Smart Intentionally Restricting P2P

Blaster99

If I sat on ADSL2+ technology, I would put it to use and not mimick Eircom's offerings with a bit of a discount.

zuma

Blaster99 wrote:

If I sat on ADSL2+ technology, I would put it to use and not mimick Eircom's offerings with a bit of a discount.

Exactly!!!
WHy cant Smart start to mimick Bulldog in the UK and really begin to push the boundaries???
I realise Smart need a marketing plan...but for their business to take off in the new year(hopefully the court battle will be over by then)...doubling of all current speeds will be required to stimulate the industry as what happened in March of this year!!!

lucernarian

Smart have a problem here if they increase the speed further because our phone network is not up to the standard needed for speeds greater than 6 MBs in the majority of cases.

If 40% of phone lines cannot handle 1 Megabit broadband then I'd love to see how the rest can cope.

TimTim

To_be_confirmed wrote:

Smart have a problem here if they increase the speed further because our phone network is not up to the standard needed for speeds greater than 6 MBs in the majority of cases.

If 40% of phone lines cannot handle 1 Megabit broadband then I'd love to see how the rest can cope.

Depends on who's equipment you are using

Garfield himself said he fails eircom line checker for broadband and yet can get 6Mb down.

It would be interesting to see the average speed that a user can reach assuming Smart, they must have stats around somewhere.

Kare Bear

Gold: 4mb / 512k - 6 Static IP Addresses - €120 per month (ex VAT)
Silver: 3mb / 256 - 1 Static IP Addresses - €70 per month (ex VAT)
Bronze: 2mb / 256 - 1 Static IP Addresses - €45 per month (ex VAT)

Of course bare in mind you have to have a Business to get any of these products.

Why do businesses need such speed.All they do is send word documents to each other.

GarfieldConnoll

TimTim wrote:

It would be interesting to see the average speed that a user can reach assuming Smart, they must have stats around somewhere.

This was the topic of conversation today. At present 70%-80% of unbundled lines could achieve 6Mb+. I don't have an equivalent number for upload speed, but I'll get it and post it here.
Now that's not a representative sample of Irish lines, but it's our experience to date.

Garfield.

leeroybrown

Kare Bear wrote:

Why do businesses need such speed.All they do is send word documents to each other.

A 256K upload rate can be quite a bottleneck if you have a business with plenty of e-mail users. The extra download speed is a nice bonus. It's not about being able to use 4mb/512k all the time, it's about having 4mb/512k when you need it.

lynchie

Cabaal wrote:

Agreed, I could find 0 info on their website and it only happened by chance that I was in a Doctors waiting room and saw a advert for Smart Business 4MB in one of the papers...so I looked into it further and got the info above





Thats great to hear, the Bronze package is a bloody good deal imho.

Agreed, I never knew of this either. Dont see why I need to pay €ircon the 169 a month for their package when I could get it for 50 yoyo cheaper with a 512 upload.

Blaster99

I'm using IBB's 3Mbps service and despite all its ups and downs, I would have serious difficulty seeing myself moving to something pathetic like 256kbps up for the same money. Ideally I would like to use another more reliable provider, but if this is the best the ADSL folks can come up with, well, then it's not to be.

PiE

I don't understand this "higher upload will attract P2P leechers!" idea... most P2P programs allow full-speed downloads as long as your upload is above ~5kb/s (Azureus for instance). Limiting upload to 128k isn't gonna stop anyone from downloading at their 200k/s+ max speeds and likewise, doubling the upload is not gonna suddenly turn their 2mb/s connection into a 4mb/s connection.

Besides, most leechers are just that: leechers. The vast majority of P2P users have no intention of 'sharing' their ill-gotten wares. They get on, get what they want, get off. Again, increasing the upload is not gonna affect any of this, but it will make life a lot easier for the people who legitimately need/want a higher upload rate.

TheMonster

The only thing I can think of is most of the good torrent sites(not public ones) expect people to maintain at least a 0.5 ratio and some even a 1-1 ratio.

Solair

I've had a lot of conversations with eircom engineers and other than the long rural lines (which are an unfortunate fact of life in rural areas everywhere) and the multiplexed lines in cities, which they will now sort out for you if you phone them up and order broadband. Most problems with phonelines and DSL come down to the fact that eircom set the line quality limits far too high. This was probabally initially done to limit the need for service calls / engineer calls. i.e. the lines that qualified for DSL are 100% perfect and won't ever drop a connection / cause any problems thus eircom never has to do anything.

The other huge issue is customer's internal wiring and it really is a huge issue it's not eircom just making stuff up.
Most other countries have always had very tight regulations about what you can / can't connect to a telephone line. The line would enter your house and there's a "NTU" network termination unit or some form of demarkation between the public network and your internal wiring.
In Ireland, Telecom/Eircom adopted a very haphazard approach to this and allowed people to wire anything to a line. So, you've got poor quality internal wiring, reversed polarities, ground leaks, inappropriate cable (e.g. bell or speaker wire that's both unshielded and too high resistance for decent communications traffic)

BT, for many many years insisted that you PLUG IN any extensions to your master socket. If you opened / moved / rewired the master socket they would pretty much reserve the right to charge you a huge some of money to fix it. In the old days it was actually illegal to open it!

