Broadband Woes...

sikander

Hi,

I recently moved from magnet to eircom. Two years with Magnet ISP never had a dropped connection on 12 mb + connection. However the Eircom Representative managed to convince me to switch. I would not go into details about the various headaches experienced, but the broadband support is really bad. I have made calls about dropped connections, upload lagging and dropping etc. One fix was to downgrade connection settings from 14 to 12 MBps. When i rang about the upload lagging as i play games and upload loads of code. NO fault found and cost of ringing the 1890 number adds up.

Next i did regular speed tests on speedtest.net (service provided by eircom / dublin server), its a hit and miss. Two years with magnet i was exactly at 12 / 1 Connection Status. Never a problem.

I dont want to be a bad advertisement about Eircom, but the customer service and sales dont match. 10 years + in telecommunications, I find the some of the answers offered by technical support staff nearly inexcusable. Its bad for my business and leisure time.

Sikander

eircom: Ant

Hi Sikander,

Thanks for post.

If you want to PM your home phone, or eircom Acc Number, I can investigate your case history with Technical Support.

Not sure if I can offer any more incite than a tech, though I can assure you that I will check if they have followed all the correct troubleshooting processes for broadband slow speed or connection issues.

All the best,
Ant

sikander wrote: »

Hi,

I recently moved from magnet to eircom. Two years with Magnet ISP never had a dropped connection on 12 mb + connection. However the Eircom Representative managed to convince me to switch. I would not go into details about the various headaches experienced, but the broadband support is really bad. I have made calls about dropped connections, upload lagging and dropping etc. One fix was to downgrade connection settings from 14 to 12 MBps. When i rang about the upload lagging as i play games and upload loads of code. NO fault found and cost of ringing the 1890 number adds up.

Next i did regular speed tests on speedtest.net (service provided by eircom / dublin server), its a hit and miss. Two years with magnet i was exactly at 12 / 1 Connection Status. Never a problem.

I dont want to be a bad advertisement about Eircom, but the customer service and sales dont match. 10 years + in telecommunications, I find the some of the answers offered by technical support staff nearly inexcusable. Its bad for my business and leisure time.

Sikander

sikander

Hi All,

On investigation of eircom broadband services we found some problems. There was no point in pointing out the problems if we could not find proper solutions. so first the problems,

1) Eircom zyxel p-660hw-t1 v3 router is buggy or its firmware is not up to scratch. The router has old 2010 firmware and the latest 2011 cannot be user installed as firmware has been locked down.

2) If there is a denial of service attack or rapid scanning of ports on your router, the connection will drop. This is due to the fact that CPU usage on router is 100 percent and hence system overload.

3) Increasing NAT settings from 1024 to 4048 will address the problem of the max. number of session per host!, but will overload the router even more and thus even a small port scan can cause the nice zyxel p-660hw-t1 v3 to reboot.

4) Wireless on the router is meant for low to medium usage. try to push boundaries and again you will have disconnections due to CPU flat lining at 100 percent.

5) Eircom sets a upload and download speed which is publicly view-able on the router. However there is a hidden operator setting which tells if upload or download has to be given preference.

Solution One.

Find a old eircom router and use it. They are much more reliable.

Solution Two.

Spend money and get own router, especially if you are a heavy user. Dont know the eircom support position on this solution.

Solution Three. ( Our way )

As we are stuck with this modem and therefore we use the eircom router in bridge mode. The main router is an old belkin router. We also disabled wireless on eircom zyxel modem so it does only job. Maintain ADSL2+ connection to exchange. The great router excels in this.

Biggest pro. you are not in violation of any eircom terms of service.

Will post the generic technical details on this in next post after confirming some more details after calling eircom support line on 1890260260.

Sikander

sikander

The settings for router in bridging mode is,

1) Goto ZyXEL P-660HW-T1 v3 routers Network > Internet (Wan) >Interconnection.

2) Change Mode to Bridge and Encapsulation to RFC 1483. Leave the other options same.

3) In tour router select connection type to be PPoE, username : eircom@eircom.net and password : broadand1. Service name should be left blank.