IBB Bray

Board@Work

Hello All,

I have been having extremely patchy service from the windgates mast since the new year. IBB support keeps fogging me off saying according to them there is nothing wrong.. I need this connection for business and it is beginning to really, really pi** me off.

Anyone else have any problems with the bray mast??

Blaster99

Yes. It's gotten a lot worse since the new year but it's always been fairly patchy.

MackQ

markororke wrote:

Anyone else have any problems with the bray mast??

You bet.

I got the 1MB service installed a couple of months ago and was very happy with it up to a couple of weeks ago. Then, all of a sudden it was crap.

I have contacted Support on a number of occasions and they made some half-hearted attempts to fix it. According to them my service is back to normal but it quite clearly isn't! I don't think they know what the problem is or at least if they do they don't appear to be doing anything to fix it...

MackQ.

Mutant_Fruit

Really odd... If i try and download from debian.org, nero or most websites, i get horrible speeds, and yet other people i know get great speeds.

But if i'm download from the irish debian mirror, or esat.net i get great speeds. Whats the story? Have IBB have run out of trans-continental bandwidth, or is there a better explanation?

carbsy

I too am getting awful speeds with IBB.So I was thinking it was time to upgrade to the 2mb package.Got the upgrade done today and guess what? Same if not worse than the 1mb! ffs like flucuates between 10 and 30k/sec download! Friggin disgrace for the money,I'm onto support first thing Monday morning.

Mutant_Fruit

Carbsy: as a test download any file from http://ftp.ie.debian.org/ and see what the speeds are like.

e.g. this 3mg file or this 8mb file. or this file from esat.net. Those should max out your connection. Let me now what happens with those downloads.

carbsy

47k/sec on that 3mb file.Should be in the 240k/sec region. ~40k/sec on that esat.net one.Hmmmmmmmmm....

P.S. Totally useless during the day on Monday to Friday .. 10k/sec average.A farce!

Mutant_Fruit

wierd. Right now i'm maxing out from those servers, but if i was to download from places like nero.com i'd get ****e speeds. I think a call is in order alright. I sent an email (not expecting a reply though) and i'll bitch that i got no response to that aswell.

It took over 4 hours to download a 130mb linux webinstall, and i downloaded about 500-600 megs of packages within 2 hours (not sure exactly) when i started installing. This is just wrong.

EDIT: I just followed my own link, and downloaded the 3meg file in 40 seconds... And now from nero, 4kB/sec...

Blaster99

Let me see now. We're trying to close a funding round. How about... we sell the service like crazy to get the subscriber numbers up but let's not bother with upgrading the bandwidth because we can fob off the customers with contention excuses and that we've reset the radio and other useless troubleshooting techniques that sound plausible.

Mutant_Fruit

I'd really like them to explain how irish sites give great performance for me, but anywhere else doesn't. And at the same time i'm getting 4kB/sec, a friend of mine on eircom is getting a solid 58kB/sec.

*tech guy* Hrrmmm, it sounds like the whole internet is congested. Its not our fault.
*me* But its been like that for over 2 weeks.
*tech guy* the internet's a busy place...

carbsy

I'm now getting 11k/sec on those files you posted earlier Mutant,it's just not on...

BTW over Christmas I was getting 120k/sec from everywhere so it's obviously a contention issue.But to pay €99+vat for this 2mb/2mb connection that's basically a 128k ISDN like connection is a total ripoff. :mad:

steve-hosting36

Well, Irish sites would be via the INEX, whereas everywhere else would be over expensive paid transit links

Mutant_Fruit

Aah, so it looks like IBB are skimping on the transit lines. That makes me an unhappy person. Unfortunately the internet doesn't reside completely in ireland, so slow speeds for everywhere outside of ireland just isn't acceptable. I wonder if they open saturdays...

MackQ

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

I wonder if they open saturdays...

There does appear to be a small level of activity as I have received email from Support on Saturday in the past. Can't imagine them answering the phone though as that might give the impression that their customer service level was improving.

Why not give it a shot anyway Mutant_Fruit and let us know what happens!

MackQ.

carbsy

The service only seems slightly acceptable between 12am and 7am which to be honest is useless for most people.They obviously need to invest in more bandwidth soon before they lose customers.Reminds me of the Netsource fiasco of a few years ago when they first started up. :rolleyes:

steve-hosting36

tracert to boards.ie (inex) then to microsoft.com or similar (non INEX) and see where the delays pile up.

Board@Work

Thanks all..


I have the 1MB connection and everytime I call the support I keep getting fogged off.. They told me that there was a problem just prior to new year but that was fixed and now all is fine according to the sysems when quite clearly to me it is not. They have escalated my problem to the higher tech support and I should find out on monday. Well we will see...

