Airwire

Airwire: Martin

A mail to all customers is not that easy. It was only a few customers affected worse than others, mostly because of their distance to the basestation where they are connected. Trying to find the customers affected and sending them a mail would have taken hours. Time that is better spend in getting the upgrades done.

Anyhow, TerrorFirmer, your ping times should have dropped drastically mid-day saturday. The first stage of the upgrades has been implemented.

Unfortunatly there is still an issue with our fiber-link in Galway for the connectivity to the northern part of our network, which the supplier hopefully will solve on monday or tuesday.

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
Airwire

tinofapples

A mail to all customers is not that easy.

Airwire: Martin

tinofapples wrote: »

A mail to all customers affected, that should have said.

A mail to all customers would create nothing but confusion and you probably can figure out yourself, what we'll be spending our time with then.

It is a contended service. And it's matter of fact a better contention ratio than most other providers. Upgrades can sometimes get delayed due to unforseen factors, that's when contention gets worse than we would like to, but in general it will only ever affect a very small amount of people and we're constantly upgrading our network, to solve these things.

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
Airwire

TerrorFirmer

Just as an update, things have indeed dramatically improved. Still have odd moments of sub-56k nostalgia in the evening/early night, but for the most part, the speeds are good and gaming is possible again.

Falconire

I game on uk servers all the time and I am getting better ping there then half of the clan members on uk dsl conections

sparkywolf

I've been with Airwire for months now and have never had a good connection. I'm only getting about a third of it at best.

Contacted them multiple times and been told it'll be fixed and the hardware upgraded to deal with the contention and all that jazz months ago, but nothing seems to have improved at all, even though I continue to be in contact with them.

So if its not too much to ask, I'd like an explanation.

Airwire: Martin

sparkywolf wrote: »

I've been with Airwire for months now and have never had a good connection. I'm only getting about a third of it at best.

Contacted them multiple times and been told it'll be fixed and the hardware upgraded to deal with the contention and all that jazz months ago, but nothing seems to have improved at all, even though I continue to be in contact with them.

So if its not too much to ask, I'd like an explanation.

boards.ie is not an official support forum for Airwire. Any issues with your airwire should be taken with support@airwire.ie or via our support number 091-865 968.

As you didn't tell, who you are, it would be very very difficult anyway to know, what is wrong with your service.

The hardware upgrade to deal with contention was put in place months ago and announced in our support section at http://www.airwire.ie/faq . I also announced it here for the people, that had discussed the issues. So from your post, I reckon it must have been quite some time ago, that you were in touch with support and didn't read this thread properly either.

If you look at http://www.airwire.ie/faq and if you are in Oranmore as your profile says, you would have noticed, that we have problems with one of our core links as of this morning. This is down to hardware issues related to storm in the last days and then frost last night. We're still diagnosing the issue and awaiting parts. We're hoping to have this resolved mid-week.

In the meantime, we've build a backup link, that got everybody affected back online but isn't entirely able to cope with the traffic especially in the evening time.

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
Airwire

TerrorFirmer

Airwire (Martin) wrote: »

....

Hi Martin,

Thanks for taking the time to make such a post, appreciate it. I live in the house house as Sparkywolf, the connection is in his name but we've both been using it since day one. I've contacted Airwire once or twice, but as it is in his name, I leave it to him usually.

Now...the connection itself. I appreciate that it might have degraded poorly over the last week or so with all the bad weather, flooding and wind. But our connection has been, quite frankly if you don't mind me saying so, the worst broadband I've ever experienced, including 3G modem broadband, since day one, which at this stage, was a good many months ago.

We run speedtests periodically, the results varying from 5 to 30% of what the speed should be (2/2mb), but very, very rarely exceeding said percentages. In fact, the speed only reaches its peak at ridiculous hours, which explains the problems experienced pretty conclusively - I can't think of anything other than contention that would explain terrible speeds during the evening/nighttime that level out to relatively decent levels by 1am until midday the following day. Now, don't get me wrong, there is the odd day when Airwire works respectably, and downloading and gaming is possible. But I'm sure you understand, coming home from work and being, quite literally on several occasions, unable to simply browse the net, let alone download files or play games online, is hardly acceptable when it's a fingers-crossed-will-airwire-work-tonight type scenario every single time you plan using the connection. Some nights it's considerably worse than 56k dial-up. I'm talking 20 minutes to load a 1 minute video on youtube and several minutes to load a 200kb jpeg, and frequently, connection time outs.

