eircom may have increased the pass distance to 5 miles

Sponge Bob

from a post over on IoffL, while they may do this for a single exchange its more likely they would apply the criteria to every exchange .

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=53538661&postcount=33

Was doing my weekly "Insert number into line checker and fail" routine when I got the message "May be suitable for broadband".

So I placed the order anyway and then got in touch with my eircom contact. Apparently the threshold was increased for the tara exchange just the day before. One of the figures he mentioned was 98dbs which seemed very high. Lots of lines in the village still fail outright. On google maps the exchange is a good 5 miles away. I wonder if I can't get 1 meg would it be possible to get 512K?

One wonders indeed if this is a response to 3g rollouts in recent times.

Be a good time to do IMO it as its been pissing rain for the past month and one would not want to pass becuase of a freak dry spell would one ?


(sb memo to sb 'must pm crawler' )

rc28

Yes I think you are right because I just checked my friend's phone number who definitely lives nearly 5 miles away from the exchange and before today the line always failed the bb test but I just checked there and it passed with "may be suitable for broadband".

Slaanesh

I was informed it wasn't a nationwide increase and may have only been applied to a select few exchanges. Remember the 'trial' DSL customer in my village.

Sponge Bob

I would advise him

1. That the minimum speed guaranteed by eircom is 256k but continous with no disconnects
2. That it will be interleaved and that pings are unlikely to be much under 100ms

Having said that it bates dialup and is beyond what ISDN can deliver . ISDN is max 4 miles or maybe a tad over that ...but not 5 miles.

Anyone else suddently pass or get an amber ( may be suitable) in the 4-5 mile range in the past few days ?? Slaanesh is on the Tara exchange . It may be a trial confined to a few exchanges to see how it goes.

Zaphod

Sponge Bob wrote:

Anyone else suddently pass or get an amber ( may be suitable) in the 4-5 mile range in the past few days ?? Slaanesh is on the Tara exchange . It may be a trial confined to a few exchanges to see how it goes.

Just checked and changed from 'not suitable' to 'may be suitable'. Range is 5 miles and a bit.

watty

They have noticed perhaps that BT in NI does up to 9km (just about 12% more than 5 miles)

gerryo

Sponge Bob wrote:

1. That the minimum speed guaranteed by eircom is 256k but continous with no disconnects .

Any idea what the upload speed might be?

Sponge Bob

upload could be near 128k even if download is low you 'lose' download first

gerryo

Sponge Bob wrote:

upload could be near 128k even if download is low you 'lose' download first

"lose", don't like the sound of that, do you pay full whack for this, i.e, is it discounted because of the lowbitrate?

kaizersoze

gerryo wrote:

"lose", don't like the sound of that, do you pay full whack for this, i.e, is it discounted because of the lowbitrate?

No it's not. You pay the sub for the lowest package and take what you get.
As Sponge said, they only guarantee 256 down on all their residential packages.
WRT upload, I've see many a crappy line with download syncing as low as 160 but the upload was never affected.

Sponge Bob

The problem KS is that you PAY 30-50€€€€s for a downgrade but upgrades are free.

You should therefore START low and upgrade later if your line stats are favourable .

I would only recommend 3mbits starters if your dialup modem connects at 48k-50k or so . If the dialup modem synchs at 42k or less you are only deluding yourself ordering 3mbits for starters NO MATTER what the eircom line tester tells you .

kaizersoze

^^^Good advice.
To avoid the downgrade charge the trick is to get tech support to do the downgrade during troubleshoot to stablise the connection and they get an engineer to check the test results. If the engineer finds a problem, he'll sort it. If it's not sorted then the connection is left at the slower speed.
They don't usually charge for downgrades due to technical probs, only for reasons of moving to a cheaper package.

Tzetze

Is there an online line checker which doesn't require an eircom account number? I'd like to check some numbers back home, but have no such account numbers handy.

rc28

Tzetze wrote:

Is there an online line checker which doesn't require an eircom account number? I'd like to check some numbers back home, but have no such account numbers handy.

What do you mean? You only need a phone number to check if your line is suitable for bb, not an account number:
http://eircom.ie/cgi-bin/bvsm/bveircom/bladerunner/showContent.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@0069417787.1183905003@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccciaddlgljdkedcefeceiedffndffj.0&cid=BroadbandIntroRes1&site=Res&chanId=-536889055#
In the link above look down the page and click on the "check if your line is suitable for broadband" link, it will open a little window where you can enter in multiple phone numbers.

Tzetze

Thanks, completely missed that when I was looking earlier. Looks like they extended the range on the Carrickmacross exchange too. Was still failing when I last checked 9/10 months ago. Now, it's 'May be suitable; subject to confirmation'.

stylers

looks like they've done it here in mullingar and rochfortbridge too..
they're just bending to the competition from 3 et al. there's no reason they couldnt have done this ages ago..

