Digiweb Homewave

Danno

Any news on speed upgrades for the Digiweb Homewave? I am in Durrow, County Laois. VOIP is painful to use alot of the time. Seriously considering returning to €ircon as DSL is available since Dec 2007.

Come on Digiweb! Give us speed.

watty

Do you mean real VOIP calls to/from real phones or vioce chat on MSN, Skype etc?


The VOIP should be OK. Try a different VOIP supplier. Make G.729 default and G.711 A the 2nd choice, G.711 uLaw the 3rd choice (sometimes called PCMA and PCMU).

Which VOIP ATA are you using?

If you are using Skype and have a Router/Firewall you need to setup Skype so it does not relay. Make sure any regular contacts do the same. Relaying doubles the latency and can give very poor quality. If you are using Skype and don't know how to do the firewall settings, ask an I'll explain.

If you need faster (which doesn't help VOIP) ring and see is Metro available. With eircom DSL you have to pay line rental, so overall it's much more expensive. If you are saving by not having a line they may charge to install.

Even though your exchange is enabled you have no way of knowing how well your line performs till you get DSL. Eircom retail and all resold "bitstream" DSL is interleaved which increases latency and reduces VOIP quality.

Danno

VOIP is blueface. The calls are choppy sometimes. The ideal service for homewave should be 3mb/512kb, but Digiweb have their tap down low at 1mb/128kb.

nilhg

Irishisptest's speed test is designed to highlight areas which might be causing trouble for VOIP, it might be worth giving it a few runs and see what it comes up with.

lucernarian

I have the same service off Digiweb.

We finally ordered 1 Mbit DSL yesterday as we were becoming sick of ~180kbps download speeds in the evenings, and our upload is so unstable (even though it averages 80% of our rated speed) we can't upload photo attachments (300 KB) to gmail let alone try to use skype. Skype was occasionally broken even when speeds recovered to 1 mbit, and is unusable for most of the day.

Even though ping times are usually allright (about 50 to 70 ms to irish websites), they vary so much that it's no good for voip. And even downloads show up where nothing might be downloaded for half a second, then it rushes through at over 200KBps for a second, stopping and starting constantly.

I know exactly how Danno feels. The airspan tech digiweb use has a max speed of 4 mbps I believe. Not sure about upload.

watty

Skype can be just as bad on 6Mbps DSL or Cable if either end is relaying...

bigpaddy2004

Danno a friend of mine in the Ballacolla area also has the homewave product.
His connection is only 512/128. He uses blueface and it works 100% of the time. I often use it myself and I was surprised by it. He is using the voip ata unit provided by Blueface. Both Durrow and Ballacolla get their backhaul from the ESB fibre in Stradbally where the Metro in Portlaoise also gets its backhaul from.. So both your connections are fairly similar. It could be just your ata unit, settings or maybe even your signal to the base station?

Jack Sheehan

I just got an email from digiweb saying they were upgrading my speed from 3mb to 7.8 mb if that helps.

bigpaddy2004

Jack Sheehan wrote: »

I just got an email from digiweb saying they were upgrading my speed from 3mb to 7.8 mb if that helps.

Bless him! Danno is talking about fixed wireless Jack, I bet your talking about DSL?

Jack Sheehan

I'm sorry, I dont understand this lark, I'll let myself out.

Danno

To_be_confirmed wrote: »

I have the same service off Digiweb.

We finally ordered 1 Mbit DSL yesterday as we were becoming sick of ~180kbps download speeds in the evenings, and our upload is so unstable (even though it averages 80% of our rated speed) we can't upload photo attachments (300 KB) to gmail let alone try to use skype. Skype was occasionally broken even when speeds recovered to 1 mbit, and is unusable for most of the day.

Even though ping times are usually allright (about 50 to 70 ms to irish websites), they vary so much that it's no good for voip. And even downloads show up where nothing might be downloaded for half a second, then it rushes through at over 200KBps for a second, stopping and starting constantly.

I know exactly how Danno feels. The airspan tech digiweb use has a max speed of 4 mbps I believe. Not sure about upload.

Bang on there. An exact replica of my connection. I have the big white airspan box. I notice other people have a black plug connection between the reciever and the D-Link router. Is that white Airspan box my problem?

bigpaddy2004

The 'black plug connection' is the POE unit for the Airspan cpe. You probably have a white one?

lucernarian

I don't know what the problem is, but I can guess. I see the issue is worst on weekday evenings, so I'd say contention plays a big part.

Danno

Probably contention, but if Digiweb increased speeds surely contention would be a less of a problem running Blueface VOIP.

I am really fed up of it as I was heavilly involved in helping Digiweb set up here under the Group Broadband Scheme and requests for speed increases or help with the issues fall on deaf ears.

Freddie59

watty wrote: »

Skype can be just as bad on 6Mbps DSL or Cable if either end is relaying...

I second that. I've got Blueface and it's fine (NTL 10 Megs) but Skype can be very, very trying. It can work perfectly for about 10 minutes then goes haywire. Gave up using it for video calls.

AlphaDelta

While these are all old posts, has any seen any improvement in the Digiweb uplink speed in the last 3 years ?

I am using the homewave with a claimed uplink speed of 128k near Durrow. The actual uplink speed rarely averages 55k when I am am using it. My application measures every transfer on the uplink averaging the
last 100 transfers.

On complaining to Digiweb over a year ago it improved for a few months, unfortunately it almost unusable again. Any suggestions ?

watty

I think a small proportion of Customers are on Homewave. See if they can now offer an alternative service.

AlphaDelta

Sure, they want me to buy a more expensive package which has no guarantee of any improved bandwidth on a continuous basis.

Unfortunately, the regulator gives them complete freedom to offer a service
they cannot deliver upon and yet charge customers for this non existant
service.

Since it is almost impossible to get the claimed speed at any reasonable
hour of the day then this is bordering on false advertising in my opinion.
The toothless regulator refuses to do anything about this.

watty

On same hardware or new hardware?

AlphaDelta

They never mentioned a hardware upgrade. They offered a trial and
from what I can remember it was effectively removing the rate limiter for
my connection (Digiweb did not mention exactly what they would do).


Can you specify which hardware can be upgrade so that I can achieve the
128kbit uplink speed.

Thanks.