Having said all that, I don't expect the full 2/2 consistently nor would I ever. At this stage, even if we got .5/.2 I'd be fairly happy as even that would be usable if it was consistent. But it just flies all over the place, very frequently in the evenings and sociable night hours up to, say, eleven - the time at which you'd be most likely to use it - we hit lows of .1/.02 with horrific latency. Just to emphasize that, i'm talking 100kbps down and 20kbps up rates with latencies approaching 1000ms. At this stage I can't even remember when I last bothered trying to play a game online, as 95% of the time its unusable due to latency. Actually, think it was about 8 weeks ago, at about 2am. I find it rather amusing that you say the speed might be a result of an offline link that happened recently, as the speed the last few days, while still pretty poor, is usable for web browsing and thus that makes it better than it has ever been over the past month in particular.

I'm sure Airwire in general is good...I've heard mostly good things about it and the person who recommended it to us is using Airwire without problems for a very long period of time and was very surprised to hear of our troubles. He is however in a very different area to us, as are the people who have praised Airwire in the past. Unfortunately in summary I would have to say that at this stage we are probably going to cancel Airwire once we source another provider because since it's been installed it's been nothing but frustration. Every time we - or more accurately my housemate - has contacted you (as in, your company, not yourself personally), they've promised us it will be fixed by varying time frames, but never has it improved, or certainly, even if it has temporarily improved, does it remain improved beyond a few days. I'd say he's been onto them seven or eight times with the same complaint i.e terrible speeds, latencies, time-outs, and so on.

Thanks for the response anyway, and for taking the time to write it.

Airwire: Martin

Hi,

why is it, that you haven't taken this up with support up since the upgrades were in place ? And why is it, that instead of taking it up with support, you are taking it to this forum again, that isn't read by our support people ?

Basically, we have made you aware, that the upgrades were in place, we have asked if the connection was ok after that and I've not heard of complaints since.

As you are on the absolute minimal signal from the basestation, you are also at the maximum distance from the basestation (20 km) and it's the only basestation, that covers you, the only solution at this point is to decommission the connection, if it still gives trouble.

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
Airwire

sparkywolf

Airwire (Martin) wrote: »

boards.ie is not an official support forum for Airwire. Any issues with your airwire should be taken with support@airwire.ie or via our support number 091-865 968.

Thank you for your reply.

I have been in contact with customer support constantly during the past few months and this has been the first reply I have had in weeks from any Airwire representative.

I have fully read this forum and can understand recent problems mentioned in the FAQ updates but this problem has been consistently present since I began availing of the service. I will send on my information to you if its not too much trouble, as I have had no luck with customer services recently.

Airwire: Martin

I get a copy of EVERY mail that goes to support@airwire.ie .

Send it to support@airwire.ie , feel free to reference your username on boards.ie and this discussion.

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
Airwire

TerrorFirmer

Airwire (Martin) wrote: »

As you are on the absolute minimal signal from the basestation, you are also at the maximum distance from the basestation (20 km) and it's the only basestation, that covers you, the only solution at this point is to decommission the connection, if it still gives trouble.

Well Martin, it's unfortunately that we can say this is the first time we've heard this; incidentally, it is far from the first time a complaint has been made. If we are this far from the basestation why was this not offered as explanation for poor service before? In fact, we were told the connection was 'good'.

Also, however, I'm not entirely convinced by that explanation and still maintain it's related in some way to contention, how else would you explain that sometimes the connection is stable and reliable, particularly at late night and early morning, despite being mostly extremely poor during common sociable hours? Earlier on a download of mine was pulling 10kb/s, now that it's quite late that has quadrupled, as predicted by our experience. I fail to see how that is attributable to signal rather than what would appear to be more obvious contention.

That aside, if you still stick by your explanation that it's distance from the basestation and all other considerations regarding contention become irrelevant, at the end of the day we are a paying customer, paying for incredibly poor service, that at no point throughout several complaints was it mentioned, suggested or even touched upon in the faintest manner possible that we might be out of the necessitated range of a basestation in order to receive basic reliable service even though all other explanations seemed to offer no solution.

TerrorFirmer

Just felt it was fair to add that my housemate said he had been speaking to you personally and felt he received an in-depth explanation and possible list of solutions, cancellation being the worst of them. I suppose you can't ask much fairer than that...thank you.

Airwire: Martin

First of all, the above are infos that most customers neither want to know, care to know nor need to know. Most customers wouldn't even understand them. They are just an explanation of the circumstances, that can be the cause of the issues.

The connection as such is well within the limits (technically) as what it should be, but doesn't seem to perform as such.

I had made you guys aware of, that the upgrades were done and expected that you'd contact support refering to the original issues as unresolved after the upgrades, if there still was issues.

