tweaked to make it work



From results I'm seeing from another test I run, the problem is not ICE, it's Hosting365, their servers are all over the place with response times. Some of ICE's services are hosted there, so if 365 is slow, for whatever reason, then guess what, so will ICE be slow.

What would make things so much simpler would be for Eircom to get off their fat backsides and start providing a decent 2 way speed so that small companies can host in house on their own hardware, and not be held to ransom by useless upload speeds that make it all but worthless to host at the end of a 'standard' ADSL link.

I'm sorry but that doesn't make any sense at all. My problem isn't getting to sites it's a slow speed even getting out to the gateway. The issue is local. It is with ICE's radio equipment. In fact, I'd wager large amounts of cash it's simply a contention issue. They have sold more bandwidth than they have here in Maynooth.

Also, there is no way on earth you can blame Hosting365 for the disgrace that is ICE support. I deal with Hosting365 a lot and they are the model of good support. If only ICE were half as good as H365 at support.

Also, your contention that H365 is all over the place isn't supported by my experiences. I have a lot of servers hosted there and connections to them are good.

I just don't see how you can realistically blame any of the problems myself and many others are having with ICE on Hosting365.

Bart.

Irish Steve

Bart,

Yes, the gateway can go slow, but some of that is the servers at the other end of the link getting backed up because they are queued to process the requests. I did a visual trace route from here to ICE website, (can't post it here, as I don't have an easy way to upload the graphic from this site) which is hosted on 365, and some of the other sites I work with are also hosted there, and the conclusion I am coming to is that there is an overload somewhere at 365, which has a knock on effect on the response of all the servers in the line, primarily because the processing queue is getting longer and longer rather than being cleared, and at some point in that process, the server ends up spending more time managing the queue than it does processing the data from it, which then leads to sub 1 second responses. I'm not on Maynooth, so I can't be specific about that area, but I do know that the area I'm on at the moment was problematic a while back, but not across the board, it was only some areas that were slow.

The link from here to icecomms.net is 9 hops, some of which are on ICE own system, ( which I think may also be hosted on 365) and all of the responses from one specific test were over a second, and that is suggesting to me that the problem is not one of performance, but one of queuing of requests, and some of those responses are directly on 365 hardware.

Yes, you'll get no argument from me that ICE support is not as good as 365 support, I've dealt with both over a number of issues.

I just wish I could get a good reliable service that is capable of (at least) 4 Mb down, and 4 Mb up, that way, I could host in house, and not have problems with poor response times to the users.

All I'm saying is that while ICE may well have problems, and I'm in discussion about one with them today, not all of it is necesarily down to things that they can directly control in house, due to the very high number of external hosting services that are being used in Ireland because of the massive problems with poor broadband quality, availabilty and bandwidth on the existing wired network. If I could host in house, I would, but not while I can't get better than 384 upload from my servers back to the end user at the other end of what is probably a 10Mb line.

Steve

bartificer

If the problems were isolated to servers hosted by H365 then you might have a point. However, they are not. I have speed issues across the board. That traffic should not be processed by any H365 servers. ICE should not be processing my traffic, just routing it.

It's ICE's responsibility to ensure that it has no weak links in the chain. It needs good bandwidth locally, it needs good bandwidth in the links back to it's data centres and it needs good bandwidth on it's links to the internet backbone and in particular to INEX. All of that is 100% in ICE's control. If they choose to sub-contact any of that out to anyone it is still 100% ICE's fault if it doesn't work.

ICE cannot pass the book on the shoddy quality of their network. If it is partners letting them down then it is ICE's fault for picking bad partners and then for not replacing those partners once their crapness became evident. There is simply no excuse for an ISP that cannot deliver that it promises, it is 100% their fault.

There is no way you can implicated Hosting365 in the mess that is ICE.

Bart.

TouchingVirus

bartificer wrote: »

If the problems were isolated to servers hosted by H365 then you might have a point. However, they are not. I have speed issues across the board. That traffic should not be processed by any H365 servers. ICE should not be processing my traffic, just routing it.

It's ICE's responsibility to ensure that it has no weak links in the chain. It needs good bandwidth locally, it needs good bandwidth in the links back to it's data centres and it needs good bandwidth on it's links to the internet backbone and in particular to INEX. All of that is 100% in ICE's control. If they choose to sub-contact any of that out to anyone it is still 100% ICE's fault if it doesn't work.

ICE cannot pass the book on the shoddy quality of their network. If it is partners letting them down then it is ICE's fault for picking bad partners and then for not replacing those partners once their crapness became evident. There is simply no excuse for an ISP that cannot deliver that it promises, it is 100% their fault.

There is no way you can implicated Hosting365 in the mess that is ICE.

Bart.

I'm just going to quote that for emphasis ---^

ICE may have their websites/email services hosted with H365 but to run other services out of there is a bit

Apparently there's a problem with a base station in Maynooth, "Major Upgrades are underway" and have been for the past month, "rest assured there is somebody on site every day trying to fix the issues but you will have periods of sporadic internet" - ahh right, I guess that's ok then..?

These cowboys get their comeuppance on March 26th when we get DSL

Irish Steve

Bart,

Valid points, and indeed, ICE do have some serious issues that need to be addressed, but some of them appear to be out of their direct control, and if you've been in Ireland anything like as long as I have, you will be only too well aware of how easy it is for suppliers, especially when they have a monopoly, to ignore their customers, regardless of how valid the issues are. Companies like NTL, Chorus, and others in similar areas come to mind, I live in Ashbourne, and the cable system there that is now part of the Chorus NTL group has been a technical disaster for over 15 years, and there's no sign of any updates or investment in it at all.

