Eircom e fibre unlimited or UPC

tunner

Looking for advice lads. I have UPC 100meg and I stream TV but its constantly buffering. I am thinking of switching to eircoms efibre unlimited as its the same price as what I pay now

Would youse recommend it or has anyone done it?

Thanks

Praetorian

It's a very new product. The general consensus is that efibre is very good. You can get the same products from Magnet / Digiweb / Vodafone. If you are near a cabinet then you should get good speeds. Should be cheaper than your UPC connection also (with magnet anyway). In theory you could order magnet whom have no minimum contract...keep your UPC for a month as well, then cancel whichever one you want. Make sure you are not mid contract with UPC however.

RangeR

What's the length from your cabinet? Speed drops off dramatically every 100 or 200 meters.

* Generally [adaptive profile]*
Distance : Speed
<200m : 70 Mbps
<300m : 60 Mbps
<500m : 50 Mbps
<750m : 40 Mbps
<850m : 30 Mbps
< 1000 : <25 Mbps

ekevosu

Praetorian wrote: »

It's a very new product. The general consensus is that efibre is very good. You can get the same products from Magnet / Digiweb / Vodafone. If you are near a cabinet then you should get good speeds. Should be cheaper than your UPC connection also (with magnet anyway). In theory you could order magnet whom have no minimum contract...keep your UPC for a month as well, then cancel whichever one you want. Make sure you are not mid contract with UPC however.

Magnet have a cancellation fee of €50 on the no contract offer....not sure if they offer first month free etc though.

tunner

How do I know how far I am from a cabinet?

RangeR

Step 1. Locate your cabinet.
Step 2. How far away is it from your house, as the crow files.
Step 3. Add on 50% to give you a rough guess.

It's usually at the end of your road / estate.

jamesnp

Also worth noting that the eFibre upload speed (20mb) absolutly destorys even UPC's 150mb offering (10mb)!

-jp

tunner

RangeR wrote: »

Step 1. Locate your cabinet.
Step 2. How far away is it from your house, as the crow files.
Step 3. Add on 50% to give you a rough guess.

It's usually at the end of your road / estate.

By cabinet do you mean the exchange? The green box?

RangeR

Not the exchange but The Green box. There should be two beside each other. If it's only one, it's not upgraded. The second one should have a pretty big lock on it's side.

PrzemoF

jamesnp wrote: »

Also worth noting that the eFibre upload speed (20mb) absolutly destorys even UPC's 150mb offering (10mb)!

-jp

But is it a real speed or advertised speed? I have UPC 100MB/10MB and having 20MB upload would be great (a home server).

jamesnp

My line rate is 71678 Kbps / 20479 Kbps and am getting 67Mbps/17Mbps according to Speedtest.net

... so yeah, real speed.

I backup to AWS and the upload speed is nothing short of miraculous — for example, I backed up a full 120GB HD yesterday in about 12 hrs.

-jp

PrzemoF

jamesnp, what router/modem do you have?

jamesnp

It's the Magnet one, a technicolour thing — it's pretty awful to be honest, but I'm only using it as a PPPoE bridge to my Gargoyle router.

-jp

jamesnp

I should also say, seeing as you have a home server, that the [unadvertized] static IP magnet give is a nice touch.

Beir bua,
JP

Praetorian

jamesnp wrote: »

My line rate is 71678 Kbps / 20479 Kbps and am getting 67Mbps/17Mbps according to Speedtest.net

... so yeah, real speed.

I backup to AWS and the upload speed is nothing short of miraculous — for example, I backed up a full 120GB HD yesterday in about 12 hrs.

-jp

Your sync rates are on the exceptionally high side. Lucky you! When uploading to AWS, how many megabytes per second are you getting? Just off the top of my head...120 gb in 12 hours is 2.8 megabytes per second!

Most people won't sync quite that high. But most will definitely sync higher upload speeds than UPC's 5m/bit.

jamesnp

Praetorian wrote: »

Your sync rates are on the exceptionally high side. Lucky you! When uploading to AWS, how many megabytes per second are you getting? Just off the top of my head...120 gb in 12 hours is 2.8 megabytes per second!

Most people won't sync quite that high. But most will definitely sync higher upload speeds than UPC's 5m/bit.

I'm not sure, I'm using Arq for Glacier backups and it doesn't show. My backup class in Gargoyle shows an average of about 17000Kbps up though, so I guess about 2MB/sec. It's worth noting too that the 120GB HD may have contained duplicate files which wouldn't have been uploaded twice.

