Ice Broadband steadily becoming even more terrible

bartificer

delakota wrote:

Is anybody else in the Maynooth area still suffering from low speed with them?

I'm in Maynooth as well and all is well now. Like you I had a few weeks where 200KB was the limit regardless of the time of day or night. As I have an insanely good signal I knew it was a problem with the infrastructure "behind" the wireless mast. It was fixed a few weeks ago and has been perfect every since. I'm getting consistently good speeds on my 4MB line.

I also just want to give an alternate experience of ICE customer support. I have no doubt that those of you who have posted about your bad experience really did have those bad experiences but I have had very good experiences and I think those need to be noted here for completeness.

1) I DID get call backs
2) I was never on hold long
3) I felt I got good answers from the guys there
4) I felt the service was head and shoulders above that which I'd become accustomed to from DigiWeb who I used to be with.

So, basically, experiences vary, but I'm a happy ICE customer.

Cat5

I'm Using ICE in Clane and yesterday measured 4.6mb down and 2.3mb up with a 37ms responce time.. I'm very happy with them..:)

caff

bartificer wrote:

I'm in Maynooth as well and all is well now. Like you I had a few weeks where 200KB was the limit regardless of the time of day or night. As I have an insanely good signal I knew it was a problem with the infrastructure "behind" the wireless mast. It was fixed a few weeks ago and has been perfect every since. I'm getting consistently good speeds on my 4MB line.

I also just want to give an alternate experience of ICE customer support. I have no doubt that those of you who have posted about your bad experience really did have those bad experiences but I have had very good experiences and I think those need to be noted here for completeness.

1) I DID get call backs
2) I was never on hold long
3) I felt I got good answers from the guys there
4) I felt the service was head and shoulders above that which I'd become accustomed to from DigiWeb who I used to be with.

So, basically, experiences vary, but I'm a happy ICE customer.

what are good speeds for you?
Im getting between 1.2 - 3 megs downa and .5 to 1.5 up on the 4meg gamming package

bartificer

caff wrote:

what are good speeds for you?
Im getting between 1.2 - 3 megs downa and .5 to 1.5 up on the 4meg gamming package

Speeds vary a bit with contention but I get between 3 and 4 down and between 1 and 2 up. Late at night I sometimes even get a little above 4 down.

caff

rang them up left a message saying they hadn't rung me back yesterday got a call within 10 mins back, they changed the quadrant my aerial was running off from their mast to lower the contention and now getting



so pretty good, see how that goes over the next week whether it stays that good

bartificer

I take it back. It would seem that as soon as you praise ICE your service COLAPSES. My broadband is now effectively un-usable because my up-pipe is running at a paltry 97kb/s (that's BITS). My down-pipe is fine, at almost the 4 megs it should be but since just about every protocol out there have an up component as well as a down component I can't even browse the web properly. DNS lookups are taking ages and the whole experience is actually like being on dialup.

Rang support. Did I get an answer? No. So, I left a message. Wonder how long it will be till I hear back?

Anyone else in the Maynooth area experiencing this same problem?

mrplop

Exactly the same problem I'm having.
Just to get this page to load took about a minute today - it's that bad.
Even if you do get through they'll spin you a line about your radio unit malfunctioning or problems with the mast.
They must think we all came down in the last shower.
They can't provide the service advertised and as far as I can tell they don't give a sh!t as long as they get their money every month.
I'm happy for the people that get a decent service and have had no problems with support - you're in the MINORITY though.
I've just been trying to download and right at the moment I'm getting download speeds of 8kbs.
Unreal.

mrplop

caff wrote:

what are good speeds for you?
Im getting between 1.2 - 3 megs downa and .5 to 1.5 up on the 4meg gamming package

If 3mb is your best dl speed that's not really great for a 4 mb connection.
If you look at the stats for the other providers they're practically getting those speeds from a 3mb connection.
Plus the price of the 4mb gaming package is €69.99 isn't it?

If I were paying €70 for 3mbs top speed I don't think I'd be very happy.

bartificer

bartificer wrote:

I take it back. It would seem that as soon as you praise ICE your service COLAPSES. My broadband is now effectively un-usable because my up-pipe is running at a paltry 97kb/s (that's BITS). My down-pipe is fine, at almost the 4 megs it should be but since just about every protocol out there have an up component as well as a down component I can't even browse the web properly. DNS lookups are taking ages and the whole experience is actually like being on dialup.

