Imagine LTE Rural Broadband

rodge123

Usual rubbish speeds on Cappagh mast this evening on kildare/Meath border!

xxyyzz

robbiep958 wrote: »

God it sound like the imagine service is after getting terrible .. Glad this never came available in my area as i would have gotten it and by the sounds would have probably ended up with problems ..

As with anything on here you only hear the bad side of the story. Mine rarely drops below 15Mbps during peak hours.

Marlow

xxyyzz wrote: »

As with anything on here you only hear the bad side of the story. Mine rarely drops below 15Mbps during peak hours.

15 Mbit/s is nowhere near the advertised 70 Mbit/s though. I what speed did they test at the day they installed ?

/M

deadl0ck

Marlow wrote: »

15 Mbit/s is nowhere near the advertised 70 Mbit/s though. I what speed did they test at the day they installed ?

/M

It's advertised as up to 70 Mbit/s. That's a big difference

It's all relative - I was paying the same price for Eir with a 5Meg Max connections speed due to my location

Gonzo

deadl0ck wrote: »

It's advertised as up to 70 Mbit/s. That's a big difference

It's all relative - I was paying the same price for Eir with a 5Meg Max connections speed due to my location

That is true, but they sugar coat it to make it sound like your going to get close to 70meg all the time.

Taken from their website:

Genuine broadband speeds of upto 70Mb
Reliable wireless connectivity

LTE delivers fibre speeds right to your home. Enjoy up to 70Mb broadband and say wave goodbye to black spots. LTE literally changes family lives, opening up a world of learning, entertainment and communication for all.

LTE Fibre speed broadband starts with a connection that’s up to 70Mb a second. An open door of possibilities, education, employment and of course entertainment. The possibilities are simply endless.

They also call it 'a full fibre experience'. The average rural customer is going to read this and instantly expect close to 70 meg all the time, but in reality from what we see here the speeds regularly struggle to hit double digits and pings in the 100s, which is a far reality from a 'true fibre experience'.

jcd5971

Well guys anyone have any suggestions to reduce ping.

The speeds are great 40-70 down all the time even peak (west clare) but the brother plays forrnite and overwatch and says the latency is always over a hundred, I'd happily lose some speed to fix the ping issue.

xxyyzz

Marlow wrote: »

15 Mbit/s is nowhere near the advertised 70 Mbit/s though. I what speed did they test at the day they installed ?

/M

I think you are misrepresenting my post. The post I replied to was under the impression that the service was a disaster because some users were getting as low as 2Mbps peak times. I merely said that this is not the case case for everyone. My own never drops below 15 at peak times which is pretty bloody good, I'm not naive enough to believe the marketing blurb about 30 min. That was never going to be the case. I'm with them 2 years.

listermint

Gonzo wrote: »

That is true, but they sugar coat it to make it sound like your going to get close to 70meg all the time.

Taken from their website:

Genuine broadband speeds of upto 70Mb
Reliable wireless connectivity

LTE delivers fibre speeds right to your home. Enjoy up to 70Mb broadband and say wave goodbye to black spots. LTE literally changes family lives, opening up a world of learning, entertainment and communication for all.

LTE Fibre speed broadband starts with a connection that’s up to 70Mb a second. An open door of possibilities, education, employment and of course entertainment. The possibilities are simply endless.

They also call it 'a full fibre experience'. The average rural customer is going to read this and instantly expect close to 70 meg all the time, but in reality from what we see here the speeds regularly struggle to hit double digits and pings in the 100s, which is a far reality from a 'true fibre experience'.

And i see 100+ in wicklow. So some people are having good experience others who are over prescribed are not.

not ideal, but its not rubbish for everyone. * for clarity sake

SkepticQuark

Ultimately it depends on the mast.

My results are from the mast in the Hollyford area in Co Tipp. Other bad results seem to be from Athy mast.

Gonzo

listermint wrote: »

And i see 100+ in wicklow. So some people are having good experience others who are over prescribed are not.

not ideal, but its not rubbish for everyone. * for clarity sake

I am guessing Wicklow probably has a better chance of having lower contention than most other counties for several reasons. Much of the county is mountainous, most of the population lives along the coast in towns and villages with FTTC/FTTH in many areas. There is of course scattered rural housing but I don't think it's to the same level as many other counties.

I have seen some very fast speedtests from Imagine customers in Wicklow, but these sort of speeds are very much the exception, I think those speeds could also be part of a trial on certain masts.

listermint

Gonzo wrote: »

I am guessing Wicklow probably has a better chance of having lower contention than most other counties for several reasons. Much of the county is mountainous, most of the population lives along the coast in towns and villages with FTTC/FTTH in many areas. There is of course scattered rural housing but I don't think it's to the same level as many other counties.