We have about 2000 users in the system and do not monitor each individual customers connection. That would be impossible.

I've explained the situation and options in detail to sparkywolf and can't see, why you are continuing to rant on about it here.

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
Airwire

tinofapples

why you are continuing to rant on about it here.

IMO if someone is prepared to promote or praise a service/product here on boards I think they should also be prepared to accept critisism. Just my 2 cents.

Airwire: Martin

tinofapples wrote: »

IMO if someone is prepared to promote or praise a service/product here on boards I think they should also be prepared to accept critisism. Just my 2 cents.

I fully agree with that. But this goes beyond critisism, as there are several factors here and I will not go any further into this. The issue here is specific to one customer.

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
Airwire

VainSitchy

hey i have a 2mb connection from airwire for months now and overall its poor and all i really want it for is online gameing but its impossible most of the time. I have also contacted airwire more times than i can count (not lately) about this with very little responce or help.

At the moment the speeds are shocking like .30 down .19 up and ping 400 and its like this for the last 2weeks youtube is unwatchable and even just browseing the internet is so slow i dont bother most of the time.I have read that something got damaged in a storm but surely they should have a backup plan and now i have read its not going to be fixed until 12dec so thats a month with very poor service but still paying full price.

I would like to know just how many people play online useing airwire because even at the best of times when speeds are up games lag all over the place for me and im not useing a router it must be down to the ping i can just about play call of duty it dose lag and i never have higher then three bar reception out of five it jumps between two and three most of the time then games like fifa and other sports games are completely unplayable. when I check other isp websites next to all of them mention gameing and have some sort of package to suit the needs at a competitive price or at least know something about it to help you out but airwire dont seem to know anything about the subject.

Im only being honest about the matter and not trying to blackn airwires name im sure there are people who recommend them highly and if i could play my xbox360 and ps3 online i would be happy. I am going to try and contact them again about the matter but im not holding much hope.

Airwire: Martin

VainSitchy wrote: »

At the moment the speeds are shocking like .30 down .19 up and ping 400 and its like this for the last 2weeks youtube is unwatchable and even just browseing the internet is so slow i dont bother most of the time.I have read that something got damaged in a storm but surely they should have a backup plan and now i have read its not going to be fixed until 12dec so thats a month with very poor service but still paying full price.

I don't know, how you calculate a month out of our current network issue. The service issue was on monday (7 days ago) and will be fixed hopefully on friday/saturday. That's less than 2 weeks.

The service is currently poor alright in the affected areas, but you are on a 16:1 contended product, so you are getting the full product, just quite contended at the moment.
When you say .30 down and .19 up, what's that ? KB, MB, kbit, mbit ? Please be specific !!

VainSitchy wrote: »

im not useing a router it must be down to the ping i can just about play call of duty it dose lag and i never have higher then three bar reception out of five it jumps between two and three most of the time then games like fifa and other sports games are completely unplayable.

Where do you get those bar readings from ? You can not read the signal of your Airwire connection anywhere on the equipment that we supply.

So if you have a reading, that indicates, that you must be using some wireless gear between the connection, that we supplied and your computer. And you need to explain your setup to support, otherwise it's very hard for them to help you.

VainSitchy wrote: »

when I check other isp websites next to all of them mention gameing and have some sort of package to suit the needs at a competitive price or at least know something about it to help you out but airwire dont seem to know anything about the subject.

That is, because our product in general works for gaming. Our service is in general under 200ms unless there is an issue. Most people see between 40-60 ms at a maximum. I know of customers with as low as 10 ms average ping-times, depending on where in the network they are.

DSL providers that use bitstream had to implement dedicated gaming packages, because pingtimes on high interleave dsl lines are way over 200-300 ms at times and gaming will not work.

VainSitchy wrote: »

Im only being honest about the matter and not trying to blackn airwires name im sure there are people who recommend them highly and if i could play my xbox360 and ps3 online i would be happy.

We can not help you much on the issue of xbox360 and ps3 as we don't have any nor use them. If you however provide support with ping-test results from http://www.pingtest.net/ and a precise indication, on what equipment you have connected to the cable that we supplied, we can usually give you a good idea what your problem is.

Again, you should contact support@airwire.ie or 091-865 968 with this. Obviously there is no point in running tests before our core link is back online.

Hope this helps.

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
Airwire

tinofapples

Still frustrating ...........



Almost 3am in the morning, hardly peak usage time.

VainSitchy

im connecting straight to the ps3 or xbox where im getting the reception reading from is when you play a game online there is a reception bar beside your name like a mobile phone and on mine its never higher then three and usually jumps between two and three.