Rang support. Did I get an answer? No. So, I left a message. Wonder how long it will be till I hear back?

Anyone else in the Maynooth area experiencing this same problem?

Ok, I did get a call back and they have managed to improve things quite a lot. At first they tried to fob me off till Monday but after asking whether or not they had any network technicians working at weekends he did say they had one on call "for emergencies only". I pointed out that 97kb on a 2Mb line was an emergency and then stuff happened.

As a friend of mine put it, "you have to be the opposite to a door mat" when talking to ICE. Be polite, but be assertive.

I had said I preferred ICE to DigiWeb. Now I'm not so sure. Is there a single good ISP in Ireland?

caff

bartificer wrote:

I had said I preferred ICE to DigiWeb. Now I'm not so sure. Is there a single good ISP in Ireland?

The people on the smart threads seem happy

cant get them in 'nooth

caff

this is a jike

mrplop

You think that's bad - this is what €37.99 gets from Ice Broadband



You're getting 1.5mb for €69.99 though:eek:

What can we do about this folks?
They've got to be breaking the law advertising their service as 3mb and 4mb.

caff

now all better again.. reliability is not these guys strong point

pm.

i got ice installed yesterday and im getting great speeds, only hope it lasts, i finally got rid of last mile i hope its not not a case of out of the frying pan into the fire.

bartificer

delakota wrote:

Is anybody else in the Maynooth area still suffering from low speed with them?

I am now ... since literally the day I replied here that I was a happy customer things been bad. They were REALLY bad, now they are just bad.

When they were REALLY bad the guy insisted on moving me to a different sector. I HAD been having consistently poor speeds till the sector was chagned a few weeks before that. I guess I'm now back on the crappy sector.

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that ICE don't have the infrastructure to reliable deliver a good service. In Maynooth they appear to be over-subscribed and to be seriously lacking in bandwidth behind the radio mast to get our connections out onto the internet. I don't think the issues in Maynooth are with the radio units.

I get download speeds of about 200B which VERY occasionally peak at 300kB in the dead of night. During the day, the evening and the civilised part of the night (up till 1am) my speeds are consistently crap.

I think I too will be asking about their complaints proceedure. I'll be playing it by the book. I'll be giving them 10 days to reply and if I don't get a reply I will be making a formal complaint to ComReg.

Bart.

mrplop

Right at the moment my download speeds are pretty decent and when I do a check on speedtest my pings not bad either BUT it can take about three minutes for speedtest and other website pages to load up.
What would cause this?

Peanut

Try using alternative DNS servers.

bartificer

mrplop wrote:

Right at the moment my download speeds are pretty decent and when I do a check on speedtest my pings not bad either BUT it can take about three minutes for speedtest and other website pages to load up.
What would cause this?

The fact that ICE's DNS server is slow as hell. Consider switching to the Open DNS servers instead.

Bart.

rc28

Here's the link to open dns:
http://www.opendns.com/
When Eircom were having similar problems I switched to open dns and it fixed everything.

mrplop

That seemed to work but speedtest is still taking an age to load.
Suppose it could them...

mrplop

It's the worst it's EVER been today.
It took this page about 3 minutes to load (not their DNS servers just their speed today) it's unreal, worse than 56k.
I'm so utterly, utterly sick of Ice at this point.

My recommendation to any prospective Ice customers is please don't sign up to this service for the sake of your own sanity.
You may get half a decent service one day, maybe even a decent one but next day it'll be completely sh!te.
There's absolutely nothing even vaguely consistent about them and their technical support is worse than dire with the exception of the guy with the strong country accent.
Tech support is supposedly available today but the automated message that gives support times has been left on.

In other words there's no-one there at all.

They don't give a sh!t about their customers and their service is MORE than typical of this country.

daveharnett

Charles Augustu wrote:

Golly, am I glad I entered "ICE broadband problems" into Google the other day. They have recently opened for business in my area, and I was very interested, Eircom being tear-inducingly bad, but am sceptical about the promises.
Does anyone have any reports from this neighbourhood on how they perform? I live near Murroe, Co Limerick.

Charles, A friend of mine got it near murroe (abington) a few weeks ago. At the moment, it's pretty good. I'm sure that in a month or two the contention will make it just as bad as everywhere else tho still, they're the only show in town afaik

nickw

daveharnett wrote:

Charles, A friend of mine got it near murroe (abington) a few weeks ago. At the moment, it's pretty good. I'm sure that in a month or two the contention will make it just as bad as everywhere else tho still, they're the only show in town afaik

Not quite true...