Owen.

lucernarian

I passed the line test again 2 weeks ago, after failing every test after the initial extension of the limit to 78-80 dB. I was the last house on the road to pass at all. Now there's houses passing further up the road, which is great for them as they can't see Mount Oriel or Drogheda for wireless broadband. I've tried 3 exchanges in the 041 area and all seem to have had the increase.

I've seen a figure of 89 dB being the limit for READSL2 on one of the two extra-high attenuation profiles in the standard. memory is iffy on this so point out errors please:)

A limit of 98 dB, which works out at exactly 5 miles :eek: is looking virtually impossible unless eircom have finally decided to use repeaters. I know for a fact that they were at least trialling repeaters/researching them, or "DSL-compatible pairgains" or suchlike.

Conspiracy theory moment: Did eircom do this so that people can check the line and find out that they failed, "despite eircom's best efforts"?? These increases in the distance gets them praise and credit, even if most of the lines benifiting from this increase will still not manage to sync.

Btw, don't be suprised if the ADSL modem only reports 63 dB when you get the modem. They cannot read high attenuation properly.

Carrickmacross has the worst phone wiring of any exchange area I've seen. I'm glad that at least some people have no pairgains or lines in ditches there.

Zaphod

Up and running:

Max Allowed Speed (kbps) 1024 (down) 128 (up)
SN Margin (dB) 12.50 13.00
Line Attenuation (dB) 60.00 31.50

Rechecked the distance in the car which pretty much follows the same route as the lines : 7.8KM -> 4.85 miles.

Sponge Bob

atten 60db at 4.85 miles seems suspicious to me.

I am sure that others are better qualified than I to comment but I would have thought that would be a 3.5 mile line ( especially as the sn margin is over 10)
.

It may be there is a repeater at c. 1.3-1.5 miles from the exchange so.

lucernarian

I have the same feeling, even if some modems can't hack attenuation readings greater than 63 dB, the signal margin is too high for a line which, assuming they're normal cables, would normally have an attenuation of 94 dB.

60 dB attenuation would mean a 3 mile long line with eircom's formula for normal phone wiring.

watty

Using the top and bottom wires of a fence as phone line is high attenuation. Every 20m or 50m you need to cross over to keep the capacitance to ground average the same on each wire.

The copper Cat3 is the best they use, anything else (plated steel or aluminium) could only be worse. Must be a repeater or a subcabinet. Cat5 is lower attenuation, but generally only used in buildings.

Zaphod

Sponge Bob wrote:

I am sure that others are better qualified than I to comment but I would have thought that would be a 3.5 mile line ( especially as the sn margin is over 10)
It may be there is a repeater at c. 1.3-1.5 miles from the exchange so.

There's a national school about 3 miles away (and ~1.5 miles from the exchange) which would be about right.

lucernarian

watty, I'm not sure where you got fencing wire from , but Cat 3 is something that's been around for the last 15 odd years, whilee much of eircom's copper wiring is based around the 1977-1982 period. The phone wiring before Cat 3 was of varying standards, BT ones I think.

The point is, that the thickness/gauge of the wire is the key to how much attenuation per kilometre there is. I presume that the 12 dB/km is based on Cat 3 wiring.

The distance is sort-of irrelevant in this, as it's the attenuation which is the actual problem. And the new limit appears to be 98-100 dB.

stylers

Well lads,

well after seeing my line was possibly passing the line test after they raised the distance limit (subject to confirmation of course !) I ordered the 1 meg package about a week and a half ago. modem arrived yesterday, set it up and she synced up straight away..

from rochfortbridge, I'm about 4.5 miles from the exchange.. so i wasnt expecting much luck but its actually worked out well. I knew the line quality was decent enough from the analogue modem, which usually managed 45K..

here's the stats from the router..

Downstream Upstream
Max Allowed Speed (kbps) 1024 128
SN Margin (dB) 11.50 12.00
Line Attenuation (dB) 63.50 31.50
CRC Errors 390 2

connection seems to be rock solid and I'm getting a speedtest.net reading of 890 kbps downstream..

what do ye make of the SN ?


On a seperate note, it seems eircom are unwilling as yet to offer a bundle with the talktime mobile package - which I've changed to in order to see the effect on our mobile calls..

Owen.

SalteeDog

I assume this relaxation of the attenuation limits is a nation-wide thing. I know it's been applied to several exchanges in Co. Galway.

I myself was in the exact same boat as the original poster - hadn't expected the line check to come up amber and even then never expected it to work. I'm about 4 miles from Headford exchange - and got connected to adsl about two weeks ago.

Current stats:

speedtest.net giving me 837kb/s down 89kb/s up.

Line State Up
Modulation DMT
Data Path Interleave

Max Allowed Speed (kbps) 1024 128
SN Margin (dB) 8.00 12.00
Line Attenuation (dB) 63.50 31.50

Those numbers aren't great but the connection has been rock solid so far.
Also - I'm pinging boards.ie at 25ms - interleaving doesn't appear to have a severe impact.