Internal wiring or face plate affecting Broadband speeds

mack10

Hoping for some assistance in resolving a broadband speed issue.

I live in an apartment that is approximately 10 years old and it has a single eircom phone socket. We have nothing else connected to the line (e.g. phonewatch alarm). Recently I moved from Vodafone (7MB) to Sky (24MB). [I understand that I will never get 24MB].

Since joining Sky I have never gotten higher than 7MB but it is predominantly between 4 and 6MBs. After 4 weeks of calls to sky and trying different solutions this is what I know:

• An issue at the exchange was resolved by Eircom engineer fixing the telephone part of the line,
• Line attainable speeds are 10MB but stable speed is no higher than 8MB,
• Removing the face plate improves the speed to 6-7MB but no higher.
  

[*]

According to Sky the next step is to get a private electrician/engineer to take a look at the internal wiring in my apartment.

Has anyone else experienced similar issues and how was it resolved?
Anyone from Eircom offer any further tests/checks that I could perform?
Or can anyone recommend an experienced electrician that could look at this for me?


Thanks in advance

eircom: Alan

mack10 wrote: »

Hoping for some assistance in resolving a broadband speed issue.

I live in an apartment that is approximately 10 years old and it has a single eircom phone socket. We have nothing else connected to the line (e.g. phonewatch alarm). Recently I moved from Vodafone (7MB) to Sky (24MB). [I understand that I will never get 24MB].

Since joining Sky I have never gotten higher than 7MB but it is predominantly between 4 and 6MBs. After 4 weeks of calls to sky and trying different solutions this is what I know:

• An issue at the exchange was resolved by Eircom engineer fixing the telephone part of the line,
• Line attainable speeds are 10MB but stable speed is no higher than 8MB,
• Removing the face plate improves the speed to 6-7MB but no higher.
  
  
  

[*]

According to Sky the next step is to get a private electrician/engineer to take a look at the internal wiring in my apartment.

Has anyone else experienced similar issues and how was it resolved?
Anyone from Eircom offer any further tests/checks that I could perform?
Or can anyone recommend an experienced electrician that could look at this for me?


Thanks in advance

[*]

[font=Times New Roman","serif]Hi mack10

As this is service provided by another provider we will be unable to conduct any further test ( for regulatory purposes and because we simply do not have access to do so).

I can confirm that any qualified electrician should be able to help with the faceplate. I have never heard the removing the faceplate increases speeds to be honest. My best advice is to check with your current provider on what speed your line is actually 'synced' to and request them to increase this if possible.

Thanks
Al[/font]

grassroots33

Hi Mack,

From my similar experience I would probably say with 99% certainty there is nothing wrong with the wiring in your apartment. This is just the usual line of bull**** that ISP's feed to unsuspecting public.

I switched from eircon's 3mb line after Christmas to Vodafone up to 24mb deal as soon as I got connected the best speed I could get was 5 to 5.5mbs, during the day and in the evening it dropped to .5-1mbs before disconnecting altogether and having no service all evening and night weekends included. They blamed the same things, Your wiring, Your modem, Your dsl filter,. My brother is an electrician that wired my house 7 years ago, he checked everything, and all ok. It took me 20 working days to go the comreg route to break the contract.
I am now back with eircom and I am in the same boat with the same battle listening to the same support scripted lines of ****e that Vodafone was feeding me for a month.

Researching the net and all my personal experience this is what I found so far,
like you my Line attainable speeds are 10MB but you will not get this ever, some people on 24mb package get around 11-14mbs if their lines support up to 24mbs. The engineers that called to my house explained, if you log into your modem and see that your line attainable speed is set to, mine is something like 6144kbs, but I cannot reach this maximum, as there is a certain percentage lost due to distance from exchange and something called inverse squared law, meaning as the engineer says around .5 of a meg less that the line can take according to DSL line speed you find in your modem.
I think it would be a waste of your money to have a electrician come check and look for something he more than likely will not find, if it works at 4-5 mbs then it works, the only thing to slow it down is the amount of people that are using it at the same time, I mean in the evening at peak times everyone's broadband slows down, mine goes off.

Looking through the forums and here on boards I see that since last September everybody is complaining with the slow speeds they are getting. A story in the independent last week about how the data being used in Ireland in the last 12 months has doubled, net flicks, rteplayer, and such heavy users are killing the third world infrastructure in this country plain and simple but ISP are all about selling the package, they will never admit that there is something wrong with the (service) they provide you!

Well that's my 2cents, Best of luck with whatever you decide to do.

mack10

Eircom Al - thanks for the reply. I had a feeling that would be Eircom's position - "it is not our problem, it is theirs". I wouldn't hold out much hope that if I were to move to Eircom that you would go through the exact same scripted tests and checks only to tell me the same thing.

I was also told that my exchange would be upgraded to efibre my March this year but that hasn't happened and even if it did they gave no indication of whether it would be wired to all/any households in my estate.

Sky technicians have tried increasing my speed to 10MB but it wasn't stable and had to reduce it back to 6MB which is less than I received on Vodafone. They offered a stable 7MB at all times day or night. I'm kicking myself for leaving Vodafone and paying €160 termination charge only to find out the "competition" couldn't even provide the same level of service never mind better.

Grassroots33 - I feel your pain. Thankfully my speeds are fairly steady just lower than what I was hoping for. I knew when I signed up that if they said 24Mb I'd be lucky to get 17. I was willing to take that risk as it would have been a 10MB improvement on what I currently had. Now I'm going to attempt to get out of this contract even though they've delayed me past the 30days with constant back and forth.

I have a funny feeling that even if I did pay an electrician to take a look at the wiring he wouldn't be able to access it all as I'm in an apartment block albeit with only 3 units.

I even would have chosen UPC broadband but they couldn't offer that until 2018???????