A few digiweb metro question.

zonEEE

Just gave digiweb a call today and found out i could get metro. At the moment im on a with a wireless company called fastcom, while for the ordinary customer fastcom are fine they fail in delivering low ping all the time etc while gaming. I use the the net mostly for competitive gaming and need it to be top notch and not get ping spikes while playing a serious match. I have talked to a good few people with metro and they said its fine for gaming but it looks like the mast is about 8-10 miles away from me, would this effect the latency much? Also whats the tech support like for high latency issues? with fastcom there is one guy on support and hes a gamer so it was great But during peak times the ping spikes made the net unusable for gaming. Anyways thanks in advance !

zonEEE

cgarvey

strongr wrote: »

Also whats the tech support like for high latency issues?

2 words; The first is something men do in the toilet that doesn't require sitting down, and the second is one way of describing the state of having no wealth.

Metro is good, and especially at that price, but their support lines are limited to rebooting the modem and hope for the best. Any escalations take 2+ days for a response (and given that network issues tend to be sorted by then, it's pointless).

As for latency.. I don't know how far I am from the Tallaght mast, but I'd guess around that upper limit. I rarely notice contention except some peak time evenings. Some might be 1 every 2 weeks, or 3 in 1 week. Latency doesn't go that high (to first hop), but it does vary quite a bit, and packet loss rises to double digits. That does affect gaming (and makes playing UT3 impossible, for e.g.) .. i.e. the variance and packet loss are more damning than just high latency. However, I'm getting cheap consumer broadband that works most of the time, and getting a phone line that Sky boxes will work with (after about 4 or 5 attempts on each call), so I'm happy enough.

Just don't expect to be able to cotact someone, and get a meaningful reply, when it comes to network issues. Digiweb clearly have internal communications issues in that regard (i.e. their entire network is down due to a DDoS for over half an hour, yet people are still fighting with support staff to convince them there's a problem).

zonEEE

Cheers, i would guess up your neck of the woods there would be a huge amount of usage and that would explain the peak times etc. Hopefully it shouldn't be to bad in sligo. And also to hear about the packet loss is a bit concerning as it makes counter strike nearly unplayable as well.

Thanks for your help,

Keep the replies coming !

frisket

I have Metro, and for most purposes it's fine.
I agree their tech support is limited but once they grok that you know what you're talking about they are much better.
Their two main problems have been
a) their SMTP server is consistently blocked by Comcast and most of the anal-retentive ISPs
on the grounds of spam -- presumably because some of Digiweb's less savvy users are members
of botnets churning it out. If like me you rely on non-web email, this is a bummer.
b) Until recently, their IP addresses for connected customers had no reverse DNS lookup, so some
gateways that probe IP addresses for names were returning null, and thus rejecting your mail. This
appears to have been fixed, but one of my remote sites still won't authenticate me for the SMTP
server because it claims I am not being "seen".

zonEEE

My main thing about it is i am about 8 miles away from the mast. Would this effect me in any way?