Imagine LTE Rural Broadband

Marlow

Gonzo wrote: »

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'.

Well. The speeds could be considered usable .. all depending on what you want to use it for.

The latency however is the big giveaway. It only beats satellite broadband. But only by mm.

Is it worth 60 EUR/month ? ....... only if you were in the middle of the Atlantic ... and not on an Island.

/M

irishfeen

irishfeen wrote: »

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

Speed OK at this time of the day but this evening as every Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings it will fall back to almost nothing...

rodge123

Started backing up my data to BackBlaze last night....speeds about 15Mb down / 2 Up / 25 ping before started.

Websites extremely slow to respond once I started the backup...getting request timeouts and pings of 1000ms+!

Have the backup service throttled to 0.5Mbps so should'nt be a bandwidth issue.

Anyone encountered this before?

Have about 100GB to upload over next few days.

Grab All Association

Wow! I'm paying €9.99 less a month for 1000mb FTTH for 12 months. It's a disgrace they're getting away with this. I hope for everyones sake FTTH rolls out to them or the NBP comes to fruition.

It wouldn't be too bad if it was <€29.99 a month, but it's €60 ffs for a service akin to cheaper products like 4G or wireless. Some people would probably be better off with FW or 4G.

Has anyone here thought of starting a Facebook group for aggrieved customers to confront them (Imagine) on social media. You could call it Imagine Fraudband. Invite customers posting on their pages to join before they delete them.

They were here a few weeks ago advertising their shïte beside Eircom DP' in a village fully covered by FTTH. The focus should be targeting customers not covered by FTTH or VDSL.

Marlow

Grab All Association wrote: »

They were here a few weeks ago advertising their shïte beside Eircom DP' in a village fully covered by FTTH. The focus should be targeting customers not covered by FTTH or VDSL.

Imagine started out reselling Bitstream DSL before they aquired Irish Broadband. Irish Broadband had high quality standards for the Breeze product. Their ripwave wimax product was always muck.

As you can see from the list: https://fibrerollout.ie/rollout-map/where-to-buy/ they have not taken this any further and signed up for NGA products (FTTC / FTTH). At least they're not listed there.

Obviously they have no interest in handing off money to a wholesale provider, as the margins are bigger on a product, where they run the infrastructure themselves.

The technology they have is well capable of delivering the speeds they advertise and can easily compete with fiber products ... if the provider doesn't get greedy and oversubscribes the f***** out of the service.

Plenty of providers out there, that deliver a similar service, delivering better quality and cost less .... just not on a national level.

Bottom line: if you spread yourself too far, build on a shoe-strong budget, oversubscribe the hell out of it and charge a fortune and don't offer the support needed, customers will only stay until they find something more solid, cheaper and/or faster.

/M

Mr. Moonshine

I am on the Athy mast. I had Imagine installed last October and it was great for a while but over the months it's been getting worse and worse, to the point now where online gaming in the evenings is pointless and I have to watch youtube in 480p. I use teamspeak to monitor my ping because it updates the ping once a second, I get about 40 ping normally but in the evenings it will constantly spike to several hundred, sometimes several thousand, every few minutes. I like to play Rainbow Six Siege and it's quite literally impossible to stay in a match without getting kicked as the ping limit for the game is 500, often what will happen is my ping will spike to 2000 or something for 20 seconds but it's enough to get me kicked. Imagine support is infuriating, trying to put the blame on my teamspeak server and other ping monitoring software instead of themselves.

I love gaming online and while my ping used to be bad only on the weekends, now it's bad on the weekdays as well. Whatever about the speed, the ping is what I really care about. I just wanted to rant because I have no other option and the """service""" is getting worse and worse as time goes on. It's not quite dial-up speeds yet but give it another few months and I wouldn't be surprised.

Gonzo

Marlow wrote: »

Bottom line: if you spread yourself too far, build on a shoe-strong budget, oversubscribe the hell out of it and charge a fortune and don't offer the support needed, customers will only stay until they find something more solid, cheaper and/or faster.

/M

basically Imagine have not changed since 2008, today's product is still as crap as their Wimax product because they shove as much customers as they can onto the service for maximum profit. They continue to get away with this because the majority of their customers have no other option other than to pay for a Porsche and end up with a Lada.

Ultimanemo

Gonzo wrote: »

basically Imagine have not changed since 2008, today's product is still as crap as their Wimax product because they shove as much customers as they can onto the service for maximum profit. They continue to get away with this because the majority of their customers have no other option other than to pay for a Porsche and end up with a Lada.

That is what is happening, I think they want to make as much profit as possible before the NBP kicks in. When the NBP is confirmed dead, they might invest more money and accept smaller profit margin

Marlow

Gonzo wrote: »

and end up with a Lada.

That's an insult to a Lada.

/M

Ardent

rodge123 wrote: »

Started backing up my data to BackBlaze last night....speeds about 15Mb down / 2 Up / 25 ping before started.

Websites extremely slow to respond once I started the backup...getting request timeouts and pings of 1000ms+!

