Misleading Eircom Ad

Simon201

Does anyone else think this latest Eircom Broadband ad is misleading - the guy says something about there being no 'congestion'. He says it real quick. Then when people contact tech support cos their broadband is slow they get told this is because of contention. They then reply 'but in your ad they said there was no 'contention'! Which is not the case with Eircom's broadband.

Typical!

jor el

All current eircom broadband products have contention/congestion. Their new "NGB" branded product supposedly has no contention/congestion, which means you should get the max your line can handle (up to 8Mbps) all the time. I'd like to see that verified by independent sources though. It remains to be seen how reliable this claim will be.

Cabaal

Simon201 wrote: »

Does anyone else think this latest Eircom Broadband ad is misleading - the guy says something about there being no 'congestion'. He says it real quick. Then when people contact tech support cos their broadband is slow they get told this is because of contention. They then reply 'but in your ad they said there was no 'contention'! Which is not the case with Eircom's broadband.

Typical!

Your confusing Eircom's general Bit-stream product and their newer NGN bit-stream product, so its not really misleading as the advert refers to NGN clearly

Simon201

Yeah I see what you mean Cabaal - I've just found a page which does in fact say -

With Next Generation Broadband (NGB) you will not be sharing your broadband connection with other Internet users. Therefore even at peak hours of the day you will receive a consistent speed and experience with your eircom NGB product

But still, why don't they use the term 'no contention ratio' more plainly in the ads and on the NGB site? The word 'contention' is not even used anywhere on that site....

Dardania

I thought that once there are more than 30% of cables in a multicore running DSL that cross inductance (because of the high frequencies invloved) caused cross talk, and interference. surely this is a form of low grade contention, as it would undoubtedly affect your SNR stats, and therefore transfer speeds?

watty

Crosstalk is part of line quality like distance and condtion of copper, insulation, quality of it (CAT3 etc). Yes cross talk will reduce 10Mbps to under 7Mbps or lower. But so can many things. Lots of people only get 1Mbps, 3Mbps, etc...

It's not even to do with the percentage of cables either.

It's not contention either. Contention has two meanings. Design contention is if your system has X bandwidth total and divide that into sum of all customer's package speeds. Actual contention is the X bandwidth total divided into sum af all actually online costomer's packages.

It's unlikely they design for 1:1 contention. If you have 1000 people on DSL on an exchange you will save serious money by only having enough X for the second calculation to give an answer close to 1. If past statistics show that only 1/10th of users simultaneously download (and maybe only 1/4 online at same time), then you can install 10:1 contention backhaul and to the users it looks like 1:1.

In practice the actual simultaneous downloads is likely to be a good bit less than 1/10th.

Also the cap actually limits contention, as you can only actually download for 1/100th of the time maybe... or less.

So they will not at all be installing 1:1 contention, contention free. But it will seem like 1:1 hence the expression "congestion".

BUT!

If a TV series becomes popular on streaming, or P2p rises to more than 15% of users, or people spend more time watching streaming than broadcast TV, or people upgrade to higher cap, then actual contention (what they call congestion) will rise and could go to 10:1 if people do all their TV watching via Net and also do p2p.

Note that BBC, C4, Sky have all had / have legal p2p (downloads rather than streaming often uses Kontiki P2P installed by the "player" application). Then it will be bad again.

Same applies if many more people sign up to DSL.

They will have extra capacity, but you can be sure not enough for future growth if a Broadcaster adds something "nice" or Government force a slash in obscenely high line rental.