Imagine LTE Rural Broadband

oscarBravo

alec76 wrote: »

Elon Musk seems to be our only hope?!
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/04/spacex-internet-satellites-elon-musk.html

You know that's still a wireless network, right?

alec76

oscarBravo wrote: »

You know that's still a wireless network, right?

Global network . Fair prices ..... Probably no local wireless/LTE providers left in Ireland .
Only Musk and FTTH.

Quin_Dub

George Sunsnow wrote: »

No data base issues with me,but I'd agree the regulation of Imagine is woeful
There should be quality control regulation

That being said,they've circa 15 to 20000 customers now,all of whom have just worse and in most cases significantly worse land line broadband options available

I don't see the point of using ftth as a yardstick to bash imagine with,if it's not available to Imagines customers

Then there's those who think 4 or 5 Mb broadband is the bees knees
There's a significant amount of those people around

This is a key thing..

For most people , the alternative options are either non-existant or a complete joke.

In my own case , I live about 4kms away from the telephone exchange outside a small rural village. They upgraded the exchange to Fibre , but of course I'm way outside the range so I'm stuck with a 3Mb/s profile giving significantly less than that in real terms.

So I moved to Mobile Broadband for the last year or so via Three , paying €70/Month for a 4G account with a 250GB profile , plus an additional €10/Month for a VOIP Phone service. I'd typically average 200-220Gb a month.

Performing at it's best I would get maybe 20-22Mb/s but at peak times that would drop down to ~5Mb/s with very high ping , so I wouldn't have been able to watch Netflix in the evenings for example.

I signed up with Imagine about a month ago and so far I'm very pleased.

I have line of sight to the Maghera Mast (17kms away) and when they tested from their van they got 55Mb/s , however when they connected it all up with the proper connection I was getting 90Mb/s.

In the month since it's been consistently very good , during the day I get a solid 70Mb/s and often higher and even now at 8:30 PM whilst connected to a work Skype conference call with screen-sharing active over VPN I'm still getting 48Mb/s on Speedtest.

I've been able to stream Netflix in full Ultra HD without the slightest issue (other than hitting the 20Gb limit!!). I have now set Netflix to the "standard" profile which gives me 720p image that my 4K TV upscales anyway so the picture is great..

As a result after that 1st day "testing" I haven't gotten the 15Gb warning mail once...

And that's with me working from home full time and 2 teenagers watch Netflix and playing XBox. I will caveat that by saying that any xbox game updates are done via tethered mobile (Thank you Three and your truly "all you can eat" data!!)

I fully understand that if my house was a few kms closer to my village I'd have a much better service for a bit cheaper , but for where I am and what is available I couldn't be happier with the Service thus far..

I'm hopeful that, as much of the population along the line between me and the Mast have access to proper fixed-line services that I should keep a decent level of service moving forward , but I'll take what I can for as long as I can..

smokingman

Well, surprise surprise. No Internet again.
Funny enough, it's happening after their support line closes...

ItHurtsWhenIP

George Sunsnow wrote: »

...
I don't see the point of using ftth as a yardstick to bash imagine with,if it's not available to Imagines customers
...

I believe the point about the using FTTH as a yardstick was because Imagine themselves went on a propaganda campaign a few months back in "sponsored" features (which had disabled comments in the online versions) in the national papers saying that their Fibre LTE is a much cheaper, reliable solution than proper FTTH for the NBP.

This is of course:

George Sunsnow

ItHurtsWhenIP wrote: »

I believe the point about the using FTTH as a yardstick was because Imagine themselves went on a propaganda campaign a few months back in "sponsored" features (which had disabled comments in the online versions) in the national papers saying that their Fibre LTE is a much cheaper, reliable solution than proper FTTH for the NBP.

This is of course:

That's as may be,it's the Ryanair philosophy of getting your message out there by whatever means
It has no impact whatsoever on ftth roll out
I'll still take ftth when it comes,my neighbours who think their 4Mb is the bees knees will stay on that until forced otherwise
The Imagine hate is only justified if you're one of their disappointed customers with better options available
If you're not one of those,it's better to concentrate on things that do affect you

Like Quin_Dub,and me,there's an awful lot of us lucky enough to be happy with a much faster service currently only provide able by imagine

chrismon

George Sunsnow wrote: »

That's as may be,it's the Ryanair philosophy of getting your message out there by whatever means
It has no impact whatsoever on ftth roll out
I'll still take ftth when it comes,my neighbours who think their 4Mb is the bees knees will stay on that until forced otherwise
The Imagine hate is only justified if you're one of their disappointed customers with better options available
If you're not one of those,it's better to concentrate on things that do affect you

Like Quin_Dub,and me,there's an awful lot of us lucky enough to be happy with a much faster service currently only provide able by imagine

The problem is when you have no other option available, you have been promised 30MB minimum, for €60 a month, and you can't even get online.
People are allowed to be p!ssed off.

