IBB Ripwave - The Lowdown

brianw

Just ordered this from IBB. Have 7 days to test anyway.
Wanted Breeze but it is now taking 8 weeks they said, and minimum contract etc.
Question I have - is this enough time to figure out if it is reliable enough.
I'm ouside Guinness map by about 500m, but am on 4th floor facing towrds Guinness. The bloke said thats OK (off the record of course as they won't stand that up later i'm sure) and I should get 60-100kB/s downloads.
Seems a little overestimate based on other threads I've read.
I'm mainly interested in music downloading.

Any experience/advice would be great.

Shiny

ok first off you will never get 60k a second or higher.

512k connection = maximum of 64k a second but when start
and end bytes are taken into account then this is reduced to
around 50k a second.

7 days is definately not enough for testing. When i had ripwave
it worked great for about a month and then smack bang crap.

I quickly upgraded to Breeze Lite and it has been very good since,
(bar the 4 week ballymun mast experience).

I am 400m from the ballymun mast and I have clear line of sight
but ripwave still sucked. But at least when you are upgrading to
breeze from ripwave they dont charge you for installation again.

Altheus

I have to say, just on the phone to a tech there, demanding a refund, he switch base stations and now I'm getting decent speeds (45k/s +) and reasonable pings considered (average 225ms).

PowerHouseDan

225ms Fukin hell i am on breeze mine are 15ms to boards and 25 to jolt

SkepticOne

I have been on IBB ripwave since last September. While there have been rough patches, over the last couple months things have settled down a lot.

Good points:
Reasonably cheap.
Not tied to an Eircom line.
Not tied into a contract.

Bad points:
High latency - No good for gaming. I could not get VoIP to work.
Not particularly reliable.
Poor support. My worst experience is getting download speeds of around 500 bytes per second. The explanation given by IBB being that other people are maxing out the connection (which is impossible given the advertised contention ratio).

It is not particulary fast especially considering the newly announced offerings. Right now I'm getting 40K/sec downloading a single file over https. I might be able to push this a bit higher using a download manager.

It is better than dial-up or ISDN which I have had before. It is not, imo, better than DSL (which I have also had) for reasons above.

I have it because it is cheap and I make a point of not giving business to Eircom where possible. If NTL cable was in the area I would probably go for that although I don't like having to take their TV service. I would also consider Smart since they are not simply reselling an Eircom service.

Get it

a) if you want something more than dial-up but can't get anything else.
b) if you are planning on upgrading to something else later and don't want to be tied into a contract yet want something more later.
c) if you don't have a telephone line.

If you can't get it to work within the 7 day trial period, you are probably in a bad area and it will never work so make sure you get the refund.

OldTitan

The IBB RipWave service is designed for people who are essentially upgrading from Dialup. It is not designed for gaming although we have tested it with a Playstation. It can carry VoIP (we use it in the office and outside to use Skype), but it is not great where it has a lot of gain loss due to walls etc indoors. It is a 512kbps service and is now symetrical in most areas although it is still advertised as a 512/128kbps asymetrical service.

The Breeze product entry level is 1Mbps symetrical (1Mb up and down, depending on distance from the site and interference). The latency on this should not exceed 25ms normally making it very good for VoIP and for gaming. It is software upgradable to 2Mb up to 6Mb under IBB's current service plans.

Oddjob

I have Ripwave since January, and it is pure muck, it drops constantly and then takes anywhere from 2 minutes to 3 hours to regain an IP address. The best download speed I ever got was 23k, average is about 12k. I will be cancelling the contract this month as I can now get Eircom.

Sparky

Ive had IBB ripwave since the start of november last year and firstly it was crap, i was on 3rock and had a USB modem which disco'd every 10mins with DL speeds of 6k/s
max speed was 37kbps.
But one night i noticed my BTS ID changed and i was getting 450kbps, so contacted IBB and asked them to move me to so called Bts Id and had a brill service till the USB modem kept disconnecting so i swapped for a ethernet one, but decided to switch to IOL back at the start of middle of Feb. so im now going to cancel my IBB Ripwave.
But out of 5 months of service i had two of which i had proper speeds.
TBH, if IBB employed people to survey areas 2 days after you received a Ripwave modem for optimal preformace it would work better.

GreeBo

I first got Ripwave back in June and was over the moon with it, was upgrading from dialup and to be able to just plug it in and get 50Kb/s with 100ms pings was fantastic
Then after about 6 weeks it all went wrong, was getting crazy 1500ms spikes on my pings, until finally, for the last 3-4 months my connection drops 2 out of every 3 packets like clockwork.
Something I also noticed was that after I started making my complaints the coverage map for my area changed, changed to include a big spike to my house moving it outside the coverage net.
Thanks for letting me know guys.
I'd avoid it like the plague myself.
The support seems to be a bit hit and miss and currently not speaking to the accounts dept as I am still getting invoiced even though I have cancelled and they picked up my modem the begining of last week...