Have the backup service throttled to 0.5Mbps so should'nt be a bandwidth issue.

Anyone encountered this before?

Have about 100GB to upload over next few days.

Honestly, I hope you are being throttled. You're just killing the service for everyone else. Using a crappy service like Imagine to perform 100GB backups.....ffs.

rodge123

Ardent wrote: »

Honestly, I hope you are being throttled. You're just killing the service for everyone else. Using a crappy service like Imagine to perform 100GB backups.....ffs.

I asked has anyone had this problem when uploading data, not for a condescending pointless remark.

I’m well aware of the crappy service of imagine but some of us have no other option.
It’s up to imagine to manage their network and throttle users if needed

Like I said, I’ve throttled the upload to 0.5Mb myself so it should not be unreasonable to expect To be able to use other services while this is in progress.

d31b0y

I'd rethink my backup plan tbh... It's going to take you 17.5 days to backup 100GB @ 0.5mbps

To answer your question, I've never had an issue uploading but then I keep any upload requirements strictly to night time so it doesn't affect me in any case.

Gonzo

I would agree that in order to perform a 100 gig backup that Imagine is not the answer. Their network can barely cope with 20 gigs a day and once you go past that you are throttled anyway, and it may take weeks to back up once throttled.

Imagine is really only able to cope with light usage such as checking emails, low resolution streaming and moderate use of social media. It is not really a solution for gaming, downloading, HD Streaming, running a business or downloading/uploading data in large quantities.

d31b0y

I cope fine streaming HD. My entire TV consumption is done via streaming.
I accept my case may not be the norm but the service is more than capable of streaming HD for extended periods of time. I am also able to game online without any issues while streaming. Latency stays low and lag is infrequent.
To add to this, I have not seen my service get throttled since January (or the 75% warning for that matter). I suspect there may have been changes to their policy that they are not announcing.

Quin_Dub

d31b0y wrote: »

I cope fine streaming HD. My entire TV consumption is done via streaming.
I accept my case may not be the norm but the service is more than capable of streaming HD for extended periods of time. I am also able to game online without any issues while streaming. Latency stays low and lag is infrequent.

Agreed on the streaming - I can stream quite happily on 4K Ultra settings on Netflix while my kids are on the Xbox or watching Netflix on an iPad. I know that I'm very lucky but I'm happy with what I have and my alternative is a 2Mb line from Eircom..

d31b0y wrote: »

To add to this, I have not seen my service get throttled since January (or the 75% warning for that matter). I suspect there may have been changes to their policy that they are not announcing.

I'm the same - Haven't had 75% warning in months whereas previously I'd get it 3 or 4 times a week.

I suspect that when they took their online usage dashboard tool offline , they also disabled any usage monitoring they were doing.

rodge123

Gonzo wrote: »

I would agree that in order to perform a 100 gig backup that Imagine is not the answer. Their network can barely cope with 20 gigs a day and once you go past that you are throttled anyway, and it may take weeks to back up once throttled.

Imagine is really only able to cope with light usage such as checking emails, low resolution streaming and moderate use of social media. It is not really a solution for gaming, downloading, HD Streaming, running a business or downloading/uploading data in large quantities.

It’s only the initial backup of my laptop contents that will take maybe 20 days or so. Afterwards, it will be just small data uploads as I add new photos, music, files,etc.

km79

Quin_Dub wrote: »

Agreed on the streaming - I can stream quite happily on 4K Ultra settings on Netflix while my kids are on the Xbox or watching Netflix on an iPad. I know that I'm very lucky but I'm happy with what I have and my alternative is a 2Mb line from Eircom..



I'm the same - Haven't had 75% warning in months whereas previously I'd get it 3 or 4 times a week.

I suspect that when they took their online usage dashboard tool offline , they also disabled any usage monitoring they were doing.

Similar for me too
Did a 10GB Xbox update during the day Sunday so was fully expecting a warning but it never came ...................I used to have to bring an external hard drive into the in laws house 40km away to do updates before Imagine ......

SoupyNorman

For anyone who cares, Aptus have launched a new range of plans up to speeds of 100mb.

The increased my speed to 50mb (up from 30mb) and dropped my monthly bill by €8, all without me even asking!

Marlow

SoupyNorman wrote: »

For anyone who cares, Aptus have launched a new range of plans up to speeds of 100mb.

The increased my speed to 50mb (up from 30mb) and dropped my monthly bill by €8, all without me even asking!

Is that still on Cambrium platform or has he moved to something different like Radwin Jet ?

/M

deadl0ck

SoupyNorman wrote: »

For anyone who cares, Aptus have launched a new range of plans up to speeds of 100mb.

The increased my speed to 50mb (up from 30mb) and dropped my monthly bill by €8, all without me even asking!

Hadn't heard of them - had a look at the site and you click on Coverage it gives you a form to fill in

Anybody any idea what areas they cover ?

Marlow

deadl0ck wrote: »

Hadn't heard of them - had a look at the site and you click on Coverage it gives you a form to fill in

Anybody any idea what areas they cover ?