The high horse brigade

alec76 wrote: »

Elon Musk seems to be our only hope?!
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/04/spacex-internet-satellites-elon-musk.html

I'm looking forward to the bit where they break the laws of physics and make radio waves travel faster. You'll get great speeds on satellite, but this is no use in the real world when your information takes more than a full second to get to the satellite and back.

alec76

The high horse brigade wrote: »

I'm looking forward to the bit where they break the laws of physics and make radio waves travel faster. You'll get great speeds on satellite, but this is no use in the real world when your information takes more than a full second to get to the satellite and back.

You are forgetting one thing , latency is the key factor for the current sat providers , their satellites operate in geostationary orbit ( 35 000 kilometres) and Musk's supposed to be in 1100-1300 km orbits . . I'll be expecting ping time in a range of 20-35 ms.

dickieh

Just off the phone to tech as i had a 15gb warning emailed to me at 3 this morning ! That was a mistake. However in discussing data usage he told me that we have a 50gb allowance for the week between around 1 and 7 in the morning.

How dose this work can i use the full 50 in one night and after 7am get my 20gb. then what is measured after 1am if ive used my weeks 50gb but still have my 20 daily left ?

Can someone explain how much and when it is measured please.

Anyone ells getting warnings when they think they shouldn't ?

George Sunsnow

chrismon wrote: »

The problem is when you have no other option available, you have been promised 30MB minimum, for €60 a month, and you can't even get online.
People are allowed to be p!ssed off.

Exactly,I agree
People not getting a minimum of 30Mb have a right to be pissed off
People getting nothing at all or consistently poor coverage may engage in the process to leave (free of charge in my opinion if the service is not what was sold)
However if your alternative is way less than what you can get from imagine,you'd be obviously better off staying put
Clearly some people are being set up in sub optimal circumstances

I was onto tech yesterday evening,as I couldn't browse
While waiting I plugged out their router and by the time I was talking to a tech,everything was normal
They said in my case the router was just stuck in a session from being plugged in for so long (weeks in my case)

The high horse brigade

alec76 wrote: »

You are forgetting one thing , latency is the key factor for the current sat providers , their satellites operate in geostationary orbit ( 35 000 kilometres) and Musk's supposed to be in 1100-1300 km orbits . . I'll be expecting ping time in a range of 20-35 ms.

It's still a nonsense idea. Most small village exchanges have more backhaul than a single satellite with thousands of shared users. An Imagine mast could even have more backhaul

Scruff

dickieh wrote: »

Just off the phone to tech as i had a 15gb warning emailed to me at 3 this morning ! That was a mistake. However in discussing data usage he told me that we have a 50gb allowance for the week between around 1 and 7 in the morning.

How dose this work can i use the full 50 in one night and after 7am get my 20gb. then what is measured after 1am if ive used my weeks 50gb but still have my 20 daily left ?

Can someone explain how much and when it is measured please.

Anyone ells getting warnings when they think they shouldn't ?

From what tech support told me recently there is an additional 50gb weekly limit runs from 01:00 to 07:00 that resets on the Monday 01:00.
The 50Gb is for the entire week and can be used all in one go or spread across the week.
Downloads within this period and under the total 50Gb do not count towards the daily 20Gb limit.

The tech was able to tell me how much from each i had used. I asked if there were plans to make this info available to customers and he said they were testing a new customer portal internally that would allow you to do this but he had no info on when it would go public.
I also asked why the throttling was limited to 1Mb and he said there was no technical reason but was above his pay grade as to the why and it was one of the biggest areas of complaints but hasnt caused a change in policy.

i had a 60Gb game download that i didnt schedule that used up my daily 20Gb. I paused it until after 1am and then downloaded the rest at full speed and had no issue the following day with throttling so it worked as described for me on that occasion.

deadl0ck

My install is on Wednesday - I'll be running it in Parallel for a couple of months with my Eircom 5Meg connection so I can see how it goes without being screwed for work (I work from home 2 days a week and connect a lot to back end servers for development / deployment / source code management)

I'll be on the new Longford Mast (in Ardagh)

I'll post back as soon as I have some data speeds etc...

NewWorldLeader

Scruff wrote: »

From what tech support told me recently there is an additional 50gb weekly limit runs from 01:00 to 07:00 that resets on the Monday 01:00.
The 50Gb is for the entire week and can be used all in one go or spread across the week.
Downloads within this period and under the total 50Gb do not count towards the daily 20Gb limit.

The tech was able to tell me how much from each i had used. I asked if there were plans to make this info available to customers and he said they were testing a new customer portal internally that would allow you to do this but he had no info on when it would go public.
I also asked why the throttling was limited to 1Mb and he said there was no technical reason but was above his pay grade as to the why and it was one of the biggest areas of complaints but hasnt caused a change in policy.

i had a 60Gb game download that i didnt schedule that used up my daily 20Gb. I paused it until after 1am and then downloaded the rest at full speed and had no issue the following day with throttling so it worked as described for me on that occasion.

Does everybody get this or is it random customers as a test?

Dero

Everybody I would think. I was told the same thing and have tested it the same way.

