If i can't...

cman

If i can't get iol,eircom,utv broadband because i failed the line test does that mean i can't get it with smart even though i passed there test.

Giblet

Most likely, unless Eircom have made a mistake.

GarfieldConnoll

Giblet wrote:

Most likely, unless Eircom have made a mistake.

My line failed the eircom line test (in fact both of them did).

I have Smart broadband at home and not only can I get 2MB but I can get 8MB!

Garfield.

damien

But Garfield are you the exception as you are a Smart employee or will others that fail the linetest be able to get Smart ? Also will people get above the 2MB ? Will there be customers who can get 8MB like you are getting ?

GarfieldConnoll

damien.m wrote:

But Garfield are you the exception as you are a Smart employee or will others that fail the linetest be able to get Smart ? Also will people get above the 2MB ? Will there be customers who can get 8MB like you are getting ?

Not the exception at all.

There are other Smart customers on this forum who have Smart BB where they previously failed eircom's line test.

Of course, you could fail on both eircom and Smart. The point here though, is that just because you fail eircom's test, doesn't mean you couldn't get Smart's service. Failing eircom's test is the same as failing every other bitstream provider's test as it's all eircom in the end.

Now I am the exception in terms of the 8MB offer. First off, we don't offer an 8MB product at present (no demand for it at present, most people appear more interested in greater uploads speeds, we're looking at this right now). Secondly, I can get 8MB because of my line conditions. Obviously, not every line would support this.

Hope this clarifies the situation.

Turner

GarfieldConnoll wrote:

First off, we don't offer an 8MB product at present (no demand for it at present, most people appear more interested in greater uploads speeds, we're looking at this right now).

I think youd find that if smart offered 8mb up/down on their current prices there would be great demand for it

damien

GarfieldConnoll wrote:

Not the exception at all.

There are other Smart customers on this forum who have Smart BB where they previously failed eircom's line test.

Very glad to hear that. This should be highlighted more to the unfortunate 20-30% who fail the secret eircom line test criteria.

First off, we don't offer an 8MB product at present ... I can get 8MB because of my line conditions. Obviously, not every line would support this.

Nice to know though that in the future an 8MB package could be available if the demand was there.

GarfieldConnoll

Chief--- wrote:

I think youd find that if smart offered 8mb up/down on their current prices there would be great demand for it

Chief---,

Done deal. Of course, we'd have to sneek a connection fee into the small print and put a 24GB cap on the service

Seriously though, we've taken feedback from this forum and others regarding upload speeds and what price people would pay for it. Is there a demand for a 4MB, 6MB, 8MB service outside of the niche requirements of a few customers?

I'd like to see a poll where people indicate what they think would be a realistic price for other services. I've seen some posts where people think a 2048/512 service should only cost another 5 euro a month above our existing 35 euro 2048/128 service. Sorry, but that ain't going to fly.

Garfield.

causal

GarfieldConnoll wrote:

I've seen some posts where people think a 2048/512 service should only cost another 5 euro a month above our existing 35 euro 2048/128 service. Sorry, but that ain't going to fly.

Genuine question: What are extra the costs to Smart in providing 256kbps upstream rather than 128kbps? I'm not looking necessarily for actual figures, but why does it cost you any more?

causal

GarfieldConnoll

causal wrote:

Genuine question: What are extra the costs to Smart in providing 256kbps upstream rather than 128kbps? I'm not looking necessarily for actual figures, but why does it cost you any more?

causal

I've posted here previously about the process whereby we buy our international IP capacity. Search under my name for the post. The post mainly addressed download caps, but the same arguement applies.

Essentially.. we buy international IP transit based on a % of our max concurrent capacity requirements. Upload speed count just as much to this as download speed.

So when we calculate costs, we don't consider the 128K simply as part of the 2048K, we see it in addition to the 2048K.

So adding more (512K for example) has an increased cost to us. People may argue with this, but that's the way we look at it. Before anyone starts to knock the argument, it's that argument that has brought a 2MB service to the market for an effective 11 euro a month.

The other side of it is P2P. Before everyone flames me saying that they use P2P for Red Hat ISOs, or the Genome project, I accept that P2P has a place for users. But helping you to use P2P to replicate Time Warner's back catalogue is not the business we're in. Don't really care what you use your Internet connection for, but if you're nailing a solid 2MB connection all day everyday, that's costing us money.

