UPC offering 30Mbps broadband and problems with upgrade

IrishTonyO

Snake Plisken wrote: »

Ok so spent the last half hour awaiting to get to talk to tech support apparantly there is a big meeting on monday in UPC with their network people on a fix time to address this issue the girl makes out that its down to noise issue to the local node, she wasn't buying that it was a contention issue and I also advised her a lot of people were having similar issues in the lucan area and across the city, she said they were putting a plan in place on Monday and which would include fix time resolution, and credit to the affected customers and we should all be getting phone calls starting on monday to give us updates, I also mentioned people were keeping track of their speed issues via this forum and she said that UPC "monitor" boards.ie as well

Has anyone received a phone call as a result of the so called meeting yesterday?

John2009

I just had 2 UPC network engineers at my house and both of them have confirmed to me that my line and area is suffering from severe contention in the evening time.

One of the lads said that everything on my end is 100% perfect and the fault is at their end and the local node that i'm connected to is at 92% capacity and rising with new connections being signed up everyday.

He said for everyone to get full speed 24/7 the node would ideally be at about 50 - 60% capacity but its obvious that UPC are over-subscribing our local node and he couldn't give me an idea or estimate on when or if it'll be fixed.

In my opinion it'll probably be when the node is totally crippled with connections and fail for them to upgrade it or for us in the area to suffer on until and if they upgrade to DOCSIS 3 whenever that happens.

rymus

just to throw my 2 cents in. Dublin 8 on the 15mbit package. Speed is perfect during the day, getting between 5 and 7mbit at night to pretty much any servers. Guess I'll have to do all my downloading during the day.

IrishTonyO

rymus wrote: »

just to throw my 2 cents in. Dublin 8 on the 15mbit package. Speed is perfect during the day, getting between 5 and 7mbit at night to pretty much any servers. Guess I'll have to do all my downloading during the day.

ring UPC and let them know, I mean you are getting 33% of the bandwidth you should be getting in the evening. And to be honest the more people call them, the more they know they have a BIG problem and not just a few users in your area.

rymus

I emailed them last night before I'd read the updated thread and noticed how many other users were having similar problems. Didn't think I'd bother ringing as I thought I was in a minority of people that were having problems. Now that I know it's a widely recognised problem, I'll follow up with a phone call as you've suggested. Hopefully they'll actually show interest in providing a fix.

L5

heres my speed now, on 15mb package, almost maxing it out



Ill post later on about 8pm, when it'll be about a quarter of this speed

Snake Plisken

No didn't get a call back as promised but thats not surprising. Thanks John2009, your chat with the engineers basically confirms what we all suspected the UPC nodes are over-subscribed, UPC I reckon think that the majority of their customers won't even check their speeds, but why should we pay for a service when they cannot supply it on a constant level? Anyone who calls make sure to push for credit to be put back on your account until they resolve this issue, I and many more have been getting slower speeds then their minimum package so thats the reduction I want in my bill. If enough of us push for this credit then it will hit them in the pockets and they will have to act to fix this issue sooner that later.

Tony

I dont understand though how the nodes became suddenly overscribed at the time of the upgrade and it seems that all nodes have suffered equally from reports here. Unless they reduced the capacity of the fibre backbone its hard to understand why speeds went down so dramaticially and did not just revert to their pre upgrade levels. Is some sort of throttling going on ?

fionny

Engie showed up today and confirmed that there is a problem on my line with too much noise etc... its more then likely a flooded junction box thingy as all my area is underground. He said it should be fixed tomorrow.

He also pointed out that he himself has not seen 30megs on his line on the other side of the city (although my brother does). But it was his opinion that they jumped to 30 in too much of a hurry to test it....

rymus

bizarre.. I'm back up to my previous 15mbit now. I'm sure having just posted this it'll go to hell within 10 mins though

Snake Plisken

Tony wrote: »

I dont understand though how the nodes became suddenly overscribed at the time of the upgrade and it seems that all nodes have suffered equally from reports here. Unless they reduced the capacity of the fibre backbone its hard to understand why speeds went down so dramaticially and did not just revert to their pre upgrade levels. Is some sort of throttling going on ?

I have to say even on the 20meg package here in Lucan I've never got 20meg max has been 18meg off peak so I do believe that this issue has been around for a while but the move to 30meg has made it impossible in some over-subscribed area nodes to get anywhere over the 20meg .

John2009

Basically the way i see it now is, i know now that my local node is over-subscribed and i have made my voice well known that " i know there's a fault " and maybe 1 or 2 more people in the area could have voiced their concerns too because we know about speedtest and downloads etc etc,

but to the average joe soap who comes home from work or school each day and switches on their laptops or pc and sees that they can surf, watch youtube, skype, bebo and the rest probably are'nt to bothered or know of what they should be getting as long as they have a connection their happy.

If you have maybe 2 - 4 UPC broadband users that have made a complaint to them out of for arguments sake 200 users on that particular node, i dont think UPC are going to move the moon and the stars just for us tiny portion of unhappy but abit tech savvy customers to notice what speeds we should be getting that we pay good money for.

I guess i have to make do with what speeds i have until such time that UPC start to roll out their proposed DOCSIS 3 network upgrade and when that comes along i will not be jumping straight into the deep-end, would be chuffed with a solid 40 - 50MB solid connection if its possible to achieve in my area when the time comes along.

