Eircom 7MB Broadband

Bonavox

Hey people,

I'm thinking on getting Eircom Broadband 7MB and switching from the horrifying Ripwave Irish Broadband.

I was told by a friend it will take 10 mins to download a movie, and will be extremely fast and reliable. I know it will be fast, but 10 mins?? :eek:

Also, do you need a landline for Eircom Broadband (I don't have one and I don't want one )

Thanks guys!

EDIT: Has anyone used this with a network? I like my mobility!

Epeen

Your friend is a prick, he lies

Yes ripwave is ****, yes eircom (was?) a lot better. Its probably about the same right now.

Anyway; yes you need a landline. A 700mb movie will take around 45 minutes to download on the highest 7mb connection.

Bonavox

Epeen wrote: »

Your friend is a prick, he lies

Yes ripwave is ****, yes eircom (was?) a lot better. Its probably about the same right now.

Anyway; yes you need a landline. A 700mb movie will take around 45 minutes to download on the highest 7mb connection.

Ah well, I had a feeling it wasn't true. I might pop up to his house and try downloading a movie and see how long it takes (just so I can laugh in his face muhahahahahahah )

Also, anyone know how long it would take to download an album via torrent? Just curious

Epeen

Depends on how many songs on the album and the quality. 12 songs ~4mb a song = ~50mb which is about 2 minutes depending on the speed you get

Bonavox

Epeen wrote: »

Depends on how many songs on the album and the quality. 12 songs ~4mb a song = ~50mb which is about 2 minutes depending on the speed you get

Okay, so about 2 mins for a full 50MB album via a healthy torrent?

Epeen

Roughly yeah

I had ripwave in cork 2 years ago, its a pile of **** i wouldnt give it away never mind pay for it. Eircom is a few steps up from that ****.

Bonavox

Epeen wrote: »

Roughly yeah

I had ripwave in cork 2 years ago, its a pile of **** i wouldnt give it away never mind pay for it. Eircom is a few steps up from that ****.

Haha Ripwave is useless.

Any idea what the ideal broadband would be for someone who likes to download movies, music, large sized software via torrent?

Thanks

Epeen

Depends where you are. Eircom at the moment is alright for downloading, but **** for anything else. I heard digiweb is pretty good and stable. Probably the best for downloading is NTL @ 20mb package (although they had a lot of problems before and are having a few now too)

Vertakill

Surfing has been a bit of a pain in the hole lately (due to all these dns problems) but downloading and gaming are spot on, as usual.

Other than the last few weeks of DNS issues, I've literally never had a single problem with eircom and I use it everyday and I'm very particular as to what ISP I would use as for most of my time on eircom I was using it for gaming so I know how reliable it's been for me.

As far as the 10 mins to download a movie.. your friend isn't completely wrong.

I've just downloaded an 800mb movie at 760k/sec and it took approx 17 minutes on newsgroups on the 7.6mb package (not the 7mb one you quoted).

Vertakill

Btw OP, I would take whatever Epeen is saying with a colossal pinch of salt.

Anyone who gauges their download speed on a torrent is seriously not worth listening to as far as technical advice is concerned.

Torrents can be completely erratic.

He's right about one thing though. Ripwave is complete sh1t.


So, by all means go and laugh in your friends face but the joke will be on you. :P

Epeen

Vertakill wrote: »

Surfing has been a bit of a pain in the hole lately (due to all these dns problems) but downloading and gaming are spot on, as usual.

Other than the last few weeks of DNS issues, I've literally never had a single problem with eircom and I use it everyday and I'm very particular as to what ISP I would use as for most of my time on eircom I was using it for gaming so I know how reliable it's been for me.

As far as the 10 mins to download a movie.. your friend isn't completely wrong.

I've just downloaded an 800mb movie at 760k/sec and it took approx 17 minutes on newsgroups on the 7.6mb package (not the 7mb one you quoted).

Ive been with eircoms broadband for about 8 years and ive never had a single problem. Until 3 months ago. I cannot play games between the hours of 5pm and 1am (and even then its dodgy) and downloading is under the speed im paying for (paying for 7.6mb getting 6mb)

I used to sing their praises but after 3 months of this **** im sick and tired of it.