Is this just a problem with bray or is it elsewhere and has anyone had any luck with the tech support that IBB so pride themselves on?

dan2002

markororke wrote:

Thanks all..


I have the 1MB connection and everytime I call the support I keep getting fogged off.. They told me that there was a problem just prior to new year but that was fixed and now all is fine according to the sysems when quite clearly to me it is not. They have escalated my problem to the higher tech support and I should find out on monday. Well we will see...

Is this just a problem with bray or is it elsewhere and has anyone had any luck with the tech support that IBB so pride themselves on?

Yes, My problem is even worse. I got my 1mb installed on 10th Dec 04, only worked for 7 days. then they were working on the guiness high site, i got very bad packets loss. until last week i don't have any connection at all. i call then every day. spoke to couple of staffs and asked me to ping this and ping that. i told them i don't have any connection! urr silly boys. how can i ping without any connection??! then they promissed me they would escalate my problem to higher level. one day later a guy called me. did the same thing(pinging, checking radio signal, but with no luck). he then told me he would hand over to network guys, he has nothing to do after all. ?? until now i'm still waiting. by the way' i've checked my bank A/C, it seems they haven't charge me anything yet, is that odd? or i'm lucky? BTW i'm living in rathmines.

Come on IBB!!!!

Blaster99

So did anyone have any luck with support?

Board@Work

I had luck of sorts..

One of the tech guys after being on the recieving end of my tirade admitted that they have over sold the bray site..

They have too many customers than the site can handle. they are going to augment the bandwidth over the next 10 days which should sort out a lot of problems..

I wait in hope because right now it is terrible

Mutant_Fruit

Same story here...

I was talking to a techie today, and he was telling me they had about 100 customers on tallaght, and 5 meg's of bandwidth. Doesn't take a genious to work out that thats 20:1 contention. So, part of the problem is that tallaght is constantly maxing out, as it did earlier when i was on the phone.

But that can't be all the problem, because downloading from abroad is still **** slow while at the same time, http://ftp.ie.debian.org can be full speed. But, solve one problem at a time i suppose. The guy told me i'd get a call back tomorrow, and in fairness, he did call back today. I was shocked!

I'll let ye know how it goes.

carbsy

Same story here, it seems they have over sold by some margin on a few (maybe more) of their points... I must say though that I found their support very quick to respond with 2 messages left on my mobile today and have arranged for a change of high site tomorrow.I'll let ye know how it goes...

Blaster99

If they told you that they have oversold the bandwidth, you should contact ComReg and nail them. That's totally unacceptable. I haven't gotten anything of any use out of them the last couple of days, other than accepting that the performance is **** and the usual resetting the radio bollocks.

From a functional point of view, looking at it from Bray, there are two problems. One is that there's not sufficient backhaul bandwidth from Bray so all sites can sometimes suffer really badly. Second, there's lack of bandwidth on certain transit links that affect all of us. For me it tends to be the backhaul that's the bottleneck. Today during the day I got about 5KB/s from anywhere which is of course unacceptable.

As I wrote above somewhere, IBB has clearly gotten greedy the last little while. Not the way to run a business, though. Maybe if it sorts itself out I will forgive them, but whenever there's another product available that does at least 1meg up I'll switch.

flamegrill

Afair iBB have at least 2 external transit providers, packet exchange and tiscali. They would probably have 100mb FE from both of them, I can't see them maxing out the two links.

I've a customer in Bray on the 2mbps service, I'll drop them a mail tomorrow and see what they say. Will try to rememeber to report back.

Paul

carbsy

No complaints here now from me.The 2mb line is finally performing like it should.

P.S. Hats off to the IBB tech support team who responded lightning quick and got the connection sorted with the minimum of fuss!

Blaster99

I bet you're not in Bray, though. I believe there's an upgrade happening this weekend so we'll see.

carbsy

Blaster99 wrote:

I bet you're not in Bray, though. I believe there's an upgrade happening this weekend so we'll see.

Oops, no sorry.In Cork so I'll keep stump.

MiCr0

is there any chance of getting this service (however bad) on the seafront?

Mr_Man

You'll need line of sight to Windgates so it is unlikely that you'll get italong the seafront.

M.

Mutant_Fruit

Amazingly enough, i've actually been getting calls back from IBB support. The tech huy realised (with a little prompting from myself) that irish traffic is grand, but foreign traffic is crap. He said he was sending an email to their bandwidth providers to let them know of the problem, but so far no word. I was supposed to get another call back today, but i've been out all day and probably missed em (if they did ring).

So it looks like they are doing something, however slowly that might be.

carbsy

Mutant, the bottleneck seems to be with Tiscali.If you trace the outgoing connection you will see it's routed through Telebor which is fine.Get someone else in the UK to trace the incoming connection back to you and it's routed through Tiscali which is slow as hell atm.