Still a pain in the arse to have to nurse your downloads, but still better than my previous (or any alternate) provider... :-/

John_2187

Scruff wrote: »

From what tech support told me recently there is an additional 50gb weekly limit runs from 01:00 to 07:00 that resets on the Monday 01:00.
The 50Gb is for the entire week and can be used all in one go or spread across the week.
Downloads within this period and under the total 50Gb do not count towards the daily 20Gb limit.

The tech was able to tell me how much from each i had used. I asked if there were plans to make this info available to customers and he said they were testing a new customer portal internally that would allow you to do this but he had no info on when it would go public.
I also asked why the throttling was limited to 1Mb and he said there was no technical reason but was above his pay grade as to the why and it was one of the biggest areas of complaints but hasnt caused a change in policy.

i had a 60Gb game download that i didnt schedule that used up my daily 20Gb. I paused it until after 1am and then downloaded the rest at full speed and had no issue the following day with throttling so it worked as described for me on that occasion.

Does everyone have this? Would be very handy for me as I've got a lot of downloads on standby since I got Imagine.

John_2187

So you're saying I could download my game (which has 25gb left) after 1 o clock, that would use half of my weekly 50gb, then my daily 20gb would NOT be affected? If someone could confirm this that would be great.

Dero

Unfortunately, the only reliable way to verify it is to try it. However, I can can confirm that it works like that for me.

d31b0y

Works for me too. Be sure to kick off the download just before you go to bed so that you use up the previous days allowance before going into the 50gb. IIRC, the reset is at 1am so it should go from the previous days allowance straight into the 50gb weekly limit without affecting the next day's usage.

Quin_Dub

d31b0y wrote: »

Works for me too. Be sure to kick off the download just before you go to bed so that you use up the previous days allowance before going into the 50gb. IIRC, the reset is at 1am so it should go from the previous days allowance straight into the 50gb weekly limit without affecting the next day's usage.

The trouble with that though is that because the "free 50gb" doesn't start until 1am , you could have your daily allowance of 20Gb downloaded between midnight and 1am if you start a very large download before then..

If it was midnight to 6am or something that it would be quite useful , but by making it 1am it means the majority of people will never be really able to use it..

deadl0ck

Quin_Dub wrote: »

The trouble with that though is that because the "free 50gb" doesn't start until 1am , you could have your daily allowance of 20Gb downloaded between midnight and 1am if you start a very large download before then..

If it was midnight to 6am or something that it would be quite useful , but by making it 1am it means the majority of people will never be really able to use it..

Fair point - you could put a timer plug on your router, switch off it's power at bedtime and then have it come on at 1.15 (just to be sure) and off again at 5.55 (in case the download doesn't finish)

If it's on a windows / linux box I'm sure there some programs available to time a download (here's one after a quick google : http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/features.htm)

Quin_Dub

deadl0ck wrote: »

Fair point - you could put a timer plug on your router, switch off it's power at bedtime and then have it come on at 1.15 (just to be sure) and off again at 5.55 (in case the download doesn't finish)

If it's on a windows / linux box I'm sure there some programs available to time a download (here's one after a quick google : http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/features.htm)

For sure there are ways around it , but the average person with a games console with large game updates probably isn't going to be aware/able to use things like that..

That 1hr "air gap" in the schedule just makes it far more difficult to avail of the facility..

deadl0ck

True - but I guess the bottom line is that that everyone is aware they have a limit and they have to do their best to manage their own bandwidth. It's not like they are not being told about it

d31b0y

Like I said, the reset of usage for the day doesn't happen till AFTER the 50gb time kicks in so you should be grand. e.g. the time runs from 1am to 1am. Imagine CS should be able to confirm this.

d31b0y

Samknows stats for last month, for those interested.

deadl0ck

d31b0y wrote: »

Samknows stats for last month, for those interested.

Cool - gotta get me one of those boxes !

I assume you have one ? Are they hard to get ?

d31b0y

I just applied for one here https://www.samknows.com/signup
I can't find an email detailing when I signed up, only the congratulations on being selected email. Not sure how long the wait was.

Keep in mind that these boxes use up some of your data allowance. I haven't actually tested how much data yet but I stream all my TV and movies and only rarely hit the cap (twice since signing up back in April).

Quin_Dub

d31b0y wrote: »

I just applied for one here https://www.samknows.com/signup
I can't find an email detailing when I signed up, only the congratulations on being selected email. Not sure how long the wait was.

Keep in mind that these boxes use up some of your data allowance. I haven't actually tested how much data yet but I stream all my TV and movies and only rarely hit the cap (twice since signing up back in April).

It's basically like running speedtest.net every couple of hours , think it runs about 6 or 8 tests a day across the 24hrs.

Shouldn't really impact Data cap unless you are running things very very close.

tsue921i8wljb3

Quin_Dub wrote: »

It's basically like running speedtest.net every couple of hours , think it runs about 6 or 8 tests a day across the 24hrs.

Shouldn't really impact Data cap unless you are running things very very close.

I have the box also and I asked SamKnows for data figures. On three consecutive days the box used 470MB, 670MB and 610MB. This was before they revamped their site so it may be even greater now with more tests added.