I have seen some very fast speedtests from Imagine customers in Wicklow, but these sort of speeds are very much the exception, I think those speeds could also be part of a trial on certain masts.

Im on the coast in a heavily populated region. And if by trial you mean 14 months since install. Then thats a long oul trial

9726_9726

roddy15 wrote: »

Ultimately it depends on the mast.

My results are from the mast in the Hollyford area in Co Tipp. Other bad results seem to be from Athy mast.

Tipp was always a black hole for backhaul, no matter what the network.

The site you are on is Towercom Lachtseifin, backhauled on a Ceragon wireless PTP link to Roches Street. Imagine/Irish Broadband have had a rack in the building for years. The main feed is a Ceragon from Roches Street in Limerick, which was used to serve about 4 corporate customers/schools (on Ceragon IP10 wireless links). They also served all of Thurles with a single downstream Ceragon IP10 out of this site too. So the 4 corporate/school customers, and all of Thurles, comes back on wireless through here, then comes back on wireless to Limerick city, then on fibre to Dublin.

In the last year or two, they put up some 3.6GHz LTE sectors two. They didn't really have the backhaul to do it. Bit of a stretch. "Full fibre experience" my ass. Changing families' lives. Yeah.

I could upload a pic of the cab that your cat videos go through, blinky lights and all, but that'd be giving the game away....

Imagine, Three, Meteor/Eircom, Nova Telecom, Vodafone and Tipp FM are on the site.

The thing is, there is acutally an eircom fibre ring in the hut, a pair to Hollyford and a pair to Golden. Eircom have a bunch of ancient SIAE wireless links to sub-exchanges.

Marlow

9726_9726 wrote: »

The thing is, there is acutally an eircom fibre ring in the hut, a pair to Hollyford and a pair to Golden. Eircom have a bunch of ancient SIAE wireless links to sub-exchanges.

Ah here. Those SIAE links have to be extreme ancient to be called ancient .. SIAE actually is on par with Ceragon .. But then again SIAE have been around for over 60 years. Those links could be real ancient

And eircom having a fibre ring in the hut doesn't mean, they have the capacity. Only if the stuff is upgraded to NGN, there might be a chance. In that case the non use of that would either be a cost saving measure or political.

And yes .. a lot if the imagine stuff is simply build on good old overspec'ed IBB infrastructure .. without investing further, so now it's not coping.

/M

9726_9726

Marlow wrote: »

Ah here. Those SIAE links have to be extreme ancient to be called ancient .. SIAE actually is on par with Ceragon .. But then again SIAE have been around for over 60 years. Those links could be real ancient

And eircom having a fibre ring in the hut doesn't mean, they have the capacity. Only if the stuff is upgraded to NGN, there might be a chance. In that case the non use of that would either be a cost saving measure or political.

And yes .. a lot if the imagine stuff is simply build on good old overspec'ed IBB infrastructure .. without investing further, so now it's not coping.

/M

SIAE is top kit, to be fair. These ones are so old, the IDUs look like they are nicotine stained! Maybe Don Draper was a microwave engineer!

TopTec

Speak English please Chaps!!


TT

SkepticQuark

There you go coming up to peak time speeds I suppose, this time test was done on a direct ethernet connection to our router so no potential issues with wifi or powerplugs.

spankalish

roddy15 wrote: »

There you go coming up to peak time speeds I suppose, this time test was done on a direct ethernet connection to our router so no potential issues with wifi or powerplugs.

That's roughly what I am getting, located in Mayo.

bennyineire

Ridge of Cappard (Loais/Offaly border) has gone to pure crap in the evening for the last couple of weeks

70 meg no problem during the day but get around 2 meg in the evenings now, can only imagine what it will be like in the winter

trant

Does anyone have instructions on bridging the Imagine modem and using another wireless router for better performance?

Thinking that just putting a second wireless router behind it and have it do nothing but wifi might be best. Let the Imagine router do firewall, uPNP and DHCP.

xxyyzz

It's a piece of piss really, just plug a network cable into the network port on your imagine router and the other end into the WAN/Internet port on the new wireless router you are going to use. Then just configure the wireless network on the new router.

d31b0y

You might want to request Imagine turn the wifi off on their router if you aren't going to use it.

Wegian

Anybody seeing issues in south Galway?