Mainly Carlow. You can find a them on the Ireland Offline map: http://irelandoffline.org/map/#!/map

/M

SoupyNorman

deadl0ck wrote: »

Hadn't heard of them - had a look at the site and you click on Coverage it gives you a form to fill in

Anybody any idea what areas they cover ?

Fixed wireless provider covering south Kildare, Carlow, West Wicklow.

I moved to the country 3 years ago and never researched what BB options were on offer...very few as it turned out. Aptus saved my bacon, at the time I signed up it was a 5MB package but it was consistent. They've upgraded over the years and can offer up to 100mb down now, im on 50mb.

Gonzo

When I said that Imagine is only good for SD Streaming, not HD, I didn't really make myself clear by what I properly meant. In most cases Imagine is fine for 720p streaming or even 1080p streaming if the connection is performing well. It's the data limit that has to be watched which rules out several hours of HD Streaming per day in a household.

Even with Eir FTTH I would not go near 4k streaming unless your on a new plan with unlimited usage. 4k Streaming would eat through a 1tb cap easily if it was used often enough.

Nuphor

SoupyNorman wrote: »

Fixed wireless provider covering south Kildare, Carlow, West Wicklow.

I moved to the country 3 years ago and never researched what BB options were on offer...very few as it turned out. Aptus saved my bacon, at the time I signed up it was a 5MB package but it was consistent. They've upgraded over the years and can offer up to 100mb down now, im on 50mb.

Do you get fairly consistent speeds, close to advertised? Was in touch with them earlier last month and they said to get in touch when their new plans (eg 100) are out. Sorta finding it hard to find customers & real world speeds though

SoupyNorman

Nuphor wrote: »

Do you get fairly consistent speeds, close to advertised? Was in touch with them earlier last month and they said to get in touch when their new plans (eg 100) are out. Sorta finding it hard to find customers & real world speeds though

Yes, with them 3 years and only time I had an issue was when it was first installed. Was supposed to get 5mb down but was barely getting 1mb...thought I was sold a pup but they sent an engineer out who cut away a few more branches from the line of sight and never had an issue since.

Im on the 50mb package now, the 100mb is also available.

bennyineire

There has been a serious deterioration in the peak time speeds of our broadband.

This is not just affecting me but also my neighbors who also have your service.

This has been particular acute in the last couple of weeks.

During the day and late at night speeds are around 50mb download but between the hours of 6pm and 9pm speeds are dropping below 2mb.

This is purely down to contention, I have been monitoring this at both day times and evening times and the speed differences are consistent.

This service is unusable in the evening at the moment, disgraceful services.

(Service from Ridge of Capard in Laois)

SoupyNorman

bennyineire wrote: »

There has been a serious deterioration in the peak time speeds of our broadband.

This is not just affecting me but also my neighbors who also have your service.

This has been particular acute in the last couple of weeks.

During the day and late at night speeds are around 50mb download but between the hours of 6pm and 9pm speeds are dropping below 2mb.

This is purely down to contention, I have been monitoring this at both day times and evening times and the speed differences are consistent.

This service is unusable in the evening at the moment, disgraceful services.

(Service from Ridge of Capard in Laois)

What provider are you referring to?

bennyineire

SoupyNorman wrote: »

What provider are you referring to?

Eh check the thread title

Dero

bennyineire wrote: »

There has been a serious deterioration in the peak time speeds of our broadband.

This is not just affecting me but also my neighbors who also have your service.

This has been particular acute in the last couple of weeks.

During the day and late at night speeds are around 50mb download but between the hours of 6pm and 9pm speeds are dropping below 2mb.

This is purely down to contention, I have been monitoring this at both day times and evening times and the speed differences are consistent.

This service is unusable in the evening at the moment, disgraceful services.

(Service from Ridge of Capard in Laois)

Same here (Old Kilcullen mast, Kildare). It's ~90Mb at five AM and basically unusable from about half eight in the evening until past midnight.

I'm loath to say anything in case they just shrug their shoulders and say bye bye as reported by someone else previously. That is quite probably a deliberate ploy/policy given that almost all Imagine customers are only going to land in a fire if they leave this particular pan.

rodge123

Dero wrote: »

Same here (Old Kilcullen mast, Kildare). It's ~90Mb at five AM and basically unusable from about half eight in the evening until past midnight.

I'm loath to say anything in case they just shrug their shoulders and say bye bye as reported by someone else previously. That is quite probably a deliberate ploy/policy given that almost all Imagine customers are only going to land in a fire if they leave this particular pan.

Same situation on Cappagh mast north kildare, very poor speeds last few months but I’m wary of complaining Incase they just cancel my contract in which case I’ll be in a worse situation than the current 6mb evening speeds!

With a bit of luck the nbp gets signed off in next few weeks and we can all look forward to giving imagine the two fingers when ftth delivers to majority of homes!

I know I’ll get great satification giving them the two fingers and can promise I’ll never return to them again for any future service they may offer.