IrishTonyO

speeds are normal this evening so far, well except the upload, wonder have they fixed something?

F1ngers

30Mb/s, wireless in Tallaght.

Nehaxak

Speedtest of direct file download from HeaNet FTP.

John2009

Nehaxak wrote: »

Speedtest of direct file download from HeaNet FTP.

That's a cracking result you got there. Are your speeds spot on always?

Snake Plisken

Maybe they need to hit a certain number of users per Node before they can justify the cost of an upgrade, be that 50% over subscribed to that particular Node. Our hands are tied until the official Launch in March of this product.

John2009

Come march when they auto upgrade current users who hav'nt availed of the speed increase yet, our damn node will probably explode , maybe that will push them to get the finger out and upgrade our node.

Magzire

Okay i got NTL Chorus 30/3 meg about a week now. I'm pleased with the

download speed. Highest i seen it go was 3.2Mb/s on a torrent. But my

upload is terrible. Definitely not getting what I paid for, maybe one sixth of

what I should be getting.:rolleyes:







I have reset my Cisco router a couple of times now. So what should i do?

Contact UPC or just wait it out and hope it gets better?

IrishTonyO

Magzire wrote: »

Okay i got NTL Chorus 30/3 meg about a week now. I'm pleased with the

download speed. Highest i seen it go was 3.2Mb/s on a torrent. But my

upload is terrible. Definitely not getting what I paid for, maybe one sixth of

what I should be getting.:rolleyes:







I have reset my Cisco router a couple of times now. So what should i do?

Contact UPC or just wait it out and hope it gets better?

Contact UPC, they won't know you have a problem unless you tell them:)

IrishTonyO

15 Mb line, Download speed still good has been down to below 5Mbps at this time since the upgrade.

L5

yeah good download speed this evening (15mb line)



upload is still not great, never has been anywhere above 1.5mb

IrishTonyO

L5 wrote: »

yeah good download speed this evening (15mb line)



upload is still not great, never has been anywhere above 1.5mb

15Mb line has max upload of 1.5Mb

Tony

Improved here too for this time of the evening on a 30MB

theteal

lads, i noticed connection speeds going to the dogs - xbox live MW2 unplayable - during the freeze of a couple of weeks ago; similar thing happened last year. as i think of it now, the upgrade happened at about the same time. i decided not to call but keep an eye on speedtests for a couple of weeks to see an improvement.

now, it is a lot better, but looking at the results, i'm not getting anywhere close to max - 20meg package


as you can see, a previous poster's 15meg line is pulling in a higher bandwidth. upload speed is utter caic (my meteor midband stick pumps quicker).

i'm just posting to say thanks for all the previous info. i'll call and weigh in with the complaints tomorrow

gone_crazry

Dublin 7 on a 20mb line from UPC

been like this for over a week now...already logged around 9 calls and all i got from the technical guys are : It may take 1 day 1 month or 2 months to be fixed...

thats like ~ i dont care what ur problem is as long as i am being paid for answering the phone.

Any1 knows when all this mess is going to be fixed at UPC?:mad:

ryball

No improvement here. 15Mb line :mad:

the_law

Just to update you all with my progress - reported excessive contention yesterday evening 25/01 to Customer service. After basic investigation case forwarded to Tech Support and promised a call back.

Called just now 26/01 (no call back received) and after a 22 minute hold for Tech Support the call was answered by a Customer Service person who apologised for the delay (clearly TS are mobbed) and said that she could see on my account that Technical Support had forwarded the problem today to what sounded like RMC (RNC?) who are clearly the next level in the chain, and that they would get in touch within 48 hours.

To be honest, if all this leads to a resolution I haven't got a problem. Everyone I've spoken to in UPC has been polite and efficient, and if 48 hours is what they need then fine.

Will keep you all posted.

An interesting point to note is that if you read the 'conditions' page of the UPC broadband packages on their website (not the major T&Cs, the ones on http://www.upc.ie/broadband/thirty/ ) it states (as required to do so by the joint Comreg/ASAI Code on broadband advertising) that

Average expected broadband speeds at peak times are 5Mb, 15Mb and 30Mb.

Now if anyone tries to get out of lower speeds on the 'average' word, then if that's how they are using average then speeds must also be higher sometimes in order to average at 30Mbit. Now the modem is rate limited to 30Mbit so that's impossible!

So for once, a Comreg effort made a BB provider put information in their ad that is of use to us.

the_law

fionny wrote: »

Engie showed up today ... it was his opinion that they jumped to 30 in too much of a hurry to test it....

Selling a 30Mbit product on DOCSIS 1.1 is the equivalent of offering a 24Mbit ADSL service with 100 ports on the DSLAM and only 30.4Mbits upstream bandwidth.

gone_crazry

I have been told that someone would get in touch within 48hours aswell..Tomorrow morning will be 48 hours and none contacted me yet. One girl from billing departments called and said that she is waiting for the problem to be resolved so she can credit me back for the hours i didnt receive proper service. But no call yet from tech people saying when this issue is going to be solved.

Funny story they come up with everytime is they are working on the cables..How wierd is it for them to work on the cables only during peak time. IF there is any UPC workers moderating this thread then please tell ur customer care agents to stop feeding people with nonsense. People paying for a service and using the internet are not dumb enough to eat that kind of stuff everytime.

On a sidenote.. I was never informed of any maintenance upgrade or even such a downgrade from 20mb to barely 1mb.