Epeen

Vertakill wrote: »

Btw OP, I would take whatever Epeen is saying with a colossal pinch of salt.

Anyone who gauges their download speed on a torrent is seriously not worth listening to as far as technical advice is concerned.

Torrents can be completely erratic.

He's right about one thing though. Ripwave is complete sh1t.


So, by all means go and laugh in your friends face but the joke will be on you. :P

Hey now i wasnt gauging my download speed on torrents, he asked for the speed of a torrent and ive given him an average time of what it usually takes me to get stuff

I do my tv shows

Rybka

I have 7mb broadband. It is perfect - unless you want to use it at peak times - like we all do. I am thinking of downgrading.

eirebhoy

Epeen wrote: »

Ive been with eircoms broadband for about 8 years and ive never had a single problem. Until 3 months ago. I cannot play games between the hours of 5pm and 1am (and even then its dodgy) and downloading is under the speed im paying for (paying for 7.6mb getting 6mb)

Not wanting to drag the thread off topic but newbie question, this is to do with contention ratio yeh? I'm with Smart and the contention ratio is 1:1 which means I'll always have the same speeds. If Smart can do it why can't Eircom?

Bonavox

Well I'd never judge an ISP by their torrent D/L speeds.
As Epeen said, I was just wondering

So compare this to UPCs 20MB option. Which one would you choose?

Thanks

Epeen

Rybka wrote: »

I have 7mb broadband. It is perfect - unless you want to use it at peak times - like we all do. I am thinking of downgrading.

I had mine downgraded for a week and it made no difference. Still had to pay the full price though.

Vertakill

Epeen wrote: »

Hey now i wasnt gauging my download speed on torrents, he asked for the speed of a torrent and ive given him an average time of what it usually takes me to get stuff

I do my tv shows

Hehe, alright fair enough.

He asked how long it'd take to download a movie in general. But in fairness as you hinted on, the vast majority of people are using torrents but it's obviously not the fastest.

So if you were to let eircom go downloading a movie at it's full potential (like I do), you'd get it in around 20 minutes (for 700mb).
We obviously can't hold eircom responsible for torrent speeds unfortunately.


Note. I've no difference in download rate at peak times.
I have probably an extra 5 or 10 ping in games at peak times, however. But that's to be expected as there'd be a vast increase in traffic on the company who is hosting the game server during peak times.

Epeen

eirebhoy wrote: »

Not wanting to drag the thread off topic but newbie question, this is to do with contention ratio yeh? I'm with Smart and the contention ratio is 1:1 which means I'll always have the same speeds. If Smart can do it why can't Eircom?

I have no idea what the problem is, i just KNOW it isnt anything my side.

According to Eircom, they dont know what the problem is and they dont actually care. I probably have a "slow speeds" ticket floating around somewhere in their system still and the guy i talked to from the business support (since apparantly 7.6mb is a business line) said he would tell his manager about how disgusted i was. Im sure his manager got that message.

Vertakill

vflhp wrote: »

Well I'd never judge an ISP by their torrent D/L speeds.
As Epeen said, I was just wondering

So compare this to UPCs 20MB option. Which one would you choose?

Thanks

Well, UPC should be a lot better for downloading obviously but it doesn't seem to always work out that way.
They've suffered a bit with reliability issues but if you happen to be one of the lucky ones with a flawless 20mb UPC connection, you'd be laughing.


Btw, I don't see how downgrading would ever solve any problems with eircom unless you were complaining about your ping and the interleaving issue.

If you're not into gaming and you've no interest in your latency, disregard my last sentence as it won't have any baring on you. :P

eirebhoy

Epeen wrote:

I have no idea what the problem is, i just KNOW it isnt anything my side.

Eircom's contention ratio for that broadband is 48:1. As far as I'm aware that means there's up to 48 people sharing some part of the connection. So the more people online, the slower it will be for you.

Smart has a contention ratio of 1:1 and I never ever have a dip in speed. It's always around the 600k/s download mark.