-jp

PrzemoF

jamesnp wrote: »

I should also say, seeing as you have a home server, that the [unadvertized] static IP magnet give is a nice touch.

Beir bua,
JP

I have a ddns confiured anyway. I'm 250 meters from an eircom box, so the download speed should be 60-70 Mbps.

tunner

Can we get back to my original post? Is it a good move for me? I'm about 100 meters from the cabinet

jamesnp

That's your decision. You have all the information you need to make it.

It's only really a good call if you 1) have issues with UPC and are willing to take a reduced download speed to get away from them 2) have a real need for a faster upload speed.

-jp

RangeR

tunner wrote: »

Can we get back to my original post? Is it a good move for me? I'm about 100 meters from the cabinet

Getting back to your OP, have you contacted UPC to fix the problem?

jamesnp

BTW, what TV service is always buffering? If your 100Mbps connection is working properly it's far more likely the issue is on the other end, something a change of ISP won't remedy.

-jp

tunner

I have contacted them and they sent an engineer out but he said there isn't much he can do its just that there are too many people congesting it.

I only need it for streaming movies on my Apple TV. I run a program called xbmc and use that to watch all my TV shows in the evenings. When I go to watch something it just starts buffering and then plays for ten mins and then buffers for ten mins and the cycle goes on and on till I turn the TV off in temper!

jamesnp

Which service though? If it's iTunes or Netflix then there's deffo a problem with a line, but if it's some dodgy server in China it's far more likely the line's fine and that the server on the other end is the problem.

Have you ever done a speed test when you're experiencing these problems?

How far is the router from your Apple TV? WiFi issues are another possability.

Beir bua,
JP

tunner

jamesnp wrote: »

Which service though? If it's iTunes or Netflix then there's deffo a problem with a line, but if it's some dodgy server in China it's far more likely the line's fine and that the server on the other end is the problem.

Have you ever done a speed test when you're experiencing these problems?

How far is the router from your Apple TV? WiFi issues are another possability.

Beir bua,
JP

Hi
Netflix is actually ok but I run a program called <snip> on xbmc on a jail broken Apple TV. I have my router address changed so I can access us Netflix.

I assume if there was a problem with that end then Netflix would buffer also?

I have the Apple TV under the TV n d beside the router and its connected directly to the Apple TV.

jamesnp

I'm thinking that <snip> is your problem and that your connection is totally grand.

Just to make sure, the next time it says that it's buffering, go to www.speedtest.net and do a test. Let us know what it says.

-jp

bk

tunner wrote: »

Hi
Netflix is actually ok but I run a program called <snip> on xbmc on a jail broken Apple TV. I have my router address changed so I can access us Netflix.

Mod Note: Please don't mention the name of the dodgy site you are using to access pirated material.

If Netflix is ok, then that sounds like it is an issue with the dodgy site you are using rather then anything to do with UPC.

So switching from UPC to VDSL (Eircom efibre) is unlikely to make any difference.

You have to understand that using dodgy pirated sites like this, your experience is very variable, as it depends on the upload speed of the people sharing the content, not your ISP.

Looking at the wider discussion of people thinking of switching from UPC to VDSL, a few points to consider:

- UPC's latency (ping times) in general seem to be significantly lower (better) then VDSL. On the VDSL speed tests being posted, ping times to Irish servers seem to be about 30ms, while typically they are around 10ms on UPC.

- UPC has the ability to boast their download speeds to 400mb/s and their upload speeds to 120mb/s with their existing modems!

VDSL tops out at 100mb down / 20mb up with vectoring enabled. If you lock yourself into a 12 month contract with VDSL, you might regret it in a few months time when UPC boast their speeds again, which I expect they will.

Freddy Smelly

tunner wrote: »

Looking for advice lads. I have UPC 100meg and I stream TV but its constantly buffering. I am thinking of switching to eircoms efibre unlimited as its the same price as what I pay now

Would youse recommend it or has anyone done it?

Thanks

stick with upc. efibre is full of problems

jamesnp

Freddy Smelly wrote: »

stick with upc. efibre is full of problems

I could say the same about any provider — what problems are you talking about?

-jp

Freddy Smelly

jamesnp wrote: »

I could say the same about any provider — what problems are you talking about?

-jp

phones not working. modems going dead after 8 days... macs not working because of ipv6

trust me i have to deal with it