Telecom's / Eircom's approach was quite consumer friendly i.e. you could drop down to the local shop and buy any old phone, wire it up and away you go.

However, it's causing havok for DSL.

They also need to run more frequent line tests. once a month isn't good enough. They should be available pretty much on request where possible.

They also need to produce some advisory information on the testing process.

e.g.:

1) New lines arn't necessarily tested for up to 1 month, so will come up as failed even though they're potentially perfect for DSL (this has happened to me twice!)

2) If your line fails you should be given step by step instructions to remove internal wiring problems. e.g. unplugging phones, making sure the line's not over loaded and even, how to remove DIY extensions completely.
They could even suggest that you replace your internal extensions with a nice new DECT cordless phone set & a couple of handsets.

You should then be able to schedual a retest / at least know when your line will be hit by the tester again.

Just saying PASS/FAIL isn't good enough.

Sponge Bob

All very true Solair except that when your line is manifestly unfit for the purpose in a rural area Eircom will still not bother testing or fixing it .

My consistent advice to anyone with 'issues' is to disconnect ALL their internal wiring and leaving one socket in service thats the one with the TE or Eircom logo only and then plugging in a bog standard phone....not one that sucks lekky to power a display...and then hassling Eircom.

Internal wiring is your own problem but there are a lot of bus formation internal distributions out there which should all be in series.

Solair

What's worse is that Telecom Eireann / Eircom didn't even stick to their own wiring rules when they wired most homes in the 1980s

Lots of places have multiple master sockets all connected in a star configuration back to a junction box in the hall or in the attic.

Best bet is rip the whole thing out and put in a decent DECT phone system ... no need for wires at all.

I'm totally convinced that eircom has set the test bar way way too high though and are failing lines that are marginal but quite passable for DSL.
They should at the very least be able to give you a breakdown of line noise stats etc rather than just FAIL.

And yeah, in rural areas I would agree 100% they need their asses kicked by use of the universal service obligations clause. Rural areas are being understaffed and local distribution networks arn't being maintained the way they used to be.

There should be some sort of a formula that redistributes money earned on urban line rentals to the higher cost rural areas. i.e. an accounting mechanism that's fully transparent.

I can't see why this couldn't be implemented given their unusual position as an almost total monopoly. There will certainly be no major incentive for the likes of smart telecom or anyone else to unbundle in rural areas, so the rural - urban broadband divide is just going to increase if someone doesn't step in and regulate the market properly.

It's a bit like the old days of rural electrification. Some areas are not going to be economic to wire up for broadband, but for social inclusion reasons they need to be funded somehow and that doesn't have to be via direct taxation it's just a case of redistribution!

Sponge Bob

Solair wrote:

What's worse is that Telecom Eireann / Eircom didn't even stick to their own wiring rules when they wired most homes in the 1980s

Lots of places have multiple master sockets all connected in a star configuration back to a junction box in the hall or in the attic.

LOL , seen them .

And yeah, in rural areas I would agree 100% they need their asses kicked by use of the universal service obligations clause. Rural areas are being understaffed and local distribution networks arn't being maintained the way they used to be.

The issue here is that Eircom offloaded a bloated engineering staff in the early 90's but has not recruited anyone for about 25 years. Rural areas are maintained by too small a staff who are now typically aged about 50 and not as athletic as they once were. They probably have the oldest line engineers in the world . The lads even got nice new vans with Cherry Pickers this year to save them horsing ladders around on their own.

They went from overstaffed to understaffed to undertaffed and ancient ....and with somewhat more copper around now than there was then.

There should be some sort of a formula that redistributes money earned on urban line rentals to the higher cost rural areas. i.e. an accounting mechanism that's fully transparent.

They should relax the installation targets to allow the engineers find copper and not be under time pressure to provision, time = pairgain installation. Rural lines are simply LONGER and more awkward to trace , give the engineers time.

I can't see why this couldn't be implemented given their unusual position as an almost total monopoly. There will certainly be no major incentive for the likes of smart telecom or anyone else to unbundle in rural areas, so the rural - urban broadband divide is just going to increase if someone doesn't step in and regulate the market properly.

Thats already happened Solair . It happened when Comreg defined a phoneline line as Functional at a data rate of 0k in 2002/2003 . Smart et al can get a line fixed under the CLFMP but customers have to ring 1901 <gnash>

It's a bit like the old days of rural electrification. Some areas are not going to be economic to wire up for broadband, but for social inclusion reasons they need to be funded somehow and that doesn't have to be via direct taxation it's just a case of redistribution!

Funny that because country folks pay higher line rental (standing charge) to the ESB but we get our 220 + or - 10% same as everyone else .

I am not saying the ESB should flatrate that either .

Solair

Does that mean that in 5 years time when they all retire we'll have a new young fit crew out to fix everything?

I just had a line installed in Dublin and 2 guys arrived up on the hottest day of the year (Aged 50+)
Scaled two walls to get into where the line needed to go! Certainly no shortage of athletic ability!

It was also 4 days after the order date!

zuma

Ever hear the saying "Young and dumb!"?

They must have staggered recruitment or else you'll have no one left with any experience once they start mass retiremnet.