Dreadful speed here for the past few months but in particular since the weekend

Total of 45 minutes spent with tech support over the past two days alone, I may as well have listened to the dying minutes of the talking clock

Psygnosis

You'll end up with double natting doing this though.
I have the gemtek unit and logged in as the admin. But no bridging option available that I could see I turned off the dhcp and wifi on it that ended in a world of pain. Could not get back into the box. In the end used a ether net cable and had to set a static IP to get back into it.

I have a linksys velop mesh units which I have now bridged into the gemtek unit but would prefer it the other way around as I have lost some functionality doing it this way. Any one got any ideas
I can see on the WAN settings that I can select bridge mode tunnell mode router mode and Nat mode. NAT is what its currently set to. I'm afraid now to change it in case I cannot get back into the unit again,

Dero

Psygnosis wrote: »

You'll end up with double natting doing this though.
I have the gemtek unit and logged in as the admin. But no bridging option available that I could see I turned off the dhcp and wifi on it that ended in a world of pain. Could not get back into the box. In the end used a ether net cable and had to set a static IP to get back into it.

I have a linksys velop mesh units which I have now bridged into the gemtek unit but would prefer it the other way around as I have lost some functionality doing it this way. Any one got any ideas
I can see on the WAN settings that I can select bridge mode tunnell mode router mode and Nat mode. NAT is what its currently set to. I'm afraid now to change it in case I cannot get back into the unit again,

The problem with Imagine as I understand it is that in order to bridge properly, the CPE has to support two APNs; one for your routable Internet address and one for Imagine's management interface.

On the current setup, the CPE has an IP on the Imagine internal network which they NAT to your external address and also use for managing the CPE. If it is (properly) bridged, the CPE loses the internal address so they can no longer access/manage it from their side.

For this reason, when I requested bridging they had to change out my radio. However, I now have a properly bridged setup with my public IP passed straight through to my own router.

Psygnosis

Dero wrote: »

The problem with Imagine as I understand it is that in order to bridge properly, the CPE has to support two APNs; one for your routable Internet address and one for Imagine's management interface.

On the current setup, the CPE has an IP on the Imagine internal network which they NAT to your external address and also use for managing the CPE. If it is (properly) bridged, the CPE loses the internal address so they can no longer access/manage it from their side.

For this reason, when I requested bridging they had to change out my radio. However, I now have a properly bridged setup with my public IP passed straight through to my own router.

Could I also get around this by putting my second router in the DMZ of the imagine one? I think that may work also,

Fatal Except1on

smokingman wrote: »

Same one loads of people on here have been giving out about again lately. Athy.
Wouldn't mind but the first support guy I got on this last week said there was a mast fault and this was the cause of the 1MB download in the evenings. Then they wanted to send engineers out, found nothing wrong and now they're getting rid of me because, I'm guessing, they've suddenly realised how oversubscribed the mast is.

if you don't mind me asking, how far from the Athy mast are you, and in which direction? Curious to see how far people are from the same mast as me!

deadl0ck

So I was having some problems with my connection speed and I was pretty sure it's because there is forest around me and the trees are getting higher and interrupting the line of sight.
Best speeds I've had ever were around the 40MBit mark as I live abou 17K from the mast.

I called Imagine and they did some tests and confirmed there is signal degradation.

Engineers arrived today and put up a 10 foot pole and now I'm getting 80-90 MBit speeds.

So I can't complain and when it works it works well.

Also - before this my only option (for the same price) was Eircom, which I had for 8 years, giving me a 5Mbit speed.
So anything more than that is a bonus for me.

Can't believe the speeds I'm now getting; I just wanted to add this as something positive into the conversation.

SkepticQuark

deadl0ck wrote: »

So I was having some problems with my connection speed and I was pretty sure it's because there is forest around me and the trees are getting higher and interrupting the line of sight.
Best speeds I've had ever were around the 40MBit mark as I live abou 17K from the mast.

I called Imagine and they did some tests and confirmed there is signal degradation.

Engineers arrived today and put up a 10 foot pole and now I'm getting 80-90 MBit speeds.

So I can't complain and when it works it works well.

Also - before this my only option (for the same price) was Eircom, which I had for 8 years, giving me a 5Mbit speed.
So anything more than that is a bonus for me.

Can't believe the speeds I'm now getting; I just wanted to add this as something positive into the conversation.

Yeah, I've got a theory some of the problems here could be LOS, will see how it plays out now autumn is approaching.

irishfeen

Imagine "Fibre Broadband" .... Up to 70mb, €59.99 per month....

Gonzo

irishfeen wrote: »

Imagine "Fibre Broadband" .... Up to 70mb, €59.99 per month....

That's not even usable internet. I'd be looking for a refund or termination of contract if that's what you get regularly.

It doesn't look like your getting anything like a 'true fibre experience'.