UPC or EIRCOM

kenyard

i looked into options besides upc, being "rural" also....

all other services besides sat broadband work off eircoms existing lines so what you have with one you will more than likely have with the others.
Eircom have "metro" now which is their next gen. still old system, maxes at 24mb/s. they're broke so wont upgrade in future + LTE+fibre optic is the future anyway (LTE rights being sold soon. gonna be a huge deal for whoever gets them for phones and even sat broadband) fibre, upc already have the market sucked in.
I went with digiweb, changing from eircom's 1Mb service to digiwebs 8Mb service (my line maxes at 7Mb so i only get that)
its 100Gb download limit (vodafone have 400 i think), iv hit..or my nephew hit 150Gb on it and no problems, the limits are a fair usage policy, their main reason is so that you dont affect other customers and when you are rural and have max speeds at all times (i cant guarantee you will, its area specific) they wont enforce any limits.
I relooked at the services since and i think vodafone are cheaper than digiweb at the moment.
Bigger towns but not having upc will have metro more than likely (eircom have coverage map on their site) and all those do enforce the fair usage pretty much.
Also on another note. if your line goes down, its up to eircom to fix it, and since you arent their customer it can take ages (we were with perlico years upon years ago now, and it happened, and eircom didnt fix it- said 2 weeks so we switched back and they fixed it the next day...:P)
but everything going well, I would recommend digiweb or vodafone.
ping times, for me i think they were 30-60ms..thats on wifi, anything below 100ms is fine imo... =either way online gaming is fine using wifi on my xbox/wii/pc..im up there with the best of them generally so no lag issues
vodafone charge for going over your limit on broadband also i think (a fortune) whereas digiweb say they just throttle you(slow you to dialup speeds)
theres been lots of people complained in past abuot 500 euro bills and stuff from vodafone unexpectantly.. dunno if its still the case.. 2 years since i read into this stuff properly.
there may be others also. eircom line rental is 90% of my bill, so thats what it comes down to really.

jimmymal

Magnet might be worth the look, though not sure about rural situ!

https://www.magnet.ie/

Solair

jimmymal wrote: »

Magnet might be worth the look, though not sure about rural situ!

https://www.magnet.ie/

Magnet and Smart offer a LLU (Local Loop Unbundled) product i.e. they connect you to their equipment. In Smart's case, this is for both voice and data, so you get a dial tone from their exchange, not eircom's.

I'm not sure if Magnet provides its own voice service, or uses line-sharing i.e. the local eircom voice switch + their own DSL service. Perhaps someone who has magnet could clarify this?

These companies have only installed equipment in high-density population areas and even then only in a selection of exchanges (this could be based on factors like size, and also ability to connect to their fibre networks). In both cases this is about 40 exchanges, all of which are in major urban centres.

Both companies now provide bitstream i.e. using eircom's wholesale DSL access products routing data to their network i.e. the same as anyone else.

In areas where eircom has NGB you'll get up to 24mbit/s, if not you'll get up to 8mbit/s.

LLU providers can sometimes have better ping times, but to be honest, there isn't a huge difference between ADSL2+ on an LLU provider or on an eircom hosted one. It's the same technology.

Smart had a huge lead when it was providing LLU 24mbit/s ADSL+ when eircom was only doing 8 and in the days before UPC was a serious player.

scamalert

comparing upc to eircom is like comparing Ferrari to motorbike,in other words peace of $hit nothing else eircom is ,as to this day they still live in 1800s with their rotten phone lines and ridiculous charges 20e month for a phone line which no one ever uses one these days,that's my opinion.

Solair

scamalert wrote: »

comparing upc to eircom is like comparing Ferrari to motorbike,in other words peace of $hit nothing else eircom is ,as to this day they still live in 1800s with their rotten phone lines and ridiculous charges 20e month for a phone line which no one ever uses one these days,that's my opinion.

Well, I'd say more the 1990s than the 1800s.

They're suffering from two problems:

1) Serious lack of investment in new technology and

2) Irish bad planning laws which have resulted in scattered, expensive to serve populations and ridiculously long lines. You can thank previous Governments and the people who brought you the troika, the IMF, national financial humiliation, NAMA, property bubbles and bank collapses for that one!

Oh, yeah and the lack of investment, well guess who came up with the great deal that resulted in them going down a path where they ran up billions of debt without spending a cent on their networks!

Eircom have a fairly sophisticated fibre core but their access networks are pants in many areas and still living off infrastructure that was cutting edge in about 1988. They should have been investing in cabinets and fibre, instead they just borrowed money to buy themselves several times over.

I'm not entirely sure what the future's likely to hold for eircom, I just wish someone who actually ran telephone companies i.e. a major large European telco would pick them up. It urgently needs to be run as a going concern and a boring utility, not a speculative play thing!

scamalert

Solair wrote: »

Well, I'd say more the 1990s than the 1800s.

They're suffering from two problems:

1) Serious lack of investment in new technology and

2) Irish bad planning laws which have resulted in scattered, expensive to serve populations and ridiculously long lines. You can thank previous Governments and the people who brought you the troika, the IMF, national financial humiliation, NAMA, property bubbles and bank collapses for that one!

Oh, yeah and the lack of investment, well guess who came up with the great deal that resulted in them going down a path where they ran up billions of debt without spending a cent on their networks!

Eircom have a fairly sophisticated fibre core but their access networks are pants in many areas and still living off infrastructure that was cutting edge in about 1988. They should have been investing in cabinets and fibre, instead they just borrowed money to buy themselves several times over.

I'm not entirely sure what the future's likely to hold for eircom, I just wish someone who actually ran telephone companies i.e. a major large European telco would pick them up. It urgently needs to be run as a going concern and a boring utility, not a speculative play thing!

I believe you are right they have thousands of customers and over the years instead of investing money into structure they did F all,