I did a visual trace from here to Icecomms.net, so in theory, I'm not going outside of the ICE system. I've also done traces to other sites that are external, and the same sorts of issues are happening with all of the traces I do. Once a link outside of ICE goes slow, it's almost instant that the ICE system then slows also. I've done lookups on the external links, and they are not small bit players, they are large backbone organisations, so the very real and substantive issue has to be that there are probably significant attacks going on using the backbone routes, and the nett effect of that is unfortunately that all users suffer, and stopping such activity at present is almost impossible, in that there is not adequate international legislation to allow action across borders.

So, where does hosting 365 fit into this. Icecomms.net is hosted there, and I suspect that the core processing of the routing for ICE is also on their farm, I do know that the microwave link from Ashbourne routes back to Citywest. There are other companies at Citywest, so it's possible that H365 are not the hub supplier, but I do know that ICE do not have their own hardware at head office in Blanchardstown, and they use their own network to get to their servers.

So, if ICE are routing via H365, and then their web site is also on H365, that for me has 'implications'. It is possible they are not using H365 for the routing, the trace I am using does not give the geographic location of the servers.

ICE have issues, to the extent that while they offer a good package that would suit one of my clients, I've not signed them up for it yet because of the issues, but the other side of that coin is that not all the issues are directly controllable by ICE, even though they might wish them to be so. All I'm trying to point out here in this thread is that not all the issues are down to ICE directly, some of them are external to ICE, but are affecting what happens at ICE.

The same happens at times with EIRCOM, I spent 3 weeks a while back proving to EIRCOM that one of their caching servers had crashed, and they did eventually admit that the server was down, and they were having to rebuild it from scratch. The effect on me was that I was seeing serious and significant delays on only one web site, (E-bay), and every other site I was using was perfect. A repaint of a page on E-bay at the time was taking over 60 seconds, with many errors, and it required some very complex logging and analysis to eventually prove that the problem was local, as even using E-bay from another location but still on EIRCOM was working perfectly.


Steve

Longrangedriver

Irish Steve wrote: »

Bart,

Yes, you'll get no argument from me that ICE support is not as good as 365 support, I've dealt with both over a number of issues.

Steve

"Not as good", you're having a laugh, its absolutely horrendus!

I was ringing Ice to cancel, and it took 3 days of calls to the worst English speaking people on the planet, to get my point across, only to be told that I had to email 2 different email addresses to cancel. Guess what, I still have no reply to the emails sent 3 weeks ago.

pm.

TouchingVirus

That's what a 4meg connection will get ya here in Maynooth this evening..

Peanut

TouchingVirus wrote: »

That's what a 4meg connection will get ya here in Maynooth this evening..

It would be useful if there was some app to plot speeds over time, that type of speed isn't entirely unreasonable on a contended wireless link, but if it's consistently sh*t then you should be able to see that a lot more easily on a graph.

btq

In Lusk.

4med down 1meg up, not the gaming package but got it for the gaming but since i got it installed (yesterday) the lag is crazy. As it stands my eircom 1meg package is better for COD so if the ICE broadband doesnt improve or doesnt look like improving i'll pack it in.

Anyone avail of the 10 day cooling off period?

btq

A few more tests...

bartificer

Peanut wrote: »

It would be useful if there was some app to plot speeds over time, that type of speed isn't entirely unreasonable on a contended wireless link, but if it's consistently sh*t then you should be able to see that a lot more easily on a graph.

I beg to differ here. On a high-end package with a low conention ratio that sucks at any time of the day. That's supposed to be a 4Mb/s connection! a little over half a megabit is not far off one eight of the supposed speed!

Also, the service most certainly is consistently crap. My router keeps a log of speeds and I NEVER get near 4Mb/s. No insane hour of the night is late enough to get a good connection in Maynooth.

Finally, the quality of the connection SUCKS. It is jittery as hell, one second you're getting 200KB/s, the next second 5KB/s, then 50, then 150, then 80, then 200 again etc.. My speed graphs are almost never flat. The only time they are is when the connection sucks and I get a ceiling of about 80KB/s. Then you have all the dropped packets. A clean skype conversation is just not possible despite the fact that skype only wants about 15KB/s. What connection there is is dirty as hell.

Shoddy just doesn't begin to describe the service here in Maynooth. The figures ICE quote for their packages are pure lies here.

Bart.

Peanut

bartificer wrote: »

I beg to differ here. On a high-end package with a low conention ratio that sucks at any time of the day. That's supposed to be a 4Mb/s connection! a little over half a megabit is not far off one eight of the supposed speed!

Well the thing is, the supposed speed is anything they want it to be!

Strictly speaking, if you're on something like the Gaming package, the contention is 20:1, and getting 512k on a 4Mb package is 8:1 ...

But speeds rarely get provisioned on an even basis like that, and yes the general assumption is that it should be between 50% and 100% of the full speed.

However, there's nothing to say that they're obliged to provide that, and if you complain they will most likely blame an intermittent problem and/or contention.

So if you can get your router logs to show consistent shoddiness then you should have a much better case to argue with, if you haven't given up already..

roadruner

anyone here from co limerick have ICE rubberband installed?

I got a callback after 3 months of emailing my interest (quick response time or what!), I'm wondering if the speeds are any good around my area
I have a vodafone 3G modem which goes up and down like a flaming see-saw
so is ICE gonna be any better I'm wondering!

alansweeney100

Don't go with ICE man they're useless, I've been trying to get through to them all morning, no one in any dept. picks up and when you attempt to leave a voice mail for customer services a message tells you that their voice mails are full. Probably full of messages with a lot of foul language from some angry customers.
I have a 'gaming line' which is supposedly 4mb download 2mb upload. heres my results,
http://www.speedtest.net/result/249181664.png

Piss poor