Just wondering if Smart have that contention ratio why Eircom don't?

Epeen

If it was as easy as switching to smart, i'd do it tomorrow. I cant find anything on their site though about their contention ratio.

Also;

Thank you for checking your phone number.


Sadly your phone line is not connected directly to one of Smart's telephone exchanges. However, it appears that your line does qualify for one of our other outstanding value for money services available NATIONWIDE.

Dont know if that makes a difference

Btw, I don't see how downgrading would ever solve any problems with eircom unless you were complaining about your ping and the interleaving issue.

It was their idea to see about attainables if that was causing the problem

Yes i was complaining about my ping IM ****ING RAGING about it. Not so much the ping but the constant disconnections and stalls is more of a problem than ping at the moment. Id get over a 200 ping but being able to stay in game for 20 seconds at a time; not so fun.

Vertakill

Epeen wrote: »

Yes i was complaining about my ping IM ****ING RAGING about it. Not so much the ping but the constant disconnections and stalls is more of a problem than ping at the moment. Id get over a 200 ping but being able to stay in game for 20 seconds at a time; not so fun.

Ah I see. Do you live far from your exchange? What's your line attenuation/SNR on your line (on your router's homepage)?

If you had interleaving turned down to improve your ping and you're living too far from your exchange, you can experience all sorts of problems.

Eircom have it on by default. I'm guessing they did it so they could reach houses further from exchanges (rural mostly) than if it was lowered.

I had mine lowered upon request and I know some other lads did it and since they lived quite far from their exchanges, they had some bad results. The eircom engineer on the phone warned them about this beforehand of course.

Iirc, disconnections and ping spikes being the most common issue.

Epeen

My exchange is around the corner; under a half a mile. I had interleaving altered to see if it would fix my problem - its exactly the same.

Downstream Upstream
Max Allowed Speed (kbps) 7584 672
SN Margin (dB) 12.00 12.00
Line Attenuation (dB) 18.00 9.00
CRC Errors 3 1

dub45

eirebhoy wrote: »

Not wanting to drag the thread off topic but newbie question, this is to do with contention ratio yeh? I'm with Smart and the contention ratio is 1:1 which means I'll always have the same speeds. If Smart can do it why can't Eircom?

It is arguable about Smart's contention ratio (I am a Smart customer by the way) but Smart operate totally differently to Eircom and a big factor which mustnt be forgotten is that Eircom probably have at least 10 times as many customers as Smart to provide for.

dub45

Epeen wrote: »

My exchange is around the corner; under a half a mile. I had interleaving altered to see if it would fix my problem - its exactly the same.

Did you check your internal wiring? Your snr is very low given the distance involved to the exchange.

Low Snr is usually the cause of siganl disruption.

ArseBurger

vflhp wrote: »

I might pop up to his house and try downloading a movie and see how long it takes

The best way to gauge 'speed' is to download an ISO from ftp://ftp.heanet.ie/

Eircom, and most ISPs in Ireland, interconnect at INEX. Heanet's FTP server is on a 10Gb backbone.

Hank Scorpio

vflhp wrote: »

Well I'd never judge an ISP by their torrent D/L speeds.
As Epeen said, I was just wondering

So compare this to UPCs 20MB option. Which one would you choose?

Thanks

Trying looking into Magnet or Smart

Best thing about UPC is no phone line and price, but theres known to throttle torrents

If you use rapidshare thought i wouldnt worry

And btw it takes alot less than 45 minutes on a 7meg connection to download 700Mb

Maskedgameguru

I have Eircom business at home 7.6mb it's ok pings average around 60ms so it's ok.
I haven't the problem with home peck times because i am with business so i can't comment on that.

Epeen

dub45 wrote: »

Did you check your internal wiring? Your snr is very low given the distance involved to the exchange.

Low Snr is usually the cause of siganl disruption.

Nothing has changed my side. Its still exactly the same as when ive had perfect service.

Ill go get some new wires anyway and re-wire everything, might as well try something

MGLman

Any comments on Home Vision?

MGLman

Never go with Cable watch. Try to live without it.