Irish Broadband in Dublin City-Centre

nahgoe

Anyone know how good, bad, or otherwise IBBs coverage is in the city centre? More specifically, around the Fitzwilliam Square area?

We're looking to get either the 2 or 3 -meg business package, seeing as we need a high upload speed ( we have a few people working remotely, and 128k just isn't enough )

The only thing i'm worried about, is that i've heard some real horror stories about them. We run our web, mail, and dns servers on-site, as well as a number of employees needing to connect in and work. We can't really afford to have a connection that's dropping all the time. Are they the only provider ( i haven't found any others ) that do anything more than 256k up, wihtout buying a leased line? But from what i've seen, IBB are just about our only option.

I think i've done enough rambling for now, any help would be appreciated

Thanks

Praetorian

Irish Broadband is a lottery. It can work very well for some people, like me for example, or you could be plagued with problems, and you will have your very own horror story.

Steffano2002

Hi nahgoe,

I have a 2MB up/down "business connection" (in Inverted Commas as there doesn't seem to be a real difference between business and home users in IBB AFAIK).

To be honest, IBB is a bit of a company where it all depends on the luck of the draw... Maybe you're connection will be perfect. Maybe it won't... The only way to really know is to subscribe and cross your fingers. And that's not really reassuring when choosing an ISP for your business...

Put it this way: if it works for you, GREAT! You've got a good symmetrical connection (with no cap) that is really cheap! If it doesn't, you're stuck with something that you pay for, but which doesn't work, for a whole year.

They do have a nice service level agreement as well...

nahgoe

On the topic of their SLA... They mention 12 hours in the proaganda that they sent me. Does that mean 12 hours to acknowledge that the problem exists? Or 12 hours to fix it?

--Eoghan

Praetorian

The SLA isn't worth the toilet paper it's written on.

Steffano2002

Praetorian wrote:

The SLA isn't worth the toilet paper it's written on.

I can't really disagree with Praetorian here... I believe the SLA states that problem will be resolved within 12 hours. But what problem is that? I believe it is only for complete loss of connection. Ringing up to report slow speeds takes for ever to get fixed...

Blaster99

Hence it's not worth the toilet paper it's written on.

The real question is what mast would you be connecting to and what's the performance on it usually? IBB doesn't have anything resembling consistency in their network. They oversell it in places and then you get crap performance until they get around to sorting it out, like a month or so later.

The alternative is Leap, by the way. More expensive but there's rarely any complaints about them. But if IBB works, it's very good value, hence a tempting proposition on paper.

Adey2002

nahgoe wrote:

On the topic of their SLA... They mention 12 hours in the proaganda that they sent me. Does that mean 12 hours to acknowledge that the problem exists? Or 12 hours to fix it?

--Eoghan

3 months and still waiting for it to be fixed.... 12 hours, lol.