There is also other Broadband providers here in Murroe... but they are one man, overworked etc etc....

Right now I am (in Abington) considering getting my own 1 to 1 link and reselling!

oscarBravo

nickw wrote:

Right now I am (in Abington) considering getting my own 1 to 1 link and reselling!

Check your T&Cs first...

TCollins

Got a call from someone in digiweb the other day telling me it would be available in the next few weeks in my area. If it works out im dropping ICE like a hot snot.
The ONLY reason i even have Ice is that i cant get BB anywhere else.
Pings still going from about 80 to 4000.
Speed still crap. Mate of mine down the road downgraded from their business package to their lowest home package and hasnt noticed any difference whatsoever in speed or pings, apart from it now costs him €37.99 inc VAT instead of (wait for it) €163 inc VAT for the crap service he gets from ice.

He reckons they give you the exact same package and just charge you whatever you'll put up with in the hope that you get a proper service.

They really should be brought to book by Comreg for not providing anywhere near the service people are paying for. I cant believe Comreg are not up to their eyeballs with complaints about Ices treatment of paying customers.

Marlow

TCollins wrote:

He reckons they give you the exact same package and just charge you whatever you'll put up with in the hope that you get a proper service.

It depends, where they apply limits/contention for the package. If they do it on their edge routers and the bandwidth from the customer up to that point is crap, then it would be the same crap at the customer end, regardless of package.

If they applied limits at the last mile to the customer, they probably would have less troubles, unless they internal links are utterly at the limits.

Mind you, for some of the ISPs around contention is not applied at all and the difference between business and residential is option of fixed ip, priority for support, timeframe for onsite visit and if you are allowed to resell the connection (internet cafe, etc.)

/Marlow

TCollins

We dont think its contention at all.
Ice are just crap. Every customer gets their crap service and ISPs all too easily have the "contention excuse" to roll out whenever they havent a clue or just plain dont care about fixing problems.

Doesnt really matter where they apply the contention to the end user.
If i see a crap service i call it a crap service. i dont care what goes on behind where the BB comes into my house. Thats Ices area and i cant control it.

I wouldnt think anyone would be reselling Ices packages either. Imagine 1 crap package shared by 10 or 20 users ouch.

Marlow

TCollins wrote:

I wouldnt think anyone would be reselling Ices packages either. Imagine 1 crap package shared by 10 or 20 users ouch.

Well, reselling from a contended service does not make sense, but that is a different matter.

/Marlow

nickw

oscarBravo wrote:

Check your T&Cs first...

Of course. For the moment, I wait......

RazielDoomgate

has anyone with ice around the lusk/ballough/balbriggin and surrounding areas felt a BIG decline in there quality of theyre connection.

i live in lusk, just outside it accualy. and am 0.5 miles away from the eircom switches hence i had to go wireless and ice were the first to offer that service to me. i still dont think i can get any other isps in my area.

from exactly the 23 of july i lantency/ping has shot up to 400+ for 90% of the day. anyone else have the same problem...

as a result my download/upload speeds are like that of a 512kb connection or less with the extra annoyence of the huge ping.

i have sent ice tech sopport 3 emails. on the 2nd they replied saying that they are looking into it and that i should help them by doing speedtests. i sent the tests in all 3 emails. and 2 weeks later i am awaiting a reply to the last.

taking this as a sign to ring them with i did 3 times i have gotten 3 different answers from them.
1. they are doing maintenance on my exchange, it should be back working properly in a day or two.
2 another wireless isp has come into the area and it is using the same data transering frequency as ice. ice are now requesting theyre own private frequency from the frenquency regulater or somewhere.. it should be working properly in the next day or 2.
3 there is a lot of server choke on 2 of the data exchanges. and hence they are setting up a new one near me. this will bypass all of the choke and hopfuly reduce it for everyone else. it will be up and runing by this wednesday.

saying this. i have had runing with ice before and i have aways found their tech sopport very easy to deal with and polite.
my net connection was quite stable most of the time with maybe it spiking for a day once or twice a month.

but ive been without a proper service for nearly a month. am i wrong to question the trustworthy of the tech support after 3 diff answer?..

ill be ringing them again later today and see what the story is. hey maybe ill get a 4th explaination