eircom 7.6 mb/s vs. Chorus 20mb/s

bevan619

My parents currently pay 40 euros a month for 7.6 meg broadband. Chorus does 20 meg for 43 euros a month. Anyone have Chorus? And is it good, because eircom is going down a lot lately.

Thanks in advance.

rob808

bevan619 wrote: »

My parents currently pay 40 euros a month for 7.6 meg broadband. Chorus does 20 meg for 43 euros a month. Anyone have Chorus? And is it good, because eircom is going down a lot lately.

Thanks in advance.

i haven't got chorus but there way better than eircon go for it but they can have trouble now again but notting like eircom does plus there upgrading there network to speed of 120mb it make eircom head spin

Simi

DSL simply can't compare to cable. Get UPC try it for a month & if you're satisfied with the performance, cancel your phone line.

ArthurG

Simi wrote: »

DSL simply can't compare to cable. Get UPC try it for a month & if you're satisfied with the performance, cancel your phone line.

Do UPC have a one month no obligation trial then?. They've just upgraded my area and wouldn't mind giving them a shot if I'm not tied into them for a year.

Simi

ArthurG wrote: »

Do UPC have a one month no obligation trial then?. They've just upgraded my area and wouldn't mind giving them a shot if I'm not tied into them for a year.

Sorry I should have made that clearer. I don't know if they offer a trial period. You could ask them.

What I was trying to say was that if you cancel your phone line you won't be able to keep your old number. So it might be worth trying out the telephone service they offer first, before cancelling your phone line altogether.

vibe666

i've seen epople trying it and not liking it and cancelling after a week with no penalties (afaik), but your best bet would be to ask UPC (UPC being the company that bought chorus & NTL) yourself.

i have the 20mbps broadband with them and the phoneline and it's great. i have lost the phone occasionally if the broadband goes down (it's voip, so no broadband = no phone) but it's rare and everyone has mobiles so the home phone isn't essential like it used to be.

speeds are great. i came over from BT whgo are generally regarded as offering better broadband than eircom anyway and I'd never go back to anyone else after having UPC broadband, i just don't know how anyone could.

i know they're not perfect, but nobody in ireland is and in our imperfect world they're the best option imho.

add to that the 120mbps upgrades next year and eircom (and every other ISP in ireland) are going to be in a lot of trouble this time next year.

the_law

There is a 7 day trial period during which you can cancel with no obligations. This isn't NTL being nice, it's a legal requirement as you order the service with no face-to-face contact (Distance Selling).

I was sceptical as to the reliability of cable broadband due to hearing some horror stories on here - but I took the plunge and put it through its paces in that trial period - when they say 20Mb it is really 20Mb (20000000bps, which is 20 marketing megabits, not quite 20 real megabits - every provider does this with the exception of Smart).

If you have poor wireless signal (or lots of interference from neighbours access points) then you'll need to go wired ethernet to get more than 12-15Mb, or sit beside your router...

_Sidhe_

Simi wrote: »

Sorry I should have made that clearer. I don't know if they offer a trial period. You could ask them.

What I was trying to say was that if you cancel your phone line you won't be able to keep your old number. So it might be worth trying out the telephone service they offer first, before cancelling your phone line altogether.

Just a little note on that.
In Ireland all Phone providers are required to hold onto a canceled number for 6 months before releasing it back.
If you cancel a phone line, you can always get your number back for at least 6 months, and possibly more as long as your number isn't recycled straight away.

That goes for all providers, not just Eircom.
It can take a few weeks, but you won't loose the number.

Rickard

Be aware that if you use p2p regularly this connection is a complete ripoff.
You will be throttled.

docmol

I'm with UPC for the last few months (10Mb + phone + digital TV) after an ongoing nightmare with eircom. When you get phone from upc you get a form to fill in and send back to them and they arrainge porting your old number to their network. This means you will have 2 phones for a couple of weeks until they sort that out. Their internet is far superior to anything I could get from eircom, even after numerous logged calls and engineer call-outs. I found eircom telephone support to be so bad, and to lie so often, that to be honest, I would have taken internet service from anyone. I have only once had to ring UPC support, and to my suprise, I found them to be honest and proffesional. They rang back when they said they would (!!!) kept me informed and fixed the fault quickly. I have heard other people haven't been so lucky but I can only speak from my own experience. As for bittorrent, they do limit it at peak times but I can still get 1.5MB/s off-peak and the latency is nearly always excellent(I can play CSS on thousands of servers now, this is more important to me than download speed) I'm also saving money as the package I'm on is about €25/month cheaper than having Eircom and UPC both charging me line-rental with the bonus of digital tv + digital video recorder + internet about 8 times faster! There are two caveats however: 1. All your eggs are in one basket, if your UPC goes down you have no internet/phone or tv. 2. They use subcontractors to do their installs, the guys who did mine were excellent, a mate had a less then perfect experience. I hope thats of some help.

sdanseo

the_law wrote: »

There is a 7 day trial period during which you can cancel with no obligations. This isn't NTL being nice, it's a legal requirement as you order the service with no face-to-face contact (Distance Selling).

It's a comreg thing for all contractual services regarding communications actually, I sell phones in a retail store and we have to abide by it too. Quite happy to actually, it's a good selling point.

Rickard wrote: »

Be aware that if you use p2p regularly this connection is a complete ripoff.
You will be throttled.

Fair use with NTL (I'm on their 20Mb) is 250GB, although I've heard of some people being throttled at lesst (~150-200GB) and also heard of people getting away with 400GB before throttling.

Well better than eircom either way, told my dad to change his the other day and I was preaching to the converted within about 30 secons. Eircom are deplorable; an excuse for a company. My BB has dropped no more than four times since May 2008; I attribute one of those to a power cut which started near us and eventually knocked our lights out too. Was only without it for more than a few hours once when it took 24hrs.

As for speeds, was 20Mb steady for the first year and is 14Mb as I speak, goes lower at peak but rare to see anything under 10Mb.

Rickard

it becomes pretty much the equivelant of a 2meg connection for torrents though. I checked it, I had 18m to speedtest.. and i couldnt get over 100-200k donwnload off any well seeded trackers (whereas the eircon one would max out instantly to 630).

oh well, I guess ill have to go back to using newsgroups............

if the damn connection was working. ironically it is down as we speak..

LoGiE

I'm on UPC 20mb and while they do trottle Bit torrrent it depends on the tracker. I've maxed out my connection at times so I don't think it's fair to say they have capped it at 2mb.

It also seems that they stop traffic shaping during the night as I've seen multiple torrents jump in speed at around 2am.

Rickard

yea I did hit like 900k/s on one but still far from the 20 meg im paying for. I only use some of the best private trackers which pretty much would max out any connection (unless youre on some sick 100meg)

oh well, i had forgotten about newsgroups so I paid for one of them now.

oh and Did I mention that the connection is down and Im waiting for them to send out technicians...

anyways im not too bothered now that I have purchased usenet access.

bevan619

I'm downloading at 2800kb/s now on my 7.6mb/s connection.

jor el

Rickard wrote: »

Be aware that if you use p2p regularly this connection is a complete ripoff.
You will be throttled.

That's not quite true. I've yet to see any conclusive evidence that UPC actually throttle P2P all the time. Some people have experienced problems, some of the time, but it is far from proven.

P2P works quite well on UPC, in a lot of cases.