You said in general your service works with online gameing but then you say that ye dont and never have used a console so then how do you know it works. If i do contact airwire support like i know others have about this they dont know anything about it. I will contact them again and go through everything in detail. ask is there any way to get a low ping of 10ms to 40ms and keep it at that.

PogMoThoin

VainSitchy wrote: »

im connecting straight to the ps3 or xbox where im getting the reception reading from is when you play a game online there is a reception bar beside your name like a mobile phone and on mine its never higher then three and usually jumps between two and three.

Using a game to judge Your pingtimes without actually knowing where the game is hosted isn't at all accurate. Could be the other side of the world

VainSitchy wrote: »

You said in general your service works with online gameing but then you say that ye dont and never have used a console so then how do you know it works

Wow, I'm amazed Martin managed to build a network at all if he doesn't play consoles. Never heard that pc's play games?

bigpaddy2004

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Wow, I'm amazed Martin managed to build a network at all if he doesn't play consoles. Never heard that pc's play games?

What have game consoles got to do with building networks? I have never played or even owned a game console in my life and I manage a massive network everyday.
I know of half a dozen other network engineers whom manage and build national networks here in Ireland and they would'nt even know how to turn an xbox on...come to think of it neither do I.

VainSitchy

at the end of it all if airwire could manage to keep there speeds up and ping low at least that would be something. I still think if a company is providing a service and its used in a particular way by some people then then they should know about that subject and i do realise that people useing airwire to play online games is surely a small percentage but they should still know something about it.

Airwire: Martin

VainSitchy wrote: »

they should know about that subject and i do realise that people useing airwire to play online games is surely a small percentage but they should still know something about it.

There are millions of services on the internet and that is changing every day, so if you have problems with a product, you usually need to go to whoever develops/offers the product.

In your case that would be the manufacturer of your game console, and the developer of your games.

As bigpaddy2004 pointed out, there is more to the games than just turning the console on. Your latency varies very much from server to server.

In the other thread you started, you wrote, you've never seen your ping below 70-80 ms. On PC games a ping of 70-80 ms is still no problem to play games.

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
Airwire

Airwire: Martin

tinofapples wrote: »

Still frustrating ...........

Almost 3am in the morning, hardly peak usage time.

Of course it is and we've made you aware, why that is and when we expect to fix it. Can't do anything, when the part isn't available in Ireland and has to be manufactured specificly.

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
Airwire

VainSitchy

well this is my last post on this thread because im pretty much sick of reading excuse after excuse. Fact is when i do a speedtest one minute its good 5mins later it rubbish why cant it just be stable connection. airwire is ok for people who only use the internet every now and again and dont have a clue about speeds and what they should be getting. In my opinion and its just my opinion airwire is poor and they dont really give a sh1t :mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:

tinofapples

excuse after excuse.

I'm with you on that.I called "Support" last Wednesday morning, spoke with a lady who couldn't tell me what a "Ping" was as i was querying why mine was so high. She didn't know. I explained that over a month ago my speeds were terrible and after a period of okay speeds they were crap again. She took my mobile number and told me someone would get back to me.

On the 4th I received an e-mail not a call telling me about a part needed being manufactured in Latvia.

Now if i experience money problems and I can pay only €25 this month for my BB I doubt that would be acceptable

I think I'll refrain from posting anymore in this thread also cause i don't wanna hear anymore about this that or the other.I want the service/product I'm paying for, plain and simple.

PogMoThoin

VainSitchy wrote: »

well this is my last post on this thread because im pretty much sick of reading excuse after excuse. Fact is when i do a speedtest one minute its good 5mins later it rubbish why cant it just be stable connection. airwire is ok for people who only use the internet every now and again and dont have a clue about speeds and what they should be getting. In my opinion and its just my opinion airwire is poor and they dont really give a sh1t :mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:

You said earlier Your connection is going straight to Your console, how do You do a speedtest?

VainSitchy

PogMoThoin wrote: »

You said earlier Your connection is going straight to Your console, how do You do a speedtest?

plug it out and plug it into my laptop. I have been on another website and listed what connection i have all the details about it and a lot of people have the same or even abit less and they can play games online with no lag i just dont get it.

PogMoThoin

Didn't realise You had a laptop, open a command prompt (in accessories, system tools), type "ping www.boards.ie" without quotes and copy the results here. Goto www.speedtest.net, run a test, pick the Airwire Galway server, when done click to copy forum link and paste here.

You've given out loads about Airwire with no proof other than what Your console tells You is bad, which isn't exactly telling much.