Experience with UPC/Chorus BB when working from home?

Victor_M

Hi,
My Wife is starting to work from home, my contract with Esat BT is up in march and I'm planning to Move to UPC 30 Mbps connection and switch the phones over to Blueface, has anyone had any experience with using UPC to run a business, especially in D15 (Castleknock) from a home office?
I've been with NTL/UPC in the past (not in the last 4 years) and I left them due to patchy BB service, it seemed any time my wife went to use the BB it was down.
Have they improved? Much and all as I dislike Eircon & Esat BT, with their slow speeds, high ping times and huge prices they are reliable. I'll be gutted if I sign up for 12 months only to find the service drops out on a regular basis, particularly now that my wife's business will depend on the BB for VOIP as well as internet access.

Any feed back would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

the_law

There's always your 7 day cooling off period... hammer the connection hard for that week and that'll give you a good indication... If not, stick with BT.

Victor_M

Sorry to be bumping this thread, but I'm trying to do as much homework before I make the switch to UPC, would current customers of UPC recommend them to a friend? Put it another way in 4 years with Eircom/Esat BT I've had a handful of outages, actually only 1 proper outage and a handful of slowdowns, mainly this year, so over all apart from the price and lack of really high speed, they have been reliable. So if reliability of service was a priority I'd happily recommend them, but on every other front I'd suggest they look at the competition.

How would UPC/NTL/Chorus compare from an uptime point of view? How many outages would you expect to see in a given month, would they be a brief loss in service or out for a few hours at a time?

And what sort of ping times would I be likely to get? Do the cable modems work the same way as DSL modems from a NAT 1,2, & 3 point of view? I'm guessing when the BB is working properly there is no lag when gaming and low enough ping times, would that be true?

Fat_Fingers

Hard one to answer, i can only tell you my personal experience here.. I've been with Eircom for 9 years and had only one day that service was down for a few hours.
I've been with UPC about 3-4 weeks and had 3 full days of no service. Maybe it was just bad luck.

When i was with eircom i had full bandwidth i purchased all the time, no matter what time of the day is. OK, ping could get as bas as 120ms when is busy. Now with UPC I'm on 15mb. I get max 12Mb early morning up to 9 - 10AM then it goes down slowly and it hits its worse around 6PM to 11PM when speed is between 4Mb and 8Mb, sometimes as low as 1Mb.

Pete67

I've been with UPC for about 5 years now, and curently have 20mbit service. Very few issues in my area (Firhouse), I've had maybe two or three outages in all that time. One was when I upgraded to 20mbit from 10mbit and it turned out the original cable modem was not up to it. They replaced the modem but it took about two days. I also use Blueface as the primary phone line and they are extremely good.

As far as I know UPC will not allow you to configure their cable modem for Blueface (they only support their own phone service directly on the modem) so you will need a separate wireless router and ATA. The combined router/ATA has benefits in that it is easier to prioritise voice traffic to ensure good call quality.

One thing to consider is power outages - this would leave you with no phone line if you are using voip. I bought a standalone UPS and run the cable modem, wireless router, ATA, and DECT base station from it. It will run these for about 12 hours if there is a power failure, so you will have phone and internet at least for as long as a laptop battery lasts. After that you need a generator, but I cannot remember having a power failure of more than a couple of hours in the last 15 years!

Victor_M

Pete67 wrote: »

I've been with UPC for about 5 years now, and curently have 20mbit service. Very few issues in my area (Firhouse), I've had maybe two or three outages in all that time. One was when I upgraded to 20mbit from 10mbit and it turned out the original cable modem was not up to it. They replaced the modem but it took about two days. I also use Blueface as the primary phone line and they are extremely good.

As far as I know UPC will not allow you to configure their cable modem for Blueface (they only support their own phone service directly on the modem) so you will need a separate wireless router and ATA. The combined router/ATA has benefits in that it is easier to prioritise voice traffic to ensure good call quality.

One thing to consider is power outages - this would leave you with no phone line if you are using voip. I bought a standalone UPS and run the cable modem, wireless router, ATA, and DECT base station from it. It will run these for about 12 hours if there is a power failure, so you will have phone and internet at least for as long as a laptop battery lasts. After that you need a generator, but I cannot remember having a power failure of more than a couple of hours in the last 15 years!

Jasus Pete, great info, were you in the boyscouts when you were younger? A UPS for your phone system now that's what you call prepared.

I'll be using blueface too but I'll have the calls going to 2 phones the second being a mobile if there is an outage they will al get directed to the mobiles, but the cost will be on our shoulders for the diverted calls so it wouldn't want to be happening too often!

So it seems DSL is the way to go for outright reliability at lower speeds, higher ping times and higher cost, and cable for less reliable, sometimes higher contended, but much higher speeds, both have their ups and downs

DingDong

Victor If its for work you could always look into one of the SME product from UPC. You pay a premium but you do get your own account manager.
Take a look here here.

Chanquete

Pete67 wrote: »

One thing to consider is power outages - this would leave you with no phone line if you are using voip. I bought a standalone UPS and run the cable modem, wireless router, ATA, and DECT base station from it. It will run these for about 12 hours if there is a power failure, so you will have phone and internet at least for as long as a laptop battery lasts.

Can I ask what UPS system did you buy? Considering doing this at the moment.