And for the love of God, don't argue that you're paying for it, you can use it for whatever you want. We accept that, but understand that there is an element of 'sharing' anticipated in the network. If you want a committed 2MB Internet connection, talk to our Metro team or talk to anyone else. No-one is doing it for 35 euro including line rental.

Anyway, the point here is that lots of P2P software chokes your download speed to a % of your upload speed. We're already seeing plenty of P2P uploads on our core network. Offering a 256 or 512 product will increase that dramatically. So you'll have to pay for it.

So an extra 5 euro a month ain't going to fly.

Hope this helps answer the question. Let the abuse begin

Garfield.

SeaSide

Is Smart the only ISP in the world that buys assymetric Internet Transit. Sorry G but that one doesnt fly

Blaster99

GarfieldConnoll wrote:

Of course, you could fail on both eircom and Smart. The point here though, is that just because you fail eircom's test, doesn't mean you couldn't get Smart's service. Failing eircom's test is the same as failing every other bitstream provider's test as it's all eircom in the end.

Did you pass Smart's test?

GarfieldConnoll wrote:

Seriously though, we've taken feedback from this forum and others regarding upload speeds and what price people would pay for it. Is there a demand for a 4MB, 6MB, 8MB service outside of the niche requirements of a few customers?

I'm interested, but you would have to offer at least 1Mbps up to get me as a customer. Personally I would have difficulty justifying paying more than €100 for a BB service, but I would consider something like an 8Mbps/1Mbps for an office setup and probably would be willing to pay €200 for it.

Why incidently don't you go after a higher margin niche market, considering the issues you guys have with Eircom dealing with LLU volumes? It would seem to be better to focus on the high end until that situation settles down. I can only assume that it wouldn't be too difficult for you to come up with a product that competes with Eircom's 4Mbps/256kps product for €180 or whatever it costs. Particularly if you go above 8Mbps as Eircom doesn't have ADSL2+ in service yet so you would have the market to yourself for a couple of months at least.

beller b

With the higher speeds you will always have something to throw at eircom should they ever make a serious effort to compete. eh Garfield lol.. btw had a rep onto me from eircom a while back offering the same speeds as Smart for only €85 a month.. you really should explain this compitition stratagy to them!!!!

causal

GarfieldConnoll wrote:

Essentially.. we buy international IP transit based on a % of our max concurrent capacity requirements. Upload speed count just as much to this as download speed.
<snip>
Anyway, the point here is that lots of P2P software chokes your download speed to a % of your upload speed. We're already seeing plenty of P2P uploads on our core network. Offering a 256 or 512 product will increase that dramatically. So you'll have to pay for it.

Thanks for the reply Garfield. So essentially the cost to Smart of increasing upload rates is that it increases your IP transit costs.
Of course my answer to that is ok, rather than give me 2048/128, give me 1536/512, that's actually less in total.
Your answer to that is that 512 upload will facilitate huge P2P traffic costing Smart cash, so I've gotta pay for it.

My answer to that is that I don't use P2P, my total traffic (up+down) in the last 25 days (since I installed DUMeter) is less than 2GB. I want a bigger upload for VoIP, for emailing my digital camera photo's and videos, and for online gaming. And I'm willing to sacrafice some download speed for that.

Your answer is well everyone isn't like you, some people are bandwidth whores.
From the Smart website

There is no limits on the amount of data that can be downloaded or uploaded however users whose usage is deemed excessive on a regular basis will be contacted and restrictions will be used if the activity persists.

My answer is that you can have a flexible bandwidth (up+down) cap. Figures like ntl have. i.e. 1GB per day, or 30GB per month. Consistent abuse of this will incur pro-rated costs for the abuser. I say consistent abuse coz there are genuine (and genuinely infrequent) downloads of Fedora distros, or Netbeans etc. which may once in a blue moon push a normally moderate user above 1GB in a day.

And why not allow people to have no cap - but they pay a reasonable amount per MB above the normal 30GB monthly allowance.
That way people like me who require reasonable uses and reasonable usage pay reasonable amounts.
And people who require larger usage can pay larger amounts.

This way everyone pays for what they get - and everyone gets what they want

causal

CyberGhost

GarfieldConnoll wrote:

So an extra 5 euro a month ain't going to fly.

Garfield.

like I said in another thread, add 35, that way 70 including the rental for 2048/512 = eircom killer + still 5 euro cheaper.

Mutant_Fruit

So adding more (512K for example) has an increased cost to us. People may argue with this, but that's the way we look at it. Before anyone starts to knock the argument, it's that argument that has brought a 2MB service to the market for an effective 11 euro a month.

And for an effective €16 a month (€5 extra) why couldn't you offer a service with at least 256kbps upload.

That extra €5 will increase effective gross profits by about 33%, and increase effective bandwidth by about 7%. Those figures speak volumes i think.

In all fairness now. I think there are plenty of ways to justify at least 256kbps upload without having to resort to linux ISO's in bittorrent. Heres 5 uses for more upload:

Games servers
Personal FTP (i'm a big fan of my 2meg upload when i'm at college)
Sending large pictures (does happen)
VoIP
Video conferencing (impossible on 128kbps upload, unless you like postage stamps)

WillieFlynn

I just wonder why in France (adsl.free.fr) can offer a LLU product for 30 euros (in total) which has speeds of 20M/1M, comes with free calls to any French landline and TV.

The normal line rental from France telecom for voice only is 13.99 Euro, so the effective difference is 16 Euro.

What is so different with the cost structure here in Ireland........ that Smart's offering looks good, when it is only a fraction of what is avalible for less elsewhere in France which is not a very cheap country.

beller b

WillieFlynn wrote:

I just wonder why in France (adsl.free.fr) can offer a LLU product for 30 euros (in total) which has speeds of 20M/1M, comes with free calls to any French landline and includes TV.

What is so different with the cost structure here in Ireland........ that Smart's offering looks good, when it is only a fraction of what is avalible for less elsewhere in Europe.

Could it be there is a lot more competition in France?

vishal

a 1500/512 connection doesn't look as good on paper then all the other bitstream providers connection speed, but maybe you could offer it as a seperate package. regarding p2p, you should introduce a cap of like 30 or 40 gb (more than enough for any normal user) and then a reasonable cost per gb above that should a user want to go over that if you want to, or the option of cutting off the service until the next month.

if not then i would think that most people would accept paying an extra €15 pm over what you already charge for 2000/512

Blaster99

WillieFlynn wrote:

I just wonder why in France (adsl.free.fr) can offer a LLU product for 30 euros (in total) which has speeds of 20M/1M, comes with free calls to any French landline and TV.

I would say they could in Ireland too, but they're not forced to. The reason this works, and it would work in Ireland too, is because the ISP pays for actual usage on the transit connections. People, in general, don't actually use their broadband connection all that much more just because it's faster. Most people haven't drastically altered their BB usage patterns just because speeds went from 512kbps to 2048kbps. So it doesn't actually cost all that much more to provide higher speeds. You can see this in Sweden where one BB provider charges the same for ADSL (up to 8Mbps) and ADSL2+ (up to 24Mbps). The speed you get depends on the equipment in the exchange and the distance from the exchange. I think it's about €50 for that service.

beller b

The speeds will increase eventually.. At th moment people are struggling just to get BB .. when all areas are enabeled then the ISPs will only have speed increases & price to compete with.... I couldn't give a toss re upload at the moment, I will be happy just to get my BB back (along with my free line rental for life, of course!) But in a year or so if there are better offers around of course I would switch again....

causal

beller b wrote:

.. when all areas are enabeled then the ISPs will only have speed increases & price to compete with....

They'll also compete on the services they can offer - broadband, telephone, tv, VideoOnDemand, etc.

Also DSL can't carry the same bandwidth as coax cable; that puts the DSL providers at a disadvantage.

It's fine to say "when all areas are enabled" but when will that be? Until such time (if it ever arrives) then providers will also compete based on their network penetration.

causal

beller b

Very true. but who knows what technology awaits... not so long ago we tought ISDN was the dogs ******.! I wouldn't worry with regard to cable or coax.. It will always get better, its just in this country we have to wait,wait & wait!!!!!